If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by The Book of the Black Sun by G. W. Thomas. In this collection of Mythos tales, the author experiments with different sizes of stories. Each section has a drabble of 100 words, a flash piece of less than 500 and a longer tale of over 5000. How long a story should be is very much a concern of the writer. Is the idea big enough to support more words? G. W. Thomas plays with this as he weaves concepts throughout the book. A classic volume for any Cthulhu Mythos fan. Check out the sequel: The Book of the Black Sun II: The Book Collector if you enjoy your Mythos in a Noir Mystery style.
Ten stories in two years (1926-1927) and only one illustration among them. So none for this year. Derleth has found his market and his story length, the shorter story that Weird Tales uses to pad out between longer tales and serials. These tales don’t get pictures. Farnsworth Wright must have been pleased for he did not reject any that I know about. (These would have shown up elsewhere later, either at another Pulp or in the fanzines.) And I was surprised to see how few were written with Marc Schorer. Derleth produced more tales on his own than in collaboration. I had thought the two were responsible for most if not all the stories at this time.
“The Night Rider” (Weird Tales, January 1927) bears the label of “A Short Ghost Story”, which it is at two magazine pages (none of these stories in 1927 are longer than three pages). It is another Italian tale with Messer Morini hearing the approaching hoof beats late at night. He tries to rouse Madonna Lucrezia but heads outside alone. Later the old woman joins him. Morini sees a white horse with a silver-caped rider. The rider’s breast bears a wound. This happens at midnight. The old woman says nothing and goes back inside. The next day a rider from the army comes and tells Morini his son has died in battle with King Charles, and that he was stabbed just before midnight. Morini demands to know if old Madonna saw what he saw. She denies it, grinning to herself.
The name Lucrezia is an obvious reference to Lucrezia Borgia, the notorious lover of Italian history. Charles would be the French king, Charles VIII, placing the story in 1494 or 95. Derleth must have had an interest in the history of Italy as so many of his first stories have Latin settings.
“The River” (Weird Tales, February 1927) begins with a letter from Nemo H. Lawlor to Algernon E. Downes, the man who hired him to build a dam across the Volga River in Russia. Lawlor is quitting the dam-building project because of supernatural events that have frightened him. A local man, Professor Boursky-Maminoff, has reported the stories of the local peasants nearby. He speaks of the ghosts of the boat-men whose singing signals death. Lawlor quits and we see his boss, Randeur, staying on despite the stories. He builds a cottage on the edge of the dam in defiance. Later, the boat-men come and he witnesses the collapse of the dam. His body is found by the hunchback who has been tormenting him with warnings.
Not a particularly complex ghost story, it does feature two points of interest. First, that the boat-men were half-man/half-beast and were used by Russian royalty to pull their boats upstream. Second, we see Derleth learning from his first story “Bat’s Belfry”. He begins with a letter but tells the second half, Randeur’s demise, as a straight narrative rather than trying to jam it into an unlikely letter.
“The Black Castle” (Weird Tales, May 1927) is the first of two tales written with Marc R. Schorer. The Count de Cheveaux sits in his castle that towers over the village. His hand is writing a message to him through the medium of astral projection. An Armand Champoy is a man that the count has wronged, killing his body and starving his family. Champoy tells him that he will take over the body of the count’s son, who is a weak character. Once he has possessed the body, Champoy will kill him.
The count watches his son, becoming most suspicious. One stormy night, after he sees his son take a stiletto to his room, the count kills the lad with it. The ghost hand writes to tell him that the murder was unnecessary as the ghost has done nothing. Despite this, the count will die tonight. Cheveaux goes to his window to shake his fist in anger at God. A bolt of lightning strikes him dead as a laugh of vengeance drifts on the wind.
“The Turret Room” (Weird Tales, September 1927) also with Marc R. Schorer is a very English tale, with a crowd of lords and ladies playing bridge. Lord Alving asks the Earl of Kent why he believes in ghosts. The Earl relates an occurrence that convinced him. At another gathering at a castle belonging to the Duke of Glouchester, the ghost in the turret room of the castle is mentioned. The narrator takes on the challenge of sleeping in the haunted room. The artist Harry Longworth jokes that if the sleeper can’t find a ghost, he’ll send one up. From 10pm until after midnight, nothing happens. When the Earl awakens at 2am, he finds the artist Longworth sitting there with him. The Earl calls Harry to the window but he does not listen. Later, in the morning, the Earl complains of the lack of ghosts to his host, saying all he found was Harry Longworth. He then learns that Harry died sometime between 1 and 2 am. The artist had sent a ghost up to him. A very traditional, English ghost story with little new to add but it does show Derleth’s Anglophilia.
Neither of these two tales, or those from 1926, appeared in the one volume of Derleth/Schorer stories, Colonel Markesan and Other Unpleasant People (1966). The earliest one would be “The Pacer” from 1930. So these quite short tales are practice for the longer ones to come.
Letter (Weird Tales, September 1927) Derleth wrote a short missive to congratulate the editors on finding the artist Hugh Rankin. “May he stay with you as long as you exist!” Though Rankin does not, he is one of the best of the Weird Tales illustrators and a friend of Farnsworth Wright.
“The Sleepers” (Weird Tales, December 1927) is set in America. Four men are joined by a fifth in a blue suit with brass buttons as one of the men tells of his experience on a train. The man is a writer named H. P. McCarthy, working in Hollywood, when his publisher in Chicago wires him to come immediately. The train is full so when McCarthy and a business man complain an additional Pullman car is added to the train. When the men go to their berths they find them filled with sleeping travelers. In fact, every berth is filled, and when touched the sleepers prove to be ghosts. The ghost conductor appears then walks into the wall of the train. The train has passed the curve in the line where on an August 7th years before a terrible crash happened. When they reach the spot, all the sleepers disappear. The men listening to tale are surprised to see the fifth man, dressed in a conductor’s clothes, disappear.
Pretty standard train ghost stuff. “The Upper Berth” by F. Marion Crawford lurks behind this one but is a far scarier tale. Perhaps more fun is the reference to the publisher being in Chicago, not New York. Weird Tales was published out of Chicago. As Derleth has sold all of his stories to WT, it could be considered his publisher. The character’s named “H. P.” McCarthy might have been meant as a Lovecraft nod.
Conclusion
I have to admit I am feeling a little impatient with Derleth. Where are the good ones? I know these will appear in the 1930s, so I need to be patient. (The Mythos stuff is even later in the 1940s!) 1928 and 1929 will provide more stories but not really vastly different ones. Derleth is only eighteen in 1927. He’s young, working his way through the process of creating a story, hopefully a chill. At this time he is largely imitative. The innovations or personal flourishes are yet to come. He is fascinated by tales set in Renaissance Italy, Victorian England, and occasionally, in ordinary old America.
One last thing I did notice, and this will go on for a few years yet, is that his titles tend to be “The —–“, a feature of Ray Bradbury’s work from Weird Tales (and later) that he was famous for. “The Jar”, “The Scythe”, “The Crowd”, etc. Derleth is using very similar one noun titles as in this year, too. Derleth is doing it fifteen years sooner. I guess it doesn’t become part of AD’s legacy because later Derleth titles will be longer and more Lovecraftian: “The Statement of Justin Parker”, “Mr. Bentley’s Daughter” or “The Shadow on the Sky”, etc. I haven’t done an exhaustive study of this but Weird Tales titles for short stories range from one word titles like “Penelope” to the more common three word “The Death Cell” which is similar to Derleth’s “The Turret Room”.
Next time…1928
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