13. THE CHALLENGE OF THE DETECTIVE PULPS
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 hund
red 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.
Burroughs now began to worry about his image with the readers. He wrote Davis on September 19, 1914, wondering if The Girl from Farris' should not be run elsewhere, since the ALL-STORY CAVALIER WEEKLY readership had an antipathy to "smut." This again raises suspicions as to Burroughs' original motive in writing the story, which if not Machiavellian was at the very least capricious, in the sense that it seemed intended to intimidate Davis.
Davis, in accepting a sequel to The Mad King, titled Barney of Custer, on November 11, 1914, asked for a rewrite. Burroughs agreed, but requested a five-hundred-dollar advance on November 13, which was sent him. Burroughs always claimed to read very little fiction, but on November 14 he wrote to Davis highly praising E. Phillips Oppenheim's Curious Quest of Mr. Ernest Bliss.
As the magazine's first fantasy for 1915, Davis was able again to present Burroughs in his most effective format, with a sequel to The Eternal Lover, titled Sweethearts Primeval, a four-part novel appearing January 23 to February 13. When Victoria Custer disappears into the jungle on Tarzan's estate with Nu, the primitive man from one hundred thousand years past, they take refuge in a cave and are rendered unconscious by an earthquake. Victoria regains her senses, to find herself in the body of a prehistoric girl, with Nu as her mate. A series of thrilling adventures terminates where the story began, with Nu going out to hunt the sabertooth tiger, which will lead to his being trapped in a cave by an earthquake. Victoria, recovering after a faint at Tarzan's ranch, is told that all the adventures have passed through her mind in but three minutes. She refuses to believe it was only a phantasm and travels back to the site of the cave, where she finds "the crumbling skeleton of a large man. By its side rested a broken, stone-tipped spear, and there was a stone knife and a stone ax as well." A little beyond was "the grinning skull of a great cat, its upper jaw armed with two mighty, eighteen-inch, curved fangs."
Pellucidar, the sequel to At the Earth's Core, was purchased January 20, 1915, and $1,522 was paid for its 60,900 words. The preciseness of the word count was due to Burroughs. He incessantly warred with Davis over even a few hundred words, and in this respect his letters read a great deal like Jack London's, with the exception that London was getting three times the rate of Burroughs, and a few hundred words could add up to a substantial sum.
Aggravated by these petty squabbles, Bob Davis quipped in his letter of September 29, 1914: "Believe me, Burroughs, you are one hell of a howler."
Burroughs was far more ingenious and imaginative than he has been given credit for. His stories arc not merely transposals to a primitive terrain to provide a landscape for battles with men and beasts. In Pellucidar, the dominant race are the Mahars, hideous reptiles who communicate telepathically through the fourth dimension and possess written records. Despite the fact that it is at the earth's center, Pellucidar has far greater land area than the surface, because the seas are smaller. The central "sun" has a satellite which tantalizingly offers evidences of water and vegetation. This satellite perpetually keeps a specified area in a twilight gloom, which causes it to be called "The Land of the Awful Shadow." With the aid of David Innes and Abner Perry, the savage tribes of Pellucidar are united and drive the Mahars from their territory. Guns and cannon are introduced, railroads built, the written word taught, and David Innes and his "mate," Dian the Beautiful, settle down to a satisfying life in their land of the central sun.
14. THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE BURROUGHS' IMITATORS
THE QUANTITIES of material demanded by the weekly schedule of what had been THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE reduced the ratio of science fiction to the total fiction content of the publication during 1915. The science-fiction wordage of the fifty-two issues of 1915 did not greatly exceed that of the twelve issues of 1913. It was evident that even Burroughs, at his most prolific, could not have produced enough wordage to sustain sales for a weekly on the basis of his following alone. Issues without an
y fantasy content were frequent, and the four consecutive issues with August dating carried nothing in the vein of fantasy. By contrast, not a single 1913 issue had appeared without science fiction.
If there was a deliberate, planned reduction of the percentage of fantasy wordage in the contents, it was not a wise move, for the change in the title from ALL-STORY-CAVALIER WEEKLY to ALL-STORY WEEKLY with the issue of May 15, 1915, could have been interpreted as a sign of weakness, even though the simplified title was undoubtedly better. While Davis knew that the stories of Burroughs and England made significant differences in his circulation and reader response, was he actually aware of the differences between their type of scientific romance and standard science fiction?
There was one indication, at least, that he might be. On June 24, 1914, Bob Davis had bought from Charles Billings Stilson, a Rochester, New York, author, a fifty-nine-thousand-word novel titled Polaris for four hundred dollars. Why he held it for a year and a half, or nearly eighty issues, before publishing it can only be surmised. Perhaps the combination with THE CAVALIER had provided an excessive backlog of stories to be worked off. Perhaps the story on second reading raised certain doubts. Polaris was obviously directly inspired by Tarzan of the Apes, and its later situations were suggestive of Burroughs' Mars series.
Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 Page 54
