Weird Tales, June 1923, front and back coversThe fourth issue of Weird Tales, dated June 1923, keeps the same format as the issue previous — starting with the large bedsheet size, about 9 inches by 12. The trade dress of the cover is the same, with the same logo. The design of the cover, with a splash of red in which one story is advertised in black writing, is the same. Unfortunately, the actual cover art, by regular Weird Tales artist William Heitman, isn’t very good.
There’s a lady, there’s an ape, and the latter seems to have surprised the former in her room. The majority of Weird Tales readers were likely able to place the image at once as a scene from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders In the Rue Morgue,” which is reprinted this issue. The problem is that it’s not a particularly evocative image, and the poses of the characters seem odd at first glance and make less sense the more you look at them.
Miguel Santos’ Banner Art for #69. A tip of the hat to a classic!
Happy news, S&S fans! Heroic Fantasy Quarterly #69 is out and it is one of our most ambitious issues yet.
We’ve got four stories and three poems, three audio works, the next two pages of Miguel Santos’ comic Ancestors and more art than you can shake a broadsword at!
Richard Tooker was born in Farina, Illinois on July 3, 1902 to George Lattimer Tooker and Laura J. (nee Switzer) Tooker. His family eventually left the small town of 600 people to move to North Dakota and also lived in Minneapolis.
After graduating from prep school, he took a job as an editor of Westerns before serving for two years as a private in the U.S. Marine Corps during the 1920s. As with many authors he worked a variety of jobs, including as a musician, journalist, cowboy, railroad clerk, bank clerk, and a farmer. By the 1930s, he had settled in Phoenix, which would be his permanent home.
His first short story was “Planet Paradise,” published as by Dick Presley Tooker was written when he was only fifteen, but did not appear until the February 1924 issue of Weird Tales. His only other publication in the 1920s was the novel The Day of the Brown Horde, published by Payson & Clarke in 1929. It would be reviewed in both Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories and later an excerpt would be reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries.
Space Cadet (Ace Books, May 1971). Cover by Davis Meltzer
A book with the title Space Cadet is a little hard to take seriously; not many people can help thinking of the slang meaning. But it wasn’t used that way when Heinlein wrote it in 1948. If some people didn’t take it seriously, it was because science fiction as such wasn’t taken seriously — but Heinlein himself was quite serious about it.
In fact his novel was the first public use of the phrase, though it became better known after the television show Tom Corbett, Space Cadet bought the right to use it from him in 1950 — enough so that in 1953, Porky Pig appeared in Duck Dodgers in the 24th 1/2 Century as an “eager young space cadet.” The expression might have suggested youth and naiveté, but not being out of touch with reality.
The Best Weird Fiction of the Year, Volume 2 (Undertow Publications, August 18, 2026). Cover by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis
Weirdness is often part of horror, so we might call it a sub-genre that editor Michael Kelly has decided to further explore (after an excellent previous anthology) by collecting a number of dark short stories penned by a group of distinguished authors.
As a reviewer I enjoy the privilege of focusing on the stories that I’ve especially enjoyed, especially on the basis of their “weird” character.
This is the last of the rants related to my misguided venture back into social media (must try and market, you know?) that resulted in several eyebrow-raising arguments in the bookish corner of those spaces.
This last one is perhaps most forgivable, and could be chalked up to not paying attention in English class, and perhaps not being especially well read. Clearly the original poster was not aware of certain literary devices (and maybe English in general).
Welcome back to the final week of Cimmerian September. I realized that I’ve never done a Ten Things I Think I Think for REH. Now THAT seems remiss of me. So, we’ll ease into that with Five Things.
1) CONAN IS A ROGUE
Of course, “Rogues in the House” (which I wrote about for Hither Came Conan) is a favorite story among fans. It’s right there in the name. I’ve been re-reading some Solomon Kane lately, and I revisited El Borak last month. Those two are honorable men, fighting for justice, or nation, or to vanquish evil. Conan has his barbarian’s sense of honor. But he’s after wine, women, and money. He does ‘noble’ things, but that’s not what’s driving him. He’s a lusty sword swinger out for an adventurous life.
Sometimes I see the makings of a Conan story while I’m reading Kane and El Borak. But the character motivation is usually different. Doesn’t make it better or worse, but it does make the heroes different.
A newsboy in the 1920s.
This is the sixth post in a series reflecting on the world of the 1920s as a background to early issues of Weird Tales. Imagine that you’re an American in a big city in 1923, and you’re taking a walk to the newsstand to buy the first issue of a new pulp fiction magazine. What sort of things might you see? What do those things suggest about ways people think? What do they say about the stories they tell?
And what might you hear? Cars, of course, and maybe the buzz of conversation around you. But perhaps you’ll hear the voice of a boy on a streetcorner, holding up a newspaper and crying out a still-famous phrase: Extra! Extra! Read all about it! For this is a time when newsboys are still a feature of urban life.
Designers & Dragons: Origins, by Shannon Appelcline. Covers by Lorne Colt
This is emphatically not a review of Shannon Appelcline’s Designers & Dragons: Origins, although if you have an interest in 1970s and 1980s OD&D, D&D, or AD&D, you should grab a copy. Rather it is a collection of personal reflections having read the first two volumes and part of the third for reasons that will be made clear later.
I started playing D&D in 1980 with the Holmes box and the included module In Search of the Unknown. Someone else in the group wound up with a copy of The Keep on the Borderlands. My group quickly moved on to Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, leaving the box set behind. When we began, one of us bought the Monster Manual, one bought the Player’s Handbook, and I bought the Dungeon Master’s Guide (I remember riding my bike home from Klipper’s hobby shop with the book in my backpack). Eventually we all filled out our collections. We made our way through our own worlds, but also through Greyhawk, once it was released and I had the folio version of Darlene’s map attached to a wooden board.
Reading these books made me understand why we were never going to see details of Greyhawk the way we eventually did of the Forgotten Realms, and why it would be impossible for Gary Gygax’s “real” Castle Greyhawk to be published.
Robert Arthur, Jr. was born on November 10, 1909 at Fort Mills on Corregidor in the Phillipines to Robert Jay Arthur and Sarah Abbie (nee Fee). His father was a Lieutenant stationed there at the time. As his father was stationed in various places, Arthur grew up on the movie, in Massachusetts, Michigan, Kansas, and Virginia. He attended Hampton High School in Virginia and was elected Senior Class President.
Although accepted to West Point, Arthur chose not to follow in his father’s footsteps, instead enrolling at the College of William and Mary. After his sophomore year, he transferred to the University of Michigan, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in English in 1930. Following graduation, he worked briefly as an editor for Munsey Publications before returning to work toward his Master of Arts in Journalism, which he received from Michigan in 1932.
After earning his Master’s, Arthur moved to Greenwich Village and began writing stories for the pulp magazines, appearing in Wonder Stories, The Shadow, Argosy Weekly, Unknown Worlds, Black Mask, and more. He also worked for Dell Magazines as an editor and as an associate editor for Photo-Story.
