Authors: Sam Moskowitz (ed.)
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Sci-Fi, #SF, #Magazines, #Pulps
Science fiction and fantasy did appear in PEOPLE'S FAVORITE MAGAZINE, but the editor, Eugene Clancy, was so adroit at outwardly disguising it that a complete reading of every story was required to identify it. Undoubtedly, the most important single work of science fiction to run in the entire history of the magazine was a seven-part novel by George Allan England,
The Nebula of Death
(February 10-May 10, 1918). It was England's intent to show the importance to life on this planet of the chlorophyll manufactured by plants from the sun's rays, and the effect of the earth's passing through a nebula that prevents the creation of this vital chemical is the basis of the story. Immediately following its publication, the editor claimed it was the most popular single story in the magazine since it began publication. PEOPLE'S FAVORITE MAGAZINE appeared to be doing well until it raised its price to twenty cents with the August 25, 1918, issue. To add insult to injury, it cut the number of pages back to 192 with the October 10, 1918, number. With its issued dated September, 1919, it went to letter-size on coated stock and began running illustrated "significant" articles along with the fiction, and temporarily left pulp competition.
BY FAR the most significant development and the one most far-reaching in its example was the publication of the first all-crime magazine in history, DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, launched by Street & Smith as a semimonthly with the issue of October 5, 1915. Covers were by John A. Coughlin, there were 128 pages, and the price was ten cents. While not the first of the specialized fiction magazines, being preceded by THE OCEAN and THE RAILROAD MAN'S MAGAZINE, it accomplished what they had not by creating a trend that would result in the proliferation of the pulps into western, love, air, science fiction, and supernatural, as well as detective.
An unusual fact about the
first
issue was that it featured the second installment of a four-part serial by and about Nick Carter, titled
The Yellow Label
. DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, like the earlier TOP-NOTCH, was another step in the transition from the dime novels to the pulps. The first installment of the serial had run in NICK CARTER WEEKLY, Number 819, the last issue of that series. The first DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE carried a story by Scott Campbell, a pen name for Frederick W. Davis, who was then writing the Nick Carter stories. The magazine boasted "Nick Carter" as its editor, but the actual editor was Frank E. Blackwell, a staff member of Street & Smith.
Most of the other authors in the first issue were unknown but one, R. Norman Grisewood, had written a curious interplanetary novel
Zarlah, the Martian
, published in 1909 by R. F. Fenno & Co., Chicago, that told of an earthman and Martian who exchange bodies to explore each other's worlds, and the romance that is the result of the experiment.
If any readers of THE ARGOSY happened to buy the November 5 DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE, they would have found the first story in a new series of the much-maligned Fred Jackson, but these were all legitimate detective stories.
Detective and mystery stories had been one of the mainstays of (lie all-fiction pulp magazines. The publication of DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE meant that a reader whose primary interest was mysteries need not buy a general magazine for a meager ration, nor endure love stories as a compromise to get it. Less than two years later, DETECTIVE STORY MAGAZINE would have a semimonthly competitor titled MYSTERY MAGAZINE (November 15, 1917), which carried over many dime-novel authors as contributors and was edited by the author of the famous Frank Reade and Jack Wright "invention" stories, Luis P. Senarens.
A major part of ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY'S fiction fare was off-trail mystery and detective tales that involved elements of the fantastic. The Semi-Dual series was a regular feature, but in addition, the author of Fu Manchu, Sax Rohmer, introduced his unusual detective, Morris Klaw, who solves the most bizarre crimes by sleeping in the rooms in which they were committed. Four of these short stories were published during February and March, 1915. Equally unusual was Maurice Drake's
Austin Voogdt, Sherlock of the Sea
, February 27 to April 3, 1915, a six-part novel about a sea-faring sleuth. From the French of Paul d'Avoi, Florence Crew-Jones translated
The Laughing Death
(March 27-April 17, 1915), which was run in four parts, a novel of international spies involving greatly advanced dirigibles and unusual methods of murder. Paul d'Avoi was the pen name of Paul Erie, a ranking French science-fiction author whose series of
Voyages Excentriques
, comprising a score of volumes, each with a hundred or more illustrations and six pounds in weight apiece, made his works the showcase for science fiction in France. A series inherited from the old THE CAVALIER was the adventures of the Honeymoon Detectives, a man-and-wife team, the creation of Arnold Fredericks.
The Telltale Mirror
, by Helen E. Haskill, was an unusual detective novel which employed the device of using a liquid which will disclose people's feelings. Richard Marsh, renowned for his novel of ancient supernatural influence,
The Beetle
(1897), introduced a unique female detective in
The Adventures of Judith Lee, Lip Reader
.
Mystery and detective stories were also an important part of the editorial balance of THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, ADVENTURE, THE BLUE BOOK MAGAZINE, PEOPLE'S, NEW STORY MAGAZINE, and other direct competitors of ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY. The appearance of specialized publications in the genre was inevitably to cost them a certain percentage of the readership that bought them primarily for mystery fiction, and force them to place greater importance on other types of stories to sustain the old and attract additional readership.
The challenge of turning THE ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY into a commercial success was a formidable one. If for no other reason than because of its frequency of publication, it was technically the leading pulp magazine. The grinding job of providing consistently a type of fiction that would sustain a high level of weekly readership was acknowledged by Bob Davis in "Heart to Heart Talks" in the June 20, 1914, issue. "Not only do our readers, but most of our rival editors wonder how we manage to keep up such a regular flow of good fiction, hold our old favorites, and make room for new writers," he said. "Persistency is at the bottom of it. There is nothing else on my mind except THE ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY. That is all I think about, dream about, and talk about."
Davis had bought the first pulp story of Albert Payson Terhune, a sixty-thousand-worder, for one hundred and twenty-five dollars, titled
The Secret of the Blue House
, a tale of love and mystery, for THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, where it appeared in four installments, April-July, 1905. Terhune later referred to the magazine and its mentor as "a soft paper periodical with a hardboiled editor." It would be 1919 before Terhune would achieve fame with
Lad: A Dog
, but his name ranked high with the readers of the Munsey magazines. Between 1906 and 1916, Terhune's income from pulp-magazine writing fluctuated from a low of twelve thousand dollars to a high of thirty thousand dollars, including his eighty-dollar-a-week salary on the staff of THE NEW YORK WORLD. Among the "big" stories that Davis used to help put over ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY was a four-part novel titled
"Dad,"
by Albert Payson Terhune, which ran July 4-25, 1914. The story, about a drunken veteran of the Mexican War, who teams up with his son to become a hero of the Civil War, was of special interest, since it was plotted by Sinclair Lewis, who also wrote two of its chapters and in exchange received twenty-five percent of the check. Terhune's major contribution to fantasy was the novelization of the play
The Return of Peter Grimm
(Dodd, Mead), a ghost story based on an idea by Cecil B. DeMille and published under the by-line of David Belasco in 1912.
The readers had no way of knowing that they were reading the words of a budding genius ghosting a Terhune story, so there was no positive reaction. The regulars found the quantities of science fiction thinning out and resented it. A novel by Stephen Chalmers,
The Frozen Beauty
(June 20-July 4), telling of a girl in suspended animation and a semi-human ape involved in the proceedings, underscored a lack of originality that was typical of most other science fiction of the time.
One answer Davis had to the growing discontent was to explode
The Mucker
by Edgar Rice Burroughs on his readers the four issues October 24-November 14, 1914, after it had been revised and resubmitted on September 9, 1914. Even more important, in the issue which concluded
The Mucker
, he finally opened a major science-fiction novel by George Allan England,
The Empire in the Air
, with the title changed from
The Love Wrecker
. The seventy-four-thousand-word novel was written, delivered, and paid for in segments, beginning with a hundred dollars on June 18, 1913, and concluding with the sixth and final payment on March 18, 1914, of five hundred dollars, all payments adding up to nine-hundred and fifty dollars.
The cover was one of the most effective the magazine had ever run for science fiction, showing a fluorescent globe hovering in the air, pseudoyps with eyes on their ends wriggling from it. At last Davis had placed stories by the two greatest writers of the scientific romance in a single issue, but neither was completely representative.
The Mucker
, though an action story, was primarily a study of character.
The Empire in the Air
was a super-science epic, fifteen years ahead of its time, whose importance has since been ignored because it never was reprinted.
George Allan England's extraordinary novel told of the use of a space warp which projected globelike creatures from one hundred thousand light-years away to earth through the fourth dimension. They have no more regard for human life, despite their intelligence, than man has for the insects. They dissolve solid worlds into a gaseous state from which they can absorb nutrient, then move on to other worlds to repeat the process. They are nomads of space. Boston is destroyed, and the world is in chaos, when a scientist rises in a high-altitude plane, projects five men into the fourth dimension, and utilizes the polarized dust from the 1883 explosion of the volcano of Krakatau, which is still suspended in great quantities in the upper atmosphere, to destroy the invaders through the release of negative electricity.
The story ends as one of the glowing green globes enters the room of the scientist who has defeated them and leaves a message on a sheet of paper, stating: "You have conquered. All but a few of us are lost. Those few are returning beyond the Galactic Ring. Your little planet and you strange creatures, puny as you are, have vanquished us. Nothing in the universe can stand against man.
"I return now to the Fourth Dimension, never more to leave it, as no man ever more shall leave the Third. In my dimension I will remember you, Kramer. In yours remember me. And now, across the infinite gulf that sunders our intelligences, farewell eternally."
Somewhere in the Bronx, a pudgy, nearsighted little man, who now lived frugally on the returns from a real-estate legacy, must have read that story. That man was Charles Fort, who had contributed short stories to THE ARGOSY and THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, whose aspirations as a novelist were to remain unfulfilled, and who already was collecting thousands of "inexplicable happenings" for which he would form theories in his first volume of strange phenomena,
Book of the Damned
, to be published in 1919. This book would deal with the possibility of superior intelligences from space visiting our world and regarding us with as much consideration as we would an insect, and it would offer hundreds of newspaper reports to substantiate the plausibility of his thesis.
Then, supreme irony, George Allan England would read
Book of the Damned
and be inspired by it to write a short masterpiece titled
The Thing from — Outside
, about an invisible entity that seeks to obtain the brains of earthmen for experimental purposes. "I had to read Charles Fort's
Book of the Damned
before writing the story," he wrote in the July, 1923, issue of THE STORY WORLD, in an article titled
Facts About Fantasy
. "I wonder if Fort will reciprocate by reading my phantasmagoria?"
The Thing from — Outside
was rejected by ARGOSY ALL-STORY WEEKLY, but accepted by Hugo Gernsback for publication in the April, 1923, SCIENCE AND INVENTION. England, Fort's inspiration, had been enthralled when he found the reflection of his own ideas in someone else's work!
Before the conclusion of
The Empire of the Air
, Davis added another popular set of authors from THE CAVALIER, J. U. Giesy and Junius B. Smith, in a complete novel,
The Curse of Quetzal
, in the November 28, 1914, ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY. A cursed image is the basis for a murder and brings into play Semi-Dual's unorthodox methods of crime detection.
The complexity of the diplomacy required to keep a pivot author like Edgar Rice Burroughs happy was at no time better demonstrated than in the summer of 1914, after Davis had personally met with him and presumably ironed out all problems. Burroughs happily wrote Davis on July 20, 1914, enclosing some colored stickers promoting the hardcover
Tarzan of the Apes
. He followed it the next day with the revised manuscript of what was now titled
The Girl from Farris'
. The purpose of the change in name from the Anglo-Saxon "Harris" to the indeterminate "Farris" is puzzling, particularly since Farris' first name is Abe. Considering Farris' social status as the villainous owner of a house of prostitution, the implications of the altered name could have been, by a stretch of the imagination, misconstrued by Jewish readers.
Burroughs was startled to receive a rejection slip for the manuscript from assistant editor H. E. Coffin, dated August 3—especially since the story had been paid for the previous April. Davis was on vacation, but somehow his secretary found out about it and dispatched a letter on August 4 asking Burroughs to disregard the rejection. Davis, on his return August 18, wrote Burroughs that he would use the story.