Murray Leinster
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Will would have been most pleased to read in Clute’s essay in Science Fiction Writers that, “His importance lies in the pleasure he gave. In that he was the dean.”
Will was amused to learn later about a glitch in the convention arrangements, averted just in time. Apparently there was a fan from Philadelphia named Will J. Jenkins who was accidentally given the guest of honor courtesy room at the Statler. He was evicted before Mary and Will arrived, bothering no one but the panicked committee chair.
Will was glad that his half-sister Lula’s daughter Francis [ sic] and granddaughter Ellen were able to attend, as well as many other members of the family, and everyone had a good time. His daughters thought it was fun when 146
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they were asked for autographs, and couldn’t imagine why. It was a high point for Will, who was essentially modest and did not seek out attention, but was very pleased when it came to him.
In the mid-fifties, Scott Meredith had told his clients not to bother sending in anything under 100,000 words: the short story market was dead. In spite of that, Will appeared in The Saturday Evening Post three times in 1961
and 1962. The Post stopped printing in 1969 (resuming in 1971 as a quarterly with health and medical articles). Will published fifteen books in the 1960s, taking up the slack for the diminishing magazine market, and kept on looking for new markets.
On March 8, 1962, he wrote from Ardudwy to Leo Margulies at Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine:
Dear Leo,
Herewith three stories originally printed in Collier’s. As you know, the Colliers-Crowell people now have no interest in these rights. You can check this, of course, by telephone.
One comment. When Collier’s printed “Two in a Boat,” they omitted the quotes from the reward poster. I think they were wise. I’ve crossed them out myself.
As usual, I look eagerly in the mail for that cheque you said would be along around the first of the month for “Shelter Hut.” Regards to Sylvia,
In a postscript, he reports enthusiastically on the “dig,” bragging that he is now “the owner of one of the earliest collections of colonial garbage in the United States.”
“Shelter Hut” was published in the August 1962 issue of Mike Shayne’s Mystery Magazine. Of the three stories mentioned in a postscript in the letter,
“Two in a Boat” appeared in the same magazine in November 1962, and “No More Walls” in December 1963. “Fate Doesn’t Care,” also mentioned, was not reprinted.
In a March 1963 letter, he told Jo-an:
I did Med Service stories for Analog and Galaxy. Both went over. Now I have a Med Service book [ Doctor to the Stars, Pyramid, 1964 included “The Grandfather’s War,” “Med Ship Man,” and “Tallien Three”] but have to have the dates of publication for those stories set before I can sign a contract, which will have to specify publication after magazine use. Incidentally, Byrne of Macfadden, who used to be in charge of Berkeley [ sic] Books said he’d like a book for Macfadden.
I’ve sent him a synopsis (which John said he’d like for a serial) and he’s to read a Med Service story to see if he’d like that book also. Ace Books wants it, but Macfadden would pay exactly twice as much advance. I shall hope.
Macfadden published The Greks Bring Gifts in 1964 and reprinted it in 1968. Ridderhof translated it into Dutch in 1964. This story is unusual Nine • The 1960s
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because, perhaps due to the influence of having four daughters, the female protagonist, Lucy Thale, makes most of the important discoveries.
One character in the Med Service series was so popular he had his own fan base. As Will reported in a letter to Jo-an, November 24, 1974, “There is an imaginary small animal called Murgatroyd who has shown signs of having his own public. I’ve had fan mail addressed to him.” An imaginary book referred to in the Med Service series also attracted many fans. The Practice of Thinking by Fitzgerald, often quoted by one of the doctors, sounded so good that for years readers asked him where they could buy a copy.
Writer Stephen Goldin was a Murgatroyd fan.
There’s also a fond place in my heart for his Med Ship stories that appeared in such books as Doctor to the Stars and This World Is Taboo. I’ll always remember Murgatroyd the tormal, whose sole conversational contributions were “Chee!” (or, in a more talkative mood, “Chee chee”), but who saved countless lives and made invaluable contributions to medical science. These stories blazed a trail that Star Trek later followed. Murray Leinster taught me that the best stories are the ones that expand your universe while they entertain. It’s a lesson I’ve tried never to forget.
On May 3, 1963, Will wrote to Jo-an:
Things look up. That option business was not a request for an option on Monster from Earth’s End. Somebody paid $500 for a year’s option in 1961 and didn’t take it up. They were asking if they could make an outright purchase on the terms the option outlined. Movie rights, three thousand, if television shows were made in addition, so much — not much — additional. It was the Reynolds agency that bought Rogers Terrill’s agency when he died. Last year Fawcett arranged a reissue of Four from Planet Five through them.
The Monster from Earth’s End was made into a movie called The Navy vs.
the Night Monsters released April 15, 1966. Its director, Michael A. Hoey, went on to direct many well-known TV shows. The production was very low budget, and Hoey was so upset by the result that he and producer Jack Broder had major disagreements, among them the use of the “tree stump monsters” that had been created for the film. Hoey thought that they were ridiculous and refused to shoot them.
An online critic recommended it for “nostalgic sci-fi buffs,” saying the story was interesting, the actors professional and the film print good. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists the salary for Murray Leinster as $4,000, and for Michael A. Hoey as $10,000. The movie is available on DVD.
There is general agreement that the biggest asset is the star Mamie Van Doren.
Dan Stumpf in Mystery*File, published online August 6, 2009, reviewed The Monster from Earth’s End, which he found in the 50 cents pile at a used 148
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book store. He called it: “The genuine article, the real banana, a taut, sus-penseful, exciting and genuinely creepy couple hours packed into 176 pages by a writer who knew how to do it.”
The story is set on an island off the coast of Chile, a way-station for supplies and scientists going to and from an Antarctic research station. Briefly, a north-bound plane bringing scientists and specimens from the South Pole lands — empty except for the pilot who blows his brains out.
Members of the staff on the island are then stalked by an unseen creature big enough to devour them and by growing numbers of carnivorous crawling insects. Stumpf praises the development of the characters saying, “the char-acterization here is ably done indeed; I’d swear I have worked with some of these guys.”
In between stories, Will continued to tinker.
I made a magnificent invention yesterday. Mother gave me an opium pipe —
Korean — that she’d bought for Christmas and forgot about. I figured the smoke would be horribly hot. So I remembered about that cigarette ad that says the paper is porous and dilutes the smoke. So I took one of my old pipes that would make a goat sick, and drilled a tiny hole into the smoke passage, arranged to open and close it to the desired degree, and lighted it. I’ve been smoking it ever since — almost literally. It dilutes the smoke by allowing clear air to leak into the smoke-passage. I can open it wide and the smoke feels cool against my tongue.
I’ve diluted the smoke to mildness. Or, of course one can have it full strength or anything in between. I think I’ll try it on cigarette holders and cigar holders.
And then what? Damfino.
Letter to Jo-an, January 19, 1963
One of Will’s experiments around this time so interested John Campbell, with whom Will discussed most of his ideas,
that he contacted the scientist, lecturer and writer Joseph P. Martino, then at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in Washington, D.C., where he was assigned from 1963 to 1968.
Martino later wrote:
One of the nice features of the assignment was that I was in almost daily contact with colleagues at the research offices of Army, Navy, NASA, National Science Foundation, etc. I knew “everybody who was anybody” in the government agencies funding basic research.
By then I had published several stories in Analog, and knew John W. Campbell fairly well. One day I received a letter from Campbell. He wrote that Murray Leinster had done something that he thought had national security implications. Campbell asked me to get in touch with Leinster, which I did.
Leinster sent me a document describing something he had devised. It was a method for electrochemically separating isotopes of the same element. At that time there was considerable interest in signing arms control treaties with the Soviet Union. Leinster was concerned that the U.S. might sign a treaty that banned known methods of separating U235 from U238, but miss the one he had Nine • The 1960s
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developed. This might give the Soviets a loophole in any treaty we might sign with them.
The method consisted of a long glass tube filled with a thick sugar solution, and with a high voltage applied between the ends of the tube. The idea was that lighter isotopes would pass through the sugar solution more rapidly than heavier ones, and eventually the two would be separated sufficiently that they could be extracted efficiently. The question was, how did he know he was actually separating isotopes? He had an ingenious scheme. He mixed oxides of several “rare earth” elements whose isotopes, in naturally-occurring material, were “inter-leaved” in atomic mass. That is, element A had some isotopes that were heavier, and some that were lighter, than an isotope of element B. The hydroxides of the elements had different colors in the sugar solution. After passing through the tube, the isotopes formed colored bands whose order was that expected, given the known atomic masses of the isotopes. It was a really neat proof that he could separate isotopes electrochemically. Moreover, it was something that was simple enough that it could be done for a science fair project.
I copied the material he sent me (on the then-new Xerox machine) and sent the copy to a colleague at the then–Atomic Energy Commission. I expected a long delay for a response. But within a week I received back a stack of Xeroxed articles from scientific journals that proved the method could not be scaled up for practical applications. I passed that on to Leinster, and got back a nice letter thanking me for relieving his concerns.
A few years later, after being re-assigned elsewhere, I read an article in a technical journal describing an electrochemical isotope separation method being used in industry. I realized then that I’d been had. The AEC kept a stack of those
“disproving” articles handy. Any time anyone invented an electrochemical method for separating isotopes, they fired off copies to discourage the inventor from pursuing the matter further. Science being what it is, however, discoveries can’t be suppressed indefinitely. Someone had re-invented a technique equivalent to Leinster’s, and hadn’t bothered to ask the AEC about it. They had simply gone ahead and commercialized it.
That was my only contact with Leinster. I had been a fan of his stories, ever since reading The Murder of the U.S.A. when I was in high school, and First Contact when I was in college. In his correspondence with me, he mentioned Heart of the Serpent, the Soviet “reply” to First Contact. I wish I’d had the opportunity to meet him personally.
When not tinkering, Will loved to entertain. One of his letters, typical of his sense of humor, was written in September 1964 to his nephew George Cox and his wife, Martha, regarding their daughter Bonnie’s wedding.
George was the son of Will’s brother-in-law, the Rev. G. W. Cox, a Baptist minister.
A Presbyterian preacher? Evidently, George, you didn’t tell her the facts of a preacher’s wife’s life! Remember those wise and truthful old saws? “If the Lord will keep him humble, then the church will keep him poor.” ... I shall hope, in my Papist way, that Bonnie Ann’s husband rules his congregation with an iron hand, and his wife in a much gentler fashion....
Love to the kids, even if they think they’re too old.
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He lived to see one grandson-in-law become a Presbyterian minister but did not know a great-grandson would also be ordained in the Presbyterian Church.
Billee’s girls were growing up and still loving their visits to Clay Bank.
With their usual hospitality, Will and Mary even allowed Pam to bring a high school boyfriend down. After she graduated from high school in 1965 and left for Tusculum College in Tennessee, this became a half way stop on the way to school.
Will’s novel Killer Ship was published in three parts in Amazing beginning with the October 1965 issue, which also included stories by Ray Bradbury, John Wyndham and Jack Williamson. Murray Leinster rated the cover. Amazing had just been bought by Sol Cohen and his Universal Publishing Company.
Joseph Ross was managing editor, and his editorial in this October issue began, “What does it take to be the dean of science fiction?” It continues with:
Well, if you’re Murray Leinster, you start out by writing “The Runaway Skyscraper,” a different story which immediately wins you the enthusiastic loyalty of Argosy readers back in 1919. Then you follow with “The Red Planet” and its sequel “The Red Dust,” classic insect stories that will eventually become “The Forgotten Planet,” one of your best books. From then you keep turning out more stories like “Sidewise in Time,” “First Contact” and “Exploration Team” (which wins a Hugo in 1956.) And all the while you adapt smoothly to changing styles and the astonishing advances of modern science. Then, as if that wasn’t enough, in 1965 you come up with Killer Ship and Trent of the Yarrow, one of your most memorable characters. That’s what it takes to be the “dean of science fiction,” and that’s why Murray Leinster holds the title.
Killer Ship was published in book form in 1966 by Ace under the title Space Captain.
New Year’s Eve in 1966 was like old times. Billee and her family were at the Clay Bank house, and Betty, Billy and Beth, the Allens and many of their long time friends joined the celebrations. There was the usual spread of finger food, plenty of whiskey, but, as usual, no one drank too much. Mary had made cassoulet. She was an excellent cook and loved trying new recipes. She was excited about making this French stew for the first time. There were the usual noisemakers and shouts of “Happy New Year” at midnight and the conga line that had become a tradition. Mary and Will were at the lead, and everyone conga-ed from the living room through the dining room and kitchen and into the sunporch and out the door, in spite of the weather, and back through the front door. It was like all the old time parties and New Year’s Eves at Clay Bank through the years. Mary and Will were making plans for their 50th wedding anniversary celebration. No one dreamed that this would be their last party.
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Tragedy struck shortly after Mary’s 70th birthday. She died suddenly on April 24, 1967. Although they knew she had a heart condition, she refused to slow down and always enjoyed life to the fullest. They were staying at the apartment in New York when she became ill, and she was taken immediately to nearby Booth Memorial Hospital, but nothing could be done.
Mary was buried in the historic Ware Church Cemetery in Gloucester, near the grave of a grandchild, Betty’s second daughter, who was stillborn.
• TEN •
After Mary’s Death
Will and Mary had been married for almost 46 years in a uniquely close relationship. As he had always worked at home, they were in each other’s company constantly, and he would boast, with satisfaction, that they had almost never spent a night apart. Will loved and protected her. Mary organized his life, fixed the meals he liked and laid out his clo
thes every morning. He read his stories to her as he worked on them, and she listened and commented, carefully correcting typos before
the final copies were sent off in the
mail. As one of Will’s long time
friends Edward Chism once said,
“Will has the perfect life. He does
whatever he wants, and Mary
helps him.”
After Mary died, Will said he
“had the stuffing knocked out of
him.” He never again slept in
their bedroom, instead creating a
new, single bed on the sun porch,
so, as he said, “I would know the
minute I woke up that things were
different.” Still, as Jo-an experi-
enced, he would wake in the
morning and call immediately,
“Mary,” forgetting for a moment
that there would be no reply.
Mary and Will in a happy moment
at Clay Bank.
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And a year later, in a letter to Jo-an dated April 8, 1968, he told her, “I still forget that I’m alone and every so often I discover I’ve called Mother to ask her what time it is or something.”
He found it hard to concentrate and missed his most helpful audience.
Mary had listened and commented on bits of stories as he read them to her.
He found it difficult to continue writing as he used to, and his thirty-six year record of contributing to Astounding Stories, Astounding Science-Fiction and Analog ended in November 1966 with the publication of “Quarantine World.”