If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by The Book of the Black Sun II: The Book Collector by G. W. Thomas. This sister volume to The Book of the Black Sun, contains stories written in the nameless detective Noir style. The Book Collector works for Telford, a guy who rents out arcane tomes. But when the renters don’t want to return their copies, Telford sends a goon to rough up the bad customer. When the goons don’t come back, he sends the Book Collector. Each story has a running clock, twenty four hours to retrieve the book or the fee is cut in half. Half a million sounds pretty good but when you have expenses… This is Cthulhu Mythos fiction that moves.
The trend of nice fat anthologies that started in the 1920s continues into the 1930s that produces even more books! The effect of Weird Tales and other Pulps must have fed into the book-buying hunger. Some of the editors from the 1920s are still at in the next decade. Horror pulps are a far more common sight with Ghost Stories, Strange Tales, Strange Stories, Unknown and the first Shudder Pulps all appearing in the 1930s. Others will only consider tried and true “literary” material for their books, searching the well-mined classics. The 1930s saw anthologies based on newspapers like The Evening Standard. We also begin the Mammoth Book of series with The Mammoth Books of Thrillers, Ghosts & Mysteries (1936).
Montague Summers (1880-1940)
The Reverend Montague Summers is the second most famous Montague I know. (Montague Rhodes James being the other.) Summers wrote weighty treatises on medieval witches, as well as books purporting that vampires and werewolves exist today! He was a mysterious figure in his own right. His Supernatural Omnibus has an opening editorial that might be the best guide since H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Supernatural Horror in Literature”. Victorian Ghost Stories almost seems redundant but his picks are quite good and not all obvious.
The Supernatural Omnibus (1931) V2
Victorian Ghost Stories (1934)
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
Perhaps the most famous Mystery writer after Agatha Christie, Sayers’ Omnibus of Crime seems like it is in the wrong post but as she outlines in her editorials stories of Mystery and Horror are cousins. In fact, she posits three types: the Detective story, one that will be solved, the Horror tale, where no rational solution is possible and the intermediary story that appears supernatural but is found out to be earthly in the end. (Mystery, Horror and the false monster occult detective story.) She points to Edgar Allan Poe as the creator of all three.
The Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery & Horror Second Series (1931)
The Second Omnibus Of Crime (1932)
The Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery & Horror Third Series (1934)
The Third Omnibus of Crime (1935)
Great Short Stories of Detection Part II, Mystery and Horror (1939)
Christine Campbell Thomson (1897-1985)
Thomson finishes her run of original collections in the 1930s, though there will be reprints later on. She continues to use many stories from Weird Tales, being the first to really mine that source.
Keep on the Light (1933)
Terror by Night (1934)
Nightmare by Daylight (1936)
The “Not at Night” Omnibus (1937)
John Gawsworth (aka T. I. F. Armstrong)(1912 – 1970)
John Gawsworth was a British writer and poet. An admirer of Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel and Edgar Jepson, the Mystery writer, he later became executor to M. P. Shiel’s works. His anthologies aren’t all Horror-related and even those that are often are a mixed lot. But you can’t complain because he later declared himself Juan I, the king of Redondo. You can’t argue with a king.
Full Score Twenty-Five Stories (1933)
New Tales of Horror by Eminent Authors (1934)
Thrills, Chills and Mysteries (1935)
Crimes, Creeps And Thrills (1936)
Thrills (1936)
Singles and Series
1931
The Ghost Book or They Walk By Night edited by Walter De La Mare (1931) – stories selected by one of the greatest ghost story writers.
1932
Modern Tales of Horror (1932) edited by Dashiell Hammett – stories selected by the man who wrote The Maltese Falcon. Hammett uses some Weird Tales writers like H. P. Lovecraft and Frank Belknap Long.
1934
A Century of Creepy Stories (1934)
A Century of Thrillers (1934) with a Foreword by James Agate
The Evening Standard Book of Strange Stories (1934)
Panics: A Collection of Unease Tales (1934)
Tales of the Grotesque (1934) edited by L. A. Lewis
1935
A Century of Horror Stories (1935) edited by Dennis Wheatley – famous thriller writer, Wheatley would offer more Horror collections in The Dennis Wheatley Occult Library later during the paperback explosion of the 1960s and 1970s.
A Century of Thrillers Second Series (1935)
The Creeps Omnibus (1935) edited by Charles Birkin – another famous Horror writer collecting stories. Birkin had only one collection of his own work, Devil’s Spawn in the 1930s but would return in the 1960s for many more.
1936
A Century of Ghost Stories (1936)
Great Horror Stories (1936) edited by H. Douglas Thomson
The Mammoth Books of Thrillers, Ghosts & Mysteries (1936) edited by J. M. Parrish & John R. Crossland
1937
The Evening Standard Second Book of Strange Stories (1937)
The Haunted Omnibus (1937) edited by Alexander Laing
1938
The Cabinet of Gems (1938) edited by Bradford Allen Booth
Conclusion
The 1930s feels more established than the previous decade. Anthologists know what to do since they had good examples from the 1920s. The Pulps run alongside these more prestigious publications, ironically supplying new material for future volumes. This new market didn’t really spell bigger income for the Pulpsters since they sold all rights to the magazines. Editors like Farnsworth Wright got all the income, which quite frankly was lower than you’d think, which he funneled back into Weird Tales. I try to imagine a writer like H. P. Lovecraft or Robert Bloch seeing their names in a book for the first time (which would not happen until Arkham House was created in 1939). They might have been quite proud at the same time they felt ripped off.
Next time…the 1940s
Mythos Horror & Ghostbreakers at RAGE m a c h i n e
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