OSJ Brings the Horror/Weird Author of the Week

[OSJ]

Okay, figure I should do something constructive like suggesting authors that you may have missed. So what I'll try and do is come up with one author per week and suggestions on where to get their stuff (cheaply if possible). So, the first author to be so honored will be a cranky old guy who blew me off completely when I queried him about publishing a collection of his work (not that I''m going to give up that easy).  Ladles and Gentrymen, I give you: Albert Cowdrey

 

A very odd career, Mr. Cowdrey published his first story in 1968 and then vanished for several decades. He does both SF and horror fiction, much of the latter centered around his native New Orleans. As you'll see on his bibliography (lifted from the internet speculative fiction database), he's almost  exclusive to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (which y'all should be getting anyway...)  Anyway, there's one e-book thus far and as Mr. Cowdrey just celebrated his 80th birthday, I should probably ping him again about a collection.

Enjoy!

Novels

• Crux (2004)

Chapterbooks

• The Tribes of Bela (2006) (This here is available as an e-book)

Short Fiction Series

• Azalea Place, New Orleans
• The Familiar (1997)
• White Magic (1998)
• The Great Ancestor (1998)

• Colonel Kohn
• The Tribes of Bela (2004)
• Murder in the Flying Vatican (2007)

• Paranormal Services "Jimmie & Morrie"
• Hartmut's World (2012)
• The Ladies in Waiting (2012)

Shortfiction

• The Lucky People (1968) [only as byChet Arthur]
• Revenge (1999)
• Crux (2000)
• The Stalker (2000)
• Mosh (2000)
• The King of New Orleans (2001)
• Nature 2000 (2001)
• Tomorrow (2001)
• Queen For a Day (2001)
• Ransom (2002)
• The Posthumous Man (2002)
• The Boy's Got Talent (2002)
• Grey Star (2003)
• The Dog Movie (2003)
• Danny's Inferno (2003)
• Rapper (2004)
• Silent Echoes (2004)
• A Balance of Terrors (2004)
• The Name of the Sphinx (2004)
• The Amulet (2005)
• Twilight States (2005)
• The Housewarming (2005)
• The Revivalist (2006)
• Imitation of Life (2006)
• Animal Magnetism (2006)
• Immortal Forms (2006)
• Revelation (2006)
• Envoy Extraordinary (2007)
• The Recreation Room (2007)
• The Overseer (2008)
• Thrilling Wonder Stories (2008)
• Poison Victory (2008)
• Inside Story (2008)
• A Skeptical Spirit (2008)
• Seafarer's Blood (2009)
• Paradiso Lost (2009)
• The Private Eye (2009)
• Bandits of the Trace (2009)
• Fort Clay, Louisiana: A Tragical History (2010)
• Mister Sweetpants and the Living Dead (2010)
• Death Must Die (2010)
• The Bogle (2011)
• Scatter My Ashes (2011)
• The Black Mountain (2011)
• Where Have All the Young Men Gone? (2011)
• How Peter Met Pan (2011)
• Mindbender (2012)
• Greed (2012)
• Asylum (2012)
• The Goddess (2012)
• The Sheriff (2012) [only as byChet Arthur]
• A Haunting in Love City (2013)
• The Assassin (2013)
• The Trouble With Heaven (2013) [only as byChet Arthur]
• The Woman in the Moon (2013)

[DEAN]

Hey John!  Long time no see, my brother!

[OSJ]

I have returned, my brother!

[OSJ]

Okay, for this week a guy that I'm almost positive no one here has ever heard of... (Hell, I didn't know much about him until a few years ago and it's my job to know this stuff!) The author of the week is Wyatt Blassingame (no relation to Bray Wyatt, although that opens an interesting line of thought...)

 

Considering the prodigious quantity and remarkably high quality of his work during the 1930s one would expect Wyatt Blassingame to be mentioned in the same breath as contemporaries such as Lovecraft, Smith, and Howard. Certainly, he was as important to the success of Popular Publications’ “Big Three” weird menace pulps as the aforementioned gentlemen were to the success of Weird Tales.

Between 1934 and 1940 Wyatt Blassingame authored over five dozen outstanding horror stories; almost all were for Popular Publications and the vast majority were of at least novelette length and frequently the had the place of honor as the cover story. Such a track record should have served to make the author a well-known figure within the genre. Sadly, this was not to be the case… The reasons for Blassingame’s obscurity are ironically enough a result of his success!

First and foremost, with the exception of a handful of reprint anthologies edited and published by Robert Weinberg over twenty years ago and two fine anthologies edited by the late Sheldon Jaffrey, the weird menace pulps have been pretty much ignored by anthologists, with only a handful of tales by Hugh B. Cave appearing in the massive collections of his pulp fiction published by Fedogan & Bremer. Until recently, with the advent of “Terror Trios” at Altus Press and a six-volume set of Blassingame’s collected weird tales in process at Dancing Tuatara Press, only one volume (a slim paperback collection of detective stories which was published over fifty years ago) existed as evidence of Wyatt Blassingame’s career as a pulpster.

The main reason for the weird menace pulps being ignored is a partially deserved reputation for formulaic tales of cardboard characters with the main emphasis being on wild excesses of violence and hints of all manner of depravity.  While true to a certain extent, a sweeping generalization like this is no more accurate or useful than to state that Weird Tales published the worst science fiction of the 1930s. Again, a true statement, but one that ignores all of the fine work published there.

The truisms are that editor Rogers Terrill was fond of the formula where a seemingly supernatural menace would be revealed to be of a mundane nature on the last page of the story. Equally true is that when the genre was bad, it was awful… However, the mainstays of the “Big Three” (Dime Mystery Magazine, Horror Stories, and Terror Tales)  such as Blassingame, Knox, Ernst, Cave, Zagat, & Burks were talented enough to get the most out of the formula and more importantly, were popular enough that they could blithely ignore the editorial mandate and turn in out-and-out supernatural tales whenever they chose to do so. The results were a body of work that can stand comparison to the best stories in Weird Tales or Strange Tales. In the case of Wyatt Blassingame, he started at a high level in 1934 and remained in top form until the genre imploded in the late 1930s.

To add a bit more background, I’d like to address the canard that has floated around collecting circles for many years; the idea that somehow the aforementioned authors weren’t good enough to crack Weird Tales… Obviously, Burks, Cave, and Ernst were so prolific that they were frequent contributors to “The Unique Magazine” as all three men were capable of filling a magazine’s complete content. In the cases of Blassingame and Knox there’s a very pragmatic reason that they ignored Weird Tales… They were earning two to three times as much appearing in the “Big Three”! One might also take note of the fact that during the height of the weird menace genre (1935-1937) both Arthurs (Burks and Zagat) are pretty much absent from Weird Tales, presumably with only overflow tales being submitted there.

While Wyatt Blassingame did write a wide variety of fiction, it’s evident that with his knowledge of obscure mythologies and cultures that the genre of weird fiction was perfectly suited to his talents. Of the three novellas presented here, two are from his first year as a professional writer and serve to show just how polished his work was from the very beginning. Throughout the 1930s he remained one of, if not the best of the authors specializing in the genre. Equally comfortable with Terrill’s formula or with the full-blown supernatural tale, his stories provide a great mix and keep the reader guessing as to whether or not the horror is supernatural or not. As the decade wound to close and the weird menace genre perished due to its self-imposed limitations Blassingame switch to more straightforward detective and mystery tales and proved to be equally good at these.

Called into service in WWII, Blassingame returned to find a vastly different market from what he had left… The weird menace genre was gone entirely with only an occasional story of that type showing up here and there. The pulps themselves were dying, where once over two dozen mystery and horror pulps dominated the newsstands now there were only a handful of digest-sized magazines in their stead. Wyatt Blassingame saw the handwriting on the wall and immediately made the switch to authoring childrens’ books on a variety of subjects (most often, U.S. History). Later he would augment his income by teaching creative writing.

Apparently, these new careers left little time to contemplate marketing collections of his pulp fiction and thus, some of the finest weird fiction of the 1930s has remained unavailable… Until now… So far there are three volumes of his short fiction available from Dancing Tuatara Press and I have two more complete. The sixth volume will pretty much finish things off with every significant piece of his horror fiction reprinted. You can buy the books off eBay (seller ID = chrismorris927) or if you're not sure about picking up the whole set,  e-mail me at [email protected] What the hell, I'll send anyone interested a free Blassingame story to peruse. This really is an author deserving of a wider audience.

[DEAN]

Terror Tales covers are aaawwwwesome. There are a batch at http://pulpcovers.com/tag/terrortales/ .

 

[Control]

This thread is amazing and is pretty much my favourite thing on this board.

[DEAN]

Greatest name for a all-female death metal band- DARLINGS OF THE BLACK MASTER!

[OSJ]

Terror Tales covers are aaawwwwesome. There are a batch at http://pulpcovers.com/tag/terrortales/ .

 

 

Jest so ya know... Russell Gray was a pen-name for well-known mystery author Bruno Fischer. He was also the most hardcore of all the guys working for the weird menace pulps. In case you doubt me, check out http://fiction.libgen.net/view.php?id=878409 and consider that this was written seventy years ago... It would be difficult to get something this sick published now, how it got published then is a complete mystery...

 

However, if anyone is seeking more Gray Grand Guignol goodness, I have put together two collections of his best stuff, and the first one Hostesses in Hell is available now...

[DEAN]

OSJ, that story is some twisted shit in any era.  I got his read his hard-boiled noir stuff.

[OSJ]

OSJ, that story is some twisted shit in any era.  I got his read his hard-boiled noir stuff.

 

 

Check out House of Flesh under his real name (Bruno Fischer), another good one is The Lustful Ape.

[OSJ]

Okay folks, let's go way, way back this week to the 1920s when booze was illegal and the west was terrified of all things Asian... The author of the week is Edmund Snell, at one time he was so prolific that you couldn't pick up a fiction magazine in the UK without finding a Snell story somewhere on the table of contents. When the story paper The Thriller came along, Snell was in hog heaven, the publisher wanted full-length novellas, Snell loved to write at that length and the end result was dozens of stories that qualified as book-length back in the day. Snell wrote of American gangsters (and was one of the few Brits that could do so without sounding like a complete twit), but his real forte was writing stories of Asian super-criminals, generally with a good deal of the action taking place in exotic locales like Singapore or Borneo (Snell lived in both places).  

 

As this was in those halcyon days before marketing categories dictated everything, his novels were all simply called "thrillers". You never knew what you were going to get, straight mystery, fantastic inventions, or outright supernatural content. Some of the best were The White Owl, The Yu-chi Stone, The Sound Machine, and The Yellow Seven. Several are available as reprints from Ramble House Publishers, others can be found cheaply on abebooks.com.

 

Sadly, Snell's short stories didn't get the same treatment and there are well over 100 (by my count) that have never been reprinted, (please excuse the shameless self-promotion that follows), so far, I've assembled a half-dozen collections, mostly from The Thriller and Detective Fiction Weekly that will see publication from Ramble House. I'm also working on preparing a matching set of his trilogy that begins with The Yellow Seven, continues with Sign of the Scorpion and concludes with The Return of Chanda-Lung. Chanda-Lung is simply one of the most badass characters to feature in pulp fiction. Imagine a guy with the intellect of Fu Manchu and the general temperament of Bullseye and you're pretty close. Anyway, Edmund Snell's work holds up amazingly well for material written eighty years ago and if you excuse some of the fallacies in the science department, you'll find a lot to like about his stuff. It's just amazing that someone that was so prolific is so completely forgotten today, it would be like time travelling to 2050 and finding that no one had heard of Tom Clancy or Stephen King.

 

Anyway, do check out Edmund Snell and post your thoughts here!

[Control]

I've got my hands on the first volume of Blassingame's weird fiction from Dancing Tuatara. I've only read the first story; which one is the strongest of the bunch?

[J.T.]

Well shit. My local library has a copies of Yellow Jacket and The Yellow Seven by Snell.  I will have to go and check them out.

[OSJ]

J.T. :

 

Anyway I could trouble you to Xerox Yellowjacket? I will of course pay for the copies and postage and immortalize you in the introduction. ;-)

[OSJ]

I've got my hands on the first volume of Blassingame's weird fiction from Dancing Tuatara. I've only read the first story; which one is the strongest of the bunch?

 

Without question, "SONG OF THE DEAD". Damn near was my pick for best story of the year (1935) in CENTURY'S BEST HORROR. Got edged by Clark Ashton Smith, ain't no shame in that... Just my opinion, but I think if Blassingame had written for WEIRD TALES instead of the weird menace mags (which paid more), he'd be pretty much as well-known as Lovecraft today, well, maybe not Lovecraft, but at least the level of Smith...

[J.T.]

Well, shit.  Those Snell copies were on loan from the New York Public Library for restoration at the Library Sciences department at VCU and have been sent back.

 

I am pissed beyond normal levels of pissivity. I will check to see if the Snell volumes were photoed for conversion to eBook or maybe put on microfiche.

[OSJ]

Be not overly pissed! Your post suggests that you have some connection with VCU, whether it be as faculty or student matters not, you have vast powers at your disposal of which you had not even dreamed! It appears that your institution participates in the ILL network, this is the Inter-Library Loan program (which used to be a big selling point when recruiting students). Basically, anyone connected to a participating facility can obtain any book they want from anywhere in the network just by going into the library and requesting an ILL form, which will ask for the following info:

 

Your library card # or Student/Faculty ID Card #

Book Title: Yellow jacket. The Return of Chanda-Lung

Publisher: Skeffington

Date Published: 1936

Reason Needed: Research

That's it... They can't say "no", although some institutions may stipulate that an item may not be removed from the facility (that's still not a problem as far as we're concerned.)

[Control]

I'm curious: were there any women "weird menace" writers?

[OSJ]

I'm curious: were there any women "weird menace" writers?

 

Indeed there were (surprisingly enough), "Gabrielle Wilson" was Ray Cummings' wife and has a bunch of stories credited to her. However, how much work is hers and how much is Cummings' is open to debate. I sure don't see any stylistic differences, and suspect that the work may have been part or even all Cummings.

 

There was also the husband/wife team of Edith and Ejler Jacobson. Ejler is best remembered today as a sf editor during the 1950s. They churned out a dozen or so fairly lengthy and fairly mediocre pieces. There are a couple of good stories, but most of their work is nothing to get excited about.

 

Finally we come to "Donald Dale" the pen-name of Mary Dale Buckner. I'm torn between her and Greye La Spina as to who was the "First Lady of Fear Fiction" in the first half of the 20th Century (the second half we have all sorts of contneders., Lucy Taylor, Poppy Z. Brite, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Christa Faust, Elizabeth Massie, etc. , etc. etc.) For the first half, no one else comes close to these two. Buckner was a linguistics major paying her way toward her phd with writing weird menace stories. Sadly, when she got her doctorate and drifted off to the towers of academe, she didn't need the extra money and stopped writing. A damn shame. In four years she authored over five dozen stories, most of novelette length, and nary a stinker among them. I have assembled one volume of her fiction $35.00 postpaid. PayPal [email protected] and am working on a second volume that will collect all of her best stories. She was obviously very well versed in various mythologies and this shows up in her writing, setting it a notch above most of her contemporaries.

 

THE BEAUTIFUL DEAD and Other Stories

 

By Mary Dale Buckner writing as Donald Dale

 

In this collection of stories from the pulps, mostly written in the 30s by Mary Dale Buckner, we find that she wrote some of the most violent, over-the-top examples of the weird menace and horror genres. John Pelan's introduction tells all about her and her time in the pulps and the final essay by Buckner explains how she saw her role in what was a man's world. 

 

The stories are:

 

Bride of the Red Hate, © Horror Stories, June/July 1939

Maids for the Dust Devils, © Dime Mystery Magazine, July 1938

The Beautiful Dead, © Terror Tales, March/April 1937

Art Class in Hell, © Horror Stories, June/July 1937

Bodies Born for Slaughter, © Terror Tales, September 1940

The Murder Child, © Dime Mystery Magazine, February 1937

Vendetta with the Dead, © The Scorpion, April/May 1939

Times Dark Chapter, © Dime Mystery Magazine, February 1938

Call to the Murder Girls, © Dime Mystery Magazine, May 1938

I See With Dead Man’s Eyes, © Dime Mystery Magazine, May 1937

Caverns of Cain, © Horror Stories, April 1941

Fear Fiction © Terror Tales, March 1941

[Control]

Awesome. What are the top stories for Buckner and La Spina? (Also: Greya La Spina is an amazing name)

[OSJ]

Awesome. What are the top stories for Buckner and La Spina? (Also: Greya La Spina is an amazing name)

 

That's Baroness La Spina to you! ;-) Seriously, her second husband was the Baron La Spina... Her best-known and in the opinions of most, her best work is the short novel Invaders from the Dark. It vies with Thomas Tessier's The Nightwalker for greatest werewolf story of all-time. I also think that "The Dead Wagon" and "The Gargoyle" are both excellent. It so happens that Stefan Dziemianowicz and I are putting together a volume of La Spina for Centipede Press' "Masters of the Weird Tale" series. The book will contain her entire output of weird fiction and likely run around 800 pages. The "Masters of the Weird Tale" series is just amazing, they've done Blackwood, Lovecraft, Machen, Hodgson, and Kuttner as well as the volumes put together for them (Frank Belknap Long, Hugh B. Cave, Fritz Leiber, & Arthur J. Burks), so far, only the FBL volume has been published and it came in at right around 1000 pages containing some sixty stories... The Cave, Leiber, and Burks are all of similar size. The books are very expensive, but they really are works of art...

 

Send me an e-mail at  [email protected] and I'll send you a couple of sample "Donald Dale" stories. This offer good for anyone on the board... 

[Control]

Great. Email sent.

 

Now, to track down Allison V. Harding's "Damp Man" stories.

[OSJ]

Great. Email sent.

 

Now, to track down Allison V. Harding's "Damp Man" stories.

 

Why? When you've read one, you've read all three. ;-)

[OSJ]

I Give you.... ANTHONY RUD

 

 

 

Now that the good folks at Girasol Collectables have reprinted many early issues of Weird Tales, this trivia question isn’t as difficult as it once was, but it’s still useful for winning the occasional pint at a convention: “Who was the author featured on the first issue of Weird Tales?” Most of your Weird Tales readers know it wasn’t Lovecraft, but are likely to guess at Seabury Quinn, or perhaps Greye La Spina. Of course, these answers are wrong… The cover portrayed the story “Ooze: The Tale of a Thousand Thrills”! by Anthony Rud. This leads to the question “Who the heck was Anthony Rud and why was Weird Tales so high on him?

Well, this volume and its companion (to be released in 2012) addresses that very question. Anthony Rud was a dependable scribe primarily of adventure and mystery tales but he definitely had a bent for the bizarre. As can be seen in the novel The Stuffed Men, Rud was writing in the weird menace genre during its heyday in 1935, but getting published in book form as opposed to appearing in publications such as Dime Mystery Magazine, Terror Tales and Horror Stories. As to why Weird Tales was so high on Rud, an examination of the contents page of that famous first issue reveals a list of authors that did little, if anything to leave their footprints in the literary sands of time. In short, Rud was the sole professional represented in that first issue and if not a household name, at least there was the possibility that readers might recognize the name from other publications and pick up the issue.

This book had an extremely odd genesis… My currently dormant imprint, Midnight House has long focused on books that I felt should have been done decades ago by Arkham House. Weird Tales has been a primary source of material with authors such as G.G. Pendarves and Eric Frank Russell having the majority of their weird fiction collected. Future volumes include authors such as Everil Worrell and Harold Lawlor. Others, such as Frank Belknap Long and Arthur J. Burks turned into such mammoth projects that the only possible venue for their publication was the “Masters of the Weird Tale” series being offered by Centipede Press. As to this particular volume, some years back Peter Haining contacted me regarding a possible volume for Midnight House. This was somewhat of a surprise as over the years I had been less than kind in reviews of Mr. Haining’s work…

To be more precise, I have the highest regard for Mr. Haining’s enthusiasm for the genre and his tireless efforts to bring obscure weird fiction back into print; however, my opinion of his research is considerably lower. It just seems as though whenever he had a major project such as his facsimile volume Weird Tales, he just didn’t bother to check facts such as publication dates… Anyway, Peter presented the idea of doing a Rud collection paired with another author, Robert Spencer Carr working under the theory that neither author had quite enough material for a full collection… Well, there’s that research thing again… It so happens that when you consider the stories that Rud published under his pseudonym of “R. Anthony” one has eight longish stories in the weird fiction vein and the inclusion of a couple of his more bizarre adventure stories would give you a decent collection. Of course, when one factors in the two weird novels, The Stuffed Men and The House of the Damned, one is looking at two very healthy-sized volumes. As for Carr, not only does he have enough material for a collection, such a collection was published some sixty years ago!

In any event, Peter sent me just four or five pieces, laboring under the assumption that I have a huge collection of pulps and could fill in the blanks with material from my files… Unfortunately, I actually have the worst collection of Weird Tales in the world, numbering some dozen issues from the late 1940s, so the project appeared to be stillborn. Added to this was the fact that other than the minor classic “Spiderbite”, Carr’s fiction tends to leave me cold.  Also, there really isn’t any sort of commonality between the two authors that would justify a combined collection. I began to have these horrible visions of some of those monstrosities that Bill Crawford produced in the early fifties when he’s have left over sheets from two completely unrelated books and would bind them up as a “Science Fiction Twin” or some such. However, the idea of an Anthony Rud collection stuck with me as something that would be worthwhile and of interest to a wide readership.

What I’ve decided to do is include the full-length novel The Stuffed Men with a selection of shorter works from Weird Tales: “Ooze”, “A Square of Canvas”, “The Place of Hairy Death” and “The Endocrine Monster”. A second volume will include the novel The House of the Damned and the short stories “The Spectral Lover”, “Bellowing Bamboo”, “The Parasitic Hand” “The Witch-Baiter” and a little-known piece from Thrilling Wonder Stories, “The Molten Bullet”. While I can’t say that Anthony Rud is a lost master of the genre, his work is still a great deal of fun. His scientists are madder than the proverbial hatter, damsels are always in distress and any experiment started is bound to go horribly awry. It’s surprising that Rud was getting books sales with the same type of material that authors such as Wayne Rogers and Wyatt Blassingame were churning out for Terror Tales and Dime Mystery Magazine.  It’s possible that Rud’s appearances in Argosy and other top fiction magazines gave him the cache necessary to make book editors sit up and take notice. As to actual quality, there’s little difference between Rud’s work that appeared in book form and the average lead novel from the weird menace pulps (most of which were quite good). Why Rud got book publication while his colleagues toiled in the pulps is a mystery that I can’t answer, but I think that any fan of the weird menace collections that I’ve been issuing through Dancing Tuatara Press will find much to enjoy here!

While these two books took on a radically different form that what Peter may have envisioned, we do have Peter Haining to thank for these books existing at all. After nearly ninety years readers can now see why Anthony Rud merited the cover feature in the first issue of “the unique magazine” and why he should take his place alongside other writers of weird menace and bizarre crimes such as Mark Hansom, Walter S. Masterman, John H. Knox, Wyatt Blassingame and Garnett Radcliffe.