“I went to his house and used his typewriter to rattle out my own attempts at science fiction stories, which he read through and said were in his opinion worthy of publication. The magazine editors never agreed. In retrospect 1 think the yarns were too juvenile. The only one I remember now [‘Carcinoma Menace’—editor] was about a cancer sufferer in whom the malignant cells, treated with radiation in an effort to kill them, reacted rather unexpectedly. The radiation triggered off mutations in the cells, and the chap finished up with an intelligent being—malignant, of course—inside him, and taking over. The science was suitably blinding, but the fiction, I fear, was rather lame.” [In point of fact, this plot seems to be an uncanny anticipation of one used by John Kippax (John Hynam) in his powerful short story “It” a full twenty years later in Nebula, November 1958 issue!—editor]
“Sometimes we took a break from writing, largely at Jack’s mother’s instigation, and we all three played Bezique, watched by ‘Benjie,’ their wire-haired terrier.”
By then Medley had joined the Blackpool Writers Circle, where he would also do a stint as Secretary later in 1938 (taking over from Fearn, who had succeeded the now departed Jones). Geoff recalled these days thusly:
“Coming back to the period when I was typing my MSS at the Fearn house, I recall that Jack was working on a ‘straight’ novel in the intervals between writing his science fiction potboilers. It was called Little Winter, and dealt with Blackpool seen from the resident’s viewpoint. I don’t remember his completing it.” {Fearn did in fact complete this during the war, and entrusted it to a literary agency. Unfortunately it never sold, and the MSS was inadvertently destroyed following the death of his widow in 1982—editor}.
“Jack and I were members of the Blackpool Writers’ Circle, which met on one evening each week in Jenkinson’s café, in Talbot Square. Jack was then the only full-time writer in the membership.”
Other members whom Geoff recalled included Edgar Spencer and Arthur Waterhouse Painter (“whose legs were paralyzed”. [Painter became a particular friend of Fearn and his mother, and was a very successful writer of juvenile fiction after the war; he also appeared in the Vargo Statten/British SF Magazine—editor.] Geoff continued his reminiscences:
“The Misses Howe were our most regular attendees. One sister, innocent of make-up, wrote for publications like The Methodist Recorder. The other, more smartly dressed and colourfully powdered, wrote for more romantic women’s magazines.
“We all discussed and criticized the MS. of the evening, giving quite well-reasoned analyses, and being ever mindful of the criteria which the books on writing laid down. All except Jack. He listened gravely, but his own contributions to the criticism were not particularly well argued or explained. All Jack could do, really, was write—and make money by it. The rest of us seldom sold anything.
“I lost touch with Jack during the War, and I outgrew my boyhood interest in science fiction. The brown Bombardier who produced and acted in plays in the Orkney Islands was a different person from the wide-eyed youth who had concocted ‘Carcinoma Menace’. Or nearly. Just once my old science fiction familiarity surfaced. It was on Salisbury Plain. One of our sergeants came back from the mess bubbling over with good news. ‘You know them bombs, Geoff, that they used to bust them dams in Germany—they were over a ton apiece. Well, it’s on the wireless over in the mess, we’ve got a bomb over a hundred times more powerful than them, and do yon know how big it is?’
“I froze. His lead-up could only be to an impressively smaller bomb.
“‘Christ!’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me they’ve already got some form of atomic power.…’
“‘That’s what they said—atomic or something.…’
“‘Now,’ I said, ‘we’re really in trouble.’
“‘You don’t understand, Geoff. We’ve got it—not them.’
“It took a science fiction man, then, to realize what trouble we were in.”
In a letter dated 5th July 1937, the suspicious Gillings told Fearn:
“I’m afraid, as far as my anticipations go, ‘Thornton Ayre’ doesn’t get much of a look in; nor, so far, does your friend Geoff Medley, whose ‘Death From the Star’ is much too advanced. Incidentally, these two write surprisingly complex stuff for amateurs at SF don’t they? Particularly Frank Jones, whose style and ideas are remarkably reminiscent of your own. So much so that in ‘Dark World’ he gives almost word for word the same account of the destruction of Atlantis as you do in your ‘Born of Atlantis’ (which would be okay for England if it was more leisurely-written and more convincing in spots, by the way), and even chooses the same name—Izma—for the arch-villain scientist, also making the same acknowledgement to Manly P. Hall! Can you explain this, to satisfy my curiosity?
“I still don’t realize who Frank Jones is. You say I met him in London. I recall meeting two of your friends; the tall one, who said little, and the other one who spoke so quietly, and who seemed to have invented such a lot of useful things. Is he the latter? I believe it was he who wrote the Podmore story you sent me before Sprigg closed down; if so, he’s improved mightily since then.… How was it his yarns didn’t click in the U.S.? They seem just cut out for Thrilling Wonder to me. Medley, however, wants a little more practice, though he certainly has ideas.”
Fearn replied on 7th July 1937:
“Haven’t seen Geoff or Frank, but I guess they’ll both be a trifle cut up. No matter—the editor’s decision is final. Jones is the tall one who spoke little; the other is Ed. Spencer. With regard to Jones’ stories, probably the similarity of style is accounted for by the fact that I did piles of correction to his MSS to try and help him, and my own flavouring has crept in. I noticed it myself. The destruction of Atlantis accounts being similar is easily explained since they’re both lifted piecemeal from the quotations of Manly P. Hall, hence the acknowledgement in both cases. Afraid I can’t figure out how we both got Izma. Unless with his reading my ‘Born of Atlantis’ he unconsciously clicked on the same name. I didn’t remember the name again when I read his, which shows my rotten memory for the things I write.
“Frank Jones’ yarns didn’t click for Thrilling Wonder because they were too tame and too unconvincing, I understand. Ah me!”
Fearn, meantime, had learned from Schwartz that “World Without Chance” by Polton Cross had been accepted by Thrilling Wonder Stories in July 1937, but that publication was likely to be delayed for some little time, because the magazine was overstocked, At this point, it would appear that Frank Jones more or less gave up any hope of making it as a SF writer. Fearn may have told him that since he was now writing stories as Fearn and Cross, he was unable to extensively rewrite his mss. as he had been doing. It is not known what became of Jones, but it is possible that the clinching reason why he gave up SF writing was that he may have left Blackpool altogether. Fearn had stated that his regular profession was that of a commercial traveller.
However, Frank Jones would have been grateful to Fearn for the help he had given him, and so, whilst dropping out of writing himself, he must have agreed that Fearn could appropriate his—as yet unpublished—pseudonym ‘Thornton Ayre’, And Geoff Medley agreed to let Fearn continue to use his (Medley’s) home address on his ‘Thornton Ayre’ mss.
For the astute Fearn had scented a golden opportunity, and hatched a cunning scheme. Whilst his agent Schwartz knew that Fearn was Polton Cross, and would keep this a secret for commercial purposes, Schwartz also believed that ‘Thornton Ayre’ was another person entirely—Frank Jones. As indeed he then actually was! But what if Fearn was to now begin secretly writing stories himself as Thornton Ayre, also in the Weinbaum style? With Schwartz believing he was still Frank Jones (the Weinbaum imitation technique would effectively disguise the fact that Fearn and not Jones was now writing the stories), Fearn reasoned that his chances of regular sales under all three names, Fearn, Cross, and Ayre, would be immeasurably increased.
How right Fearn was would soon be proved when the January 1
938 Astounding Stories would carry stories under all three names—“Red Heritage” by Fearn, “Whispering Satellite” by Ayre, and “The Mental Ultimate” by Cross! (He would repeat the same trick in the May 1942 Amazing Stories, even adding a fourth story—as by Frank Jones!)
When I wrote to Julius Schwartz in 1983 (after I had discovered in The Writer that Frank Jones had been a real person), and asked him if he had known Fearn was Thornton Ayre when he began selling his stories, he confessed:
“I didn’t deduce that Thornton Ayre was Polton Cross till much later! Same goes for the SF Editors!”
John W. Campbell was certainly one of the editors to be fooled. The January 1938 issue of Gillings’ fanzine Scientifiction ran a real scoop article, “Campbell’s Plans for Astounding”, quoting from a postal interview with Campbell himself.:
“Included in the January (1938) issue will be stories by Warner Van Lorne, Clifton B. Kruse, John Russell Fearn, Thornton Ayre (the English Author, whom Campbell describes as ‘one of the best of the newer writers’), and Don A. Stuart, otherwise Campbell himself.”
On November 25th 1937 Fearn had told Gillings:
“Frank seems to be doing all right for himself. I understand that Julie highly praised his recently sold ‘Whispering Satellite’ as one of the best things he’d read. I did think it was tops myself, though confidentially how he ever manages to have such a swell slant on the Weinbaum angle will be an eternal mystery to me. His latest efforts, ‘The Minitors’ and ‘Sanctuary’, are both real pips. Certainly he no longer needs me to help him!”
Thereafter, all of Fearn’s Thornton Ayre stories would be first directed to America, and all of them would eventually sell there.
So there we have it. Frank Jones had indeed been a real person, and, coached by Fearn, he had tried writing SF in 1936 (as Briggs Mendel) and continued into 1937 (as Thornton Ayre). Then he had given up and handed his Thornton Ayre pseudonym to Fearn, who had already created his own pseudonym of Polton Cross, initially writing in the style of Weinbaum. And when Fearn began writing Ayre stories, even more blatantly in the style of Weinbaum, he was initially very successful, selling his first two stories to Astounding Stories. For his ‘Cross’ efforts, Fearn abandoned the Weinbaum slant, and instead developed a third quite distinct style of “scientific nemesis” stories, beginning with “The Mental Ultimate” (Astounding Stories, January 1938).
What happened next is best illustrated in an article Fearn wrote (as Thornton Ayre) that was published in the March 1939 first issue of Ted Carnell’s fanzine New Worlds, entitled “Concerning Webwork”:
“Some little time ago a much esteemed mutual friend Julius Schwartz paid me the compliment of calling me a webwork writer. Since then the words have stuck in my mind—and since English readers will be as much in the dark as 1 was I might as well explain that ‘webwork’ means a complicated mystery wherein all the strands are drawn together in the last chapter to form the complete whole. By accident I stumbled upon this mystic formula in ‘Locked City’ and repeated it in ‘The Secret of the Ring’ (originally called ‘The Circle of Life.’)
“Now all of this brings me to something. If webwork mystery is a new slant to science fiction—and presumably it is—what a colossal field it opens up for other writers as well. I don’t mean in webwork (I stick to that now as my personal angle) but in other slants. Consider a moment—what has SF been like up to now? I am virtually new to the game but I’ve read tons of it since being a boy.
“Here’s my reaction. It’s all been adventure. The pages of past SF reek with curly headed heroes and smooth hipped heroines. Villains have been monstrosities of other worlds. Rarely if ever was the formula altered, save for a few gems from Campbell, Smith, Keller or Taine. Yet even they—though their characters were life-like—pandered to the eternal hackwork adventure formula.
“Yes, and even Weinbaum. What are all his stories but adventure? True, they are magnificent adventure with living people—but they remain the same.
“For myself, I copied his style in my yarns ‘Penal World’ and ‘Whispering Satellite’ because, in the words of the old song, ‘It seemed the right and proper thing to do.’ Then it occurred to me, after a series of rejections, that something had gone wrong. I needed a new technique—I tried a complicated mystery ingredient added to adventure. It worked!”
These sidelights on Fearn’s writing as Ayre were further clarified when Fearn wrote an “About the Author” article to accompany his Thornton Ayre story “Face in the Sky” in the September 1939 Amazing Stories:
“…It all started about two years ago when I was getting pretty fed up with poor returns from occasional articles and short straight yarns in England. You see, the trouble over here is they don’t like anything sensational, or off the beaten track. At least, they didn’t then! But times are changed.
“As I was saying, I was getting fed up when my closest friend, the redoubtable dynamo known as Fearn, slanted my ideas towards science fiction. I’d read several odd tons of the stuff and I must confess it had appealed to me quite a lot. I thought there was nothing to lose by having a shot at it—but oh! Those first efforts were pretty awful, My brains, what there are of them, revolved around queer asteroids, men down in the sea, talking protoplasm, and other things usually associated with over-indulgence in opium or heavy cheese late at night.
“About that time Stanley G. Weinbaum was at his peak. Everybody was nuts about his particular slant and so, being a trier, I imitated his style and produced Jo, the ammonia man of the planet Jupiter. This was in the yarn ‘Penal World’ published in Astounding, in 1937. Shortly afterwards I followed it up with a similar type of yarn called ‘Whispering Satellite,’ also in Astounding. On that point my activities with Astounding terminated because everybody was going like Weinbaum and the Editor was plenty sick. Campbell wrote me an explanatory letter and suggested changes of style.
“I chewed things over. The science fiction business was getting a hold on me, and imitation would not do any longer. Why not try the other extreme and find out what had not been done? I felt I had got something there. Well, what hadn’t been done? Mystery!
“Mystery! Of course! So far as I could figure out all the yarns were more or less straight experiments, adventures, theories—or, very rarely—a detective sort of problem. But what about a real juicy mystery woven round with science? Something to explain Mars, for instance, as it had never been explained before?
“So I launched on a style which, I have since found, was unique. I unwittingly brought webwork plots into science fiction with my initial yarn in a new style—’Locked City.’ The praise for that one made me all of a benevolent glow and produced ‘Secret of the Ring’ (which I shall always privately regard as the best yarn I’ve written so far).”
Fearn’s initial stratagem to write stories as Polton Cross in imitation of Weinbaum (who had died in December 1935) would almost certainly have been suggested to him by his U.S. agent, Julius Schwartz. So when shortly thereafter ‘Thornton Ayre’ followed suit, Schwartz would have been quite happy about it.
Schwartz, in fact, had been Weinbaum’s agent, and in 1937 he was also representing many of the most prolific and successful American authors. It was surely no coincidence that many of those in his stable all began to write Weinbaum imitations at about the same time.
In his introduction, “The Wonder of Weinbaum” in the landmark Weinbaum collection, A Martian Odyssey (Lancer, 1962) the leading SF historian Sam Moskowitz outlined just how celebrated and influential Weinbaum’s short career (1934-35, with posthumous stories in the next few years) had been:
“Many devotees of science fiction sincerely believe that the true beginning of modern science fiction with it emphasis on polished writing, otherworldly psychology, philosophy and stronger characterization began with Stanley G. Weinbaum. Certainly few authors in this branch of literature have exercised a more obvious and persuasive influence on the attitudes of his contemporaries and through them on the states of the
readers.…
“…what cannot be argued away are the strong influences of Weinbaum to be found in the work of authors as outstanding in science fiction as Henry Kuttner, Eric Frank Russell, Philip Jose Farmer and Clifford D. Simak specifically.”
The full roll call of other authors following in his footsteps is even longer, including, amongst others, Arthur K. Barnes, Eando Binder, Moskowitz himself, and not least John Russell Fearn.
Their borrowings involved not just the stories themselves, but Weinbaum’s astronomical backcloth to his stories. This useful framework was astutely identified by Isaac Asimov in his brilliant introduction to The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum (Del Rey, 1974):
“Weinbaum had a consistent picture of the solar system (his stories never went beyond Pluto) that was astronomically correct in terms of the knowledge of the mid-1930s. He could not be wiser than his time, however, so he gave Venus a day-side and a night-side, and Mars an only moderately thin atmosphere and canals. He also took the chance (though the theory was already pretty well knocked out at the time) of making the outer planets hot rather than cold so that the satellites of Jupiter and Saturn could be habitable.
“On each of the worlds he deals with, then, he allows for the astronomic difference and creates a world of life adapted to the circumstances of that world.”
These two new Fearn collections present all of the Weinbaum pastiches that Fearn published—a dozen in total. And, as a bonus, the second volume also contains a thirteenth story, “Locked City” by Thornton Ayre, his first story marking the radical new direction Fearn was to take when he abandoned the Weinbaum slant. Each story is annotated with further sidelights, setting the stories in the context of the science fiction magazine scene in the late 1930s and early 1940s, one of its most interesting and dynamic periods.
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