This post is brought to you by The Devil’s Defile: Weird Tales From Devil’s Gulch, edited by G. W. Thomas. The Weird West was never weirder in this shared world anthology set in a town haunted by ghosts and worse. “If Music Be the Food of Love” by M. D. Jackson gets things rolling with a man seeking a lost macabre masterpiece. “Dark Raven” by T. Neil Thomas follows hanging Judge Galbraith to a haunted house where he will win (or lose?) a bet. “The Black Lake” by Jack Mackenzie has a quest for the location of this terrible body of water. “The Ghost Gun” by G. W. Thomas is a portfolio of tales featuring Deputy Sheriff Brett Hope as he fills the Ghost Gun with monster bullets, knowing that one day he will have to face Death himself. This collection of interconnected tales features illustrations and cover by M. D. Jackson.
I did some lists of authors like Jacobi (Wellman, Jakes, Long, Kuttner and others) but they were just lists. Time to re-do these with proper story summaries. We will start with Carl since he didn’t write any novels. He tried many times but never published one.
Carl Jacobi (1908-1997) has been called a Weird Tales also-ran but that is to miss so much about this fascinating writer. He was very much a Master of the Weird Tale but he was so much more. Unlike contemporaries like Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber or Henry Kuttner, Carl never wrote novels. He was a short story writer through-and-through. No comic books, no screenplays. He wrote a series of stories over seven decades in the Horror (and Shudder Pulps), jungle adventure, Mystery and Science Fiction genres. Great range for a guy from Minnesota. (Ironically, he didn’t write many Westerns.) The writer he most reminds me of is another under-rated master, Frank Belknap Long.
Carl was a journalist by trade. He attended the University of Minnesota in 1929 and 1930, where he was a classmate of Donald Wandrei. He met August Derleth in 1931. Derleth would publish much of his work after the Pulps died. Jacobi later held correspondence with other famous writers including Hugh B. Cave and Arthur O. Friel. Clifford D. Simak became his friend when he moved to Minneapolis in 1939. They would publish the fanzine, Fantasite, together.
Carl earned his stripes as a writer publishing in his university magazine Minnesota Quarterly and The Quest. I’m not going to list the juvenilia he penned there unless it got a Pulp version later. These venues allowed him to try a variety of story types from humor to Horror. Most of these pieces have not been reprinted in his five main collections.
1928
“Rumbling Cannon” (Secret Service Stories, September 1928) is a detective story and Jacobi’s first professional sale. It netted him no payment as the Pulp folded with this last issue. A hard lesson but a good one for a freelance writer. The main character is named Stephen Benedict, a sobriquet Carl had thought of using as a pen name.
1931
“The Haunted Ring” (aka “The Coach and the Ring”) (Ghost Stories, December 1931/January 1932) was rejected by both Strange Tales and Weird Tales. It begins with an American named Hess coming to an old inn nears Schlossburg. There he meets a man dressed like a rogue from two centuries ago. When Hess mentions his name, and his purpose of visiting family in the area, he learns that the Hesses were goldsmiths. The man asks about a cameo ring with a coach and six horses on it. The American is wearing the very ring. He hears the terrible history behind it. Two hundred years ago to the hour, the local lord, Hans von Hensdorf, was cursed by Johann Hess because the careless villain rode Hess’s daughter Olga down in his carriage. Hess kills him then throws his body into the coach and curses Hensdorf to ride unstopped for two centuries. With the striking of midnight, the man gets up and takes the coach waiting outside for its final ride. The carriage and horses are no longer on the ring.
This story won Carl a fan letter from the great H. P. Lovecraft, who correctly pointed out the editor was a dope for changing the title. Something HPL knew from experience when his story “Arthur Jermyn” got retitled “The White Ape”. This story and the next opened the door to the Weird Tales circle, including August Derleth, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard and HPL. Many of these correspondences lasted until the deaths of the letter writers (like Howard in 1936 and Derleth in 1971). Perhaps the best of them all was Hugh B. Cave, who traded markets, criticism and advice with Carl for forty years.
1932
“Mive” (Minnesota Quarterly, Fall 1928) was reprinted in Weird Tales, January 1932. This tale is about a swampy area known as Mive. The narrator wades through the thick plant-life to find the flat lake known as The Flan. There he encounters a gigantic black butterfly. The powder from its wings seems to send him into a hallucination about humankind warring against the giant butterflies. He also finds a gigantic cocoon before fleeing. Lovecraft correctly praised it for its truly weird feel that he bemoaned most Pulp stories lacked. This tale cemented Jacobi’s spot among the ranks of the best weird tales writers.
“Moss Island”, (Amazing Stories Quarterly Winter 1932) revised from (The Quest, May 1930). A scientist is dropped off at a remote New Brunswick island and encounters a gigantic form of moss. This happens because he discovers a reservoir of Muscivol, a super-food for plants. Exploring the island, he encounters a massive flock of blue jays then a large white moss that repels him. He goes to put a few drops of Muscivol on the plant but accidentally spills an entire thermos of this substance, causing it to become a monstrous wave of killer fungi. He flees to the shore and an awaiting boat. This encounter Science Fiction tale, in the style of H. G. Well’s short fiction, is as SF as Jacobi got at this point in his career. He spends much of the time setting up the situation with dry scientific information. This is not a supernatural tale though it has essentially the same plot as “Mive”. Later he would write space opera for Planet Tales, but in the early 1930s his SF feels more like H. P. Lovecraft’s. (Many years later he would admit to Hugh Cave that he prefers the Horror tale to the SF.) Jacobi would write several plant monster stories over the decade. For more, go here.
1933
“Revelations in Black” (Weird Tales, April 1933) is probably Jacobi’s most famous story (reprinted over thirty times). Originally rejected by Farnsworth Wright, the editor wrote him back months later asking for the story. The inspiration for the tale was a moonlight drive where the author saw a farm with numerous stone sculptures. The eeriness of the location sprouted a seed in his imagination that became a classic vampire tale. The narrator discovers three books of poetry in an antique shop. The books were written by the owner’s brother, who died in an asylum. The man borrows the first volume then feels uneasy and goes for a walk. As if under a hypnotic command, he goes to a garden on a dismal street and encounters a veiled woman named Perle von Mauren. After reading the second volume, he returns and photographs her in secret. She becomes angry and sics her odd-looking mastiff on him. The next morning he feels very ill and the doctor examining him cauterizes the two wounds in his throat. Later he steals the third poetry book and learns that he is under the spell of vampires. The mastiff dog was actually Perle’s brother, Johann, who drew her into the fold of the undead. Armed with stakes, he goes to the house with the garden and dispatches both vampires. When he gets home, he burns all three poetry books. The garden is Jacobi’s version of the farmyard with a pool surrounded by five unicorns and a wall covered in stone blue jays. (Like “Moss Island”, he mentions blue jays again.) This story certainly could be listed among “The Vampires’ Greatest Hits” when I do a Pulp version of that list.
“The Last Drive” (Weird Tales, June 1933) is a traditional Weird Tales story. Jeb Waters is driving a van with the corpse of race car driver, Philip Carr, to Marchester. The vehicle stalls in a blizzard, forcing Jeb to sleep in the back of the van. He places the coffin in the cab first. He wakes to find the vehicle moving. The dead man, Carr, is driving. Jeb tries to stop them and they crash. The men who find Jeb’s body can’t quite figure out what happened. It appears the corpse was driving. This tale is important only as it is the first with a Rentharpian Hills setting. Jacobi would write some of his best stories about his own local Minnesota area.
“A Pair of Swords” (Weird Tales, August 1933) is another short but standard Weird Tales story in an August Derleth mode. A man, during a tour of a museum, witnesses two men in old-fashioned clothes fight a duel. The one swordsman is saved by a necklace that is stabbed by the sword’s point. When the museum visitor snaps out of the vision, he asks the guide about the two swords on the wall. The guide complains that someone has ruined a necklace from the jewelry department as it now sits on one of the sword’s tip. Carl has enough class not to ask Was it a dream? in Lovecraftian italics.
“The Tomb from Beyond” (Wonder Stories, November 1933) is a Lovecraftian piece with a man fighting a monster lurking in a dark lake. Since it appeared in an SF magazine, the tale doesn’t exploit the Horror as it would if it had been in Weird Tales. For the full story, go here.
Carl Jacobi had established his Horror reputation by 1933 with four tales in Weird Tales, and two in Science Fiction magazines. Living at home with his mother and father, Carl added to the family income with his occasional sales. In 1934, he would start work for another editor that would provide him with different magazines to fill, Leo Marguiles. Carl Jacobi, adventure Pulp writer, was about to stake his claim. Next time…1934.
Conclusion
Over a decade later Carl would publish his first collection, Revelations in Black (1947) with Arkham House. The majority of the stories in that book came from Weird Tales, including the titular tale. It is one of the most solid Pulp Horror collections not by H. P. Lovecraft. Weird Tales has often been described as being not a magazine, but a club. Carl Jacobi was definitely a member of that club.
I want to acknowledge my sources here. Beside scans of the original magazines I also used information from two excellent books: Lost in the Rentharpian Hills (1986) by R. Dixon Smith, which is a gold mine of Jacobi biography and sales information. Also Hugh B. Cave’s Magazines I Remember (1994) that includes a large section about the correspondence between Hugh and Carl. Despite these excellent sources, any mistakes are my own.
Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e
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