Weird Tales November 1934: E. Hoffmann Price, August Derleth and H. P. Lovecraft

As you may be aware, here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have become committed, Ahab-like, to reading at least one story from every issue of Weird Tales published in the 1930s.  Today we fill in a gap in our WT blogging catalog: I have yet to blog about anything from the November 1934 issue* and so today we tackle three pieces from that number, new stories by E. Hoffmann Price and August Derleth, and a reprinted 1922 story by H. P. Lovecraft.

*Yeah, I blogged about Robert E. Howard's four part serial "People of the Black Circle," the third part of which appears in this issue, but for the purposes of my quest a serial only counts for the issue that presents its first episode.

"Queen of the Lilin" by E. Hoffmann Price (1934)

Price is an important member of the Weird Tales circle whose work I have very little familiarity with.  Today seems like as good a day as any to broaden my weird horizons and read Price's Weird Tales cover story that, we are promised, is about "a gloriously beautiful" woman who, sadly, is an evil ghost!  isfdb tells us "Queen of the Lilin" is a novelette, and the last of the eight stories in the Pierre D'Artois series; apparently it is also a component of the Glenn Farrell series.

I am reading "Queen of the Lilin" at the internet archive scan of the Nov. '34 issue of Weird Tales; the story would be reprinted in 1975 in the Price collection Far Lands, Other Days.

Glenn Farrell is an American (I think) who got to southern France a few weeks ago and is visiting his buddy Pierre D'Artois, a Frenchman who lives in a refurbished 13th-century tower in Bayonne.  D'Artois is a scholar and former soldier.  Both D'Artois and Farrell are detectives, and again and again in the story demonstrate the ability to learn all about a person's character and mood just by taking a quick glance at his or her face, to the point of knowing what he or she is thinking and being able to predict what a person is about to do.

Farrell has made a new friend in France, a pretty girl, Diane Livaudais.  Diane has a problem--the last few days heavy items, like a bust of Bonaparte and a sword hung on a wall, have been mysterious falling from their perches and almost hitting her in the head.  Diane also has the feeling that some evil entity is following her!  Farrell, a logical Yank, of course thinks poor Diane is suffering some kind of psychological problem, but not scholar of the occult D'Artois!  The Frenchman hypnotizes Diane and this causes the being haunting her to manifest itself so he and Farrell can see it--its a misty apparition of a beautiful woman with a haughty and evil face!  

That bust of the Little Corporal that almost brained Diane was given to her by some dude she has been hanging with, Graf Erich, a German count.  D'Artois knows about this guy--he is some kind of wizard!  (The word D'Artois uses is "thaumaturgist.")  D'Artois has Diane finagle an invite for all three of them to Erich's place; they leave almost immediately after arriving because yet again some antique weapons fall off a wall and almost kill Diane.

I had expected that every scene of "Queen of the Lilin" would feature D'Artois and/or Farrell, that we readers wouldn't get any clues to the mystery that they didn't have, so I was surprised when the third of the novelette's six chapters had us watching Graf Erich, after the departure of his guests, sneaking down a secret staircase to a subterranean vault in which five silent robed men are seated around a pentacle.  We learn that D'Artois and his five students summoned from the ancient past the spirit of Lilith, Demon Queen of Zemargad, AKA Agrat bat Mahlat, the very epitome of feminine beauty and feminine jealousy.  Lilith demands that the Count only have eyes for her, which is why she is trying to murder Diane.  Graf Erich is unable to convince Lilith to spare Diane. 

Lilith is getting stronger and stronger, and luckily Farrell and D'Artois are at Diane's house when the demonic queen tries the direct approach, materializing at Diane's front door and trying to stab her with a dagger when she answers the doorbell.  Farrell wrestles briefly with Lilith, finding her skin cold, and then D'Artois whips out an ankh (he calls it a "crux ansata") and dispels the gorgeous demon by yelling Semitic phrases at her.  Lilith vanishes into mist but Farrell and D'Artois, not wanting to scare Diane, manage to convince her the woman who just attacked her was merely a nutcase who ran away.

D'Artois and Farrell go to Graf Erich's place and the Count unburdens himself, explaining regretfully how he summoned Lilith, why she is after Diane, and why he can't easily send her back to where she came from.  D'Artois convinces him to resort to a horrible expedient--Graf Erich takes a sword and decapitates his five disciples, hoping to deny Lilith their life energy and concentration, which is what brought her to our world.  But Lilith has already gathered enough of their power to remain here indefinitely, and she animates the five headless corpses and they tear the Count limb from limb.  

When Lilith tries to murder Diane with her bare hands, D'Artois tries some more magic on her, but she is too strong to be dispelled thusly, and is now so physically strong the two men can't wrestle her hands off of Diane's throat.  Just as Diane is about to expire, D'Artois realizes that the five junior wizards concentrated on a statuette of Lilith when they summoned her--he smashes the statuette and Lilith fades away.  I don't really understand why this dispelled Lilith, even though after her disappearance we get a scene of  D'Artois explaining to Farrell and Diane the pseudoscience behind all the magic we witnessed in the story (thoughts are like radio waves and never really go away and can be amplified blah blah blah....)

Diane just survived two murder attempts and Farrell just saw five animated headless cadavers rip apart a living man, but nothing stops true love--the next day the two young people start flirting and the final scene of the story suggests they will soon be married.

I like the basic premise of the story (wizard summons jealous female demon who wants to kill other women) and the magic and undead scenes are all good.  And it is sort of interesting to see a story that leans heavily on Jewish mythology.  But many of the mundane elements of the story are distracting and lame.  The happy ending feels a little out of place and undermines what should be a tragic tale about how six people's ambition led to their deaths.  And the structure of the story is also a little weak--I find it annoying in a story when there are three different houses and the characters are always shuttling back and forth between them unnecessarily; the author should figure out a way to minimize that sort of thing, like having all the main characters staying in the same house for the weekend or something.

The magic stuff and the catastrophic violence (six dead wizards!) are good enough that I can give "Queen of the Lilin" a mild recommendation.  Maybe I'll start reading more stories by Price, in Weird Tales and maybe in other wacky magazines of the '30s and '40s like Spicy Adventure and Spicy Mystery.  

"Feigman's Beard" by August Derleth (1934)

The frail little widow Klopp, everybody in the farming community knows, is a witch!  So when Martha Feigman has had it up to here with her violent and abusive half-brother Eb, she goes to visit Klopp, telling the old woman that Eb just sold their hogs without consulting her and has refused to hand over her share of the money.  Martha wants occult aid in getting the money she is owed...and maybe Klopp can make Eb's beard fall out--Eb is inordinately proud of his long red beard, and spends a lot of time sitting with a mirror in one hand and a comb in the other, grooming that beard of his.

The widow Klopp has her own reason to want vengeance on Eb--when Mr. Klopp died, Eb managed to steal much of the Klopps' land.  She has Martha bring to her Eb's mirror and some hairs from his beard, and puts a spell on the mirror--in the morning when Eb looks in the mirror he dies of a heart attack!  Martha can't resist looking in the mirror herself, and disaster occurs.  

This is an acceptable little black magic story that warns you against greed, vanity, and the lust for revenge, and advises you that under no circumstances should you look to the devil or his agents for help.  Good advice! 

"Feigman's Beard" would reappear in the 1948 Derleth collection Not Long for This World and its abridged 1961 paperback edition.

"The Music of Erich Zann" by H. P. Lovecraft (1922)

"The Music of Erich Zann" first appeared in The National Amateur, and later in Weird Tales in 1925, and was included in the November '34 Weird Tales under the reprint banner.  When I read "The Music of Erich Zann" in my youth I was underwhelmed, but the critics think this one of Lovecraft's best stories and Lovecraft himself considered it one of his favorites: in a letter to C. L. Moore dated April 27, 1935, Lovecraft lists the stories of his own which he likes and "Erich Zann" is second on the list after "Colour Out of Space" and in a February 16, 1936 letter to Henry Kuttner Lovecraft tells Kuttner "I like 'The Colour out of Space' best of all my stuff, & 'The Music of Erich Zann' second."  So today I give the tale a reread in my copy of The Dunwich Horror and Others (Corrected Eleventh Printing.)

The narrator, apparently a Frenchman, tells us he once lived in an ugly rundown neighborhood inhabited by taciturn old geezers, in a decrepit boarding house at the top of a steep street impassable by any vehicle.  On the top floor of this boarding house lived a mute German who played the viol, Erich Zann.  The narrator could hear Zann's playing at night--the man played songs the narrator has never heard before made up of strange notes.  The narrator convinced the hermitish Zann to let him come visit so he could hear him play.  Zann played for him ordinary popular songs, and when asked to play his unique weird pieces, became alarmed and refused, even requesting that the narrator take a different room in the house so that he would be too far from Zann's attic apartment to hear his nightly playing.  Zann also refused to allow the narrator to look out his window, the highest window on this queer street.

The narrator took to sneaking upstairs so he could sit near Zann's door to listen to his bizarre music, and one night heard even more unusual sounds than usual and joined Zann.  A night of fear and drama ensued, and it become clear that that window did not look out upon the city, but on to another universe, and that Zann played that weird music every night as a means of communicating with or influencing dangerous alien entities.  When it seemed the aliens were perhaps about to invade our universe, the narrator fled the boarding house, and when later he made to return, found himself unable, even with maps, to find that rundown neighborhood and that steep street. 

I have to agree with everybody that this is a very good story, more literary and more economical, and less plot-driven than most of Lovecraft's work.  In a September 28, 1935 letter to Duane W. Rimel, Lovecraft argued that "A really serious weird story does not depend on plot or incident at all, but puts all its emphasis on mood or atmosphere."  And Lovecraft here, by describing the strange street and leaving us wondering what exactly is up with Zann and his window (the mute Zann writes down an account of many pages about his relationship with whatever is on the other side of the window but before he can hand it to the narrator a wind sucks the papers irretrievably out the window) builds an unsettling and mysterious mood without offering much by way of conventional narrative.  

"The Music of Erich Zann" was included in Dashiell Hammet's anthology Creeps By Night, which would go on to be reprinted in both America and Britain in multiple volumes; "The Music of Erich Zann" was in the second volume of Belmont's edition, which is titled after Donald Wandrei's "The Red Brain."

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My Weird Tales project creeps forward.  More stories by correspondents of H. P. Lovecraft in our next episode!