Weird Tales, Jan 1940: O A Kline & E H Price, M E Counselman and F Garfield

Last year, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log completed our project of reading at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales with a 1930s cover date.  Here find links that testify to the success of our sacred quest:

1930    1931   1932   1933    1934    1935    1936    1937    1938   1939

The classic run of Weird Tales was from 1923 to 1954 and there is no reason to refrain from extending our project backwards and forwards.  So today let's check out some stories from the penultimate issue of Weird Tales edited by Farnsworth Wright, the January 1940 ish.

This issue has work by two of our favorite WT artists, Hannes Bok and Virgil Finlay, but when it comes to fiction the really big names are in the letters column.  There's a letter from Robert Bloch defending his treatment of druids in his story "The Dark Isle," citing his sources.  (We read "The Dark Isle" in June of last year.)  Clark Ashton Smith is among the many who write in to praise Henry Kuttner's "Towers of Death."  (I wrote about "Towers of Death" in 2019, but, alas, it was not to praise it.)  Edmond Hamilton has nice things to say about H. Warner Munn and Thomas Kelly, two writers I haven't read anything by yet.

The most important writer (to us here at MPFL, at least) whose fiction appears in the issue is probably E. Hoffman Price, who has the cover story, something he co-wrote with Otis Adelbert Kline.  I read one or two of Kline's planetary romances in the days before I started the blog and found then unremarkable, and during the period of this blog's imperium over the interwebs we've explored I guess a dozen stories by Price.  So we'll tackle their collaboration.  I've been reading Mary Elizabeth Counselman, so we may as well give her contribution a shot.  To round out the blog post, we'll check out a story by Frances Garfield.        

"Spotted Satan" by Otis Adelbert Kline and E. Hoffman Price

"Spotted Satan" presents standard, traditional adventure story characters walking through a similarly routine adventure plot; this kind of material can be compelling and very fun if well-written, but I found Kline and Price's style to be poor, with many clunky sentences I was rewriting in my head as I read them.  For like half the time I was reading "Spotted Satan" I was expecting to give it a thumbs down, but in the second half I found myself wondering what the answer to the mystery was and what would happen to the various characters, who would live and who would die, who was innocent and who was responsible for the crimes, so I guess I have to admit this story gets a passing grade of barely acceptable.  (A real writer, a talented stylist, like Jack Vance or Tanith Lee, could have really done this plot and its various themes up good.)

Our tale is laid in Burma.  The native employees of a British logging company are being killed by a leopard, jeopardizing the operation.  Local hunters have signally failed to destroy the beast, which many have come to believe is no mundane cat but a shape-shifting demon.  So the head of the logging company has hired American hunter Steele and his sidekick, towering Afghan Achmet, to bring down the monster.

We get the expected episodes.  Steele has crazy dreams.  A wiry man in a breechclout tries to murder the sleeping Steele with a kukri knife, only to be foiled by loyal Achmet.  Steele and Achmet witness "the grandfather of leopards" eating some poor native, and the oversized feline somehow eludes a round from crack shot Steele's express rifle.

For the 21st-centruy reader, one of the interesting things about "Spotted Satan" is its portrayal of many cultures and ethnicities, most of whom enjoy ample description as to physical appearance and behavior.  We've got an American, an Afghan, Britons, Burmese, a Gurkha, and nautch dancers.  The exotic Achmet has more personality, more interesting dialogue (e.g., regularly invoking "Allah," "the One True God," and muttering or even inscribing upon bullets prayers against "shaitan") and behaves in a more exciting manner (e.g., chasing women and waving around a tulwar) than sober white man Steele or any of the other, more submissive, nonwhites.  Behold this description of the only white man permanently attached to the logging camp where Steele and Achmet first see the monster leopard.

There was no doubt that he was a white man: his skin, tanned as only that of a Nordic can be, and the high bridge of his nose, and the unprominent cheek-bones, testified to his race. Yet his hazel-flecked eyes were slanted like those of a Tartar or Mongol. His mustaches, sandy-colored and bristling, jutted straight out on both sides instead of being upturned at the ends, or decently drooping, or close cropped.

Achmet immediately concludes this guy, Kirby, is in league with the leopard or actually is the leopard.  For his part, Kirby admits he believes in local superstitions, thinks the oversized leopard has been sent to attack his logging camp by some supernatural entity because he ordered a new road constructed through sacred ground.

Steele fires upon and misses the leopard again, and is told by a local priest that he needs special weapons to harm the demon.  A third time Steele's fire fails to fell the beast.  Clues pile up that hint that Kirby really is transforming into a leopard at night to terrorize the camp; other clues suggest he may simply by an agent for a rival logging company, sent over to sabotage this camp's production--could he be some kind of leopard tamer?  Visiting nautch dancers are attacked by the monster, and Steele the generous man of responsibility and Achmet the horndog make the safety of these fetching young ladies their number one priority.  In the end Achmet kills the leopard and we get a half-scientific and half-mhystical explanation for what is going on and it looks like Achmet is not only going to get a pile of reward money but a hot girlfriend besides.  

Not a great story, unfortunately, but perhaps useful to those interested in Orientalism in speculative fiction, seeing as it is full of descriptions of nonwhites and mixed race people from Afghanistan through the subcontinent to Burma and we are expected to be sympathetic to at least some of them, while we also get skeptical portrayals of Western Europeans.  (Price was fascinated by China, Arab culture and Buddhism, and was a military veteran, so probably had more real life knowledge of other countries and of actual dangerous adventure than most or all the other Weird Tales authors.)    

"Spotted Satan" would not spring into print again until our own 21st century, when it appeared in the anthology Cats of Shadow, Claws of Darkness: Stories of Were-cats, Ghost Cats and Other Supernatural Felines.

"Twister" by Mary Elizabeth Counselman

Here we have an obvious and banal filler story.

A newlywed couple from the North is driving through the South on their honeymoon.  It is a rainy night and they have been driving all day and want to stop, and do so when they come to a town that, curiously, is not on their map.  But the people there tell the travelers that they cannot stay, bidding them to hurry away because a twister is coming.  Obvious clues indicate to us readers that the townspeople are ghosts, that this town was destroyed by a tornado years ago, but Counselman makes us read through multiple pages in which the newlyweds leave the ghost town, get to another town, talk to a guy, spend the night, and for contrived reasons go back to the ghost town the next morning, before she tells us what we have already figured out.

Gotta give "Twister" a thumbs down--Counselman takes a tired plot and makes it unnecessarily long and even more unbelievable than it need be.  That is not an improvement!

"Twister" was reprinted in the Counselman collection Half in Shadow. 

"Forbidden Cupboard" by Frances Garfield

Garfield is a pen name for Manly Wade Wellman's wife, Frances Obrist, who has 11 fiction credits at isfdb.  She wrote a little about herself for the "Meet the Authors" column in the December 1939 issue of Amazing, reporting that she was a tall blonde Kansan who tried to get into acting but found she couldn't deal with the kind of people who run the world of the theatre.  (This seems like a veiled reference to the ubiquity of sexual harassment in show biz, but I could be reading too much into things.)  A revised version of "Forbidden Cupboard," retitled "Don't Open that Door," appeared in a 1970 issue of the British magazine Fantasy Tales.

Like Counselman's "Twister," "Forbidden Cupboard" consists of routine material and the style is just OK, but Garfield doesn't screw up the pacing and length, so we're calling this one acceptable.

Our narrator is a young woman who moves to Greenwich Village to pursue her dream of becoming a writer.  Pushing the writing theme, Garfield includes explicit references to Edgar Allen Poe, Washington Irving, William Blake, Walter Scott, etc.  The narrator already has a project she is working on, having been hired by a widow to pen the hagiographic (and largely fictional) biography of her businessman husband.  This section is, I guess. a joke.

The young wordsmith arrives at the apartment she is renting a day early.  The old building is owned by the church, and the priest who is acting as landlord hasn't had the room quite finished yet--he wants to plaster over a closet, and the plasterers are coming today.  He forbids our narrator from opening the closet.  Our narrator and this clergyman also have a conversation about a previous resident of the house, a locally famous wizard or mad scientist who disappeared after arousing the wrath of the populace.

Once the man of the cloth is out of sight, the narrator goes to open the closet door.  Unexpected distractions delay her--the most interesting element of the story is the speculation that these distractions are the work of God trying to stop the narrator from making a stupid mistake.  But she does eventually manage to open the closet.  The wraith or ghost or whatever of the wizard emerges and the narrator is at risk of being taken over by the monster but then the priest returns, scaring off the undead sorcerer.  

I don't like deus ex machina endings--I prefer the protagonist to be defeated or to triumph based on his or her own abilities or decisions.  So a better ending of "Forbidden Cupboard," to my mind, would have the writer taken over by the mad scientist because she was too curious and ignored God's warnings, or somehow using her knowledge of writers or history or something to outwit the monster.  It is easy to imagine an entire novel in which the woman becomes a famous writer of horror stories because she is inhabited by an evil genius, who uses her wealth to conduct still more diabolical experiments only to eventually be discovered and fought by the priest and the woman's boyfriend or whoever who must try to destroy the wizard without destroying the woman.

Could have been better, but I wouldn't go so far as to call "Forbidden Cupboard" bad.   

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I'm afraid this looks like one of the weaker issues of Weird Tales.  Well, they can't all be winners, can they?  Hopefully the last issue edited by Farnsworth Wright, the March 1940 issue, will be better.

Chieftain of Andor by Andrew J. Offutt

An atavist, they called him on Earth.  A throwback, a semibarbarian.  A "savage," a man who preferred a free life and personal justice, given and taken.  And they were right.  Thus--he belonged here.

In October of last year I read Andrew J. Offutt's The Iron Lords.  That novel, the first of a trilogy, was intriguing enough that I have been looking for the sequels every time I am in a used bookstore, and in the course of this quest buying other paperbacks by Offutt.  This week I decided to read Chieftain of Andor, a 1976 novel by Offutt.  (I own the 1976 Dell paperback; British editions from 1979 bear the alternate title Clansman of Andor--now there's a painful demotion!)  Before starting Chieftain of Andor, I googled Offutt's name and came upon a fascinating and even moving and shocking profile of Offutt by his son, Chris Offutt, himself a critically acclaimed writer, that appeared last year in The New York Times.  I strongly recommend the article to anybody interested in genre literature and the people who write it.  (This year Chris Offutt published a full length book about his father.)

Chieftan of Andor is an adventure story full of elements to be found in other Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired fiction I have read over my decades-long career of reading books about guys fighting aliens and monsters with swords, sprinkled with some idiosyncratic components reflective of Offutt's own interests and opinions.

The 203-page novel is split into three parts.  In Part I we meet Robert Cleve, a 20th-century American who seeks adventure and so answers a newspaper ad seeking such adventurous men.  We've seen such ads in Robert Heinlein's 1963 Glory Road and Ken Bulmer's 1983 The Diamond Contessa.  Cleve meets a guy named Gordon who represents a secretive organization that wants to transmit a capable man's soul, or consciousness or mind or whatever you want to call it, to the planet Andor, into the head of Doralan Andrah, a fighting man of a medieval society who is dying of a brain tumor.  (Why Gordon's group cares what happens on that alien planet is never divulged.)  If my memory serves me, in Otis Adelbert Kline's 1929 Planet of Peril and Lin Carter's 1972 Under the Green Star, 20th-century Earthmen's minds were transmitted into the bodies of sword-swingers on other worlds.  (I think Michael Moorcock's John Daker stories, like The Eternal Champion, have a somewhat similar, but even less sciency, premise.)

Cleve agrees to take part in this crazy scheme.  Gordon warns him that on Andor magic is real and he should beware witches; Offutt explains this magic with references to "fields" (ensuring that this book is nominally science fiction.)  Reminding me of Poul Anderson's 1954 Brain Wave, Offut tells us that as solar systems and galaxies drift through space, they pass in and out of fields that nullify Aristotelian logic, allowing sorcery to operate.  The Earth was, apparently, in such fields during the lives of Moses and Jesus, allowing their miracles to take place; Andor is currently in such a field, fostering the careers of witches both malign and benevolent.

The first 50 pages of the novel concern court intrigue as Cleve, in Andrah's body and with both his own memories and Andrah's, unites tribes under his leadership and takes back a walled town from a usurper.  As king, Cleve is seduced by an ambitious witch, the slender and beautiful Shansi.  A second witch, Ledni, who has been friends with Andrah since their childhood, tries to save Andrah/Cleve, but is outwitted.  In that New York Times article I recommended to you we learned that Offutt got some kind of erotic charge out of depicting women in pain or torment, and in Part I of Chieftain of Andor get graphic descriptions of how poor Ledni (as well as another attractive young woman) are murdered by Shansi's magic.  (I was surprised by the death of Ledni, whom I had expected would be the love interest, so early in the book, the same way I was surprised by the death of Suldrun so early in Jack Vance's 1983 Suldrun's Garden.) With Ledni out of the way, and armed with a sample of Andrah's sperm (she secreted a sponge in her you-know what!), Shansi is able to cast a spell on sleeping Cleve/Andrah which separates the Cleve and Andrah personalities.  When Cleve wakes up in Part II in Andrah's body, laying on a raft travelling down a river in a cannibal-infested jungle, he is at a total loss!  He doesn't even remember being king in Part I!

"My God!  He did it!  Gordon did it--but he failed!  I'm not on Earth.  But I do not have the memories he said I would have!"

Cleve quickly makes friends with some cold-blooded merpeople by fighting alongside them first against some cannibals and then against some kind of alien octopus.  They take him to their underground city where, having already slept with a witch (though he sadly doesn't remember that caper) he adds a mermaid to his record of conquests--this ectothermic cutie pie can't resist his warm body!

You may recall that when John Carter went to Mars he didn't just participate in wars, marry a princess and make himself top calot of the planet--he also tried to reform Martian culture, teaching the violent Martians to be kind and exposing their bogus religion. Well, when Cleve goes to Andor he doesn't just overthrow usurpers and bed witches and mermaids; he also tries to reform the native culture, by preaching the gospel of tolerance!

"We're both men, Zivaat.  Just...slightly different.  Men need not always be enemies, because they are different."

But don't waste your time nominating Cleve for some diversity award--in a full frontal assault on feminism that cites Stendhal and "all those psychologists I've read," he also expresses the belief that women are creatures driven by emotion who have a natural desire to be a strong man's subordinate, a helpmate whose life is directed by her man. Efforts to emulate and compete with men, or to dominate men, will only lead to female unhappiness!

(I'm assuming all of Cleve's philosophical sallies reflect Offutt's own thinking--"Robert Cleve," like "Gordon," not only reminds the reader of British adventurers in the "Orient," but resembles one of Offutt's oft-used pseudonyms, John Cleve.)

John Carter and Tarzan go native, and Burroughs' fanciful versions of Mars and the African jungle serve as a means of criticizing civilization, and Offutt does a little of this with Andor.  Reminding me of the protagonist of Robert Howard's 1939 Almuric, Cleve is an "atavist" more suited to the primitive and violent world of Andor than to Earth.  Even though the Andorans we meet in the novel are always enslaving people and conspiring to stab people, including Cleve himself, in the back, Cleve persists in his arguments that they are better than Earthmen.  For example, Andorans care more about honor and fairness and less about money than do people on Earth.  Cleve is even willing to excuse Andoran cannibalism!  Not only does he consider many of the predatory elites of Earth no better than cannibals (the Communist Party governments of Russia and China are mentioned specifically), but asserts that our disgust at eating human flesh is just an irrational taboo, man!:  "...what could be more childish than to express disgust at the customs of other people?"  The Christian religion also comes in for some rough criticism from our man Cleve, making me think of Offutt as a kind of 20th century Kentucky-based Marquis de Sade.  

The merpeople live in the base of a mountain; in pitch black tunnels above them live people who have evolved in such a way that they are blind and "see" via echolocation. When Cleve realizes that the merpeople are plotting to maim or murder him he sneaks away with one of these eyeless people, whom the merpeeps have been keeping as a slave.  After he has sex with one of the eyeless women Cleve climbs further up the mountain and outside to its snowy top, where he fights hulking brutes whom he suspects are relatives of the Earthly sasquatch and yeti.  Fortunately he has what amounts to a ray gun, given him by the blind people, to defeat these monsters.  (While Tarzan, John Carter and Conan routinely defeat, by hand, dozens of human assailants as well as lions in a way that challenges our credulity, Cleve wins his fights via trickery, teamwork and superior technology.)  

In Part III of Chieftain of Andor Cleve finds, at the base of the mountain (on the other side from the cannibal jungle and river) the bustling port city of Sharne, whose economy relies largely on the slave trade.  Suave Cleve makes friends there, including with another sexy witch, Lahri, who is eager to share her bed with him.  Lahri, a good witch, can read his mind and detect that there are two personalities in there, and she helps him reintegrate his Andrah memories.  The novel ends as Andrah and friends flee the city on a ship, foiling the pursuit of the soldiers and sailors of yet another witch, Queen Kelas, tyrant of Sharne.    

The novel seems to end in the middle of the story, and lacks a conventional climax, as if Offutt was running into a page limit and/or expected to pen a sequel.  Presumably Cleve/Andrah is headed back to where his adventures started, to liberate Andrah's people from Shansi's rule and avenge the murder of poor Ledni; there is also a prophecy that he will return to the port of Sharne to overthrow Kelas.  It doesn't appear that these adventures were ever committed to print, however.  (Maybe in a sequel we also would have learned why Gordon wanted to save Andrah and why Shansi spared Andrah instead of summarily executing him like she did half a dozen other people.)

I enjoyed Chieftain of Andor, it moves briskly, and all the strange and silly philosophical and scientific asides about feminism, cultural relativism, how merpeople and eyeless people might evolve, how magic could work and how stone age people might construct a ray gun out of radioactive rocks, are fun.  It probably qualifies as rushed hack work, but it doesn't slavishly ape Burroughs or Howard, and doesn't rely on repetitive fight scenes or graphic sex--there are in fact far fewer pages devoted to sex and violence than I had expected.  I don't know that I can recommend this strange piece of work to the average reader, but committed devotees of sword and planet/planetary romance stories may find it an interesting, entertaining curiosity.

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My copy of Chieftain of Andor, Dell 4551, has five pages of ads in the back, describing books about a real-life British commando raid, a fictional haunted U. S. Navy submarine, and a celebrity scientist's speculations about extraterrestrial life, as well as a science fiction novel written by Philip José Farmer but credited to fictional author Kilgore Trout, who was based on Theodore Sturgeon--these books all sound pretty good!  (Behold the power of advertising!)  There's also a list of SF titles from Dell that look like they are worth checking out, featuring Robert Silverberg, Jack Vance, and more names readers of this blog will recognize.

Quit your job, ignore your spouse and read all of these!