Tellers of Weird Tales

Poet, Author, Reporter, Columnist, Feature Writer

Born 1895, San Francisco, California

Died February 14, 1960, Spokane, Washington

Myrtle Levy was born in San Francisco in 1895 to Morris Harry Levy (1866-1924) and Jenny (Swartz) Levy (1879-1962). She attended school in Spokane, Washington, and was in the first graduating class of Lewis and Clark High School in that city, in 1913. She married Charles Augustus Gaylord, who died in San Diego in 1929 or 1930. Myrtle Levy Gaylord started with the Spokane Press a few months later. It was her first newspaper job.

Before going to work in the newspaper business, Myrtle was a writer for pulp magazines. Her stories and poems appeared in Breezy Stories, Droll Stories, and Lover's Lane from 1922 to 1927. Her lone story for Weird Tales was "The Wish," from April 1923. She also had one story in Street & Smith’s Love Story Magazine in 1942. One of her stories won her a $1,000 prize.

When the Spokane Press closed in 1939, Myrtle Gaylord moved over to the Spokane Chronicle, where she spent the rest of career covering "every type of assignment and nearly every newsbeat in the city." She also wrote a popular column called "Glimpses.""Her writing was warm and human," remembered the Chronicle. "She had a flare for feature writing, particularly human-interest features, [a]nd she covered more murder trials in the Inland Empire than any other Spokane reporter." She was called "the dean of Spokane newspaper women." It was her tradition each spring to give a dollar to the first child who delivered a buttercup to her desk. (1)

After thirty years on the job, Myrtle Levy Gaylord retired on February 1, 1960. She died two weeks later, on February 14, in Spokane. The cause was cancer. She was survived by her mother, two sons, and seven grandchildren. Her older son, Morris Levy Gaylord, a U.S. Army veteran of World War II and the Korean War, died last year at age ninety-five. Her younger, Frank Lincoln Gaylord, Sr., a U.S. Navy veteran of both wars, died in 2011.

Note

(1) The quotes are from "Myrtle Gaylord Taken by Death,"Spokane Daily Chronicle, February 15, 1960, page 1.

Myrtle Levy Gaylord's Story in Weird Tales

"The Wish" (Apr. 1923)

Further Reading

Only the articles referred to or linked to in the text and note above.

Author, Screenwriter

Born February 12, 1896, Manchester, Lancashire, England

Died May 22, 1949, Beverly Hills, California

Charles Gordon Booth may have been unique among contributors to "The Unique Magazine" in that he won an Academy Award for his writing. He was born on February 12, 1896, in Manchester, England. His father, William Booth, died in 1901. His mother, Emily Ada Hill Booth, took her son to Canada in 1904. Booth received his schooling in Toronto and Winnipeg and was working as a stenographer for a lumber company in Norwood, Manitoba, when he enlisted in the Canadian Army on March 3, 1916, in Winnipeg. His unit, the 203rd Battalion, called the Winnipeg Rifles, shipped out for England in October 1916. Booth was discharged in 1917 and was evidently sick or wounded, as he spent seventeen months in the hospital following his discharge. In 1922, he immigrated to the United States, taking his mother with him. They first went to Washington, then to San Diego. Charles Gordon Booth lived in southern California for all or most of the rest of his life. He became a naturalized citizen in 1930. At the time he was living in Ocean Beach, California.

Charles G. Booth was the author of scores of stories published between 1921 and 1944. He contributed to The Black Mask, Clues, Detective Story Magazine, Fawcett's Triple-X Magazine, Flynn's, Holland's, MacLean's, Munsey's, Mystery Stories, Open Road, Overland, Pall Mall, Pearson's Life, People's Popular Monthly, Sunset, Western Story Magazine, and many other titles. His lone story for Weird Tales was "Dust of Shun-Ti," from October 1925. He also wrote novels, mostly in the genres of crime and mystery. All but the last were published in the United States (first date below), and all were published in the country of their author's birth (second date below).

Sinister House: A Mystery Story of Southern California (1926, 1927)
Gold Bullets (1929, 1929)
Murder at High Tide (1930, 1930)
Those Seven Alibis (1932, 1933)
The Cat and the Clock (1935, 1938)
The General Died at Dawn (1937, 1941)
Mr. Angel Comes Aboard (1944, 1946)
Kings Die Hard (London, 1949)

Booth's stories were adapted to the screen beginning in 1936. He also wrote or cowrote several screenplays and won an Oscar for The House on 92nd Street, a semi-documentary spy movie from 1945. His movie credits:

The General Died at Dawn (1936)--Based on his story
The Magnificent Fraud (1939)--Based on his story
Hurricane Smith (1941)--Based on his story
Sundown (1941)--Screenplay with Barré Lyndon
The Traitor Within (1942)--Based on his story
The House on 92nd Street (1945)--Screenplay with Barré Lyndon
Johnny Angel (1945)--Based on "Mr. Angel Comes Aboard"
Behind Green Lights (1946)--Screenplay with Scott Darling
Strange Triangle (1946)--Screenplay
Fury at Furnace Creek (1948)--Screenplay
Moon Over Parador (1988)--Based on "Caviar for His Excellency"

Charles Gordon Booth was married to Lillian Lind Booth Foley (1904-1996). He died on May 22, 1949, in Beverly Hills at age fifty-three. He and his wife, who survived him by nearly a half century, were buried at Twin Falls Cemetery, in Twin Falls, Idaho.

Charles Gordon Booth's Story in Weird Tales

"Dust of Shun-Ti" (Oct. 1925)

Further Reading

"Charles G. Booth" by Steve on the blog Bear Alley Books, Oct. 26, 2015, here. Much of the information here is from Steve's blog posting. Thank you, Steve.

Military Officer, Author
Born 1889, Cookham, Berkshire, England
Died 1957, Suffolk, England

According to The FictionMags Index, George Norsworthy was George (Lenny) Norsworthy, who was born in 1889 in Cookham, Berkshire, England, and who died in 1957 in Suffolk, England. A man named George Lenny Norsworthy of Sussex was an officer in the Royal Garrison Artillery of the British Army during World War I and in the Royal Regiment of Artillery in World War II. It seems likely that this was the same man.

George Norsworthy was an author of mystery stories set in England and in Monaco. His books and short stories:

"Murder by Suicide" in Detective Story Magazine (Apr. 27, 1929)
"The Third Man" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1930)
"'Do You Keep Pigs?'" in 20-Story Magazine (June 1933)
Casino (1934?)
Dames-Errant, a Gold Seal Novel complete in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer (1935)
A House-Party Mystery (1935)
Murder at Mulberry Tree Cottage (1937)
Gaz Mortel (Deadly Gas, 1938)
The Hartness Millions
Crime at the Villa Gloria (no date)

That is all I know of George Norsworthy. Maybe a British researcher can fill in the gaps.

George Norsworthy's Story in Weird Tales

"The Third Man" (Mar. 1930)

Further Reading

Click on the links in the list of Norsworthy's credits to read the complete story.

Casino, a complete novel printed in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer.

Gaz Mortel (Deadly Gas, 1938), a French-language edition with an illustration by Claudel.

Poet, Editor, Reporter
Born July 10, 1880, Cascade, Iowa
Died May 13, 1953, Dubuque, Iowa

In the centennial week of Dubuque, Iowa, in August 1933, Anthony Klinkner was awarded as the first poet laureate of the state of Iowa by the Poet Laureate League of America. The award was made "'in appreciation of the commendable interest and activity he has shown in the advancement of poetry and literature in the state of Iowa, and in recognition of his excellence in poetry composition'." (1) Klinkner had just turned fifty-three and had been writing poems for a quarter century. His poems had been broadcast over the radio and used in school programs. According to the Encyclopedia Dubuque, "Klinkner's articles and verse appeared in more than three hundred Catholic and secular newspapers throughout North America, France, and Ireland."

Anthony Ferdinand Timothy Klinkner was born on July 10, 1880, in Cascade, Iowa, to two German immigrants, John H. Klinkner (1851-1927) and Margaret F. (Knippling) Klinkner (1850-1936). He graduated from St. Mary's High School in Cascade, Iowa. On June 27, 1905, he married Margaret Wallace (1882-?) in Farley, Iowa. They had two children.

A summary of Anthony Klinkner's résumé from The American Catholics Who's Who, 1946-1947, page 234:

Apprentice, Cascade Courier, 1896
Editor, Young America, 1897-1903
Member, United and National Amateur Press Associations, ca. 1897-1903 (from another source than Who's Who)
Reporter, Dubuque Telegraph-Herald, 1903
Editor, Farley News, 1904-1910
With Waukegon Republican and Cascade Pioneer, 1912-1919
With the Catholic Printing Company, Dubuque, from 1919
State and fiction editor, Catholic Daily Tribune, Dubuque, from 1926
Named first poet laureate of Iowa by the Poet Laureate League of America, 1933
Contributing editor, The Circle poetry magazine
Member, Catholic Poetry Society of America and other Catholic organizations

He wrote one poem in Weird Tales. Here is a list, far from complete, of his credits:

"The Sign" in The Sign (Sept. 1921)
Ten Nights in Fairyland (1921)
"The Dead Are in the Hillside Clay" in Weird Tales (Jan. 1933)
My Baby: Petals, Selected Poems (Dubuque, 1935)

Anthony Klinkner died on May 13, 1953, at age seventy-two and was buried at Mount Calvary Cemetery in Dubuque.

Note

(1) Quoted in the Mason City Globe-Gazette, Mason City, Iowa, Aug. 3, 1933, p. 2.

Some poems by Anthony F.T. Klinkner:

Alleluia!
The Christ who works in offices
Is weary of his load,
Sum Total is his torture
And Hurry is his goad.

From Pilate's hall to Caiaphas
They drive him to and fro,
And only He Who is a Sign
His agony will know.

They crown his brow with wrinkles deep
To profit find or loss,
With price and cost they load him down,
The Ledger is his cross.

Each day he goes to Golgotha
To meekly do their will,
They look at him with eyes of scorn
On crucifixion hill.

The Christ who works in offices
For masters stern and grim,
Looks from his window prison bars
To hear the Easter hymn!

Baby Lindbergh
The empty arms of his mother will ache
For the feel of his velvet cheek,
The loving heart of his father will break
For no more will his red lips speak.
And over the hills with angels to roam
Where no sin of the world may mar,
He waits in the halls of heavenly home
Where all of God's little ones are.
--from The Catholic Tribune, May 14, 1932.

Armistice Day
Endless crosses row on row
Tell of boys we used to know
In the golden long ago.

They were young and they were brave,
Freely their young lives they gave,
For oblivion of the grave.

Underneath the skies of France,
Battle-scar and battle-chance,
Made of death a circumstance.

America their native land,
Saw them march to stirring band,
Saw them leave for foreign strand.

Deathless they in valor sleep,
We their memory sacred keep,
While the long years onward sweep.
--from The Catholic Tribune, Nov. 10, 1937

Anthony Klinkner's Poem in Weird Tales

"The Dead Are in the Hillside Clay" (Jan. 1933)

Further Reading

There isn't much to read about Anthony Klinkner on the Internet, but links are embedded in the main body of text above.

Poet, Author, Editor, Boy Scout
Born August 11, 1906
Died September 1987

Ralph Allen Lang was born on August 11, 1906, and though he lived past eighty, he seems to have spent a good part of his life being a boy and doing the things boys do. In the 1920s, he was a Boy Scout after having been a Lone Scout. In his middle years, he worked for Holgate Brothers Company of Kane, Pennsylvania, a maker of wooden toys. And, in the mid-1940s, he wrote this sonnet about youth, longing, and sanctuary:

Sanctuary
by Ralph Allen Lang

I have a chamber where the walls are hung
With all the splendid sunsets I have seen
Surmounting somber banks of forest green
Where, through the long sweet days, the birds have sung;
Here, too, Aurora's brightest rays are flung
In golden mist upon a dew-drenched scene
The wine of Hebe glistens in her sheen,
A draught of health that ever keeps us young--
And in my room are skies and clouds and rain
And many a star and many a rainbow glows
And laughing streams leap onward to the main,
And moonlight weirdly gleams on crusted snows.
Here Beauty waits, and here I may regain
My youth, and find a balm for all my woes. (1)

The sentiment is the same, I think, as in the Beach Boys' song "In My Room" from two decades later.

The Lone Scouts of America were founded in 1915 for boys who lived in rural areas, away from others with whom they might form a troop, or as the Lone Scouts called them, "tribe." There weren't any adult leaders and no age limit. The boys were on their own and communicated with each other by mail and through their organizational magazine, Lone Scout, to which they contributed articles, stories, photographs, and cartoons. "The magazine," wrote Robert Peterson in Scouting, "was . . . the spawning ground for thousands of future writers, editors, and printers." (2) Ralph Allen Lang was one of them. In 1965, Lang was awarded a gold merit medal for his poem "Ah, Wilderness," written for the 50th anniversary issue of Lone Scout magazine. The Lone Scouts by then existed only in the memories of the boys who were once members, for they had merged with the Boy Scouts in June 1924. (3)

If you look into old issues of Boys' Life, you will see the name of Ralph Allen Lang from time to time. In 1924, in response to the merger of the two scouting groups, he noted, "The Lone Scouts of America has developed into more of a literary organization than anything else," whereas the Boy Scouts had practiced more in woodcraft. (4) He pledged his loyalty to the Boy Scouts, and by the end of the year, he was being recognized for his accomplishments:

Another name has been added to the small number of Supreme Scouts, that of Ralph Allen Lang. Scout Lang is present Scout Chief of District #3, Pennsylvania--and has won his set of Merit Medals and Quill through his poetical efforts. (Boys' Life, Oct. 1924, p. 47)

The Council Fire, ALSAP 10, edited by Ralph Allen Lang, SS, of Kane, Pennsylvania, has been designated by the Council of Ten as official organ of Council Three . . . . (Boys' Life, Nov. 1925, p. 17)

There are other items as well, but these show Scout Lang's interest in writing and editing.

In the early 1930s, Lang contributed three stories to Weird Tales. Two have been reprinted in hardback. "The Silver Knife," from January 1932, is a werewolf story of the Far North. Strangely, there is an allusion to the Cthulhu Mythos in the mention of "an ancient temple of Dagon.""On Top," from November 1933, is a very brief tale of the Old West. It has an amusing twist at the end and reads like a story from the comic book House of Mystery or House of Secrets from the early 1970s.

In the 1940s, Ralph A. Lang was associate editor of Highlights of Holgates, the house organ of Holgate Brothers Company in Lang's hometown of Kane, Pennsylvania. The company started making wooden toys in 1929 and specialized in finely made educational playthings for preschoolers. The logo used from 1938 to 1945 reads, "Educational, Sturdy, Safe." Norman Rockwell's brother, Jarvis Rockwell, Jr., is supposed to have worked there for a time. As for Ralph Allen Lang, I know nothing more about him except that he died in September 1987 at age eighty-one.

Ralph Allen Lang's Stories in Weird Tales

"The Silver Knife" (Jan. 1932)

"On Top" (Nov. 1933)

"The Thunderstones of Nuflo" (July 1934)

Further Reading

"The Silver Knife" was reprinted in 100 Creepy Little Creature Stories, edited by Robert Weinberg, Stefan Dziemianowicz, and Martin H. Greenberg (1994).
"On Top" was reprinted in 100 Wild Little Weird Tales, edited by Stefan R. Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Martin H. Greenberg (1994).
You can read about the Lone Scouts of America and Holgate Brothers Company elsewhere on the Internet. The story of the Lone Scouts is especially interesting.

Notes

(1) The text of the poem is from a document made using text recognition software. I have had to edit it. I hope I have done so accurately.

(2) "The Way It Was: Where the Past Is Ever Present: The Museum at a North Carolina Council Scout Camp Commemorates the Lone Scouts of America." by Robert Peterson, from Scouting, September 2002, online here.

(3) See the article in the Kane (Pennsylvania) Republican, October 12, 1965, page 4.

(4) From Boys' Life, June 1924, p. 3.

The symbol of the Lone Scouts of America was an Indian with his arms raised.

This cover of Weird Tales from February 1924 is not very much different. It came just four months before the Lone Scouts were merged with the Boy Scouts of America. I wonder if the artist, R.M. Mally, was a Lone Scout.

Ralph Allen Lang in his days with the Lone Scouts, from Boys' Life, May 1924, page 50.

I began writing this blog five years ago. Today is the anniversary. I started out and have been writing more or less randomly. Not long ago, though, I looked through the remaining authors and gave them some kind of organization. Although there are still several hundred to go, I can see an end to all this, although that end might be several years out.

One of the writers I missed in my previous groupings of tellers of weird tales from the past is William Ernest Henley.* I would like to write about him today, but he really belongs with the other writers of the Victorian Age in an entry from October 27, 2011, not only because he was one of them but also because he was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), who based his character Long John Silver on Henley.

William Ernest Henley was born on August 23, 1849, in Gloucester, England, and attended The Crypt School in that city. He passed his examination in 1867 and went to work in the field of journalism. Henley edited London (1877-1878), the Magazine of Art (1882-1886), the Scots Observer/National Observer (1888-1893), and a publication called Ana Siken. Through all that, he wrote poetry and through all that he endured ill health, surgical operations, and long stays in the hospital from which he emerged minus a leg.

Henley's time was one of great prosperity and expanding horizons but also one of decadence and looking backward. Henley himself was conservative, but his poetry is forward-looking, not only in its optimism (or at least its undefeated attitude) but also in its anticipation of the verse of the coming century. According to Andrzej Diniejko, Henley and his circle (called the "Henley Regatta") "promoted realism and opposed Decadence," a viewpoint and movement then in fashion. (Quoted in Wikipedia in an entry that is disjointed at best.) If anyone might have cause to feel defeated, pessimistic, or depressed--in other words a candidate for the Decadent vogue of the fin de siècle--Henley was it. From the age of twelve, he suffered from tuberculosis in his bones. Sometime in 1868-1869, he had his left leg taken off below the knee. Henley spent a good deal of time in the hospital, including the years 1873-1875, when his right foot was also diseased. More tragically, Henley's daughter Margaret, who had inspired James Barrie in his creation of Peter Pan, died in 1894 at age five. If his poetry is any indication, Henley remained undefeated by death and disease, however. Here is his most famous work, Invictus, from 1875:

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gait,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

Here is another poem, presumably on the death of his daughter, and on his own impending end:

In Memoriam: Margaritae Sorori

A late lark twitters from the quiet skies:

And from the west,

Where the sun, his day's work ended,

Lingers as in content,

There falls on the old, gray city

An influence luminous and serene,

A shining peace.

The smoke ascends

In a rosy-and-golden haze. The spires

Shine and are changed. In the valley

Shadows rise. The lark sings on. The sun,

Closing his benediction,

Sinks, and the darkening air

Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night--

Night with her train of stars

And her great gift of sleep.

So be my passing!

My task accomplish'd and the long day done,

My wages taken, and in my heart

Some late lark singing,

Let me be gather'd to the quiet west,

The sundown splendid and serene,

Death.

I am reminded of Ralph Vaughan Williams' musical piece The Lark Ascending, from George Meredith's poem of the same name, published in 1881. To me, The Lark Ascending is both joyful and sad, music about life itself. It also represents, I think, England, about which Henley also famously wrote:

England, My England

What have I done for you,

England, my England?

What is there I would not do,

England, my own?

With your glorious eyes austere,

As the Lord were walking near,

Whispering terrible things and dear

As the Song on your bugles blown,

England--

Round the world on your bugles blown!

Where shall the watchful sun,

England, my England,

Match the master-work you’ve done,

England, my own?

When shall he rejoice agen

Such a breed of mighty men

As come forward, one to ten,

To the Song on your bugles blown,

England--

Down the years on your bugles blown?

Ever the faith endures,

England, my England:--

'Take and break us: we are yours,

England, my own!

Life is good, and joy runs high

Between English earth and sky:

Death is death; but we shall die

To the Song of your bugles blown,

England--

To the stars on your bugles blown!'

They call you proud and hard,

England, my England:

You with worlds to watch and ward,

England, my own!

You whose mail’d hand keeps the keys

Of such teeming destinies,

You could know nor dread nor ease

Were the Song on your bugles blown,

England--

Round the Pit on your bugles blown!

Mother of Ships whose might,

England, my England,

Is the fierce old Sea's delight,

England, my own,

Chosen daughter of the Lord,

Spouse-in-Chief of the ancient Sword,

There's the menace of the Word

In the Song on your bugles blown,

England--

Out of heaven on your bugles blown!

In our time, a poem like that would be called nationalistic, jingoistic, imperialistic, and even fascistic, the pejoratives that the politically correct so readily spew like verbal vomit. I take it as the work of a man who loved his country and all that it had accomplished, including, in an irony that is lost on them, the very freedom of thought and speech that allows the politically correct to criticize the country admired and the sentiments expressed in the poet's work.

William Ernest Henley died on July 11, 1903, in Woking, England. A little more than a quarter-century later, Weird Tales reprinted a poem by him that it called "A King in Babylon." Its author called it "To W.A.":

To W.A.

Or ever the knightly years were gone

With the old world to the grave,

I was a King in Babylon

And you were a Christian Slave.

I saw, I took, I cast you by,

I bent and broke your pride.

You loved me well, or I heard them lie,

But your longing was denied.

Surely I knew that by and by

You cursed your gods and died.

And a myriad suns have set and shone

Since then upon the grave

Decreed by the King of Babylon,

To her that had been his Slave.

The pride I trampled is now my scathe,

For it tramples me again.

The old resentment lasts like death,

For you love, yet you refrain.

I break my heart on your hard unfaith,

And I break my heart in vain.

Yet not for an hour do I wish undone

The deed beyond the grave,

When I was a King in Babylon

And you were a Virgin Slave.

William Ernest Henley
(1849-1903)

*Revision (Apr. 23, 2016): As it turns out, I did write about him before, but only briefly, in "More Weird Tales from the Victorian Age," October 30, 2011, here.
Original text copyright 2016 Terence E. Hanley

On October 23, 2011, I wrote about William Shakespeare (1564-1616) in an entry called "Weird Tales from the Renaissance." I had thought that Shakespeare--who died four hundred years ago today--was the only writer from the Renaissance to have been in the original Weird Tales. Now I find that there was another, Shakespeare's near contemporary, sometime collaborator, and successor, playwright John Fletcher (1579-1625).

I won't write much about John Fletcher, as his biography and credits are readily available on the Internet and in the world's libraries. He was born in Rye, England, in December 1579, orphaned in his teenage years, and educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University. His first play was The Faithful Shepherdess from 1608-1609. About fifty plays followed, of which about two-thirds were collaborations, with Francis Beaumont, Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, William Rowley, and others, including Shakespeare himself. After Shakespeare's death, John Fletcher assumed his role as the leading playwright for the acting company The King's Men. Fletcher died in August 1625 of the plague and was interred at Southwark Cathedral.

In its May issue of 1939, Weird Tales published a poem it called "The Dead Host's Welcome." (In Jaffery and Cook's Collector's Index to Weird Tales, the title is given as "The Dead Hart's Welcome.") That poem follows.

"The Dead Host's Welcome"

by John Fletcher

from The Lovers' Progress (edition of 1647)

'TIS late and cold; stir up the fire;

Sit close, and draw the table nigher;

Be merry, and drink wine that's old,

A hearty medicine 'gainst a cold:

Your beds of wanton down the best,

Where you shall tumble to your rest;

I could wish you wenches too,

But I am dead, and cannot do.

Call for the best the house may ring,

Sack, white, and claret, let them bring,

And drink apace, while breath you have;

You'll find but cold drink in the grave:

Plover, partridge, for your dinner,

And a capon for the sinner,

You shall find ready when you're up,

And your horse shall have his sup:

Welcome, welcome, shall fly round,

And I shall smile, though under ground.

John Fletcher
(1579-1625)

If you look to the right, you will see a label for Authors of Australia and New Zealand. Right now, there are only three entries with that label. The first (chronologically) is for Wilma Dorothy Vermilyea (1915-1995), an American author who lived in Australia late in life. The second is for Thomas G.L. Cockcroft (1926-2013), a New Zealander who did not write for Weird Tales but who indexed all the stories and poems in that magazine and its companion titles, Oriental Stories and The Magic Carpet Magazine. The third is for Percy B. Prior (dates unknown), whom I speculated was the only native-born Australian to have contributed to "The Unique Magazine" or its companion titles. Now I have found two others, and I would like to write about them today.

Coutts Brisbane was the nom de plume of Robert Coutts Armour, an early and fairly prolific author of what was then called the scientific romance, later science fiction. Born on September 14, 1874, in Queensland, Australia, Armour began publishing stories in his late thirties. According to the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (SFE), "[h]is earliest known story is 'Mixed Piggles' for The Red Magazine," (Dec. 1, 1910), while his earliest science fiction story is "Beyond the Orbit," also in The Red Magazine (Feb. 15, 1914). In addition to Coutts Brisbane, Armour wrote using the bylines Pierre Quiroule, Hartley Tremayne, Reid Whitley (or Whitly), "and other names not yet discovered," according to SFE. He contributed to Boys' Papers, Oriental Stories, Tales of Super Science, Tales of Wonder, and The Yellow Magazine. Armour was also the author of Terror Island, or, the House of Glass (London: The Amalgamated Press/Sexton Blake Library, 1921), The Secret of the Desert (London: Nelson, 1941), and Wheels of Fortune (London: Nelson, 1948). By the description of Wheels of Fortune in SFE, I would say that Armour's novel could have been a work of proto-Steampunk. Armour, who also worked as a lithographer, died in Surrey, England, in 1945. Other sources give dates of 1942 and 1956.

Coutts Brisbane's Stories in Oriental Stories

"For the Sake of Enlightenment" (Feb./Mar. 1931)

"At the Fortunate Frog" (Summer 1931)

Dorota Flatau, also known as (or had her name misspelled as) Dorotha or Dorothea Flatau, was born on December 30, 1874, in Bathurst, New South Wales, Australia. She was the older sister of two other writers, Hermione Flatau (1879-?) and Theodore Flatau (1886-1916). The three settled in England around 1900-1910. Theodore Flatau was killed in action in France during the Great War. You can see a list of works by all three writers in The Bibliography of Australian Literature, here. Dorota Flatau was an author of novels and children's books. The Rat of Paris (1922) is a romance involving a hunchback. Seven Journeys (1920) is listed as a genre work in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Dorota Flatau wrote one story for Oriental Stories, "Golden Rosebud" in the Winter 1931 issue. Her date of death is unknown.

Dorota Flatau's Story in Oriental Stories

"Golden Rosebud" (Winter 1931)

John Flanders

Né Raymundus Joannes de Kremer or Raymond Jean Marie De Kremer

Aka Jean Ray, King Ray, Alix R. Bantam, John Sailor, and other names
Author, Editor, Journalist, Comic Book Scriptwriter
Born July 8, 1887, Ghent, Belgium
Died September 17, 1964, Ghent, Belgium

Weird Tales published four stories by the pseudonymous author John Flanders, all in 1934-1935. That was only the smallest part of his staggering output of about 9,000 stories and 5,000 articles, essays, reviews, and so on written from the 1920s until his death in 1964.

John Flanders was born Raymundus Joannes de Kremer or Raymond Jean Marie De Kremer, in Ghent, Belgium, on July 8, 1887. He was educated in his home city and worked as a city clerk from 1910 to 1919 before joining the staff of Journal de Gand. He later worked for the monthly L'Ami du Livre. De Kremer's first book was a collection of weird stories called Les Contes du Whisky, published in 1925. He continued writing while serving jail time for "breech of trust" and began using the pseudonym John Flanders in 1928. In February 1929, he was released from prison and continued in his writing career. From 1929 to 1938, he wrote more than one hundred adventures of Harry Dickson, "the American Sherlock Holmes." De Kremer's novel Malpertuis (1943) was filmed in 1971 with Orson Welles in a starring role. After the war, de Kremer wrote comic book scripts for Les Aventures d'Harry Dickson and Les Aventures d'Edmund Bell. A native of Flanders, de Kremer wrote in Dutch as John Flanders and in French as Jean Ray; his known pseudonyms number more than four dozen. De Kremer died on September 17, 1964, in Ghent.

John Flanders' Stories in Weird Tales
"Nude with a Dagger" (Nov. 1934)
"The Graveyard Duchess" (Dec. 1934)
"The Aztec Ring" (Apr. 1935)
"The Mystery of the Last Guest" (Oct. 1935)

Further Reading
"Jean Ray (écrivain)" in the French-language Wikipedia, here.

Oscar Schisgall
Aka Stuart Hardy
Author, Corporate Historian
Born February 23, 1901, Antwerp, Belgium, or Russia
Died May 20, 1984, Manhattan, New York, New York

According to the Internet Movie Database and the online Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Oscar Schisgall was born in Russia. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database has his birthplace as Antwerp, Belgium, a bit of information that seems to have come from the U.S. Census. Whether Schisgall was born in Russia or Belgium, he was in the United States by September 19, 1926, when he married Lillian Gelberg. A newspaper item from 1947 reported that "Schisgall once toured the capitals of Europe, making his way by writing and selling mystery novels about each great city he lived in." Maybe he considered the Continent as a whole his home.

Like John Flanders, Oscar Schisgall was a very prolific author. He wrote 4,000 short stories and articles for Collier's, Liberty, The New York Times Magazine, Reader's Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, and other mainstream publications. He had a series character, Baron Ixell, in Clues from 1927 to 1932 and wrote two stories for Weird Tales and two more for Jungle Stories (1931, 1939). Other pulps that printed his stories included Blue-Ribbon Western, Cowboy Stories, Dime Detective Magazine, Frontier, The Masked Rider, and others. One of his thirty-five novels, Swastika (1939), was adapted to the silver screen as The Man I Married, also known as I Married a Nazi (1940).

In 1943, Oscar Schisgall became head of the Office of War Information (OWI) Magazine Bureau, taking the place of Dorothy Ducas. In addition to writing stories and novels, Schisgall authored corporate histories, including for Procter & Gamble, Bowery Savings Bank, Xerox, and Greyhound Bus, the last of which was published posthumously. Oscar Schisgall died in Manhattan on May 20, 1984.

Oscar Schisgall's Stories in Weird Tales
"The Death Pit" (Nov. 1923)
"In Kashla's Garden" (May 1927)

Further Reading
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, here.
Internet Movie Database, here.
Internet Speculative Fiction Database, here.
New York Times obituary, here.

1936

Henry De Vere Stacpoole
Aka Tyler De Saix
Medical Doctor, Author, Poet, Biographer, Translator
Born April 9, 1863, Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), County Dublin, Ireland
Died April 12, 1951, Shanklin, Isle of Wight, England

Henry De Vere Stacpoole was born on April 9, 1863, in Kingstown, a port city located south of Dublin. His father was William C. Stacpoole, a doctor of divinity at Trinity College and headmaster of Kingstown school. His mother was Charlotte Augusta Mountjoy Stacpoole, a native of Canada. In 1871, Stacpoole's mother took her son and three daughters to Nice in the south of France so that he might convalesce from an ailment of the lungs. He returned to Ireland to attend the boarding school at Portarlington. From there it was on to Malvern College in London, then St. George's Hospital, University College, and St. Mary's Hospital. Stacpoole completed his education and received his degree in medicine in 1891. For a short time thereafter he served as a ship's doctor. His first novel, The Intended, was published in 1894. In all, he published more than ninety novels, collections, biographies, translations, and books of verse. His number of books in fact exceeded the number of years in his very long life. Stacpoole's most well-known novel is The Blue Lagoon. Originally published in 1908, it has been adapted to film five times. Other movies based on his work include The Man Who Lost Himself (1920, 1941), Beach of Dreams (1921), and The Truth About Spring (1965). His older brother, William Henry Stacpoole (1846-1914), was also a writer and an author of genre works. Twins and doppelgängers are themes in the fiction of the two Stacpoole brothers. In addition to writing novels and other books, Henry De Vere Stacpoole contributed to Popular Magazine, Weird Tales, and The Yellow Magazine. He served as a country doctor in England for several years. In the 1920s, he relocated to the Isle of Wight, the place of his death on April 12, 1951. He had just turned eighty-eight. Henry De Vere Stacpoole's grave is at Bonchurch on the Isle of Wight.

Henry De Vere Stacpoole's Story in Weird Tales

"Dead Girl Finotte" (Jan. 1930)

Further Reading

Biographies: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction; Guardian Books; The Literature Network; Wikipedia.

A French edition of The Blue Lagoon by Henry De Vere Stacpoole. I'm not sure whether this book was a tie-in to the movie, but that looks an awful lot like Jean Simmons . . .

the star of the 1949 film adaptation. I'm not sure of the lineage of the musical genre and pop culture fad of Exotica, either, but it seems like Henry De Vere Stacpoole's desert island novels are part of it. Gilligan's Island could even be a descendant.

Harold Lawlor

Author

Born June 15, 1910, Ireland, or Chicago, Illinois

Died March 27, 1992, St. Petersburg, Florida

Harold Lawlor wrote twenty-nine stories for Weird Tales, yet little is known of his life, at least as far as the Internet is concerned. He was born on June 15, 1910, in Ireland (according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database) or in Chicago (according to the Social Security Death Index). His career as an author of genre fiction began in April 1942 with "The Eternal Priestess," published in Fantastic Adventures. His first story for Weird Tales was "Specter in the Steel" from May 1943. Of note is Lawlor's story "Mayaya's Little Green Men" (Weird Tales, Nov. 1946), the first genre work to use the phrase little green men. In the early 1960s, Rapuzzi Johannis, an Italian artist and author, claimed to have encountered a little green man in the Dolomite Mountains of his home country in August 1947, the first summer of the flying saucer era. That encounter came less than a year after Lawlor's story first appeared. Lawlor had his work adapted to screen in three episodes of the television show Thriller, "The Terror in Teakwood,""The Grim Reaper," and "What Beckoning Ghost?" all from 1961. The movie Dominique (1979) also came from "What Beckoning Ghost?" Harold W. Lawlor died on March 27, 1992, in St. Petersburg, Florida, and was buried at Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Clearwater.

Harold Lawlor's Stories in Weird Tales

"Specter in the Steel" (May 1943)

"Tamara, the Georgian Queen" (July 1943)

"The Wayward Skunk" (Sept. 1944)

"Tatiana" (Jan. 1945)

"The Peripatetic Corpse" (Mar. 1945)

"The Legend of 228" (May 1945)

"The Dark Brothers" (Sept. 1945)

"The Cranberry Goblet" (Nov. 1945)

"The Diversions of Mme. Gamorra" (Jan. 1946)

"The Silver Highway" (May 1946)

"The Cinnabar Redhead" (July 1946)

"Xerxes' Hut" (Sept. 1946)

"Mayaya's Little Green Men" (Nov. 1946)

"The Terror in Teakwood" (Mar. 1947)

"The Black Madonna" (May 1947)

"The Girdle of Venus" (Sept. 1947)

"Nemesis" (May 1948)

"What Beckoning Ghost?" (July 1948)

"The Beasts That Tread the World" (Sept. 1948)

"Lover in Scarlet" (Jan. 1949)

"The Door Beyond" (May 1949)

"The Previous Incarnation" (July 1949)

"Djinn and Bitters" (May 1950)

"Unknown Lady" (Sept. 1950)

"Grotesquerie" (Nov. 1950)

"Amok!" (July 1951)

"Lovers' Meeting" (Jan. 1952)

"Which's Witch?" (July 1952)

"The Dream Merchant" (Mar. 1953)

Letter to "The Eyrie"

July 1943

Harold Lawlor's story "The Cranberry Goblet" was the cover story for Weird Tales in November 1945. The cover artist was Lee Brown Coye.

Although most of Lawlor's genre stories were printed in either Fantastic Adventures or Weird Tales, he had other titles to his credit, including the British magazine Detective Tales.

T.W. Speight
Thomas Wilkinson Speight
Railroad Man, Author
Born 1830, Liverpool, England
Died 1915

Thomas Wilkinson Speight, better known as T.W. Speight, was born in Liverpool in 1830. The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction (1989) states that he "was probably illegitimate," continuing, "[h]e was educated at a foundation school at Kendal in the Lake District" of northwestern England. Speight worked for the Midland Railway Company from 1847 to 1887. Even before reaching the end of the line as a railroad man, Speight had begun writing for publication. He contributed to All the Year Round, Belgravia, Cassell's Magazine, Gentleman's Annual, and other periodicals. From 1867 to 1912, he published more than four dozen short stories, serials, and novels, some of which are listed below. These were mostly thrillers, mysteries, historical romances, and sensation novels, what we might call, I think, suspense, crime, or even exploitation novels. Speight died in 1915. His only story for Weird Tales, "Mrs. Penleath's Strategem," was reprinted from Cassell's Magazine nearly forty years after his death.

T.W. Speight's Books-A Partial List

Brought to Light: A Story (1867)
Under Lock and Key (1869)
In the Dead of Night: A Novel (1874)
A Secret of the Sea: A Novel (1876)
The Mysteries of Heron Dyke: A Novel of Incident (1880)
For Himself Alone: A Tale of Reversed Identities (1884)
A Barren Title: A Novel (1885)
The Sandycroft Mystery (1890)
Burgo's Romance, complete in The Gentleman's Annual (Christmas 1893)
The Grey Monk (1895)
A Husband from the Sea (1895)
The Heart of a Mystery: A Novel (1896)
The Master of Trenance: A Mid-Century Romance (1896)
A Minion of the Moon: A Romance of the King's Highway (1896)
The Crime in the Wood (1899)
The Chains of Circumstance: A Novel (1900)
Juggling Fortune: An Everyday Romance (1900)
The Celestial Ruby (1904)
Ursula Lenorme, Lady Companion: Being a Record of Certain Experiences (1909)
A Bootless Crime
By Fortune's Whim
The Golden Hoop
A Late Repentance
A Match in the Dark
The Sport of Chance
The Web of Fate
Wife or No Wife?

T.W. Speight's Story in Weird Tales
"Mrs. Penleath's Stratagem" (Mar. 1953; reprinted in Weird Tales British edition #23, 1953; originally in Cassell's Magazine, July 1905)

* * *

Richard Marsh
Pseudonym of Richard Bernard Heldmann
Author, Editor
Born October 12, 1857, North London, England
Died August 9, 1915, Haywards Heath, Sussex, England

Richard Bernard Heldmann was born on October 12, 1857, in North London and was the son and grandson of men in the lace business. He began publishing adventure stories and boys' school stories in 1880. From October 1882 to June 1883, Heldmann was co-editor of the boys' weekly Union Jack. His employment ended abruptly. Only recently was it discovered that he passed forged checks in 1883. In April 1884, he began serving a sentence of hard labor because of it. Upon his release, Heldmann adopted the pseudonym Richard Marsh. (See the entry on John Flanders, from April 28, 2016, for a similar situation in the life of a writer in Weird Tales.) Marsh wrote prolifically in the same genres as T.W. Speight, including the sensation novel, a type pioneered by Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. His most well-known book is The Beetle, from 1897. (Wikipedia has a list of his books. The Internet Speculative Fiction Database has a list of his genre works.) Marsh also contributed to Belgravia, Cornhill Magazine, Household Words, and The Strand Magazine. His work appears to have been neglected by American anthologists, but it is deserving of a second look. Richard Bernard Heldmann died on August 9, 1915, at age fifty-seven. Heldmann's grandson was author Robert Aickman (1914-1981).

Richard Marsh's Story in Weird Tales

"The Adventure of the Pipe" (Sept. 1927; originally in Cornhill Magazine, Mar. 1891)

The Beetle in a British edition from 1959 with cover art by R.W. Smethurst.

As I wrote the other day, I have given some organization to the remaining tellers of weird tales. In so doing, I have come up with six British women writers. These are in addition to four about whom I have already written. (Click on their names for links.) Here is an alphabetical list of all ten. The names in bold are of the authors about whom I will write in the next few days. I will take them in chronological order by birth.

Marguerite Lynch Addis (1880-1948)
Edith M. Almedingen (1898-1971)
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (1810-1865)
Dorothea Gibbons (1902-1989)
Violet M. Methley (1882-1953)
G.G. Pendarves (1885-1938)
Alicia Ramsey (1864-1933)
Flavia Richardson (1897-1985)
Mary W. Shelley (1797-1851)
Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945)

I can't say that this list is complete, as there are dozens of tellers of weird tales about whom I know nothing. Most of these have either very common names and no fame as authors, or they used only their first and middle initials and, again, are otherwise unknown.

After I have finished this series, I plan to write about Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and her Gothic romance/proto-science fiction novel, Frankenstein. I have been reading this book and going to a book-club discussion of it. I also recently found an article of interest regarding the author and her book. All together, these things have helped me puzzle out a mystery concerning Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.

Née Alice Joanna Royston
Aka Alice Ramsey
Author, Playwright, Screenwriter
Born August 31, 1864, Chelsea, London, England
Died May 7, 1933, London, England

Alice Joanna Royston was born on August 31, 1864, in Chelsea, London, England, the daughter of hotelkeeper William Haylett Royston and Isabel Morgan Harris Royston. Mrs. Royston was a writer like her daughter after her and the author of a comedy called No Irish Need Apply. Alice was educated at Oxford College and in Paris. In addition, she studied music in Leipzig with the intention of becoming a pianist. In 1891, in Kensington, she married actor Cecil Ramsey (1866-1914), born Sanderson Henry Walker. Their son, Guy Haylett Walker (1900-1959), later known as Guy Ramsey, was also an author.

Cecil Ramsey died in 1914. On September 14, 1916, at her sister-in-law's home in New York City, Alice, then calling herself Alicia Ramsey, married Jamaican-born writer and actor Rudolph de Cordova (1859-1941). The two had been collaborating in their writing for the previous twenty years. Rudolph de Cordova, by the way, was the brother of actor and director Leander de Cordova (1877-1969).

Alicia Ramsey got her start writing for the stage with a work called Only a Model, produced in 1892. She and de Cordova began working together in or about 1896. As movies came into their own, Alicia began writing screenplays, in the United States for Famous Players-Lasky Corporation and Vitagraph and in Britain for Gaumont British and Stoll Picture Productions. She also wrote a number of books, plus short stories for Ainslee's, Argosy, Novel Magazine, The Smart Set, Snappy Stories, and Young's. Her lone story for Weird Tales was "The Black Crusader," from January 1926.

Alicia Ramsey died on May 7, 1933, in London, at age sixty-eight.

Novels
The Adventures of Mortimer Dixon (1913)
Miss Elizabeth Gibbs (1915)
The Three Cocktails and Other Stories (posthumous, 1933)

Plays-A Partial List
Only a Model (1892)
The Executioner's Daughter with Rudolph de Cordova (1896)
Gaffer Jarge (1896)
Monsieur de Paris with Rudolph de Cordova (1896)
As a Man Sows with Rudolph de Cordova (1898)
Honor with Rudolph de Cordova (1896)
Byron (1908)
Bridge
The Earthquake with Rudolph de Cordova
The Guardian Angel
The Hand of Vengeance with Rudolph de Cordova
Isla the Chosen
The Mandarin with Rudolph de Cordova
The Password with Rudolph de Cordova
The Vigilof Sieur Ercildoune
Whom the Gods Love with Rudolph de Cordova

Screenplays
Eve's Daughter (1918)
The Two Brides (1919)
The Spark Divine (1919)
The Prince of Lovers (1922)
Rob Roy (1922)
Guy Fawkes (1923)
Young Lochinvar (1924)
The Money Habit (1924)
The Desert Sheik (1924)
The Love Story of Aliette Brunton (1924)
The Presumption of Stanley Hay, MP (1925)
King of the Castle (1925)
One Colombo Night (1926)

Alicia Ramsey's Story in Weird Tales
"The Black Crusader" (Jan. 1926)

Further Reading
Who's Who in the Theater, Volume 3, page 505, here.
For the best biography you're likely to find on any of the principals in this entry, see "Guy Ramsey" by Steve at the blog Bear Alley Books, dated January 14, 2010, here.

Alicia Ramsey and her husband Rudolph de Cordova in a photograph from the Library of Congress.

Author, Playwright
Born January 1882, Seal, Sevenoaks, Kent, England
Died 1953, London, England

Violet Mary Methley was a prolific author of short stories and novels for children and adults. She specialized in stories for girls, and she may have spent time in Australia, as many of her books are set on that continent. She was born in January 1882 in Seal, Sevenoaks, Kent, England. Little is known of her life except for her credits. A list of her genre stories from The Internet Speculative Fiction Database leads to an interesting discovery. First the list:

Genre Short Stories by Violet M. Methley
"The Damned Spot" in Truth (July, 21, 1921)
"'Dusty Death'" in Truth (Nov. 16, 1921)
"Dread at Darracombe" in Weird Tales (Apr. 1930)
"The Milk Carts" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1932)

The first two stories on that list originally appeared in the British magazine Truth. They were reprinted in 2004 in an anthology called The Last "Queer Stories from Truth", issued by Ash-Tree Press. According to the website of that press:

For most of its life, the weekly publication Truth--which was more generally concerned with politics, finance, and general muck-raking [sic]--ran, in each issue, a short fiction feature called 'Queer Story.' After publication of a number of stories, they were gathered and published as anthologies titled Queer Stories from 'Truth.' The short stories were odd, peculiar, strange, macabre, weird, and at times outright supernatural, and some illustrious names contributed weird tales to the forum, including H. R. Wakefield (whose 'Annyversry' is an early version of the tale later published as 'The Fire-Watcher's Story'), A. B. Cox, and Rosemary Timperley.

Truth was founded in 1877 by Henry (also called Henri) Labouchère (1831-1912). (1) The website Metapedia describes it as a "nationalist" magazine, but that seems to have been true only in later years. Truth ceased publication in 1957. In between, as the website of Ash-Tree Press points out, Truth published anthologies of its "queer stories," what we would call, I suppose, weird stories or weird fiction. What may have been the first anthology was announced in 1886. The twenty-first series was published in 1915. So the series wasn't annual. In any case, the "queer story," a term that would never be used in that context today, would appear to have been a common type in the late 1800s and may very well have been somewhere in the family tree of weird fiction in general and Weird Tales in particular. If that's true, then I think there is some call for further research.

Getting back to Violet M. Methley, her books include the following:

Novels by Violet M. Methley
An Incomplete List

Camille Desmoulins: A Biography (1914)
Miss Quixote (1916)
The Lodestone (1914)
The Bunyip Patrol: The Story of an Australian Girls' School (1926)
The Husband-Woman (1926)
The Girls at Sandilands (1934)
The Queer Island (1934)
Seeing the Empire: The Adventurous Tour of Steven and Sallie (1935)
The Last Enemy (1936)
Cockie & Co. and Their Adventures (1937)
Dragon Island: An Adventure Story for Girls (1938)
Vackies (1941)
Great Galleon (1942)
Georgie and the Dragon (1950)
Armada, Ahoy! (1953)
Fourteen Fourteens (1954)
A Daughter of the Legion
Mystery Camp
Spectre Jungle
Three for Luck

She also wrote at least one work for the stage, "Freckles: A Sketch for Four Girls" (1922). And that is all I know of her.

Violet Methley died in London in 1953.

Violet M. Methley's Stories in Weird Tales
"Dread at Darracombe" (Apr. 1930)
"The Milk Carts" (Mar. 1932)

Further Reading

There isn't much on Violet M. Methley on the Internet. I have assembled the information I have here from many different sources, none of which offers very much about her.

Note

(1) Cynic, misanthrope, radical contrarian, wealthy banker (he left an estate of £2,000,000 or $10,000,000), wide-ranging diplomat, and anti-imperialist Member of Parliament, Henry or Henri Labouchère, nicknamed "Labby," was described thusly: "He has always been in the opposition, is there still, and will doubtless die with a protest on his lips." (Current Opinion, 1892, Vol. 11, p. 227.) His live-in paramour was the actress Henrietta Hodson, also erroneously called Henrietta Hobson or Hodgson, whom he married in 1880 after her husband, the aptly named Mr. Pigeon, died. Labouchère treated her well after her husband had treated her so badly. In later years they lived in Labouchère's Florentine "Villa Christina." Henrietta died on October 30, 1910, in Florence. Labouchère followed her to the grave on January 15, 1912. By the way, Henrietta's sister, Georgiana Hodson, was also an actress. By the way also, Labouchère was responsible for the law under which Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was prosecuted. I'll avoid the obvious pun about queer stories.

Queer Stories of the War and Others from Truth, the twenty-first in the series and published in 1915.

Née Gladys Gordon Trenery
Aka Marjory E. Lambe
Author, Pianist
Born January 1885, Cornwall, England, or West Derby, Lancashire, England, or Stonycroft, Liverpool, Merseyside, England
Died August 1, 1938, Cheshire, England

Five years ago, I wrote an entry called "Women Writers in Weird Tales" in which I gave some figures from Eric Leif Davin's book Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965 (2006). Among those figures is a list of the most prolific women writers of fiction in the pages of Weird Tales. Third on that list, after Allison V. Harding and Mary Elizabeth Counselman, is G.G. Pendarves. I believe that Allison V. Harding was actually a man, actually the associate editor of Weird Tales, Lamont Buchanan. If that's true, then G.G. Pendarves had the second-most stories in Weird Tales among women. And yet very little to nothing is known of her.

G.G. Pendarves was the nom de plume of Gladys Gordon Trenery. I hesitate to call it a pseudonym as it could easily have been her married name. No one seems to know. No one knows her birthplace, either. According to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, she was born in Cornwall. An index of births in England and Wales gives a Gladys Gordon Trenery as having been born in Lancashire in January 1885. The 1901 Census has her living in Birkenhead, Cheshire, with a birthplace in Stonycroft, Liverpool. That Gladys Gordon Trenery was sixteen years old at the time and living in a large household that included Grace H. Trenery, age fifty-five, and Elizabeth B. Trenery, age fifty-three. There were Trenerys in Cornwall to be sure. Maybe that was where the family originated before moving to Merseyside or its adjoining counties. It seems safe to assume that either Grace H. or Elizabeth B. Trenery was her mother.

So Gladys G. Trenery was sixteen years old in 1901. The next (and only other) record I have for her is her passing of her examination as a teacher in the playing of pianoforte at the Royal Academy of Music at Christmastime 1907. She would then have been just short of her twenty-third birthday. G.G. Trenery contributed "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" to The Horn Book for November 1931. Otherwise, all of her known stories were in Argosy All-Story Magazine, The Magic Carpet Magazine, Oriental Stories, and Weird Tales, all from 1926 to 1939. Her last three stories in "The Unique Magazine" were published posthumously, as Gladys G. Trenery died on August 1, 1938. That sad event is lost among the deaths of Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft from the previous two years. Incredibly, Ramsey Campbell, who was born in Liverpool on January 4, 1946, had a neighbor named Gladys Trenery. She looked after him when his mother was taken to the hospital after cutting her hand on broken glass. You can read about that event in "An Interview with Ramsey Campbell" from July 23, 2013, here. That makes me wonder whether the death date of G.G. Pendarves is correct or if the name Galdys Trenery was really common enough for it to have been given to one teller of weird tales and to the babysitter of another.

G.G. Pendarves' Stories in Oriental Stories, The Magic Carpet Magazine, and Weird Tales (plus one from Argosy All-Story Magazine)
Note: All are from Weird Tales unless otherwise noted
"The Devil's Graveyard" (Aug. 1926)
"The Return" (Apr. 1927)
"The Power of the Dog" (Aug. 1927)
"The Lord of the Tarn" (Nov. 1927)
"The Eighth Green Man" (Mar. 1928; reprinted Jan. 1937 and May 1952)
"The Ruler of Zem-Zem" in Argosy All-Story Weekly (Apr. 28, 1928)
"The Doomed Treveans" (May 1928)
"The Laughing Thing" (May 1929)
"The Grave at Goonhilly" (Oct. 1930; reprinted Mar. 1954)
"The Footprint" (May 1930)
"The Black Camel" in Oriental Stories (Oct./Nov. 1930)
"The Veiled Leopard" in Oriental Stories (Dec. 1930/Jan. 1931)
"The Secret Trail" in Oriental Stories (Feb./Mar. 1931)
"Thirty Pieces of Silver" in Oriental Stories (Summer 1931)
"El Hamel, the Lost One" in Oriental Stories (Winter 1932)
"From the Dark Halls of Hell" (Jan. 1932)
"The Djinnee of El Sheyb" in Oriental Stories (Spring 1932)
"The Altar of Melek Taos" (Sept. 1932)
"Abd Dhulma, Lord of Fire (Dec. 1933)
"Passport to the Desert" in The Magic Carpet Magazine (Jan. 1934)
"Werewolf of the Sahara" (Aug./Sept. 1936)
"The Dark Star" (Mar. 1937)
"The Whistling Corpse" (July 1937)
"Thing of Darkness" (Aug. 1937; reprinted Nov. 1953)
"The Black Monk" (Oct. 1938)
"The Sin-Eater" (Dec. 1938; reprinted Sept. 1952 and July 1954)
"The Withered Heart (Nov. 1939)

Further Reading

Look for reprints of G.G. Pendarves' stories in various anthologies and reprint editions, including in The Eighth Green Man(and Other Strange Folk) (1989). The title story was one of only five stories reprinted twice in Weird Tales. "The Sin-Eater," also by G.G Pendarves, was another.

Pseudonym of Christine Campbell Thomson
Aka Christine Hartley
Author, Editor, Anthologist, Literary Agent, Occultist
Born May 31, 1897, London, England
Died September 29, 1985

Christine Campbell Thomson was the editor of eleven collections of weird tales and the author of at least eleven weird tales of her own. She was married more than once, but her name at birth seems to have been Christine Mary Campbell Thomson. (Her husbands were named Cook and Hartley.) If Christine Mary Campbell Thomson was indeed the later editor of weird tales, then she was the daughter of Herbert Campbell Thomson and Constance Emily Temple Thomson, and she was born in Marylebone in London. In 1911, that same girl lived with her family at 34 Queen Anne Street, not far from Sherlock Holmes' residence at 221B Baker Street, also in Marylebone.

Christine Mary Campbell Thomson was born on May 31, 1897, in London. She was educated at Queen's College and by age thirty was a published author and the editor of a series called Not at Night, named after the first volume in the series, from 1925. There were eleven books in the Not at Night series, plus an omnibus edition (published in 1937), an American edition (1928), and four (or six) reprint editions from many years later. The lists that follow are from The Speculative Fiction Database. Any transcription errors are my own.

Not at Night Series

Not at Night (1925)
More Not at Night (1926)
You'll Need a Nightlight (1927)
Gruesome Cargoes (1928)
By Daylight Only (1929)
Switch on the Light (1931)
At Dead of Night (1931)
Grim Death (1932)
Keep on the Light (1933)
Terror by Night (1934)
Nightmare By Daylight (1936)
Not at Night Omnibus (1937)

In 1928, Macy-Macius of New York reprinted some of the stories from those British editions for American readers. The title was Not at Night: Creepy Tales!, and the editor was Herbert Asbury. In the 1960s, of course, there was a wave of nostalgia for fantasy and horror of the pulp-fiction era (as well as for Universal monsters and other movies from the same era). Arrow Books, a British publishing house, brought back the Not at Night series in its own series of paperback editions, two of which were reprinted with different titles:

Not at Night Arrow Books Reprints

Not at Night (1960)
More Not at Night (1961; reprinted as Never at Night, 1972)
Still Not at Night (1962; reprinted as Only By Daylight, 1972)
Terror by Night (1976)

The odd thing about all this is that the stories from the series were drawn for the most part from an American magazine, none other than Weird Tales. Mike Ashley is a historian of science fiction. By his count, there were 170 stories in the Not at Night series, of which 100 (or 59 percent) came from Weird Tales. So in the 1960s, readers could catch up on reprints from a British series from the 1920s and '30s, which were in turn reprints from an American magazine of that same period, and at least one of which, "Out of the Earth" by Christine Campbell Thomson (writing under a pseudonym), was originally in a British magazine. You'll understand why I'm not going to catalogue the stories from the Not at Night series.

If a sketchy website is a reliable source of information, then Christine Campbell Thomson registered her firm, Campbell Thomson and McLaughlin Limited, on March 19, 1932, with offices in Arsenal, London--if I interpret the thing correctly. Campbell Thomson and McLaughlin was a literary agency and its founder a literary agent. The firm was subsumed by The Marsh Agency Limited, also of London, a firm still in existence.

Even before she established her own firm, Christine worked as a literary agent. Among her clients was Richard Martin Oscar Cook (1888-1952), who went by the truncated name of Oscar Cook. Just back from Borneo in the early 1920s, he went to Christine Campbell Thomson for help with his memoir of the Orient. She retitled it and the book was published as Borneo: The Stealer of Hearts in August 1924. On the last day of the following month, she and Cook were married. It was his firm (he was a part owner, I think), Selwyn & Blount Limited, that published the books in the Not at Night series, as well as Christine's novel, His Excellency (1927). She also wrote the novels The Incredible Island (1924), Port of Call: Love and Murder in Algeria (1936), Hawk of the Sahara (1939), and In a Far Corner. And she contributed to the Daily Herald, Evening News, Glasgow Herald, Newcastle Sunday Sun, Star, and other papers. You can find out more about the writing couple on Douglas A. Anderson's blog, Lesser-Known Writers, here. There you will read that Oscar Cook and Christine Campbell Thomson had one child, a son named Gervis Hugh Frere Cook (later Frere-Cook), born on July 12, 1928. He was also a writer, but his career was cut short with his death late in 1974.

Oscar Cook and his wife were divorced in 1937 or 1938. He died on February 23, 1952, in London. In 1945, she married a man name Hartley, and that was her surname at her death in 1985. So, there is a lot about names in the story of Christine Campbell Thomson. Here's another: Flavia Richardson. That was her nom de plume, and the one she used for all but the last of the following short stories:

Short Stories

"Out of the Earth" in Hutchinson's Mystery Story Magazine (Jan. 1925; reprinted in Weird Tales, Apr. 1925)
"When Hell Laughed" in Hutchinson's Mystery Story Magazine (Jan. 1926; reprinted in Gruesome Cargoes, 1928; You'll Need a Nightlight, 1927; More Not at Night, 1961; et al.)
"At Number Eleven" in By Daylight Only (1929)
"The Gray Lady" in Weird Tales (Oct. 1929)
"Pussy" in At Dead of Night (1931; reprinted in Not At Night, 1960)
"The Red Turret" in Switch on the Light (1931; reprinted in A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; et al.)
"Behind the Blinds" in Grim Death (1932; reprinted Still Not at Night, 1962; Only By Daylight, 1972)
"The Black Hare" in Keep on the Light (1933; reprinted in Not at Night Omnibus, 1937)
"Behind the Yellow Door" in Terror by Night (1934, reprinted in Not at Night Omnibus, 1937; et al.)
"Empty Stockings" in Nightmare By Daylight (1936)
"Message for Margie" in The Fifth Pan Book of Horror Stories (1964; et al.)

As mentioned, Christine was also a novelist, and she wrote non-fiction, including:

The Right Way to Write Successful Fiction (to which she may have been only a contributor)
Murder and Sudden Death with John C. Woodiwiss (1939)
I Am A Literary Agent (1951)
The Western Mystery Tradition: The Esoteric Heritage of the West (1968)
A Case For Reincarnation (1972)

Finally, Christine Campbell Thomson Cook Hartley was an occultist, a friend of Dion Fortune (1890-1946), and a member of the Society of the Inner Light. She died on September 29, 1985, at age eighty-eight.

Flavia Richardson's Stories in Weird Tales

"Out of the Earth" (Apr. 1927; previously in Hutchinson's Mystery Story Magazine, Jan. 1925)

"The Gray Lady" (Oct. 1929)

Further Reading
You can read about Christine Campbell Thomson and her husband Oscar Cook on Douglas A. Anderson's blog, Lesser-Known Writers, here, and on the website Vault of Evil: Brit Horror Pulp Plus!, here. Otherwise, the pickings seem to be pretty slim for such a significant figure in the history of weird fiction in Great Britain.

Richard Martin Oscar Cook
Civil Servant, Author, Editor, Publisher, Actor, Playwright, Businessman
Born March 17, 1888, Tollington Park, Islington, Middlesex, England
Died February 23, 1952, Kensington, London, England

On May 14, 2016, I wrote about Christine Campbell Thomson, editor of the Not at Night series of weird tales in hardback. Today I'll write a little on her first husband. He was born Richard Martin Oscar Cook on March 17, 1888, in Tollington Park, Islington, England. From 1911 to 1919, Cook served in the British civil service in North Borneo. By 1920, he was back in his home country. In the early 1920s, he wrote about his experiences in Borneo. In the process of having his book published, Cook met Christine Campbell Thomson (1897-1985), a literary agent and editor. She had the book placed with the house of Hurst & Blackett, and it was published in August 1924 as Borneo: The Stealer of Hearts. Cook had still more stories of Borneo published in The Blue Magazine, Hutchinson’s Adventure-Story Magazine, Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story Magazine, and The Novel Magazine. He and Christine were married on September 30, 1924, in London and divorced more than a decade later, in 1937 or 1938.

I don't suppose that anyone now knows what relationship Christine Campbell Thomson had with Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940. Suffice it to say that of the 170 stories published in the Not at Night series, 100 came from Weird Tales; that the Not at Night series (1925-1937) was published during the years that Wright was still editor and Weird Tales was still based either in Indianapolis or Chicago (1924-1938) and had not been sold to Short Stories, Inc., or had moved to New York City; and that Christine secured for Wright a number of stories by British authors--including herself and her husband--for publication in Weird Tales. I wonder if she was on the lookout for stories by Continental authors as well and whether that's how certain stories by such authors ended up in the pages of the American magazine. I wonder, too, if she ever traveled to the United States, and if so, if she ever met her American counterpart.

Speaking of Oscar Cook's short stories, here's a list:

Short Stories

"Golden Lilies" in Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine (Sept. 1922; reprinted in Keep On The Light, 1933; More Not At Night, 1961, 1963; Never at Night, 1972)
"Si Urag of the Tail" in Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine (Jan. 1923; reprinted in Weird Tales, July 1926; You'll Need a Night Light, 1927; A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; 50 Strangest Stories Ever Told, 1937; Still Not At Night, 1962; Startling Mystery Stories, Spring 1967; Only By Daylight, 1972)
"On the Highway" in Weird Tales, Jan. 1925
"The Creature of Man" in Hutchinson's Mystery-Story Magazine (Apr. 1925; reprinted in Weird Tales, Nov. 1926; reprinted as "Dog Death" in Terror By Night, 1934)
"The Great White Fear" in Hutchinson's Adventure-Story Magazine (June 1925; reprinted in Grim Death, 1932; A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934)
"The Sacred Jars" in Weird Tales (Mar. 1927; reprinted as "When Glister Walks" in Gruesome Cargoes, July 1928; A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; 50 Strangest Stories Ever Told, 1937; Not At Night: Tales That Freeze The Blood, 1960, 1962)
"Piecemeal" in By Daylight Only (Oct. 1929; reprinted in Weird Tales, Feb. 1930; Not At Night Omnibus, 1937; The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1960)
"Boomerang" in Switch on the Light (1931; reprinted in A Century of Creepy Stories, 1934; The Second Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1960)
"His Beautiful Hands" in At Dead of Night (1931; reprinted in Not At Night Omnibus, 1937; The Pan Book of Horror Stories, 1959)
"The Crimson Head-Dress" in Nightmare By Daylight (1936)

His story "Boomerang," retitled "The Caterpillar," was adapted to television in Rod Serling's Night Gallery and broadcast on March 1, 1972. Cook was also author of the novel The Seventh Wave (1926) translated into Dutch as Gij zult niet.

Oscar Cook died on February 23, 1952, in Kensington, England, at age sixty-three.

Oscar Cook's Stories in Weird Tales

See the list of short stories above.

Further Reading

See Douglas A. Anderson's blog Lesser-Known Writers for April 3, 2012, here.

Dorothea Gibbons
Stella Dorothea Gibbons
Author, Journalist, Poet
Born January 5, 1902, London, England
Died December 19, 1989, London, England

I assume that Dorothea Gibbons was the well-known British author Stella Dorothea Gibbons, in which case I'll offer a few facts and then refer you to her biography on other websites, including Wikipedia. Stella was born on January 5, 1902, in London and was educated at home, at the North London Collegiate School, and at University College, London. After receiving her diploma in 1923, she went to work for British United Press, later for the London Evening Standard and The Lady. She wrote verse, short stories, book reviews, novels, and a children's book. (Some of her stories have supernatural elements.) Her 1932 novel Cold Comfort Farm won Stella Gibbons her fame, which remains today, even more than a quarter-century after her death.

So here's the part that doesn't fit: By the early 1950s, Stella Gibbons was the renowned author of more than a dozen books. Why would she write for a low-budget and rapidly declining American pulp (or digest-sized) magazine like Weird Tales? I have two suppositions and one slight bit of evidence. First, suppose that Dorothea Gibbons' three stories for Weird Tales were reprints of earlier works by Stella Gibbons or extracts from her novels and not original to the magazine at all. Second, suppose that she and Dorothy McIlwraith, the editor of the magazine, were in contact, Dorothy being a Canadian of Scottish extraction who had an interest in the literature of her family's homeland, especially literature by women. Third, as evidence, consider that the British author and artist Reggie Oliver (b. 1952) wrote an essay called "Stella Gibbons, a Writer and the Supernatural," published in his book Madder Mysteries in 2009. I don't know what that essay holds, as I have not read it, but maybe the mystery of Dorothea Gibbons can easily be solved by consulting it. I hope someone will do that and let us all know.

Dorothea Gibbons' Stories in Weird Tales
"The Crying Child" (Nov. 1953)
"The Lily Maid" (Mar. 1954)
"The Green Huntsman" (July 1954)

Lady Eleanor Smith
Eleanor Furneaux Smith
Author, Reporter, Reviewer, Publicist, Circus Fan
Born 1902, Birkenhead, Merseyside, England
Died October 20, 1945, Westminster, England

In the classic screwball comedy of the 1930s and '40s, a wild or headstrong young woman, often an upper-class young woman, takes everything and everybody around her by storm. I don't know the origins of the screwball comedy heroine, but it seems likely that she was the younger sister of the 1920s Flapper, who was probably, in turn, the daughter of the more subdued Gibson Girl from the previous generation. The Gibson Girl, the Flapper, the heroine of the screwball comedy--all were from what is perhaps a unique breed, the liberated American woman.

Britain had its own breed of wild and liberated women, and for a while they ran with wild (though often feminized) men. Observers of the British cultural scene of the 1920s called them "Bright Young Things," and writer Ben Johnson describes them with a string of epithets:

Attention-seeking, flamboyant, decadent, rebellious, promiscuous, irresponsible, outrageous and glamorous . . . . (1)

For a decade or more, from the end of the Great War to the beginning years of the Great Depression, they held wild parties, drank like fish, tooled around town and country in their roadsters, went on scavenger hunts, engaged in drug use, and carried on sexual affairs with abandon. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, they burned their candles at both ends. But then, according to Mr. Johnson (no pun intended), it all gave out with the excesses of a Masque-of-the-Red-Death-type party called the Red and White Ball, held in November 1931. Maybe, too, the Bright Young Things weren't so young anymore. And maybe their brightness came from a fast-burning and all-consuming flame.

Lady Eleanor Smith was one of them. Born Eleanor Furneaux Smith in 1902, she was the daughter of Frederick Edwin Smith, 1st Earl of Birkenhead (1872-1930), and Margaret Eleanor Furneaux, daughter of a classical scholar. Like his daughter after him, F.E. Smith was a hard liver--and it proved hard on his liver, for he died of the effects of cirrhosis at age fifty-eight after many decades of heavy imbibing. Two pieces of trivia about him: First, he successfully defended Ethel le Neve, mistress of bug-eyed murderer Dr. Hawley Harvey Crippen, whose story was a weird tale if ever there was one. Second, F.E. Smith published a utopian novel, The World in 2030 A.D., in 1930, the year of his death.

Lady Eleanor Smith attended day school in Queen's Gate with two other Bright Young Things, Zita and Teresa, the Jungman Sisters. She didn't like school and in fact didn't seem to like strictures of any kind. The whole mess of them, all the Bright Young Things, inspired Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies, published in the same year as The World in 2030 A.D. and only a year short of the Red and White Ball. By that time, Lady Eleanor Smith had already begun delving into her twin obsessions, both of which are about performers and outsiders, this in a woman who was--as an early celebrity--something of a performer and--as an aristocrat--an insider. I wonder now whether that first generation of postwar upper crust would have seen themselves as insiders, or if they, as aristocrats tend to do, sought to escape from their insular and bored lives by literal and figurative slumming, of descending into the low life of the common people.

So what were Lady Eleanor's obsessions? Well, like the early John Irving with his bears, wrestling, and Vienna, she wrote again and again of Gypsies and circuses. Eleanor believed she had Gypsy blood and she went into the field to be among the people with whom she identified. She also worked as a publicist for circus companies. In 1934, she became the first president of the Circus Fans Association (later the Circus Friends Association). Even by then, Lady Eleanor Smith had been writing about Gypsies and circuses--dancers, too--for several years, perhaps by no coincidence at all as she approached age thirty and as her father approached his end. Her books and articles include the following:

Red Wagon (1930)
Flamenco (1931)
Ballerina (1932)
"The Gypsies of Roumania" in The Spectator (Dec. 2, 1932)
Christmas Tree (1934)
Romany (1935)
Tzigane (1935)
The Spanish House (1938)
Life's a Circus: The Reminiscences of Lady Eleanor Smith (1939)
Lovers' Meeting (1940)
The Man in Grey (1941)
Caravan: A Romantic Novel (1942)
The Magic Lantern (1945)
British Circus Life (1948)

Many of those books were adapted to the silver screen. Look for Lady Eleanor in The Internet Movie Database.

In 1932, Gollancz published her collection Satan's Circus and Other Stories. The stories from that book:

"Candlelight"
"Lyceum"
"Mrs. Raeburn's Waxwork"
"One O'Clock"
"Portrait of a Strong Man"
"Satan's Circus"
"Sweet Spanish Ladies"
"Tamar"
"The Brothers"
"The Hurdy-Gurdy"

In 1934, Bobbs-Merrill reprinted Satan's Circus for American readers and included a new story, "Whittington's Cat." The title story, "Satan's Circus," was printed in Weird Tales in October 1931. Lady Eleanor had another genre story, "No Ships Pass," in the 1947 collection Travelers in Time, and a fairy tale, "The Little Mermaid," in The Fairies Return, or, New Tales for Old by Several Hands (1934).

In the end, time and death do us all in, even Bright Young Things. Lady Eleanor Furneaux Smith, barely into middle age, passed away on October 20, 1945, in Westminster, England.

Lady Eleanor Smith's Story in Weird Tales
"Satan's Circus" (Oct. 1931)

Further Reading
There is plenty to read about Lady Eleanor Smith on line and in print. You might start with:

"A Good Turn," review of Life's a Circus: The Reminiscences of Lady Eleanor Smith in The Tablet: The International Catholic News Weekly, August 5, 1939, here.
Lady Eleanor Smith: A Memoir by Lord Birkenhead (1953)

Note

(1) Quote from "Bright Young Things" by Ben Johnson on the website Historic UK (undated), here.

Lady Eleanor Furneaux Smith (1920), from the National Portrait Gallery.

Author, Poet, Editor, Advertising Man, Public Speaker
Born March 4, 1885, England
Died ?

A man named Charles Henry Mackintosh wrote for Weird Tales and another man named Charles Henry Mackintosh was an Anglo-Irish preacher of the nineteenth century. They were two and not one, though the second (chronologically) was likely named for the first. The first Charles Henry Mackintosh was born in Ireland in 1820 and died in England in 1896. The second was born on March 4, 1885, in England and died in a place and on a date unknown for now. That Charles Henry Mackintosh arrived in the United States in 1907 and lived in Duluth, Minnesota, from about 1909 to about 1917. When he filled out his draft card in September 1918, he was living in Washington, D.C., and working as an editor for the Federal government. (A contemporary article says that he came from the "northwest" to work in the nation's capitol. I guess if you live on the eastern edge of the continent, Duluth is in the northwest.) I believe Mackintosh's work was for a publication called Four Minute Men News, of which he is known to have been editor. He was also chairman of the Four Minute Men organization.

The Four Minute Men is new to me. I had never heard of it before and I had to read up on it in order to write about it here. And I had to translate a German-language Wikipedia page to do it. (Sometimes the Internet reminds me of the pterodactyls on The Flintstones, chiseling out words on stone tablets. That's how primitive the thing is.) Anyway, the Four Minute Men was a volunteer organization of speakers who worked for the Committee on Public Information, more or less a propaganda arm of the United States government, and who spoke on the war effort during the four minutes it took to change reels in the nation's movie houses. Charlie Chaplin was probably the most famous four-minute man. Mackintosh's work for the organization probably lasted for as long as the Four Minute Men lasted. If I read the German Wikipedia page correctly, the last talk took place on Christmas Eve 1918 with a tribute to the Allies who had prevailed in the Great War.

Charles Henry Mackintosh did all that work for a country not yet his own: he became a naturalized citizen on September 21, 1920, in Illinois. He lived in Chicago in the 1920s, and in Daytona Beach, Florida, in the 1930s and '40s. He seems to have called Honolulu home for a while as well. While in Duluth, he was chairman of the Stewart-Mackintosh Company. Upon returning to civilian life after the war, he served as president of the Direct Mail Advertising Association, president of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the World, and general sales and advertising counsel for Lasalle Extension University. In those capacities, he toured the country giving public addresses. He seems to have been a man made for the go-get-'em attitude of the 1920s.

Mackintosh was also a writer. In addition to four stories and letter in Weird Tales, he wrote the following (I assume these all to have been the work of the same man):

"Beauty Must Be Seen to Be Qualified" (poem) in Munsey’s Magazine (July 1911)
"'Little Laughter-Wrinkles'" (poem) in Munsey’s Magazine (Nov. 1911)
"Roses" (poem) in The Cavalier (May 4, 1912)
"The Greater Love" (poem) in Munsey’s Magazine (Aug. 1912)
"To My Typewriter" (poem) in Munsey’s Magazine (Dec. 1911)
"Trade" (poem) in the Atlanta Constitution (Jan. 29, 1922)
"I Looked on Life" (poem) in Argosy All-Story Weekly (July 14, 1923)
On Human Egoism (non-fiction book) (1935)
"Men on the Morning Star" (short story) in Super Science Stories (Sept. 1940)

His story "Guardians of the Guavas," from Weird Tales, September 1930, was reprinted in At Dead of Night, edited by Christine Campbell Thomson (aka Flavia Richardson) and published in 1931.

I don't know where or when Mackintosh died. That seems odd to me for a man who was so well known in his day. If those pterodactyls would get back to work, we might have an answer.

Charles Henry Mackintosh's Stories and Letter in Weird Tales
"Malchior Makes Magic" (May 1928)
"Guardians of the Guavas" (Sept. 1930)
"Death in Twenty Minutes" (Jan. 1935)
Letter to "The Eyrie" (Feb. 1937)
"The Eyes of Ustad Isa" (Sept. 1938)

Further Reading

I didn't find much on Mackintosh except for lots of articles about his public appearances, but keep looking. Maybe you'll find more than I did.

Myrtle Levy Gaylord (1895-1960)

Charles Gordon Booth (1896-1949)

George Norsworthy (1889-1957)

Anthony F. Klinkner (1880-1953)

Ralph Allen Lang (1906-1987)

William Ernest Henley (1849-1903)

More Weird Tales from the Renaissance

Two Australian Authors

Two Belgian Authors

Two Irish Authors

Two Victorian British Authors

Six Women from Britain-Introduction

Alicia Ramsey (1864-1933)

Violet M. Methley (1882-1953)

G.G. Pendarves (1885-1938)

Flavia Richardson (1897-1985)

Oscar Cook (1888-1952)

Dorothea Gibbons (1902-1989)

Lady Eleanor Smith (1902-1945)

Charles Henry Mackintosh (1885-?)