Weird Tales at Fifty

I don't know what changed between the early sixties and the early seventies, but in 1973, publisher Leo Margulies put out four pulp-sized issues of Weird Tales edited by Sam Moskowitz. The first of those issues, dated Summer 1973, has cover art by Virgil Finlay. Also on the cover is a blurb inside a purple circle that reads:

50th

Anniversary

Issue,

1923-1973

Among the contents of the fiftieth-anniversary issue is an essay called "Fifty Years Young," written by Moskowitz and printed inside the front cover. The next two issues, from Fall 1973 and Winter 1973, have cover blurbs reading: "Fiftieth Anniversary Year." One more issue came along in Summer 1974, and then the fiftieth-anniversary issues of Weird Tales came to an end. In the early 1960s, Moskowitz is supposed to have warned Margulies against restarting Weird Tales as a magazine for fear he would lose his shirt. Maybe he did anyway in the 1970s.

On August 14, 2013, I wrote about the four issues of Weird Tales published in 1973-1974. You can read what I wrote by clicking here.

Born in 1900 in Brooklyn, New York, Leo Margulies died on the opposite end of the country, on the day after Christmas 1975 in Los Angeles, California. Either before he died or with the disposition of his estate, the Weird Tales property was transferred to Robert E. Weinberg (1946-2016). The late Mr. Weinberg proceeded to issue his own publication on the fiftieth anniversary of Weird Tales. That one comes next in this series.

Weird Tales, Summer 1973, with never-before-published art by Virgil Finlay, at least in full-color form and in this composition. But Finlay's illustration was a swipe, or a swipe of a swipe, or maybe some other kind of thing. You can read more about it in my article from April 28, 2017, here. 

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales at Forty

You could say that Weird Tales magazine had its first run from March 1923 to September 1954. You could also break up that first run, the most obvious break being from August to October 1924 when the business behind the magazine was reorganizing and there weren't any issues published at all. A better way of saying it is that Weird Tales was just trying to survive that summer and fall. Survive it did. Last year at around this time, Weird Tales observed its own 100th anniversary with a new issue. This time this year, we find ourselves in the one-hundred-year anniversary of the first hiatus and the almost-disappearance of "The Unique Magazine."

You could make other breaks, too, if you wanted to. In its first run, there came a break after twelve almost-monthly issues, published from March 1923 to April 1924, all with Edwin Baird as editor. Then came the first and only quarterly issue of May/June/July 1924 with Baird, or Farnsworth Wright and Baird, or Baird, Wright, and/or Otis Adelbert Kline as editor. Then came a three-month break, during which there could have been another quarterly issue published. Then, finally, in November 1924, there was a return, with Wright as newly promoted editor, a post he would hold for the next fifteen and a little more years.

There weren't any breaks during the Wright years, even if there were changes made along the way. Weird Tales was published continuously during that time, even after Dorothy McIlwraith took over in May 1940. Call that a break if you want. Finally, in September 1953, Weird Tales went from being pulp-sized to being digest-sized, another break if you like. The magazine survived exactly a year in that format.

Leo Margulies acquired the Weird Tales property after the magazine ceased publication. He held it for about twenty years, finally to sell it to Robert Weinberg in the early to mid 1970s. The story is that Margulies wanted to revive Weird Tales as a magazine in the early 1960s. And the story is that Sam Moskowitz talked him out of it for fear Margulies would lose his shirt. Nevertheless, several paperbound anthologies came out at around the fortieth-anniversary year of Weird Tales. All have introductions, either by Margulies or Moskowitz, as well as shorter introductions to individual stories. None of these books is explicitly an anniversary issue, even if all look back with fondness and nostalgia on the Weird Tales years. I think the 1960s and '70s were an age of nostalgia for the popular culture of the 1920s through the 1940s or so. The Weird Tales anthologies came out near the beginning of that age.

I have written before about three of the four Weird Tales anthologies of the early to mid 1960s. They were:

• The Unexpected edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, Feb. 1961, 160 pp.), with an introduction by Leo Margulies and eleven stories (Margulies called this "a usurer's dozen"), all from Weird Tales. Cover art by John Schoenherr.

• The Ghoul Keepers edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, Oct. 1961; 1965, 157 pp.), with an introduction by Leo Margulies and nine stories, all from Weird Tales. Cover art by John Schoenherr, recycled from The Unexpected.

• Weird Tales edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, May 1964, 155 pp.), with an introduction by Leo Margulies and eight stories, all from Weird Tales. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

• Worlds of Weird edited by Leo Margulies (Pyramid Books, Jan. 1965, 158 pp.), with an introduction, "The Forgotten Creator of Weird Tales, An Introduction . . ." by Sam Moskowitz and seven stories, all from Weird Tales. Cover art and interior illustrations by Virgil Finlay.

Pyramid Books issued two more anthologies at around that time, both edited by L. Sprague de Camp. These are in the same format as the Weird Tales anthologies, but not all of their stories were from "The Unique Magazine." These two books were:

• Swords & Sorcery edited by L. Sprague de Camp (Pyramid Books, Dec. 1963, 186 pp.), with an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp and eight stories, four of which were in Weird Tales. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

• The Spell of Seven edited by L. Sprague de Camp (Pyramid Books, June 1965, 192 pp.), with an introduction by L. Sprague de Camp and seven stories, two of which were in Weird Tales. Cover art by Virgil Finlay.

One of these books is called Weird Tales. Another was published in 1963. Maybe together they make a fortieth-anniversary issue. Or take all six as an observance and celebration of forty years of Weird Tales. Finally, I should point out that Leo Margulies also reprinted stories from Weird Tales in his magazines of the 1960s, including The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Magazine, in print from 1966 to 1968.

The Jove edition of Weird Tales, published in 1979, is a reprinting of the Pyramid edition of 1964 except that Robert E. Howard's story "Pigeons from Hell" was removed. Also, Virgil Finlay's cover illustration--a good one to be sure--was replaced with this iconic image by Margaret Brundage, originally on the cover of the magazine in October 1933. I'm not sure that any other image is more closely associated with Weird Tales than this one.

By the way, the Pretenders' song "Back on the Chain Gang" includes the lyric "Got in the house like a pigeon from hell." That sounds an awful like a reference to Howard's story. As much as some fans and readers might want themselves and their favorite fiction to be separated and isolated from the real world--as much as they might want to escape from the world--it can't be done. If you're going to think about and write about genre fiction, you have to face the world, its people, its history, and its culture.

Text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Weird Tales: The Unique Magazine

Weird Tales began in March 1923 as "The Unique Magazine," and for ten years it kept that subtitle. The last issue labeled as "The Unique Magazine" came out in March 1933.

The second issue of Weird Tales, from April 1923, had a red border around the cover illustration. The border turned white, then black, in subsequent issues. By January 1924, the border was gone.

The red border came back in August 1925. There was one blue border and four black borders after that. Otherwise, borders remained red until the February/March or April/May issue of 1931, depending on how you look at it. After that, the main title logo was enclosed in a red box at the top of the cover design, this until May 1933.

So at the ten-year mark, the subtitle "The Unique Magazine" and the red border or box on the cover disappeared. Also in May 1933, a new main title logo, designed by J. Allen St. John, made its debut. It is that logo that we now associate with Weird Tales in all of its forms. After May 1933, the cover designs for the magazine were simpler and cleaner. They had a more modern look instead of an older, Victorian or prewar appearance.

There were two exceptions to all of this. As we have seen, the May issues were the place where Weird Tales usually celebrated its anniversaries. I have found two throwback covers. Both came out during the anniversary month of May. The first was in May 1936. That one had the old subtitle, "The Unique Magazine," and a red border. The second was in May 1937. That one was subtitled "The Unique Magazine," but there wasn't any border at all.

Irving Glassman's letter in the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales appears to have been the last time there was mention of an anniversary during the first run of the magazine, 1923-1954. In September 1953, Weird Tales switched from the old pulp format to being digest-sized. It must have seemed to readers that their favorite magazine was on its last leg. Again and again, it had been reduced, first in the number of pages in each issue, then in the number of issues per year, finally in its dimensions. In September 1954, it disappeared altogether. The last two covers were by Virgil Finlay. Both were reprints. (The last original cover was W.H. Silvey's cover of May 1954.) However, the word "unique" returned for one last showing. On the cover of the last issue of the magazine, September 1954, is a blurb: "Unique Fiction."

Weird Tales, the last issue, September 1954, with cover art by Virgil Finlay. This image had originally appeared on the cover of the August issue of 1939. It has the same basic color scheme--orange and black--as the first issue of the magazine, published exactly thirty-one and a half years before, in March 1923.

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley

Bacharach, Blob, & Brennan

Today I write about a circle. The circle begins with Burt Bacharach, who died two days ago, on February 8, 2023, at age ninety-four. Everyone who grew up in the 1960s through the 1980s remembers his songs. There are so many that are so good and come so quickly to mind that as soon as you hear his name, one of them is bound to start playing in your head.

Burt Bacharach and Mack David collaborated on the theme song for the 1958 film The Blob. If you grew up during the 1950s through the 1970s, you probably saw The Blob either at the theater or on late-night television. Maybe a horror host presented it for your consideration.

The star of The Blob was Steve McQueen, about whom I wrote recently. We think of The Blob as a science-fiction monster movie or an alien invasion movie, but it's also a car movie and a teenager movie (even though Steve McQueen was already twenty-seven when it was released). Teenagers drive around in their cars and save the day in The Blob. The plot is like a cross between the first encounter with Mothman in 1966 and the movie American Graffiti.*

The plot is also like Joseph Payne Brennan's novelette "Slime," from Weird Tales, March 1953. Brennan gets short shrift when it comes to The Blob. You might think that the similarity between the two stories is just a coincidence. Maybe it's a case of convergent evolution. But if you consult the description of the Joseph Payne Brennan Papers at Brown University Library, you will find that there appears to have been legal action involving The Blob and "Slime." The word plagiarism comes up in fact. Unfortunately, we have only a description of the papers available to us on line. It would take a trip to the library, I guess, to find out what it was all about.

Click on the words below for a link:

Joseph Payne Brennan papers (Ms. 2009.011), Brown University Library, Box A, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912

"Slime" was the cover story for the March 1953 issue of Weird Tales. As it so happens, that was the thirtieth-anniversary issue of "The Unique Magazine," an anniversary that seems to have been observed only in "The Eyrie," in a letter by Irving Glassman of Brooklyn, New York, on page 70. That was the last chance for anyone to observe a nice, round-numbered anniversary issue in the original run of Weird Tales. The magazine came to an end exactly a year and a half later, in September 1954. Virgil Finlay did the cover art for both, March 1953 and September 1954.

Thirty years before "Slime," there appeared another slime-blob-jelly-ooze cover, the first in fact for Weird Tales. This was of course in the first issue of Weird Tales, March 1923. The cover story was "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. The monster on the cover looks more like an octopus. If you read the story, you will find that it's actually a giant amoeba. Whereas Rud told his story from the point of view of an after-the-fact human investigator, "Slime" begins with the monster.

And that leads into the next few parts of this series.

Two slime-blob-jelly-ooze covers of Weird Tales. On the left is the cover for March 1953, illustrating "Ooze" by Anthony M. Rud. The cover artist was Richard R. Epperly. On the right is the cover for March 1953, illustrating "Slime" by Joseph Payne Brennan. The cover artist was Virgil Finlay. Note that, although thirty years separated these two issues, the cover price was the same. Of course the first issue had a lot more content. As for the cover art, well, Virgil Finlay simply outshone most pulp artists. This is no exception.

*Terrence Steven McQueen (1930-1980) and I share a first name, though his has one more "r" in it. That gave him extra Vrr-oom. He was born in Beech Grove, Indiana, a town that has been swallowed like the Blob by my native city of Indianapolis. James Dean (1931-1955) was also from Indiana. I think Steve McQueen is way cooler. He was also a better driver.

Text copyright 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Fate Magazine and Weird Tales

Fate magazine was first published in the spring of 1948, seventy-four years ago this season. The publisher was Clark Publishing Company of Chicago, founded by Raymond A. Palmer (1910-1977) and Curtis G. Fuller (1912-1991). The first cover story was about the first sighting of flying saucers, made by Kenneth A. Arnold (1915-1984) less than a year before, on St. John's Day, June 24, 1947. Fate was preceded by Doubt, the magazine of the Fortean Society, first published in or about 1937. Whereas Doubt was a specialized title and had a small circulation, Fate was intended for the general reading public and was marketed as such. It was digest-sized from the beginning and looked for all the world like a science fiction/fantasy magazine. Palmer, after all, was a canny editor, publisher, and marketer. He had a pretty good idea of what would sell as the 1940s reached their end and the 1950s began.

Fate was also preceded by Weird Tales, which was first in print a quarter of a century prior to that first issue. If I have counted correctly, Weird Tales was in its 249th whole issue in the spring of 1948. Although it had come down in the world--that happened in general to pulp magazines during the 1940s--Weird Tales was still chugging along in the old pulp format. It finally conceded in September 1953 and switched to digest-size. Only half a dozen issues remained after that: Weird Tales finally came to an end--you could say it met its fate--in September 1954.

At first glance, Fate and Weird Tales have nothing to do with each other. That's where having a collection of early issues of Fate comes in handy. I won't claim that there is a strong connection between these two magazines, but from what I have seen, readers, writers, and even one artist seem to have migrated from Weird Tales to Fate in the 1950s. I think the two magazines must have served some of the same readership. In addition, there appears to have been a kind of continuity from weird fiction into Forteana. Or maybe it was the other way around. Or I guess it doesn't matter when you're dealing with continuities. As Charles Fort wrote, "One measures a circle, beginning anywhere." I should note that the words fate and weird--in its original sense as a noun rather than an adjective--are practically synonymous.

* * *

I'll start with the writers.

This isn't necessarily a complete list, but in the issues of Fate that I recently acquired from the collection of the late Margaret B. Nicholas and William Nicholas, I found stories and articles from the following writers who also contributed to Weird Tales:

• Dulcie Brown (1899-1978)-Dulcie Brown made one contribution to the Weird Tales series "It Happened to Me." She was a Fortean and a writer of several letters to Fate. The magazine must have been right up her alley, and I can imagine her joy and pleasure once she discovered it, early or late. You can read more about Dulcie Brown in Joshua Blue Buhs' very interesting blog From an Oblique Angle, at the following URL: https://www.joshuablubuhs.com/blog/dulcie-brown-as-a-fortean
• Arthur J. Burks (1898-1974)-Arthur J. Burks wrote about Voodoo and other things in Weird Tales. A former U.S. Marine (if there is such a thing), he recounted an experience from his military days in "I Have Healing Hands" in the April 1957 issue of Fate. By coincidence, Fate reprinted William B. Seabrook's account of zombies in Haiti in that same issue.
• Mary Elizabeth Counselman (1911-1995)-Despite the fact that she wrote more stories than almost anyone for Weird Tales, Mary Elizabeth Counselman is, I think, a neglected author. In September 1962, Fate published her article "I Saw Them Take Up Serpents," about snake-handling in Southern churches. Note the confessional title.
• L. Sprague de Camp (1907-2000)-L. Sprague de Camp isn't quite in the same category as the other writers in this list. After all, he was only a minor contributor to Weird Tales but a very successful author of science fiction and fantasy, as well as factual, historical, and biographical works. For Fate, he wrote fairly often, mostly or exclusively on archeological subjects.
• Vincent H. Gaddis (1913-1997)-Vincent H. Gaddis contributed one brief story for Weird Tales but, over the years, many articles for Fate. An early member of the Fortean Society, he in fact specialized in Forteana, and it was Gaddis who popularized the idea of a Bermuda Triangle that gobbles up ships and planes. The earliest articles for Fate that I have for him are "America's Most Famous Ghost Story" and "Hollywood Superstitions," from Fall 1948, the third issue of the magazine. There may have been others before that.
• Donald E. Keyhoe (1897-1988)-Like Burks, Donald E. Keyhoe was a former military man. He contributed to Weird Tales before World War II. After the war, he became interested in--if not obsessed with--flying saucers. Fate published an interview with Major Keyhoe in August 1959, a year and a half after Mike Wallace had interviewed him on TV.
• Everil Worrell Murphy (1893-1969)-Everil Worrell was a pretty consistent contributor to Weird Tales from 1926 to 1954. In April 1957, Fate published her short article "Million-Dollar Message" as part of its regular feature "My Proof of Survival." Arthur J. Burks was in the same issue.

Stories and articles by previous contributors to Weird Tales seem to have evaporated at the end of the 1950s. There may be some significance in that. Note that most of the writers I have listed here were of the same generation, one that reached retirement age in the early 1960s. Also, pulp magazines were coming to an end as the 1950s ended, too. Even magazines that had made the switch or had started out as digest-sized titles were having a hard time by the end of the decade. As for Fate, it made a switch, too, going from painted covers to mostly text covers in 1958-1959. I think the last painted cover was in November 1959, just in time for the decade to end. Was that to cut costs? Were cover artists moving on to paperback books, men's magazines, and movie posters? Was the competition with other genre-type magazines drying up as those titles reached their end? I can't say. (1)

* * *

Fate published what is supposed to have been non-fiction. Weird Tales on the other hand was a magazine of mostly fiction, poetry, and illustration. Still, there are some connections between the two. Most obviously, Fate continued in its publication of supposed non-fictional accounts written by readers. In Weird Tales, these were called "It Happened to Me." That series lasted for eleven installments, from March 1940 to November 1941. Fate had at least two confessional-type features, "My Proof of Survival" and "Report From the Readers." Of course, confessional magazines and features had been around for a long time before that. The 1950s had their confessional genre-movie titles, such as I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958). Before that there was I Walked with a Zombie (1943), which was produced by Val Lewton (1904-1951), a onetime contributor to Weird Tales.

* * *

As you might expect from the title, a big part of Fate of the 1950s and '60s had to do with real-life strokes of fate. These accounts are brief but numerous. On page after page and in issue after issue, there are stories of how the cruelest of fates befall mostly undeserving people. There are so many of these accounts--moreover they are written in such a way--that you get the idea that the editors took real pleasure at other people's pain, suffering, and cruel deaths. (2) There's a name for stories like these. They're called contes cruels and they are a staple in weird fiction. Think "The Pit and the Pendulum" by Edgar Allan Poe. The popularity of the conte cruel in weird fiction may have something to do with what Jack Williamson called the Egyptian-Hebraic roots of the anti-utopian story. My plan is to get back to my series on Utopia and Dystopia in Weird Tales and to explore that idea further.

* * *

There is something shabby and squalid in weird fiction that doesn't as often obtain in science fiction. In looking over my new collection, I have noticed that the art on the covers of science fiction magazines of the 1950s is often clean, showing the clean machine-lines and machine-curves of spacesuits and rocketships; the topological flawlessness of toroid space stations and disc-shaped spacecraft; the pristine surfaces of planets and their deep, luminous, unpolluted skies; the spotless and uncluttered depths and vastnesses of outer space, illuminated by the crystalline light of myriad stars. This is the future after all. It's bound to be better--certainly cleaner and purer--than the present, especially once we escape this earth. Very often in these scenes, people shrink away to almost nothing. Being biological in nature, people are of course impure and messy and unclean, at least in the minds of the stereotypical physical scientist, mathematician, or engineer. The human element is therefore reduced in much of science fiction art.

Some of the covers of the Raymond A. Palmer-type magazines are like this, too, but many others are lurid, sketchy, violent, chaotic. Some are exploitative, almost to the point of being in bad taste--or beyond bad taste into new territories of badness and tastelessness. The shudder pulps of the 1930s and some cheaper weird fiction/fantasy magazines of the 1940s are like that, too. Weird Tales is far less so. I think "The Unique Magazine" strived to remain in good taste in fact. Despite the nudity so often depicted, Margaret Brundage's covers are harmless confections. They look like they are made of cake frosting and spun sugar. (Her medium was mostly chalk pastel.) I should point out that a lot of science fiction art was created using an airbrush, in other words, a machine. That tool renders a machine-like perfection to textures, curves, and contours, unlike the less well-controlled and more organic paintbrush, crayon, or pencil. This is not to take anything away from airbrushed artwork: I could look at Alex Schomburg's paintings all day long and into the night and never get tired.

* * *

Anyway, if you look at the advertisements inside Weird Tales, you will see what I mean by shabbiness and squalor. Those same kinds of ads continued in Fate. Ads about numerology, "ancient wisdom," Ouija boards and planchettes, mystic this, metaphysical that. Ads about Rosicrucianism, Theosophy, "startling revelations," astrology, palmistry, graphology, the Tarot, "psychic development," and every other kind of esoterica. There are office addresses and post office boxes where you can write to get yours today, whatever it happens to be. I imagine shabby and squalid places on the other end, places housing not only run-of-the-mill charlatans and conmen but also every kind of crank, crazy, and crackpot, some or many of whom, to their credit I guess, probably believed in what they were peddling. Men wearing turbans or toupees and dyed van-dyke beards, women with piled-up hair, hard with hairspray, their faces covered in pancake makeup, all of them dressed in cheap, fake, gaudy, or threadbare costume, wearing shoes with cracked leather and worn heels and soles, hoping to gain a few bucks by trying or claiming to be able to heal the equally cracked and worn souls of their fellow human beings. Maybe these are stereotypes I have gleaned from our vast popular culture, of all the cheap, fake, grasping, squalid psychics, mediums, soothsayers, and occultists in all of those old movies and TV shows and stories, for example Raymond Chandler's 1940 detective novel Farewell, My Lovely. In seeing these advertisements, my mind went right away to another example, the Starry Wisdom Temple in Strange Eons by Robert Bloch (1979) (pp. 94ff.), with its cluttered, musty interior, hung with old drapes and smelling like a funeral home. This shabbiness and squalor has since come back into the real world, in the cult-like lifestyle and squalor of the Manson family, the squalid and terribly tragic ending of so many people at Jonestown, and the equally squalid ending of the Heaven's Gate cult just twenty-five years ago this season.

* * *

In doing research on Dianetics/Scientology a few years ago, I looked at street views of that organization's branch offices. So many of them were cheap, rundown, practically abandoned. At around that time, I was approached by a Scientologist at an event. He was on crutches, his leg in a cast or wrappings. These were my thoughts after I had talked to him: I thought you people were able to cure such things. I thought you were able to make of yourselves superior men. Anyway, I can imagine ads for Dianetical and Scientological "products" and "services" of the 1950s as looking much like those I have seen in Weird Tales and Fate.

Speaking of that, you will find ads for Mathison electropsychometers in Fate but without any mention of Dianetics or Scientology. The inventor of these gadgets, Volney G. Mathison (1897-1965), was also a contributor to Weird Tales. He was briefly associated with L. Ron Hubbard (1911-1986) but broke with him in the early to mid 1950s. (Breaking with Hubbard seems to have been a theme back then, as we'll see.) Coincidentally or not, Scientology grew out of Dianetics in 1954, the year Weird Tales reached its end. More than one writer for Weird Tales became interested or involved in Scientology. We should remember, though, that Dianetics/Scientology was the offspring of a depraved writer of science fiction and not at all of weird fiction, at least not that appeared in Weird Tales. And in case you don't remember it, I'll remind you in a future part of this series.

By the way, Heaven's Gate was a science-fictional rather than a weird-fictional cult. So is the long-enduring quasi-cult of Flying Saucers, which are actually Fortean phenomena, even if Forteana seems to be more closely connected to weird fiction than to science fiction . . . I guess I don't have all of these things puzzled out just yet.

* * *

We're all searchers, and I don't want to hit anyone too hard with the foregoing sections or take anything away from others and their searching--from their endeavoring to persevere as the old Indian in The Outlaw Josey Wales says. We all have to search and find our way if we can. We all must do our best to persevere in this life that so often seems so incomprehensible, in which there is so much pain and suffering, much of which is or seems to be needless and meaningless.

What I'm trying to get at, I guess, is that maybe people read weird fiction and Forteana for reasons far different from the reasons they read science fiction. With science fiction, maybe the reader looks to the future and the things of the future--flawless science and perfect machines--for some kind of escape or salvation. (Are escape and salvation the same thing in some people's minds?) With weird fiction and Forteana, the past and the things of the past seem to be the attraction, even if they are--or maybe because they are--musty, dusty, threadbare, squalid, shabby, or falling into ruins. Charles Fort (1874-1932) spent his working life in libraries where old, dusty, worm-eaten books, journals, and manuscripts are kept. His personal life was squalid. His professional mission was the exhumation of the past. (The past as revenant.) Weird fiction, gothic fiction, horror, and fantasy are typically about the past and the things of the past, too. Very often, the setting in these genres is an old house or castle or abbey--lonely, desolate, run-down, decaying, falling into ruins. Like Fort, the weird-fictional hero discovers in his searching a grimoire or a whole library of such dusty tomes. Within their pages are the keys to all understanding . . .

Maybe the reasons for reading weird fiction and Forteana show through in the readers themselves and the things they want and buy and look for in the back pages of their favorite magazines. And maybe weird fiction and Forteana go together in continuity. Further still, maybe science fiction is discontinuous with those two genres--maybe with all others, too--a strange thing to consider, but maybe it's true after all.

Notes

(1) I read somewhere that the last science fiction pulp magazine was published in 1958. I don't know what that magazine was or whether the year is right. Keep in mind, too, that there was talk in the late 1950s and early 1960s that science fiction as a whole was dying.

(2) The 2021-2022 version of these stories is Covid death-porn, which so many people seem to revel in.

Virgil Finlay (1914-1971) created the art for the last issue of Weird Tales, published in September 1954. A month later, his artwork was on the cover of Fate. Fate wasn't exactly a successor to Weird Tales, but it seems to me that it served some of the same readership. Finlay's cover illustration is a simple, one-stop demonstration of that idea. Unfortunately, most of the art on the cover and inside of Fate is unsigned and no credits are given. Too often this is how the world treats artists. (Note the Florida Man blurb on the cover. Go, Florida Man!)

Text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

100 Years of "The Outsider"

This year is the 100-year anniversary of the composition of "The Outsider" and the 95th anniversary year of its initial publication. H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was of course the author. He wrote "The Outsider" between March and August 1921. He completed his story during the same month in which he turned thirty-one years old. (1)

"The Outsider" was first published in Weird Tales in its issue of April 1926. It has been reprinted again and again in the years since. Some consider it to be Lovecraft's signature story. It headlined The Outsider and Others (1939), the first hardcover collection of Lovecraft's stories. The Outsider and Others was also the first book published by Arkham House of Sauk City, Wisconsin, a firm established specifically for publishing Lovecraft's works. 

There are themes of loneliness, alienation, strangeness, ugliness, and outsidedness in "The Outsider." From the story:

I know that I am an outsider; a stranger in this century and among those who are still men.

We have probably all felt this way in our lives; Lovecraft's story has great appeal because of that feeling, especially, I think, among teenagers and young adults. Alienation and feelings of outsidedness may in fact be symptomatic of the modern dilemma.

There have of course been other works of twentieth-century alienation. The first that comes to mind is The Stranger by Albert Camus (1942). Feelings of alienation and strangeness are fully human, though, and as old as time: it was Moses who first said, "I have been a  stranger in a strange land." The context and meaning of Moses' words might not be as we would see them today. Yet his statement remains, and it inspired a science fiction author of the twentieth century, Robert A. Heinlein, in the writing of his own novel about feeling as a stranger. (1a) Jim Morrison sang after him: "People are strange/when you're a stranger . . . ."

There is every kind and level of alienation, of feelings of strangeness and outsidedness, from the popular to the philosophical. Marx and Nietzsche also had something to say about alienation. So did Mary Shelley in Frankenstein, which may have been an influence upon Lovecraft in his writing of "The Outsider." I wonder, though: is "The Outsider" a Kaspar Hauser-like story? (2) Maybe in general "The Outsider" has its roots in the nineteenth century, and the story of Kaspar Hauser has a significance that we underestimate. Edgar Allan Poe, perhaps the most powerful influence upon Lovecraft's writing of "The Outsider," was born in the first decade of that century, Lovecraft in the last. So, yes, the roots of the story are literally in the century previous to its composition.

There has been a lot of cancellation in recent years. Margaret Atwood and J.K. Rowling are two in the worlds of fantasy and science fiction who have recently been on the receiving end of efforts at cancellation. They're probably both too big to be cancelled, but then we would have thought the same thing about Beethoven and other Classical composers and Classical music not very long ago. Look what we have now. (3) Powerful people--people who fancy themselves as powerless, as among the oppressed, as victims because believing themselves to be on the lowest rung of the ladder actually places them on the highest--seek to silence outsiders, to silence anyone who disagrees with them, especially to silence women who speak out against their depraved ideologies.

There have been efforts at cancelling H.P. Lovecraft, too, but these seem only halfhearted to me. I have a possible explanation for this: despite any of his perceived offenses, Lovecraft has too much to offer those among us who feel alienated, strange, or on the outside of things; also to materialists, the godless, and unbelievers; to people who hate God because they believe he has failed them; to people who feel that we are mere specks in a great and indifferent Cosmos, that there are great and hostile forces afoot in the universe that would destroy us, that ultimately we ought to be destroyed because we are so loathsome and contemptible. Lovecraft's mother called him ugly. In alienation there is often a sense of self-hatred. A child who is called ugly or stupid or whatever by his mother may also be filled with self-hatred. Those who hate themselves learn to hate humanity, too. They turn their hatred outward because hatred of the self is such an unbearable thing. They often fantasize about destroying humanity. Sometimes they do it, or as much of humanity as they can, like a German pilot flying an airplaneful of people into a mountainside, or an Austrian-German totalitarian monster doing the same thing with his whole nation. Often these men (and women) destroy themselves. You can make a case that Lovecraft destroyed himself, by depriving himself of sustenance. His father should have sustained him. Instead he abandoned his son. His mother should have sustained him. Instead she called him ugly and kept him close, too close for him to have developed in a healthy way. Significantly or not, she died on May 24, 1921, about halfway through her son's composition of "The Outsider." (4, 5)

We can't psychoanalyze Lovecraft, least of all by looking at a work of fiction. Likewise, we can't and shouldn't try to psychoanalyze whole groups of people. People are, after all, individuals and are deserving of compassion as individuals. I'll just say that H.P. Lovecraft's authorship of "The Outsider" and many other stories--his construction of a compelling and to many people such a full and satisfying and comforting fictional universe--may mean that he and they and it will never be cancelled.

Notes
(1) I have just finished (mostly) a series on Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) who also had some success with a story written when he was thirty-one (or so), the serial "The Thing of a Thousand Shapes," published in the first two issues of Weird Tales, March and April 1923.
(1a) Update (Jan. 4, 2022): The first episode of The Book of Boba Fett, released last month, is also called "Stranger in a Strange Land."
(2) I'm not the first to make this association, although I have made it independently of anyone else (i.e., I thought it up before going to look for the idea in other people's work). Bhob Stewart (1937-2014) made the comparison in an undated essay published on line in 2015.
(3) See, for example, "Then They Came for Beethoven" by Daniel Lelchuk, dated September 19, 2020, on the website Quillette, here. Is Mr. Lelchuk the son of American novelist Alan Lelchuk? I read Alan Lelchuk's novel American Mischief (1973) not many years ago. The name and the book have stuck with me.
(4) Ironically, Lovecraft the inward-outsider seems to have turned more outward after his mother died. Perhaps he was released. If it's not too bizarre to use these two words together, maybe only then did Lovecraft blossom.
(5) For a discussion of Lovecraft, his mother, their relationship, and related topics, see "Mommie Dearest: H.P. Lovecraft's Descent into Maternal Madness" by John A. DeLaughter, dated November 14, 2013, on The Lovecraft Ezine, here.

A final note: Like Narcissus, the narrator of "The Outsider" is undone by a mirror. The Lady in C.S. Lewis' Perelandra is almost undone by the same object. The Evil Queen in the story of Snow White is so undone. To look into a mirror--is this a loss of innocence? A gaining of self-awareness? And does a sense of self-awareness lead into irony? Into alienation?

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Robert Bloch in Peril!

The circle keeps turning . . .

In July 1951, Fantastic Adventures published Robert Bloch's story "The Dead Don't Die!" The cover illustration (below) by Robert Gibson Jones (1889-1969) shows a woman in peril. If you want to see a man in peril, you have to look inside. That's where you'll find Virgil Finlay's illustration and a likeness of the author:

Twenty years later, in its summer issue of 1971, Weird Mystery magazine reprinted Bloch's story and part of Jones' cover illustration. The whole issue, I think, is made up of reprints. After all, the dead don't die.

Artists sometimes insert themselves or people they know into their works. Authors do it, too. H.G. Wells did it, but I can't say that he was the first. Maybe he provided the inspiration for his countryman Alfred Hitchcock, who made cameo appearances in most of his own films. Robert Bloch inserted H.P. Lovecraft into "The Shambler from the Stars" (Weird Tales, Sept. 1935). Lovecraft did it back to him in "The Haunter of the Dark" (Weird Tales, Dec. 1936). Anyway, I have created a new label for entries like this one. It's called Authors Depicted in Art.

Text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Earl Peirce, Jr.-Aside No. 4

Peirces in New England & A Pierce in Lovecraft

Earl Peirce's family is an ancient one in America. The first among them was born only a dozen short years after Queen Elizabeth I had died and while William Shakespeare still walked the earth. Arriving in what is now Massachusetts before the middle of the seventeenth century, the first American Peirce in Earl Peirce's line served in Capt. Myles Standish's Plymouth Colony militia. Promoted to captain himself, he served during King Philip's War only to fall victim to it. What is believed to be the oldest veteran's memorial in the United States marks the place where Capt. Peirce (as the story goes) and eight of his compatriots perished. The site, known as Nine Men's Misery, is located in Rhode Island, not far north of Providence and well within Lovecraft country.

The Peirce name is old, too. There were Anglo-Saxon Peirces and Norman French Peirces in England during the Middle Ages. The name itself refers to the apostle Peter and has many variants, including Pierce, Peirse, and Pearse. College English students will remember Piers Plowman, Piers being another variant. Here I'm using the spelling that Earl Peirce, Jr., and his family used and one that is still used by Peirces throughout New England. The name is or was pronounced Purse (possibly also as Parse). Robert Frost let us know that in his poem "New Hampshire" (a state that he personified as she):

She had one President. (Pronounce him Purse,
And make the most of it for better or worse.
He's your one chance to score against the state.)

"New Hampshire" was published in book form in 1923, the same year that Weird Tales began. 

Like the Peirces, the family of H.P. Lovecraft was ancient in America, but only on his mother's side. There were Phillips and Whipples in Rhode Island and Providence Plantations in the seventeenth century. The Lovecrafts were comparative latecomers, arriving in the United States only in the Early National Period, in the same century in which H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was born.

Lovecraft was of course a lover of all things New England. He would have been well acquainted with the Peirce/Pierce name, and he included it in one of his most well-known and popular stories, "The Colour Out of Space" (Amazing Stories, Mar. 1927). Lovecraft is supposed to have counted it his favorite among his own stories.

"The Colour Out of Space" is a strange and unsettling story of an inexplicable alien presence that fell to earth in the country west of fictional Arkham, Massachusetts. The time was in the past--"the strange days" as the locals call it. The place, now known as "the blasted heath," was on the farm of the late Nahum Gardner. The story of those "strange days" is recounted to the unnamed narrator by an old man who was a neighbor of Nahum Gardner. His name is Ammi Pierce. Now that I think about it, he reminds me of the Once-ler from The Lorax.

Again, the story of "The Colour Out of Space" is told in the present, i.e., in the late 1920s, but "the strange days" were in the past. They began in June 1882 when a meteorite fell on the Gardner farm. Only at harvest time did Nahum Gardner realize that his entire crop had been contaminated, "that the meteorite had poisoned the soil." That was only the beginning of his and his family's travails, told in increasingly horrifying detail by Ammi Pierce, who remembers it all as if it were yesterday, as well he might.

I have written about "The Colour Out of Space" before. Click here to read my posting of October 19, 2015.

Lovecraft was an amateur astronomer and a science-minded materialist. He made it a point to include real occurrences in his stories, I suppose to build a sense of verisimilitude. In 1882, there was a very bright comet in the skies of the Southern Hemisphere. Called the Great Comet of 1882, it was first observed in September, not in June. Perhaps the meteorite of June 1882 was a harbinger of the later comet, an offshoot that brought disease and death to earth, as comets do. I don't plan these things, but I wrote about all of this not very long ago. Click here for more reading on comets, disease, and death.

Now, finally, to the last part of the Earl Peirce, Jr., story.

Virgil Finlay's illustration for "The Colour Out of Space" by H.P. Lovecraft, from Famous Fantastic Mysteries, October 1941.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Earl Peirce, Jr. (1917-1983)-Part Five

In Washington, D.C.

By July 1937, when he wrote to Weird Tales about the death and legacy of H.P. Lovecraft, Earl Peirce, Jr., was living in Washington, D.C., with his family. His father had been appointed to a position there with the U.S. Forest Service. Earl Peirce, Sr., would spend the rest of his forestry career in the nation's capital, retiring in 1951 after more than forty years on the job.

"The Death Mask" may have been the last story that Earl Peirce, Jr., sent to Weird Tales from his Milwaukee home. It was published in the issue of April 1937. "The Homicidal Diary" followed in October 1937. Nearly a whole year went by before Peirce had his next story in "The Unique Magazine." Written with Bruce Bryan, "The White Rat" was published in September 1938.

Born in Washington, D.C., Leslie Bruce Bryan (1906-2004) was an archaeologist and anthropologist known for his work in the American Southwest and on the Channel Islands. He worked at the County Museum of Natural History, Science, and Art (now the Los Angeles Museum of Natural History) and the Southwest Museum of Los Angeles, not only as a man in the field but also as a curator and a staff writer for The Masterkey, the magazine of the Southwest Museum. Between 1932 and 1939, he wrote or co-wrote five stories published in Weird Tales and its sister title, Oriental Stories. During the same period, he had twelve letters printed in weird fiction magazines.

Bryan's first collaborator in weird fiction was Dudley S. Corlett (ca. 1880-1946), with whom he wrote "The Dancer of Quena," published in Oriental Stories in Spring 1932. Born in England, Corlett lived in southern California for many years. Like Bryan, he worked in scientific or semi-scientific fields, in his case, botany and tropical agriculture.

Bruce Bryan returned to his native city during the early or mid 1930s. He married his second wife, Mary Katherine Fahrenwald, in Washington, D.C., in November 1936. In 1940, he registered for the draft while living there, and like Earl Peirce, Jr., he called himself a writer. During the previous decade, Bryan had had stories not only in weird fiction magazines but also in Argosy, as well as in Western, crime, mystery, and detective titles. Bryan returned to California in the 1940s.

While living in Washington, D.C., Bryan became a member of a Weird Tales fan club. Fan and letter writer Julius Hopkins led the group. Other members included Everil Worrell (1893-1969) and Seabury Quinn (1889-1969). Earl Peirce, Jr., joined, too. Unfortunately, I don't have any details on him except that he was a member and that he co-wrote a story with Bruce Bryan.

After collaborating with Bryan, Earl Peirce had just two more stories in Weird Tales, "The Stroke of Twelve" (June/July 1939) and "Portrait of a Bride" (Jan. 1940). He followed up with "Legacy of the Dead" in Terror Tales (July 1940) and "The Shadow of Nirvana" in Strange Stories (Feb. 1941). Although Peirce had other stories in the pulp magazines of the 1940s, these were his last in the weird fiction titles.

On April 16, 1940, Earl Peirce, Jr., was counted in the U.S. census in Washington, D.C. He was with his family at 3738 Huntington Street, N.W. If the house at that address now is the same as in 1940, then it was a pretty fine one. Later that year, on October 16, 1940, Peirce filled out his draft card, giving his employer as the General Federation of Women's Clubs. On May 7, 1941, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. (His younger brother Dudley Beach Peirce enlisted the same day.) On December 26, 1941, less than three weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Earl Peirce, Jr., married Gloria Hallett Grimm (1922-1999), also in Washington, D.C. The world had suddenly become a very serious place.

I don't think it was mere coincidence that Peirce's writing for the pulps went on pause in 1941. Military service, marriage, and world war have ways of interrupting a person's plans. He had just one story published during the war and only three more after that. His last came in October 1949, just thirteen years after his first.

To be continued . . .

Earl Peirce's fifth story in Weird Tales was "The White Rat," cowritten with Bruce Bryan and published in the September 1938 issue. "The White Rat" is set in Norway. It begins as a club story, but the middle and end take place in a remote northern location. Despite the weird-fiction or gothic-romance elements of separation and isolation, "The White Rat" actually approaches science fiction. I guess we can call it a weird science story.

If there is weird science, there should probably be a weird--or mad--scientist, and there is in this story. There is also a tale told of a medical doctor with psychopathic or sociopathic proclivities. We have seen characters like that before. They're also with us in the real world.

"The White Rat" has similarities to Frankenstein. It's sort of a Frankenstein's monster of a story, too. There are elements not only of Mary Shelley's seminal gothic romance/proto-science fiction novel but also of stories by H.P. Lovecraft, including "The White Ape" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1924), "The Whisperer in Darkness" (Weird Tales, Aug. 1931), "The Dunwich Horror" (Weird Tales, Apr. 1929), and "Cool Air" (Tales of Magic and Mystery, Mar. 1928). The story was written before Watson and Crick found out about DNA, so maybe we can forgive some of its fumbling about genetics. There are, however, suggestions of Lamarckian evolution or Lysenkoism in its pages. I'm pretty sure that both would have been discredited by the time Peirce and Bryan wrote their story. Finally, the weird fiction or science fiction trope of the body frozen in a block of ice and waiting to be revivified is central to the plot. In that, "The White Rat" anticipated Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman (1943), The Thing from Another World (1951), and the Minnesota Iceman hoax of the 1960s. There is also something of The Fly (1958) in it, another film from the future.

The illustration above is the work of Virgil Finlay. It appears as a heading to the story. In combination with the first few pages of the story, it gives away part of the plot and part of the surprise. Before long, we've got it all figured out pretty well. Only the details are missing until the end. The issue in which "The White Rat" appeared was an all-star issue with stories and poems by Seabury Quinn, Algernon Blackwood, Robert E. Howard, Robert Bloch, H.P. Lovecraft, Edmond Hamilton, Clark Ashton Smith, Manly Wade Wellman, and Paul Ernst. That was pretty good company for young Earl Peirce, Jr.

Thanks to Randal A. Everts for information on Julius Hopkins' fan club.
Text and captions copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Earl Peirce, Jr. (1917-1983)-Part Four

Peirce & Bloch

Last week I wrote about how Robert Bloch came to know Weird Tales and H.P. Lovecraft. This time it's Earl Peirce's turn.

We know a whole lot less about Earl Peirce, Jr., than we do about Bloch or Lovecraft. That's one of the reasons I misidentified him so badly at the outset. The evidence was there all along. However, it was locked away in objects formerly known as books. These were and are unseen by the very nearly blind eyes of the Internet.

The first quote below is from an interview that Bloch did with Graeme Flanagan. I presume this to be from a booklet entitled Robert Bloch: A Bio-Bibliography by Graeme Flanagan (Canberra City, Australia: Author, July 1979). The second is from the book Once Around the Bloch: An Unauthorized Autobiography by who else but Robert Bloch (Tor, 1993). I don't have either of these books and I'm not the one who came up with the quotes. They're actually on a message board on the website Ancestry.com, put there by J.M. Rajala, who co-edited Lovecraftian Voyages by Kenneth W. Faig, Jr. (Hippocampus Press, 2007). Here is the URL and link to Mr. or Ms. Rajala's posting:

https://www.ancestry.com/boards/localities.northam.usa.states.connecticut.unknown/4905.1.1.2

Here is the first quote, from Mr. Flanagan's interview with Bloch:

I knew Earl Peirce Jr. in Milwaukee as a fan in 1935-37. He was a bright personable young man, about my age, whose father was in the U.S. Forestry Department [sic]. He contacted me, expressing an interest in writing, and I encouraged it--introducing him to my circle of friend and (via mail) to various writers I knew. He wrote and sold several stories--"Doom of the House of Duryea," a vampire yarn, was his best--then moved to Washington with his family. In late '41 I visited him there with my friend Harold Gauer: he had married and was (I seem to recall) working for the Navy Department. That was the last I saw or heard of him for at least twenty-five years. Then he showed up here, with a different wife, and spent a day with me. He had changed so much that I'd never have recognized him, and there wasn't a trace of the rather intense and imaginative fantasy devotee who had once dreamed of starting an organization to rule the world--the "Si-Fan," modeled on Sax Rohmer's secret society in the Fu Manchu series.

So at last we have something firsthand and personal about Peirce. We know or can be pretty sure that he lived in Laramie, Wyoming, from his birth in 1917 until 1921. From then until 1933 he was with his family in Syracuse, New York. That means that he turned twelve--the Golden Age of Science Fiction--in Syracuse in 1929, the same year in which the term science fiction was first used in print. It was around that time, too, that science fiction and fantasy pulp magazines began to proliferate:

• Amazing Stories, 1926
• Amazing Stories Annual, 1927
• Tales of Magic and Mystery, 1927
• Ghost Stories, 1928
• Amazing Stories Quarterly, 1928
• Air Wonder Stories, 1929
• Science Wonder Stories, 1929
• Wonder Stories Quarterly, 1929
• Astounding Stories (later Astounding Science-Fiction), 1930
• Scientific Detective Monthly, 1930
• Wonder Stories, 1930

We don't have a discovery story for Peirce like that of Bloch, who found Weird Tales at a Chicago train station in 1927. But as Rage Against the Machine sang, what better place than here? What better time than now? It seems pretty likely to me that Peirce discovered science fiction and fantasy in the mid to late 1920s and certainly no later than the early to mid 1930s. (1)

Peirce arrived in Wisconsin in 1933, first in the north woods, then in late 1933 or early 1934 in Milwaukee. If Bloch's memory was still good forty years after the fact, then Peirce would have been in Milwaukee for a couple of years before he and Bloch met in 1935. Like I said, it seems pretty likely that Peirce was already a fan by then. As Bloch recalled, he was a "rather intense and imaginative fantasy devotee." It sounds like that's how Bloch found him and not how he made him.

The second quote posted by J.M. Rajala is from Bloch's autobiography:

[U]pon becoming a professional writer I began to receive communications from readers with aspirations of their own. One such was Milwaukee resident Earl Peirce, Jr.; I encouraged his successful submission of stories to Weird Tales." (p. 204) 

So maybe Peirce saw Bloch's name and address in an issue of Weird Tales and that's how the two met. Anyway, Peirce had his first letter in "The Eyrie" in November 1935, then two more the following year, in June and November 1936. His first story, "Doom of the House of Duryea," was published in between, in October 1936.

Peirce & Lovecraft

According to J.M Rajala, "H. P. Lovecraft had remarked in a letter in June 1935 that 'Young Peirce seems to be a very interesting character, & I surely wouldn't mind hearing from him some day'." Lovecraft soon got his wish. I don't know the dates of Peirce's missives to Lovecraft, but there were two that went in the opposite direction. Both were published in Lovecraft's Selected Letters, volumes in which Lovecraft's letters are numbered and dated. In this case, they are Number 900 from November 28, 1936, and Number 925 from February 17, 1937. The second came just two months before Lovecraft's death and is one of the last of Lovecraft's letters reprinted in Selected Letters.

So, during two years in the life of Earl Peirce, Jr., from 1935 to 1937, he met Robert Bloch, wrote four letters printed in Weird Tales (the fourth is transcribed below), wrote two letters to H.P. Lovecraft and received two in return, and had four stories published in Weird Tales. At ages eighteen to twenty, he must have been thrilled beyond belief--he must have felt that he really would rule the world.

But then things began to change. The shadow of Lovecraft's death passed over Weird Tales and his circle. World war approached. And perhaps most importantly, Earl Peirce, Jr., began to grow up.

Two years came and went, and the Peirce family moved again, this time to Washington, D.C., where Peirce's father was appointed chief of the Division of Co-operative Forest Protection within the U.S. Forest Service. (2) We don't know when that move happened, but Peirce's last letter in Weird Tales (July 1937), in which he noted the death of H.P. Lovecraft in March 1937, was dispatched from the nation's capital:

The news of Lovecraft's passing, although not the shock of surprize, [sic] is nevertheless the shock of an irreparable loss, not alone to WT, but to his admirers and acquaintances the world over. I shall always regret that I never had the good fortune of meeting him personally, but I am truly grateful for the impulse which prompted me to write to him a few months ago, and that I have two letters in his own hand. What most impressed me were his sincerity and genuineness, which qualities were not alone in making him unique among modern writers. You have my sympathy, for this must be a hard time, but I imagine it is a feeling of pride for you to know that so many of his stories originally appeared in WEIRD TALES. Unlike many other men of genius, Lovecraft was fortunate enough to be living at a time when his work was recognized as outstanding. With the passing of time this recognition will become more universal and his work will take its proper place in the world's great literature. (p. 124) (3)

Lovecraft's work hasn't quite assumed a place "in the world's great literature," as Peirce prophesied, but Lovecraft and his stories are now known all over. His young admirer may have been filled with a fannish kind of enthusiasm, but at age twenty, Peirce briefly saw the future when he wrote, With the passing of time this recognition will become more universal . . .

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) In 1924, at about age seven, Peirce's name was mentioned in the Roll of Honor in St. Nicholas magazine for a drawing he had submitted. That may have been the first time his name was in print, and though his drawing wasn't shown, he could only have been thrilled at what he had accomplished. 
(2) In 1938, Earl S. Peirce, Sr., was assigned to the timber salvage project in New England after the hurricane of 1938. Given his penchant for incorporating real events in his stories, Lovecraft might have written about the hurricane had he lived.
(3) Peirce wrote that Lovecraft's death was "not the shock of surprize" (sic). Did he know something that most of the rest of Lovecraft's circle didn't know? I guess we need that last letter from Lovecraft to Peirce, dated February 17, 1937.

Earl Peirce's fourth published story, "The Homicidal Diary," was in Weird Tales in October 1937, right after "The Shunned House" by H.P. Lovecraft. The illustration for Peirce's story was by Virgil Finlay. It's pretty lurid. In the early 1950s, comic books would be condemned for publishing images like this one.

"The Homicidal Diary" is the also the fourth of Earl Peirce's stories I have read. It might be my favorite among them, despite the subject matter. As in his previous story, "The Death Mask" (Apr. 1937), there is a proposed scientific or pseudoscientific explanation for the events described in the story. However, when this one wraps up, we can't be sure that the explanation is a good one.

There is talk of hypnotism in "The Homicidal Diary." There is also a subtext of what we recognize now as psychopathy or sociopathy. The eponymous diary was written by a fictional serial killer, Emil Drukker of Cologne, Germany, who has been executed for his crimes. I imagine that Peirce was inspired (if that's the word for it) by news stories of real-life German serial killers such as Johann Mayer or Peter Kürten, the so-called Vampire of Düsseldorf. The twist is that the diary seems to have a life and influence of its own. An out-of-place touch in the story is in the mention of Drukker Castle. It may have been 1937, and the story may have some grounding in science or pseudoscience, but the old gothic castle still stands.

I won't give things away, but reading this story made me think of "Yours Truly--Jack the Ripper" by Robert Bloch. That story wasn't in Weird Tales until July 1943. That makes me wonder, in the literary association of Bloch and Peirce, just who influenced whom? Had Bloch already started to move towards telling tales of psychos and killers by the late 1930s when Peirce's story appeared? Again, my lack of knowledge of Bloch's career is showing. 

One more thing: there is a scene in "The Homicidal Diary" that makes me think of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by that first (or second, if Thomas De Quincey was the first) chronicler of the torments of the Abbie Normal brain, Edgar Allan Poe. I wonder if Earl Peirce ever realized that his first and last initials were the same as Poe's, or if he ever in his childhood combined Poe's and Ambrose Bierce's surnames to arrive at an approximation of his own.

Peirce's story wasn't in Startling Mystery Stories in the issue Fall 1967, but Virgil Finlay's illustration was. For some reason, though, the designer or engraver flipped it. I don't know what story it illustrates in that issue.

Acknowledgment is made to J.M. Rajala for quotes and other information.
Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley