Weird Tales, May 1923: K D Whipple, V Starrett, E T Emmons, and M F Ellis

In our last episode, I read stories from the first, second, and sixth issues of Weird Tales by famous member of the weird community Farnsworth Wright.  Looking at the contents of the third issue of the unique magazine, the May 1923 number, there's a dearth of names I recognize.  So, I'm going to choose four stories to read by people I have never heard of based on their alluring titles and the fact that they are short--let brevity be our watchword.

"The Secret Fear" by Kenneth Duane Whipple

Whipple has only one credit at isfdb, this story, which has never been reprinted.  "The Secret Fear," four pages, is billed as "A 'Creepy' Detective Story," and a detective story it is, with witnesses and clues and suspects and all that jazz.

Our narrator is a newspaper reporter with a good relationship with the cops.  He is on the waterfront when a police officer investigates the dead body of a local character, one of the many hard-drinking and hard-fighting and hard-living men who live and work among the docks and boats and ships.  Various other denizens of this district show up or are summoned and the cops interrogate them on the spot.  Most of these guys are Irish or Scottish or whatever, I guess, but one is a short, swarthy, hairy and bearded "foreigner" with an accent.  This guy admits to robbing the dead man, but denies he killed him.  The dead man's best friend amidst the waterfront had dinner with the deceased earlier and explains what must have happened.  You see, the dead guy had a terrible fear of monkeys and apes, and read in the papers that one of the gorillas had escaped from the local zoo.  So when the foreigner with his hairy arms and beard attacked him from out of the dark, the man suffered fatal heart failure from fear.

Barely acceptable filler.

"Penelope" by Vincent Starrett

I never heard of this guy, but he has a substantial body of work and Arkham House in 1965 actually produced a collection of his short stories entitled The Quick and the Dead.  "Penelope," three and half pages here in WT, appeared in that volume as well as the 1927 anthology The Moon Terror.

Our narrator has a buddy, Haswell, who never stops talking.  Haswell is equipped with an inexhaustible supply of facts, many of which are heterodox, heretical or fallacious, and he s not shy about sharing them.  One night, drunk, Haswell tells the narrator about his relationship to a star, Penelope, a heavenly body almost too dim to be seen with the naked eye, a star discovered by his father, an astronomer who died in an insane asylum.

According to motormouth Haswell, Penelope "has an orbit so vast that fifty years would be required to complete it" and Haswell, Sr. warned Haswell ,Jr. of the dangerous influence Penelope would have over him when it reached "its perihelion with our sun."  (I'm afraid Haswell and/or Starrett don't have a handle on what astronomical terms mean.)  Perihelion occurred last year, in October.  On that fateful day, Haswell awoke to find himself on the ceiling of his apartment--Penelope was at its zenith, directly above, and was pulling him towards itself, away from the Earth!  Haswell walked around the ceiling, upside down, coins and things falling out of his pockets to land on the floor below.

For some reason, Haswell decided to make his way outside, a treacherous enterprise, because the star's gravity was trying to pull him out into space and a quick death.  Haswell is clinging to a fence railing, his feet pointing at the sky and his head near the ground, when a pretty girl comes by.  Haswell learned her name, Penelope, before she scampered away, thinking him insane or drunk.  Haswell fell in love with her, and after the effect of the star waned and he was again subject to Earth's gravity, he spent months searching for this woman,  The big reveal at the end of the story is that Haswell is engaged to this Penelope.

This story doesn't really add up; nothing about it makes sense and the tone is not consistent--at times the story seems "whimsical," but your father dying in a madhouse is not whimsical, and is the star Penelope trying to seize or destroy Haswell or is it trying to help him by introducing him to a hot girl?  "Penelope" is not offensively bad, so I guess I'll judge it acceptable.  At least it is actually weird, and not just a crime story, and I do like the idea of a star having some kind of malign influence on you.

   

"Two Hours of Death" by E. Thayles Emmons

Emmons, a newspaper editor, has only this one story listed at isfdb.  Check out Terence E. Hanley's comprehensive blog about Weird Tales for more info on Emmons.

"Two Hours of Death" is subtitled "A Ghost Story."  The text, except for a little framing paragraph about where the main text came from and a brief newspaper clipping about a guy's death, is a memoir penned by an elderly man.  The narrator, in his twenties and early thirties, was close friends with a scientist of great promise, a genius of wide interests.  This genius went insane at age 34, and has just died in an insane asylum at age 69.  His friend dead, the narrator, in this memoir, reveals what drove the scientist batty over thirty years ago!

The scientist believed in a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, and sought to discover the nature of the soul via experimentation.  Eventually he came up with a drug that allowed the soul to leave the body without causing bodily death--he tested the drug on himself, and has out of body experiences.  He then tricked his friend, the narrator, into drinking the drug (some friend!) and the narrator describes the experience of being separated from your own body and sort of floating around, able to see in the dark and read minds and so forth.  

So far this story is pretty good, but then comes the twist ending.  We are told that the narrator was engaged to the woman the scientist loved, and so the genius contrived to detach the narrator's soul from his body so he could more easily murder him.  The scientist got out his fanciest dissection knife and was about to carve up the narrator's body when the narrator became so agitated that he was able to make himself visible and scare off the scientist.  The sight of his rival's immaterial form scared the scientist so severely he went insane and never recovered.  The narrator kept all this business--proof of the soul, the experience of being a ghost, the attempt on his life--a secret until writing this memoir.

"Two Hours of Death" doesn't really hold together.  We didn't know the scientist and the narrator were after the same woman until the last possible second, so the twist ending feels cheap.  Would a guy who has secured proof of the soul and who believes in God actually murder his friend--wouldn't such a believer fear punishment from God for this horrible crime?  Would a scientist as committed to knowledge as we are initially told this guy is use the greatest discovery in history to just murder somebody out of revenge--wouldn't he want to use his discovery to learn about the afterlife and all that?  And why is he scared of the ghost--he was a ghost himself and knows as a ghost he couldn't touch anything in the material world, that the narrator while detached from his body can do nothing to stop him from cutting the narrator's throat?

I liked the style and substance of "Two Hours of Death" up to the clumsy ending, so we're judging this one barely acceptable and shaking our heads ruefully.

"Case No. 27" by Mollie Frank Ellis

On the American liturgical calendar we've got black month (shortest month of the year) and homosexual month (the month school lets out) and we've also got women's month.  I don't think it is women's month as I write this, but maybe you are reading this during women's month?  Anyway, this story is by somebody named "Mollie" and I'm hoping it is better than the other three stories we've read today so I can celebrate women's contributions to the weird with some sincerity.

We are in luck!  "Case No. 27" is actually sort of affecting, and it foregrounds women's lives and concerns, those of wives and mothers, as well as hinting at the callousness of men towards women, the callousness of both working class men and of the educated bourgeois elite, even those who claim to have the good of others as their raison d'etre.  

Our narrator is visiting a friend he hasn't seen in twenty years.  Friend is a leading researcher into mental illness, and takes the narrator to meet his most fascinating patient, the woman whose case number is 27.  Mrs. Howard tells her tragic story herself.  She and her husband, a farm couple, had two young kids.  The kids were both killed in an accident, which of course broke the Howards' hearts.  They have trouble sleeping, but eventually Mr. Howard makes peace with the tragedy and could sleep, if only Mrs. Howard could--her sleeplessness, her agitation, keeps him awake.  Mrs. Howard cannot get over the loss of her children, and comes to blame herself for the disaster.

The Howards find that if Mrs. Howard massages his temples, her husband can fall asleep.  Mrs. Howard herself cannot get any sleep, and she has nobody to provide her comfort.  Mr. Howard does not take his wife's need for sleep seriously--he argues that he needs his sleep because his work brings in the money they need to survive, while her work, women's work, about the house can be safely neglected--and far from comforting her, when she can't show him affection, Mr. Howard starts going into town in the evenings.  Mrs. Howard goes insane, and begins fantasizing about crushing her husband's head during her nightly sessions of massaging his temples.

The first twist ending is that Mrs. Howard thinks she has done just that, murdered her husband, when in fact, she has not--the murder is just a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy slash guilt-induced delusion.  The second twist ending is that the shrink has no sympathy for Mrs. Howard, but has full sympathy for callous Mr. Howard; the narrator finds his friend's attitude revolting and hurries away.  We can see this story as a condemnation of our society's treatment of women, and, to me at least more interestingly, a condemnation of the science/profession of psychology/psychiatry.

The most successful of today's stories.  "Case No. 27" has real human feeling, and it all "adds up"--makes sense and has internal consistency--in a way "Penelope" and "Two Hours of Death" do not.

Like Wipple and Emmons, Ellis has only one credit at isfdb, and like "The Secret Fear" and "Two Hours of Death," it looks like "Case No. 27" has never been reprinted.  We explore some rarely travelled territory here at MPorcius Fiction Log!

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So today we have a quite weak crime story, two weird stories with supernatural ideas that are good but which are botched in the execution, and a good psychological horror story that unleashes some social commentary on us (commentary that doesn't, thank heavens, undermine or overwhelm the actual human drama of the tale.)  Not a great helping of the weird, but not bad, either--we've certainly seen much worse, and by big names, on our long weird journey.  

Stay tuned for more exploration into the earliest of Weird Tales right here at MPorcius Fiction Log.