"Do you remember The Moon Pool?" Davis asked.
"Foolish question No. 9,876,543, that!" he replied to his own question.
Since The Moon Pool's publication on June 22, 1918, A. Merritt's name had ranked second only to that of Edgar Rice Burroughs with ALL-STORY WEEKLY readers. Davis' statement that he had received hundreds of letters concerning it was borne out by his own readers' department, and the one thousand dollars paid for the hundred and twenty thousand words of the sequel was a shrewd bonanza. The cover showed a tentaclelike mass of pure energy drawing Edith (wife of the explorer Dr. David Throckmartin) into the Moon Pool and was aptly blurbed "An Amazing Sequel to an Unparalleled Adventure." At the novel's opening, Davis quite accurately enthused: "... a story so weird, so soul-stirring, and of such tense and terrible interest to every human being that even the title 'different' but weakly describes its uncanny fascination."
Three people have disappeared into the Moon Pool, and three others manage to actuate its strange mechanism to follow them into a world that is either inside the earth or in another dimension. There is action and color and drama aplenty, but the allure of the novel rests in the bizarre, poetic images it conjures up of the Shining One, the creature of pure force; Yolara, its priestess; Lugar, the inner-world Hercules; Lakla, the handmaiden to the enigmatic Silent Ones, who are the immense forces of good against the evil of the Shining One and its minions. There are races of frog men and of dwarfs, and though effectiveness of characterization and the flow of the writing are sometimes uneven in quality, the transcendental imagination of A. Merritt comes through, as do the flashes of near poetry and moments of poignancy wrung from encounters with nonhuman creatures that in a lesser hand could easily have become ludicrous. The novel, together with the original novelette, would go into hardcover in 1919 from Putnam, with a jacket and frontispiece by J. C. Coll and a dedication to Robert H. Davis which reads: "In appreciation, among many other things, for Larry O'Keefe's faith in the fairies." Fifty years later the book would still be in print and have sold a million paperbacks.
With "an actual ebullition of joy," The Girl in the Golden Atom, a twenty-two thousand-word science-fiction novelette, appropriately written by a man who had worked for and was born on the same day as inventor Thomas Alva Edison (February 11), was introduced for the March 15 issue. "As a flight of pure imagination, plus a most unusual scientific knowledge, and plus again a rare power of fantasy and delicate romance, it is our firm belief that it has few equals either in modern fiction or the classics." The story had been submitted as The Girl in the Ring, and Davis figured it was his prerogative to change the title when he paid two hundred dollars for it on November 13, 1919.
Ray Cummings said the idea was inspired by an ad for Quaker Oats, showing an endless series of identical labels dwindling into nothingness.
Actually, the beginning of the story very closely parallels The Diamond Lens, by Fitz-James O'Brien (ATLANTIC MONTHLY, January, 1858), where a man sees a girl living in a drop of water on a glass slide of his microscope. In Cummings' romance, a young man sees beneath the lens of a microscope a girl in a cave within the wedding ring of his mother. The major difference in the two stories is that Cummings' hero invents a drug that shrinks him small enough to enter the microscopic world and have a series of adventures and a beautiful romance, in the best tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs. The reaction to the story was similar to that of Merritt's The Moon Pool, inspiring a sequel, of full novel length, published in six parts the issues of January 24-February 28, 1920, titled The People of the Golden Atom. The land in the ring is visited again, and there is much intrigue and violence, solved to some extent by the ability of the visitors to become giants at will with the use of drugs.
The submission by A. Merritt of a sixteen thousand-word novelette titled The Ship of Ishtar resulted in Bob Davis sending it back on February 21, 1919, with an advance of one hundred and seventy-five dollars and a request to expand it into a novel. He was tired of having to get authors to write novel-length sequels to novelettes on popular demand.
One of the most effective fantastic covers ALL-STORY WEEKLY ever ran was for Into the Infinite, by Austin Hall, a six-part, one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand-word sequel to The Rebel Soul, purchased for only eight hundred dollars and run in the issues of April 12-May 17. George Witherspoon, who had been possessed by the "Rebel Soul" as described in the story of the same name, continues his nefarious activities, chased around the world by the Master, who hopes to terminate them. Finally the great power of a woman's love gives him the ability to free himself of the "Rebel Soul" and take up a normal life.
Davis changed the title of Homer Eon Flint's story The Death-Lord to The Lord of Death for the May 10 issue, and paid one hundred and seventy-five dollars for its twenty-two-thousand words, which told of two earth men who travel to Mercury and find a recording of the life of an ancient ruler of that world, including the fact that a man and a woman named Adeam and Ave had escaped in a space ship for a destination unknown to him but obvious to the reader.
The earthmen next take their space ship to the planet Venus and spend most of the story describing in minute detail a "Utopian" civilization in The Queen of Life (changed by Bob Davis from The Life-Queen). Most men and women live in enclosed, powered, glass cubicles to avoid breathing in germs from others, do so little walking that their legs are atrophying, have all their foods reduced to liquid, and seemed to have attained perfection, until a woman discovers a way of having children without men, and then a great mob crushes her.
The second in the Palos trilogy, by J. U. Giesy, titled Mouthpiece of Zitu, appeared in five installments July 5—August 2 and received a handsome cover for its opening installment. Jason Croft must convince the people of Palos and Princess Naia, whom he loves, that he is a mortal and the mouthpiece (prophet) of Zitu (God), and therefore a fit mate. There is much intrigue, a wooing that is partly on the astral plane, and the building of airplanes and railroads and the introduction of electricity to help Jason consolidate his supremacy upon this distant world. "Here is imagination carried to the nth power, and a story of equal charm and brilliance," Bob Davis said, but the records show that he paid but five hundred dollars for its seventy-seven thousand words.
The year 1919 was to be the peak year of all time as far as the quantity of fantasy in any one Munsey magazine was concerned. Counting each chapter of a fantastic serial as a unit, together with complete stories, there were ninety-live such units in that year, aggregating roughly about one million words. The average quality, in relation to the era, was very good, and the range of imagination was inspired.
Before the end of the year there would be an additional array of memorable stories by Todd Robbins, Philip M. Fisher, A. Merritt, Max Brand, Charles B. Stilson, Julian Hawthorne, Ray Cummings, Homer Eon Flint, H. Bedford Jones, George Allan England, Austin Hall, and J. U. Giesy.
There was also little question that companion magazine THE ARGOSY was stepping up the pace. From twenty units of fantasy in 1918, they accelerated to thirty-two in 1919, but more important, old Matthew White, Jr., either discovered or turned to fantasy several outstanding figures that had not written that type of fiction previously. Garrett Smith, a NEW YORK TRIBUNE reporter, who had published an excellent novelette On the Brink of 2,000 (THE ARGOSY, January, 1910, of a device that could see through walls at a distance), submitted a far-out novel, After a Million Years (six parts, January 18-February 22), whose theme was epochal. A million years in the future, man, who has migrated to the surface of the planet Jupiter, makes his last stand against nature in a glass-domed city. A torrent of meteorites heralds his end. Garrett Smith became an overnight sensation for readers of THE ARGOSY.
The issue that saw the final installment of Smith's novel introduced Murray Leinster (today still writing, and the dean of science-fiction authors) with The Runaway Skyscraper. The Metropolitan Tower in New York City is carried back in lime to a Manhattan overrun by Indians.
The efforts of the workers of a
modern skyscraper (still functioning and receiving power through time for its mechanisms) to cope with the situation and return to their own period, created a new reputation. Leinster did the story because, fed up with writing a series of "Happy Village" stories for Matthew White, Jr., he had informed that editor that he was through with mush and was busily engaged in writing a story about what happened when the clock on the Metropolitan Tower began to run backward. White asked to see it, and the rest is history.
Leinster had sold stories to Davis, too, and even attended plotting sessions during which that editor, despite his substantial girth, gyrated about the office, acting out a suggested plot. But Davis, for some reason, had never considered Leinster a likely prospect for science fiction. Leinster's next work of science fiction, The Mad Planet, published in THE ARGOSY for June 12, 1920, was to catapult him among the giants in the field, and is undoubtedly one of the greatest of all Munsey scientific romances. His imagination, rich style, and especially his fine characterization of Burl, man of an indefinite future and heir to a nightmare world, who meets and survives terrors that would have caused Tarzan's tanned cheeks to turn ghostly white, brand it as a classic. It has been reprinted repeatedly for fifty years and is destined, together with the equally magnificent sequel, Red Dust (THE ARGOSY, April 2, 1921), to be reprinted for another fifty.
The blossoming writer of historical romances, Harold Lamb, told of the finding of the Wosun, a branch of the white race with Christian religion in the Gobi Desert, in a four-part novel, Marching Sands, October 25-November 15. Garrett Smith was brought back quickly with a five-part novel, Between Worlds (October 11-November 8), of romance and adventure on the planet Venus and the attempt to conquer the earth by introducing Spanish Influenza. Francis Stevens was present with a short story, The Elf-Trap (July 5), of a man caught in the spell of a strange woman who seemed part of a tribe of gypsies that were really legendary folk with unusual powers; and a novel, Avalon (August 16-September 7), a modern Gothic, of the island of Avalon, owned by an American, with his "castle" on a cliff inhabited by unhealthy relatives. There is the hostility of the islanders to outsiders, a long series of murders, and a shipwrecked party, creating an atmospheric mystery of gloom and doom.
18. THE THRILL BOOK
THE TORRENT OF fantastic material appearing in ALL-STORY WEEKLY, its increasing volume in THE ARGOSY, and the fact that both were conspicuously successful weeklies could not help but be noticed by the competition. William Ralston, who had masterminded the publication of the first mystery-story pulp, DETECTIVE STORY, now a weekly success for Street & Smith, felt it might be time for an entire magazine of "different" stories. On the recommendation of W. Adolphe Roberts, editor of AINSLEE'S MAGAZINE, he hired Harold Hershey for the editorial slot of the new publication. Hershey had met Roberts at the home of Margaret Sanger, and they had in common an interest in birth control. Hershey's editorial experience had been confined to an arty Greenwich Village magazine, THE QUILL and some government publications. He also had the overpowering desire to become a great poet, which was to later bring him to grief.
The magazine was titled THE THRILL BOOK, with the subtitle "A New Type of Magazine for Everybody." Prior to publication, Harold Hershey had printed a two-page "Notice to Writers" in which he set forth the requirements of the magazine:
We are strongly desirous of securing strange, bizarre, occult, mysterious tales —novelettes of ten thousand words containing mystic happenings, weird adventures, feats of leger-de-main, spiritualism, et cetera. ... If we were to give you a formula we would say—sum up the demands of all other magazines, and then give us good stories which not one of them would take because of their odd qualities and harrowing nature. We quote as examples the stories of De Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, De Quincy's curious tales of murder; historical tales of the Inquisition in the style of Hugo; stories of terrible adventures in the spirit world, et cetera. ... If you have the unusual, the mysterious, the occult, the harrowing—such stories will be gladly considered with a view to publication. . . . We are also in the market for clean, swiftly moving adventure serials, novelettes, and short stories. ... In this magazine accent is laid on the curious twist; the strange angles of human nature; the coming into contact with an unseen world; miraculous but logical happenings; thrilling occult stories with any background either here or in foreign lands; adventures of extraordinary speed and absorbing interest; mysterious occurrences; spiritual and ghostly narratives; romantically woven novelettes and serials, and whimsical things. If you have an idea which you have considered too bizarre to write, too weird or strange, let us see it.
There have been some who have tried to claim that THE THRILL BOOK was intended to be and was the first science-fiction magazine. This "Notice to Authors," discovered by California science-fiction antiquarian book man and enthusiast Roy A. Squires, lays to rest that notion for all time. Nowhere is the word "science" even mentioned, nor is there a phrase into which "science fiction" could be fitted without greatly stretching interpretation.
The first issue of THE THRILL BOOK was dated March 1, 1919 (it was a semi-monthly), and Eugene A. Clancy, editor of PEOPLE'S FAVORITE MAGAZINE was assigned to assist Hershey with the technical details of putting a professional magazine together. The first eight issues were in the format of a dime novel (Street & Smith was still publishing many of them), 10% inches high and eight inches wide, saddle-stitched, with forty-eight pages and covers, and selling for ten cents. It had no contents page and no advertisements, and ran editorials on the back cover. By the fourth issue, its fantasy policy had been watered down to this statement by the editor: "It is no doubt clearly understood that a magazine, like newspaper or a national government, must have a policy. . . . THE THRILL BOOK has but one policy—a fundamental one—to procure the best fiction that is written, no matter what it costs or how hard it is to get." In an entire page, not a single word suggestive of the unusual or off-trail was even mentioned.
A large percentage of the stories were off-trail and might have fitted the "different" category of Bob Davis, including several by old Munsey stalwart Perley Poore Sheehan; a number by Greye La Spina, later to become popular in WEIRD TALES magazine; an early story of Seabury Quinn; and a great many by unknown names. With the eighth issue Harold Hershey was fired. Murray Leinster, a close friend of Hershey's, asserts that the main reason he was dismissed was that an inordinate quantity of stories and poems published in THE THRILL BOOK was discovered by Ralston to have been written by Hershey, and some even by his mother, under a wide variety of pen names.
Ronald Oliphant was made editor with the ninth issue, July 1, 1919. Oliphant had contributed a three-part serial in verse titled Alpheus Bings—Thrill Hound, which ran from the April 15 to the May 15 issue. Oliphant would remain a staff member of Street & Smith, editing TOP-NOTCH MAGAZINE in the early thirties.
With the July 1, 1919, issue, the magazine was changed to a regular pulp of 160 pages for fifteen cents, which format it retained until its sixteenth and last issue, October 15, 1919.
Under Oliphant the magazine showed more professionalism, and fantasies were contributed by such Munsey regulars as H. Bedford Jones, Todd Robbins, J. U. Giesy, Junius B. Smith, Francis Stevens, Don Mark Lemon, William Wallace Cook, and Murray Leinster. Heads of Cerebrus (August 15-October 15), an unusual novel of Philadelphia of the future, by Francis Stevens, of a culture that is revolted by past events, was probably the high point of the magazine's fantasy-fiction content. Murray Leinster contributed two short novels, A Thousand Degrees Below Zero (July 15), of an attempt to conquer the United States by freezing, and a sequel, The Silver Menace, in two parts (September 1-15), in which a rapidly multiplying growth from the ocean threatens to cover the land. Hershey ordered and paid for a science-fiction novelette by Leinster which Oliphant never published. The title has been forgotten, but three hundred dollars was received for its twenty thousand words, and it concerned an asteroid striking the earth, with subsequent havoc, and included dirigibles of metallic fo
am.
On October 24, 1919, Ronald Oliphant returned Edgar Rice Burroughs' Under the Red Flag, the story which would later be published in ARGOSY ALL-STORY WEEKLY as The Moon Men. At the time, THE THRILL BOOK had already seen its last issue when publication was stopped because of a printers' strike. Whether Oliphant was aware the magazine would not be resumed when he returned Burroughs' story is not known, but he used THE THRILL BOOK stationery.
In retrospect, it seems that a magazine such as THE THRILL BOOK originally intended to be might have succeeded, had it employed a professional editor who understood something about the field. There were plenty of Munsey men around that would have filled the bill. It is obvious that they failed to note that though there were many fantasy and supernatural stories, the big successes in ALL-STORY WEEKLY were the scientific romances, which by now were regularly called "different" stories. What resulted was a fascinating offshoot of the pulp field for fantasy collectors.
19. "ARGOSY" AND "ALL-STORY WEEKLY" COMBINE—END OF AN ERA
THE ALL-STORY WEEKLY figuratively roared into 1920 with its ratio of fantasy fiction as high as ever. The year 1919 had closed on a note of triumph, with George Allan England's six-parter, The Flying Legion (November 15-December 20), of a giant aircraft (part plane, part dirigible, part helicopter) that takes a group of restless adventurers to Mecca to steal the holy jewels. It was a thriller of a story, with supermen and a superwoman, and a score of devices intended to enthrall the adventure-story lover. The readers' department, which still appeared every issue, showed England second in popularity only to Burroughs in demand; the pay records indicated that Davis had worked to extricate the story from him. The novel, one hundred and seven thousand words in length, was delivered in seven segments; the first was paid for on March 6, 1919, at one hundred and fifty dollars, and the last was paid for May 29, 1919 at eight hundred dollars. All told, England received $1,750 for his contribution.
Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 Page 59
