Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  16. TORRENT OF FANTASTIC TALENT

  THE GREAT QUANTITY of material needed to fill ALL-STORY WEEKLY, plus the average low rates, required that special attention be given to the developing of new authors, and this was the area of Bob Davis' special genius. The year 1917 showed him in rare form.

  A Californian who had tried without results to get into the war via Canada, and whose great goal in life was to be a poet, was resting in a twenty-five-cent-a-night Bowery hotel in New York. He picked up a Gideon Bible and turned to a passage which read: "Knock and it shall be opened unto you. Seek and ye shall find." He decided to add prose to his literary endeavors, and on January 31, 1917, was sent fifty dollars for a seventy-five-hundred-word short story titled Convalescence. It was a story of a girl who had made a living as a con artist, and had gone straight by taking up nursing. A former criminal acquaintance is brought in shot through the head. Her example causes him to reform, and they are married. Published in the March 31, 1917, ALL-STORY WEEKLY under the by-line of Frederick Faust, it was followed by a torrent of others, many under the pen name of Max Brand.

  A Philadelphia widow named Gertrude Bennett, who resided at 4203 Girard Avenue, supported a daughter and an invalid mother on a secretary's salary. To supplement her income she took to writing fiction and submitted a thirty-four-thousand-word novelette to Davis titled The Unwilling Adventurer, about a New York man who goes to sleep on the ill-fated ocean liner Lusitania in the Atlantic and awakens to find himself struggling in the seas off an island in the Pacific. There, two competing groups are in rivalry to extract a substance from a hidden valley which will convert lead into gold. The valley contains man-eating plants, spiders as big as a dining-room table, bears as large as elephants, and bats of similar proportions. The air of mystery and the atmospheric buildup were superbly done, indicating a ranking talent. The author had requested that the story be published under the pen name of Jean Vail, but when it appeared as the feature story of the April 14, 1917, issue, it carried the man's by-line of Francis Stevens, and the title had been changed to The Nightmare. In forecasting it, Bob Davis related the plot to that of Terror Island, by Alex Shell Briscoe, because of the battles with the giant creatures, and accurately predicted the readers would want lo read more by this author. Gertrude Bennett was paid two hundred fifty dollars for the story September 7, 1916, and encouraged to write more.

  A little-known writer, Harold Lamb, destined to become one of the world's most exciting historical novelists, was introduced to ALL-STORY WEEKLY readers with, of all things, a novelette with a naval background, titled Somewhere in the Pacific, published in the April 21, 1917, issue, and went on to do other navy short stories.

  Ben Ames Williams, another author who many years later would write a famous best-seller, Leave Her to Heaven, was introduced as a science-fiction writer with the novel The Powder of Midas (June 16-July 7), where Germany during World War I has produced a powder developed by a seventeenth-century alchemist that will turn mercury into gold, and hopes to finance its war effort with it.

  Up to now there had been "different" short stories and "different" novelettes, but the first "different" serial novel was a decidedly grotesque work titled The Terrible Three, by another Davis "find" who called himself Todd Robbins, serialized in four installments, July 14-August 4, 1917. Three circus freaks—Tweedle-dee, a dwarf; Hercules, a giant; and Echo, a ventriloquist—enter into an alliance that forwards the hatred and vindictiveness that the dwarf holds against the world. Murder results, and the fiendish ingenuity of the trio in utilizing their individual abnormalities and talents to further their designs results in possibly the greatest circus horror story ever written. Robbins had a superior stylistic quality as well as a macabre, humorous imagination, and Davis seemed prouder of "discovering" him than the scores of others he had featured. The truth was that Davis never discovered him at all. Robbins had two books published in 1912 by J. S. Ogilvie—Mysterious Martin, a grim novel of a writer who murders frequently so that he can describe the authentic sensation of the killer in his novels; and The Spirit of the Town, a crudely done allegory depicting civilization ("The Spirit of the Town") as a vile and onerous thing contrasted with nature ("The Spirit of Truth").

  Philip M. Fisher, Jr., had begun writing shortly after graduating from the University of California in 1913, but had made no particular impression. His appearance in the August 18 ALL-STORY WEEKLY with The Demise of Professor Manried indicated that his true propensity was for science fiction, where he dueted in one short work the time-worn concept of antigravity and the modern idea of an electronic force field capable of stopping a bullet in flight.

  Bob Davis' most wonderful find of the year 1917 was reflected in a "different" story by A. Merritt, the thirty-three-year-old associate editor of Morrill Goddard's fabulously successful THE AMERICAN WEEKLY, a supplement distributed with Sunday Hearst newspapers. Why Abraham Merritt had begun to dream escape fantasies like Through the Dragon Glass (November 24, 1917) is a mystery that has not yet been solved. Certainly, as the right-hand man of Morrill Goddard, (whose salary would one day rise to two hundred forty thousand dollars a year), Merritt must have enjoyed a decent wage. The fifty dollars sent him on September 7, 1917, for the story could not have been his prime motivation. Through the Dragon Glass, a story in which Herndon, one of the pillagers of Peking during the Boxer Rebellion, steals a jade glass which is the doorway into a land spoken of in Chinese legend, and enters that land. There he discovers Santhu, with whom he falls in love, and the strange yellow-eyed sorcerer who commands the souls of all who dwell in that place, including a monstrously beautiful, cruelly taloned bird. The story was told in poetic prose transcending that of most of the writers of the day. Merritt was obviously strongly influenced by Robert W. Chambers' The Maker of Moons (1896), not only in style but also in subject matter. Reader reaction, considering the brevity of the fantasy, was markedly favorable, for it fulfilled all the requirements of a fantastic romance most eloquently.

  Bob Davis was well on his way to building a team that collectively, if not individually, would compensate for the loss of Edgar Rice Burroughs, which would become a reality as soon as the current inventory was depleted. For the moment, he carefully rationed out the Burroughs stories. Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, an exciting adventure in which Tarzan returns to the lost, decadent city of Atlantis and secures a treasure in jewels, which serves as the basis for much intrigue, was serialized in five installments (November 18-December 23, 1917). Again La, the priestess of Opar, one of the many memorable characters that live in Burroughs' novels, plays an important role. The Cave Man, sequel to The Cave Girl, which had been held since August 26, 1914, was presented in four parts, March 31-April 21, 1917. In this short novel, Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones, completely transformed from a cowardly weakling, gains ascendency over the primitive tribe of the island, and when rescued takes the beautiful cave girl back to Boston with him, her suitability underscored by evidence that she is the lost waif of nobility. The Lad and the Lion had been held longest of all, since April 15, 1914. Rights to the unpublished manuscript was bought by the Selig Plyscope Co., Chicago, film producers in 1915 for an advance of five hundred dollars against an agreement of one hundred dollars per reel. It is quite possible that the appearance of the story was deliberately planned to coincide with the release of the film, for when it was serialized in three parts (June 30-July 14, 1917), the cover illustration by Modest Stein simulated a motion-picture screen inside a theater. The plot concerns a fourteen-year-old son of European royalty who loses his memory from a blow on the head and spends four years on a derelict ship with a half-crazed mute and a young lion, with whom he becomes good friends. The lion kills the mute, and the two are cast ashore in Africa and cause a sheik much grief as the "lad" falls in love with Nakhla, a daughter. After much adventure, the "lad" is found to be a royal prince and is restored to his place, with a girl, who will be a future queen. When published in hardcover by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1938, the book was lengthene
d.

  Bob Davis, who also acted as an agent, selling subsidiary rights for his authors, sold to Ralph W. Ince, Arthur Hammerstein, and Lee Shubert the moving-picture rights to Max Brand's first novel, Fate's Honeymoon, which he serialized in five parts, beginning July 14, 1917. It told of an attempt of a confidence man to separate a girl from one hundred thousand dollars, by arranging a mock marriage, and the complications that came of it. These two moving-picture-related novels presented weeks apart represented excellent promotional tie-ins for ALL-STORY WEEKLY, and during 1917 that magazine, as well as THE ARGOSY, ran a number of others.

  In the same issue as the first installment of The Lad and the Lion, Davis brought to his readers another Austin Hall "different" novelette of twenty-six thousand words, for which he paid two hundred dollars on April 18, 1917. The plot dealt with the transference of bodies, an old theme, with the difference that it conceived of the idea of "rebel" souls, those who live through the ages, taking possession of individuals and turning them contrary to their natures. Such souls were alleged to be responsible for Alexander the Great and Napoleon Bonaparte wasting their great genius. The similarity to the plot of Almost Immortal, of a man living for ten thousand years by absorbing other bodies, is obvious, and while The Rebel Soul presented a stronger human situation, it was an inferior story.

  Probably the highlight of the later part of the year was the third in the Polaris trilogy, Polaris and the Goddess Glorian, by Charles B. Stilson, a five-part serial, September 15-October 13, 1917. It was a scientific romance in the finest Burroughs tradition, with a high degree of originality on the part of the author. Again it was a mixture of Tarzan and the Mars series, with Polaris killing a raging bull with a knife, and the scientific cities of Adlaz, whose men have devices for breathing under water and great submarines with destructive rays. Stilson solves for all time the time-worn dilemma of the priestess of the lost race who must give up the hero she loves to another girl with a more appropriate background. Glorian, the frustrated princess, is forced to perform the ceremony binding Polaris, whom she loves, to the American girl he rescued in the antarctic. But she possesses the secret of prolonging life, and without his knowledge is keeping him youthful and intends to marry him when his wife dies of old age.

  For the first time, with Polaris and the Goddess Glorian, Burroughs evinced awareness that attempts were being made to develop authors who employed his method. The matter was brought to his attention by Ray Long, editor of RED BOOK and BLUE BOOK, seeking to secure Burroughs' production for his own publications. Burroughs was engaged in writing a long novelette entitled The Lost U Boat. On September 11, 1917, he wrote to Davis asking for a plot outline of the Stilson story. A one-thousand-word synopsis was sent to him by Davis, which he received September 13.

  There was no response from Burroughs, but when he completed The Lost U Boat on October 15, 1917, he brought it personally to the offices of Ray Long in Chicago. On November 3 Long sent him a check for one thousand dollars. Davis never got a look at the story, nor was he notified that it had been written.

  The addition of the aging Julian Hawthorne, son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, seventy-one years old, to the list of regular contributors to ALL-STORY WEEKLY was small compensation for what now appeared to be a widening estrangement with Edgar Rice Burroughs. Hawthorne had written scores of science-fiction, supernatural, and fantasy tales in his long career, but The Cosmic Courtship, subtitled "An Inter-Planetary Romance," which was pictured on the cover of the November 24 issue and which would run for four installments, was a bit far-out even for him. It opened in the New York City of 2001, where air, water, and land were clear of any contamination. All industry and many residences were thousands of feet underground, and fifteen million people resided in the greater New York area, which stretched forty miles north into Connecticut and Long Island and five miles south into New Jersey. Individuals had antigravity belts to fly around in, predating Buck Rogers. The soul of the heroine is whisked to Saturn, where it is kidnapped by the king of a nearby world. The hero permits himself to follow her to Saturn, even though a method of return has not yet been devised. The style of the story is stilted Victorian, and the situations are a bizarre mixture of science, magic, mysticism, and mythology. The strangest element of all is that of overt sexuality as a motivating factor in the plot, unexpected when given the style of presentation. Julian Hawthorne would write a number of other short novels for ALL-STORY WEEKLY and THE ARGOSY, primarily dealing with the supernatural and the occult, and they would all contain a surprisingly strong sexual clement. In earlier years he had written much more effectively, selling to some of the leading magazines. Just as he provided a market for young writers on the way up, Hob Davis was also a haven for old writers on their way down. In this case, the subject of a scientific romance combined with a famed name had turned the trick.

  The year 1917 had been one of consequence for ALL-STORY WEEKLY. A prime cadre of outstanding new writers, both in and out of fantasy, had been developed. There would not be as much of Burroughs after the end of the year, but for the present enough was being published to satisfy readers, and an interesting by-product was the "Tribes of Tarzan," the idea of a series of fan clubs across the country, which Davis had first mentioned to Burroughs in a letter of December 13, 1916. The January 20, 1917, number ran an item headed "The Tribe of Tarzan Organized," telling of the boys of Staunton, Virginia, who had formed the first such tribe. They had a Tribe Room, grass ropes, and bows and arrows and hunting knives; Edgar Rice Burroughs was having medallions struck for them symbolic of Tarzan's diamond-studded golden locket. Chief of the First Tribe of Tarzan was Herman Newman.

  The United States had entered World War I April 6, 1917, and ALL-STORY WEEKLY'S policy of running nothing on the war had abruptly changed. Four pages of martial poems under the heading of "Red, White, and Blue" preceded the fiction of the May 19, 1917, issue. The note of war bugles sounded through poem after poem, culminating in the issue of August 4, 1917, when every story in the issue was a war story, including Perley Poore Sheehan, Louis Tracy, George Allan England, and Henry Leverage, as well as Sheehan coming back for seconds under the pen name of Paul Regard.

  The classified-advertising rates in ALL-STORY WEEKLY rose from sixty cents to seventy-five cents a line with an announcement in the June 9, 1917, issue, an increase of twenty-five per cent. Since the rates of the other magazines in the Munsey group did not advance, this must be translated into a comparable gain in circulation. As it moved into mid-1917, ALL-STORY WEEKLY must have attained a circulation of at least one hundred and twenty-five thousand weekly, with a possibility of a maximum up to one hundred fifty thousand. By cutting out the leading between lines, the wordage was increased by twenty-five thousand with the June 30, 1917, number, with no change in price, raising average fiction content to one hundred sixty thousand words an issue. The wordage dropped back to one hundred and thirty-five thousand words by restoring the leading with August 11, with no explanation of either change ever given.

  The classified-advertising line rate of ALL-STORY MAGAZINE and THE ARGOSY was combined at $1.50 for appearance in both magazines. Previously it had been $1.30 for THE ARGOSY and seventy-live cents for ALL-STORY WEEKLY. The reason for the combination rate was quick in coming. With the issue of October 6, 1917, THE ARGOSY was made a weekly with 192 pages, sixteen more than ALL-STORY WEEKLY for ten cents, with the same general content. If ALL-STORY WEEKLY had been an experimental publication calculated to determine whether a weekly all-fiction pulp magazine was feasible, it had succeeded. THE ARGOSY undoubtedly still had the larger circulation, but now it was in direct competition with ALL-STORY WEEKLY and a better buy for the money. The major difference in content was that THE ARGOSY ran no "different" stories, no Edgar Rice Burroughs, and for the past two years had run very little science fiction. The most notable they did print was Who Is Charles Avison? (April, 1916), by a man with an "obvious" pseudonym, Edison Tesla Marshall. It was a remarkable story, perhaps the first on the twin-worlds them
e, of there being another earth with identical history and inhabitants never seen because it is in perpetual eclipse of the sun. Two Charles Avisons set out in space ships, but the movement of a comet forces one to crash on his earth and the other to land while they are burying his duplicate. Edgar Wallace, who was a contributor to the Munsey magazines at the time of publication, may very well have received from it his inspiration for his short novel Planetoid 127 (Readers Library, 1929), which has an identical theme. After a few more stories, Marshall dropped the use of the middle name and went on to literary acclaim with historical novels as Edison Marshall.

  THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, when created in 1905, was an alternative to increasing the publication frequency of THE ARGOSY as an answer to the competition of other all-fiction pulps. It proved to be a sound concept, and it prospered. THE CAVALIER was an attempt to establish a third monthly with a related policy by Munsey, and it failed. THE CAVALIER, then tried as a weekly, proved that a small but dependable audience would support such frequency, and the combination with THE ALL-STORY showed that an exceptional magazine could be profitable as a weekly.

  Now with THE ARGOSY also a weekly, Munsey published eight to ten issues a month. It must have been obvious to Bob Davis that THE ARGOSY was now his major competition, rather than THE POPULAR MAGAZINE, ADVENTURE, THE BLUE BOOK, PEOPLE'S, or SHORT STORIES.

  Except for a nonfantasy short novel in the drawer, Davis had no Edgar Rice Burroughs to employ as his standard solution to a tough competitive situation. His campaign to develop a new group of fantasy writers in place of Burroughs was well under way before. THE ARGOSY was made a weekly, and was gaining momentum now. A. Merritt, the daydreaming associate editor of THE AMERICAN WEEKLY, had submitted a short story which Davis was aware had literary quality far beyond almost anything he had ever run. "The author has painted scenes and persons not of this earth—a powerful pageant of horrors which, fortunately, are fictitious," he blurbed in his announcement for the "different" story, People of the Pit, which opened the year in the January 5, 1918, issue. An Alaskan explorer discovers a seemingly bottomless staircase which leads into the depths of an extinct volcano, where a race of sluglike creatures, with the power to float in air, worships an ancient God that no longer exists. The account of the explorer's imprisonment, escape, and climb back up the endless staircase to freedom and death is a masterpiece of the genre and made a greater impact than almost any other short work of science fiction the magazine had ever run. It had been a good buy at sixty dollars for its sixty-five hundred words.