The Fantastic Pulps, page 4
It must not be understood that this force, which I finally came to control, annihilated matter; it merely annihilated form. Nor, as I soon discovered, had it any effect on inorganic structure; but to all organic form it was absolutely fatal. This partiality puzzled me at first, though had I stopped to think deeper I would have seen through it. Since the number of atoms in organic molecules is far greater than in the most complex mineral molecules, organic compounds are characterised by their instability and the ease with which they are split up by physical forces and chemical reagents.
By two powerful batteries, connected with magnets constructed specially for this purpose, two tremendous forces were projected. Considered apart from each other, they were perfectly harmless; but they accomplished their purpose by focusing at an invisible point in mid-air. After practically demonstrating its success, besides narrowly escaping being blown into nothingness, I laid my trap. Concealing the magnets, so that their force made the whole space of my chamber doorway a field of death, and placing by my couch a button by which I could throw on the current from the storage batteries, I climbed into bed.
The blackies still guarded my sleeping quarters, one relieving the other at midnight. I turned on the current as soon as the first man arrived. Hardly had I begun to doze, when I was aroused by a sharp, metallic tinkle. There, on the mid-threshold, lay the collar of Dan, my father’s St Bernard. My keeper ran to pick it up. He disappeared like a gust of wind, his clothes falling to the floor in a heap. There was a slight whiff of ozone in the air, but since the principal gaseous components of his body were hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, which are equally colourless and odourless, there was no other manifestation of his departure. Yet when I shut off the current and removed the garments, I found a deposit of carbon in the form of animal charcoal; also other powders, the isolated, solid elements of his organism, such as sulphur, potassium and iron. Resetting the trap, I crawled back to bed. At midnight I got up and removed the remains of the second black, and then slept peacefully till morning.
I was awakened by the strident voice of my father, who was calling to me from across the laboratory. I laughed to myself.
There had been no one to call him and he had overslept. I could hear him as he approached my room with the intention of rousing me, and so I sat up in bed, the better to observe his translation— perhaps apotheosis were a better term. He paused a moment at the threshold, then took the fatal step. Puff! It was like the wind sighing among the pines. He was gone. His clothes fell in a fantastic heap on the floor. Besides ozone, I noticed the faint, garliclike odour of phosphorus. A little pile of elementary solids lay among his garments. That was all. The wide world lay before me. My captors were no more.
AUTHOR’S ADVENTURE
by Upton Sinclair
(The Popular Magazine)
An idea as basically simple and startlingly successful as Frank Munsey’s pulp magazine Argosy, was of course not long in being imitated by other publishers. Credit for being next on the market with a ten-cent general fiction pulp goes to Street and Smith, for some years previously publishers of “dime” novels and boys’ weeklies, with The Popular Magazine launched in 1903. They had seen the revamped Argosy rise from a sale of a few thousand copies to nearly half a million per month in just over six years. Their rough-edged contender laid its emphasis on all the family, with action adventure stories and a strong element of tales about the great outdoors of America. It endeavoured to top Argosy by claiming to be the “Biggest Magazine in the World”—although it had in fact only two pages more and because of the layout of its type actually carried nearly 100,000 words less than its rival! Munsey’s success was not quite so easy to duplicate, though, and it was not until the proprietors scooped the American publishing world by securing the rights to Rider Haggard’s Ayesha, the eagerly awaited sequel to his enormously popular novel She, and published it in 1905, that the magazine really began to establish itself. However, as critic Richard Wilkinson has noted, “The Popular Magazine provided Argosy with the first direct competition it had ever had—a pulp identical in size, format, and basic policy, differing only in its full-colour pictorial covers.” Time quickly showed there was room for the two publications, and in a bold move Street and Smith decided in 1907 to up the magazine’s cover price to fifteen cents while adding thirty pages of text. Their gamble paid off—heavily underwritten as it was by that time with a roster of writers including Rex Beach, Elmer Davis, Rafael Sabatini, and the two internationally successful English authors, H. G. Wells and John Buchan—and soon their circulation was threatening to challenge that of Argosy, (As we shall see in the next extract, no one was more aware of this threat than Frank Munsey— nor perhaps better qualified to meet it.)
The public appetite for pulp fiction was growing all the time, and Street and Smith produced several more magazines in the ensuing years from their “Fiction Factory”,1 including People’s (1906) and Top Notch (1910). Their great innovation in the field, however, was the realisation that there was an untapped market for “specialised” pulps—and thereafter resulted a whole string of titles including Detective Story, Western Story, Love Story, Sea Stories, and so on almost ad nauseam. (Also the ill-fated Unknown magazine of fantasy stories which some experts believe might have ousted the famous Weird Tales in its market. Unfortunately it only lasted for thirty-nine issues.) The formula proved highly successful in the twenties and right on through the years of the Depression. The company was also to produce several of the great “super heroes” of pulp fiction, including Nick Carter, The Shadow and Doc Savage, to whom I have already referred.
Perhaps the most fascinating episode in connection with The Popular Magazine concerns its first editor, Henry Harrison Lewis, who, although much of his work is forgotten, is remembered because of the young man he hired to write material for Street and Smith publications—the Pulitzer prizewinner, Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Sinclair, whose campaigning novels such as The Jungle (1906) were to influence a whole nation, had begun writing while in his teens to supplement the income of his family, who were constantly on the verge of penury through the alcoholism of his father. In his Autobiography (1962), Sinclair recalls, “I first wrote stories for Argosy and also odds and ends for Munsey”s. They had a department called ‘Fads’ and I racked my imagination for new ones that could be humorously written up; each one would be a meal ticket for a week.” In 1896, aged eighteen, he learned that Street and Smith were seeking regular writers for their publications and made an appointment to see Henry Lewis. As a result of this interview he was employed to write a series of stories about the West Point Military Academy under the pen-name of Lieutenant Frederick Garrison, USA. The eager young Sinclair dashed off to West Point for three days, and having made copious notes returned to New York to begin work. “I produced a manuscript of twenty-five or thirty thousand words,” he wrote in his autobiography, “a rollicking tale of a group of ‘candidates’ who made their appearance at the academy to start their military career. The Mark Mallory stories, they were called, and they were successful, so I was definitely launched upon a literary career. I was paid, I believe, forty dollars per story; it was a fortune.” A short while later Sinclair was writing one of these novelettes a week, then added a second naval series under the name of Ensign Clarke Fitch, USN. Soon he could not resist any offer of work, and at one point was producing eighty thousand words a week! “For some months,” he wrote later, “I performed the feat of turning out eight thousand words every day. Sunday included. I tell this to literary men, and they say it could not be done; but I actually did it. I kept two stenographers working all the time, taking dictation one day and transcribing the next.” By his own admission, Upton Sinclair enjoyed the work until he was twenty-one, then “I became obsessed with the desire to write a serious novel.” The rest of his life is familiar history and, sadly, his pulp stories the rarest of rare collector’s items. Apart from the novels, he could also turn his hand to short stories and wrote numerous “fillers” for the various Street and Smith magazines. One such was “Author’s Adventure”, which first appeared anonymously in the True Blue Library in 1897 and then re-emerged under his initials in a corner of The Popular Magazine in 1904. Although the publication expressed a dislike for “gloomy stories”, it did run a number of fantasy stories which bear re-reading today, and Upton Sinclair’s swift little chiller in which he utilises the names of friends and fictional creations is certainly one such.
“Adventure,” said the successful author, “should be lived before it is written.”
We were sitting around the little club room just after the business meeting, and the conversation had of course closed around Mark Lewis’s latest short story. Someone had asked Mark where he got his ideas, and Mark, always willing to talk of himself, had launched into what might be called a lecture on his success.
Mark was an interesting talker, and one forgave him his usual song of praise when his monologue was spiced with interesting anecdotes of other people. Mark had just told us how to write short stories, as though there were the slightest possibility that one of us duffers might get the urge. Since we’re all dyed-in-the-wool businessmen whose romances consist of the wife, the children, and a flower garden, with perhaps a drop of home-made wine occasionally, the lecture, as a lecture, didn’t greatly appeal to us.
“But look here, Mark,” Fred Clarke protested. “Practically all of your stories are horror tales, murders and mysteries. And we know the most horrible thing that ever happened to you was that you missed the five fifteen one night and had to take a taxi home.”
“Nevertheless,” Mark answered in his most pompous manner, “I live every one of those stories first. You’d be surprised at the number of times I’ve murdered each one of you fellows.”
“Murdered us ?” I gasped in astonishment.
“Exactly. For instance, Mallory, when you were reading the minutes of last week’s meeting tonight, I noticed that that boar’s head over your desk had slipped a little. Immediately, in my mind, I decided that you would have to return to this room after we had left, perhaps to steal Garrison’s priceless collection of cavalry pistols. The boar’s head fell on yours, the tusk pierced your brain, and you were found dead the next morning by the porter. Another mystery.”
I looked at the boar’s head and shuddered. Decidedly, it was not a pleasant way to die, and I could see that the damned thing had slipped a trifle. “And do you mean to say,” I asked, “that by mentally putting your friends through such accidents and ordeals, you create the stories and then write them up ?”
“That’s it. Of course it would be lots better for the things to actually happen. I don’t mean, you know, that I’d like to see you fellows all murdered just to give me material for stories.” Mark was trying to be humorous now. “But you can write up an adventure a lot better if you actually see it or are in it. Without that, it isn’t just a case of sitting down and slapping out a lot of words. Before I can do that, I’ve got to construct the whole thing in my mind, and most important of all, I’ve got to get excited about it myself. And I don’t think anybody could get upset over the murder of someone who doesn’t exist; therefore, when I want a murder or a suicide, I get you fellows to do it for me.”
He smiled triumphantly, but I could see the other men were as nettled as I was. Of course, what went on in Mark’s head couldn’t harm us, but nevertheless, it is uncomfortable to learn that a fellow club member, sitting alongside you, smoking the same brand of cigars, may be plotting your death in any number of ghastly ways. If Mark wrote love stories, now, romances with lovely ladies in the South Seas, I bet we’d all be willing to figure in the tales, but this murder business was not so hot.
“Well, all I can say is it’s a hell of a way to mistreat us,” said Garrison. “You can pretend all the adventures you want, so far as . you yourself are concerned, but I’d just as soon be left out of the horrors if you don’t mind, even though they aren’t actual.”
Mark snorted. “Nonsense,” he said. “After all, the next best thing to actually living an adventure, is to create it in your own mind, and it makes it much more realistic when you place people you know in the middle of the experience.”
Seeing our blank faces, he expanded, became more animated. “For instance,” he continued, “did any of you see Fitch standing at the French window here tonight, just before the meeting ? He’s worried about something, I think. Anyway, he stood over here, like this—” Mark walked to the window through which came the faint hum of the street below—“and I thought, Fitch’s worried about something. The ghost of a wicked past is rising up from the grave, and he is haunted by a great Fear. Fear, you see, is with a capital letter. Then I thought, he’s thinking of his past misdeeds, when suddenly he hears a noise behind him. He swings around suddenly,” Mark screwed his fat body around in an attempt to depict a startled reaction—“and sees something large and vague approaching him. He draws back in horror as he feels a damp hand touching him. His foot slips !”
Mark Lewis’s story ended in a wild scream as his foot actually slipped on the polished floor. His arms whirled like windmills as he attempted to recover his balance. Then we caught a last glimpse of his terrorised face, and the window was empty. From the street below came a horrible sound of something soft and heavy landing. An ugly, grisly sound. A sound which found its echo in the sharply drawn breath of the men who had seen Mark Lewis actually live— and die—an adventure, THE ADVENTURE, of which he would never write.
* * *
1 The renowned American journalist, Quentin Reynolds, has published a history of the Street and Smith Publishing Company entitled Fiction Factory (Random House, New York 1955) which has several chapters on pulp magazines detailing the remarkable characters who ran them and incidents connected with their production.
THE RESURRECTION OF JIMBER-JAW
by Edgar Rice Burroughs
(All-Story Magazine)
After his years of unassailable market dominance with Argosy, Frank Munsey was not slow in reacting to the dramatic rise of Street and Smith’s The Popular Magazine. He was too wily a publisher to think of changing his existing magazine—it was, after all, netting him in conjunction with Munsey”s Magazine something like one million dollars a year by 1904—but decided to create a new pulp modelled very much on the lines of Argosy. His new product was called, with brilliant simplicity, AU-Story Magazine, and the first issue was published in January 1905. The cover bore the unprepossessing legend, “Something New”, but its impact was to be much more startling, as Tony Goodstone has noted in The Pulps (1970): “Of all the new pulps, it was Munsey’s All-Story that had the most electric effect not only on its readers, but also on the other magazines which were to emulate it. All-Story followed the same format as Argosy with one notable exception: its three-colour covers hinted at class and sophistication and there were illustrations inside. The new writers it published became household names practically overnight.” The success of this new magazine was due in no small measure to its editor, Robert H. Davis, who had been transferred from Munsey’s Magazine (where he had achieved the distinction of getting O. Henry to agree to letting him have first look at anything he produced) and who, in hindsight, was probably one of the greatest American fiction editors of all time. That he, with his vast editorial powers, enjoyed fantasy fiction— and later Science Fiction—was to be a significant factor in the development of the genre in America.
One writer alone, and with a single story, was to ensure the success of All-Story Magazine—and, indeed, affect the whole course of pulp fiction: Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950). Burroughs, today still one of the most widely-read authors in the world, whose greatest creation, Tarzan, has been a household word to generations of children, only took up writing to make money and because he felt “if people were paid for writing such rot as I read in the fiction magazines of the time I could write stories just as rotten”. But Burroughs, whatever he lacked as a stylist, was a storyteller of outstanding ability, and demonstrated this with the very first story he wrote and submitted to All-Story Magazine in 1921, “Under the Moons of Mars”. As Sam Moskowitz has written in his study A History of The Scientific Romance in The Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920 (1970), “The publication brought on to the magazine scene a writer whose instantaneous and phenomenal popularity shaped the policies of the early pulp magazines, making them the focal centre of science fiction and inspiring a school of writers who made the Scientific Romance he wrote the most accepted form for more than 20 years.” It was a remarkable achievement for a man who had previously tried unsuccessfully to serve in the US Cavalry, in mining, accounting, the mail order business and buying advertising space for a quack alcoholism cure. That same year Burroughs demonstrated his success had been no fluke when he turned in “Tarzan of the Apes” to All-Story Magazine. Sam Moskowitz again records the reaction: “From the instant the story was distributed, the letters came like a torrent. The readers were both delighted and furious. Thrilled by the freshness of the plot and the calibre of story-telling, they were outraged that the magnificent, noble Tarzan had come out on the short end of the situation. They pleaded, demanded and threatened dire consequences if a sequel was not written to rectify the unsatisfactory situation.” At that moment, Robert Davis realised he had made the literary discovery of a lifetime, and although he can take much credit for nurturing the talents of Joseph Conrad, O. Henry, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Max Brand, A. Merritt and dozens more, it is as the first promoter of John Carter (the hero of “Under the Moons of Mars” and many subsequent adventures) and Tarzan, the Ape Man, that he primarily earned a place in the publishers’ hall of fame.
Burroughs’ own attitude towards his work made him an excellent businessman, carefully protecting his properties and aware that in a market where editors exploited writers unmercifully, publication should only take place after the right price had been agreed. He was not interested in the dubious distinction of appearing in print, but wanted to give his family the good things he had always craved (Burroughs was thirty-seven before his first stories began appearing) and consequently the vast majority of his work is novel length for maximum financial reward. Short stories are few and far between, and “The Resurrection of Jimber-Jaw” (1937) perhaps the only one which fits the requirements of this collection. It is perhaps unique among his works in that it has a central character in the mould of Tarzan and a story with the elements of “scientific romance” which made the John Carter stories so popular. It appears here by courtesy of Hulbert Rice Burroughs, ERB’s son, whom it has been my pleasure to know for some years, and whose far-ranging knowledge not only of his father’s work but of the American publishing scene has always been imparted with great generosity.
