The 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.

The ape seems to be both trying to ward off the woman and groping her, and the position of her arms seems off — her right arm unnaturally straight, her left possibly dislocated at the shoulder. Her eyeline isn’t directed to the ape, while the position of her legs and straightness of her torso is inconsistent with the nearby chair falling over as though she’d leaped out of it. The illustration’s also not particularly consistent with the text of the story. It’s been suggested by John Locke, in his book The Secret Origins of Weird Tales, that this “may rank as the worst cover in the magazine’s thirty-two-year history;” personally it strikes me as lacking in atmosphere and horror, without any particularly interesting technique to make up for it.

Inside the magazine, the layout’s the same as last issue, with three columns of text, and seven of the stories given line-art illustrations on their first page. There’s also a photograph of an electric chair, accompanying a two-page non-fiction piece describing the process of an execution. The photo’s credited to Harry Hirschfield. The other illustrations are by Heitman, and overall I think his selection of dramatic moments to illustrate has improved from the previous issue, though the actual pictures still rely on characters (all of them male, this issue, and not especially visually distinctive) expressing obvious shock or fear.

In a few ways, though, this issue’s layout is cleaner than the last issue’s. There aren’t ads in the middle of the magazine, and when the final paragraphs of a story are divided from the main part of the tale, they’re all at the end of the issue instead of at the middle and end. Colophons at the end of some stories return, and the brief non-fiction essays that sometimes fill up a page after the end of a story are almost always presented in two columns, visually distinct from the three columns of text of the stories, and consistent with each other.

Let’s take a look at the ads before moving to the reprint story, and then to the non-fiction. The back cover, as is by now usual, has an ad for a fingerprinting course. Inside covers are missing from the .pdf at the Internet Archive, but the first page, before the table of contents, is a full-page ad for a course in draftsmanship by mail. After the table of contents is the same full-page ad for a “wonder restorative” courtesy of H.M. Stunz that (as discussed previously) would lead to Stunz’s indictment for mail fraud. That’s followed by another full-page ad, for Bernard Bernard’s book Sex Conduct In Marriage. All three of these ads were in the last issue.

Then fiction takes over, and the ads only return on page 115, after the editorial section. At that point the ads are mostly smaller, taking up a column or two beside the conclusion of stories continued from earlier on, but there are more of them than last issue. The first, taking up most of a page, is an ad for Margaret Sanger’s book on birth control Woman and the New Race. Below that is another returning ad, seeking railway mail clerks.

The next page has an ad promising big money if you become a salesman for Comer All-Weather Coats; it looks like a multi-level marketing scheme. Then an ad for a ‘body brace’ which will straighten your back and help with a range of conditions, including “nervousness” and “misplaced organs.” Then another MLM, offering readers the chance to become salesmen for Oliver Oil-Gas burners (“Every woman wants the Oliver for freedom from drudgery of roasting Summer Kitchens”). Then an ad promising to teach you to become a “radio expert.”

A full-page ad from the “U.S. School of Music” promises to teach you to “make money in your spare time by learning to play your favorite musical instrument.” The next page gives us an ad for Oliver Oil-Gas burners themselves, devices “that in one minute, makes your present coal or wood range into a real gas stove that turns on and off with a valve. … Just like using city gas.” Then an ad promising two automobile tires for $9.95, followed by an ad for a .32 calibre handgun for $9.75. And then an ad for 25 song parodies for 25 cents. All of those on the left-hand column; on the right-hand column are ads for fake diamond rings, and for physiologist and sex educator Winfield S. Hall’s 1916 book Sexual Knowledge.

Then a full-page ad for Arthur Murray’s dance classes; then, on the last page, two of the three columns are stacks of ads. On the left hand column: ads for fake diamond rings, a handgun, a ‘sex book’ called Where Knowledge Means Happiness (“Creates a new kind of married love. One reader says: It contains more real information than all other sex books put together”), a cure for pimples and related skin blemishes, then a mysterious small box with text reading in its entirety: “MEN over 18, willing to travel. Make secret investigations. Reports. Salary and expenses. Experience unnecessary. Write J. Ganor, Former Govt. Detective, St. Louis.” Make of that what you will. The right-hand column is dominated by an ad for a home Violet Ray therapy, and at the bottom is an ad for a pocket watch in a gold case.

There’s still no particular sense of a distinctive Weird Tales demographic in these ads, to my mind, though there do seem to be a lot of ads promising to teach skills by mail or looking for employees. There are also a lot of sex-education books. Advertisers have returned from previous issues, which may mean they’re satisfied with the response they got or may just mean they signed for multiple issues up front. Either way, there are more ads this issue than last; not many more, but enough to possibly help the magazine’s bottom line.

A reprint, of course, is another way to help defray expenses, taking up pages without having to pay a writer. This issue, as noted, sees the reprinting of Poe’s “The Murder in the Rue Morgue,” under the heading “Masterpieces of Weird Fiction,” second in the series after last issue’s reprint of Bulwer-Lytton’s “The Haunters and the Haunted.” Unlike that story, but like the reprint of “The Closed Cabinet” last issue, the text of “Rue Morgue” is presented in a smaller typeface than the rest of the fiction. That actual text, so far as I can see, is essentially untouched; there’s a typo added (when Poe’s “moment” becomes “movement”), but the main change is the elimination of some, though by no means all, of Poe’s italics.

The “Masterpieces of Weird Fiction” heading emphasises the use of the story as a way to indicate a lineage. “Rue Morgue” is certainly a stranger story than I, at least, usually remember. It’s tempting to see it as an anticipation of Sherlock Holmes — two men meet in a great European capital, become friends and roommates, our first-person narrator’s stunned by the mental acuity of his friend who can read his thoughts by deductive prowess, the deducer is fascinated by crime and solves a murder almost for pure pleasure, the police and their methods are gently mocked. Even the way the climax is brought about by luring a man concerned with the murder to the two friends’ chambers by putting an advertisement in a newspaper would be reused by Conan Doyle. But rereading it now, and especially in the context of Weird Tales, the differences stand out.

To start with, the structure’s odd. It becomes more dramatic as it goes along, opening with a long philosophical discussion on the nature of thought and analysis, arguing that the analytic faculty of the mind cannot itself be analysed and that “the truly imaginative [are] never otherwise than analytic.” The story’s presented as illustrating the argument (“The narrative which follows will appear to the reader somewhat in the light of a commentary upon the propositions just advanced”), but the text also suggests the long preface is justified by the story (“I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random”).

From there we’re introduced to our unnamed narrator. Presumably American, certainly not French, possibly Poe himself, he’s living in Paris when he makes the acquaintance of a “young gentleman” named C. Auguste Dupin, of a good family but reduced to poverty by “a variety of untoward events” so that he has “ceased to bestir himself in the world.” Drawn together at first by their love of rare books, the two men became roommates in a possibly-haunted old mansion (“long deserted through superstitions into which we did not inquire”) the narrator rented, where every day they closed the shutters against sunlight, and “busied our souls in dreams.” At night they wandered the streets “arm in arm” seeking mental stimulation in the city; Poe’s fascination with the nature and anonymity of city life, which makes him one of the creators of the figure of the flâneur, also anticipates the dérive of the Situationists.

It is during one of these walks that Dupin demonstrates his “analytic ability” by which he is able to deduce the thoughts of the people around him, much to the narrator’s astonishment. Later, they read newspaper articles about the murder of a fortune-teller and her daughter in the Rue Morgue; when a man is arrested on suspicion of the murders, Dupin decides it would be amusing to investigate, and with dispensation from his friend the Prefect of Police, he and the narrator examine the crime scene. As a result, Dupin works out the contours of the crime, and, by placing an ad in a newspaper, draws to his home a man who confesses all: the murderer was an orangutan the man, a sailor, had brought back to Paris from Borneo. The ape had escaped and killed the two women at random. A postscript informs us that the sailor eventually recaptures the ape, and sells it to the Jardin des Plantes (a botanical garden in Paris which at that time held a menagerie).

In all this the narrator’s a rather vague presence, who doesn’t do anything of consequence. He’s essentially a way to bring out the nature of Dupin, who is himself a fascinating character. Poe, I think, accurately captures a man whose intelligence is genuinely on another level; if Dupin’s feats are incredible, the nature of the man is recognisable. Notably, for all his gothy love of the night, he has no truck with the supernatural. “Neither of us believe in præternatural events,” he tells the narrator, even though Dupin’s ability to possess exactly the right fact needed to solve a puzzle is almost magical.

The story must have been deeply strange when it was first published in 1841. It’s still strange now, but mystery stories as we understand them barely existed then, and here Poe almost invents the genre and gives us a great ape as murderer. The story works partly because it’s so methodical, working through all the possible alternatives before producing its solution out of nowhere. Partly, I suppose, you could say that the solution of the crime works because it resolves or completes some pattern of imagery; for example, the complexity of the imperial capital of Paris terrorised by a creature brought from the periphery, the commerce and colonialism that built the city also bringing death. But on a practical narrative level it’s a completely mad idea explained and developed logically, which might work against the narrator’s insistence on the “analytic faculty,” or might support his argument that a highly-developed analytic faculty necessitates imagination.

You could say the imaginative and the analytic make a weird mix, but then this is a weird tale; and one that Weird Tales is using to build up a library of predecessors. Why this story out of all stories, and even out of all Poe stories? Is it the same fascination with apes that led to DC Comics in the 1960s putting apes on the covers on so many of their books (because sales reliably went up when they did)? Or might this story itself have inspired a fascination with apes? Apes have already appeared in several stories in Weird Tales and would appear in many more — I wonder whether Thak, the ape-creature in Howard’s “Rogues in the House” who imitates his master Nabonidus, is a literary descendant of Poe’s orangutan, who tried to imitate his sailor-captor’s shaving.

The thing that strikes me about the story in this context is, ultimately, the thoroughgoing strangeness. It has a strange introduction, a strange murder case with a strange solution, and a strange detective who solves the case. That is, arguably the first detective story as we know it still reads as a deeply strange text a hundred and eighty-five years after it was published. We’ve had all that time to learn lessons from it, and for the shock of the new to fade, and it’s still bizarre and fascinating. It’s a form of plot that would be recognisable to Weird Tales readers, even if somehow they’d never come across the actual story itself before, but the development of the plot and characters are also deeply and unassailably weird.

Let’s move on to the nonfiction pieces. There are thirteen pieces with a headline, two without, and one two-page article. The first piece comes at the end of the first story: “Snatched from the Grave, Woman Tells of Death.” It tells us that Mrs. Rafaela Mercurio of Omaha was saved from death by Dr. W.A. Gerrie injecting adrenaline into her heart. This is amusing to me, as I can’t help but think of exactly the same procedure being performed on-camera in Quentin Tarantino’s film Pulp Fiction; here it is, literally in a pulp magazine, as fact.

After the next story we get “Chicago Man Attacked by Fighting Owl.” John Casey, a night watchman for the Chicago Protective Agency (I don’t know if this was the Chicago Protective Agency for Women and Children), had a nighttime encounter with a strange beast with glowing eyes. Attacked, he struck down what turned out to be an owl with a three-foot wingspan. After the next story, we read of “Editor Baffled by Weird Seance,” in which associate editor of Scientific American J. Malcolm Bird professes himself convinced by the spiritualist manifestations at a seance conducted by Arthur Conan Doyle. Bird, who would resign from Scientific American two years later, was even at the time considered overly credulous if not actively untrustworthy with regard to spiritualism.

Two stories later we find “Failure to Keep Tab on Quitting Time Kills Two.” It’s a somewhat imaginative retelling of an incident in which two Oklahoma electrical linemen were accidentally electrocuted when, having lost track of the time, power was restored to the power line they were working on. After two more stories comes the reprint of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” at the end of which is a piece headlined “Kilted Wraith and Bagpipe Spook Communicate With Spiritualists,” briefly describing some of the ghosts who recently manifested at a convention of the Illinois Spiritualist Association.

On page 90, after the short story “The Blade of Vengeance,” we read that “Air Transportation Between Chicago and New York To Be Established.” According to the story, dirigible flights will soon be put in place between the two cities, meaning “Chicagoans will soon be able to run down to New York on business early one morning and be back home in time for breakfast the next day.” In fact, this is a reference to the General Air Service that had been announced the year before, and was a well-supported venture — Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of the men involved. On February 25, 1923, the New York Times reported that Benedict Crowell, one of the directors of the corporation and former Assistant Secretary of War, had mentioned in a dinner speech at the Hotel Majestic that fifty-passenger ships would fly between Chicago and New York once the GAS was up and running.

Two pieces follow the next story. The first tells us “Savants No Longer Know All Things,” and it’s an anecdote from “Friar McCollister, one of the University of Chicago literati” — possibly the Frier Charles McCollister who was the captain of the University of Chicago fencing team in 1923. McCollister tells us “No longer is it possible to go to a hoary old gentleman with a pile of books and a skull on his desk and ask him any question, from the date of the birth of Copernicus to the conjugations of the verb ‘to know’ in Sanscrit, and get an answer. The scholar nowadays has learned to say what the plumber says when you ask him to fix the hole he has made in the wall: ‘That is not in my department.’” And he gives us an extended anecdote about trying to get an answer from University staff about a three-million-year-old-skull only to be bounced from scholar to scholar.

That’s immediately followed by a piece headlined “Ancient Legend Recalled When Misfortune Attends Tut’s Discoverers.” This one fascinates me. According to the piece, Howard Carter, head of the expedition that found and opened the tomb of King Tutenkhamun, had come down with “a baffling disease,” while Lord Carnarvon, who funded the expedition, had died of mysterious causes — an insect bite, or “ancient death-potion,” or “the vengeance of King Tut-Ankh-Amen.” The piece ends with a nice bit of descriptive prose:

If such a legend could be credited anywhere, the Theban valley would be that place. By day nothing disturbs the place except the sound of the pick-axes and shovels of the native workmen. By night the stillness is broken only by the hooting of owls and the cries of jackals and wild-cats. The spectator is awed by the solemnity of the great, precipitous sandstone cliffs that stand sentinel on either side of the valley. In the midst of the silence and solitude one feels himself standing on the brink of two worlds, gazing into a vista of the unknown.

If it seems awfully early for the legend about the curse of King Tut to be circulating, it’s worth going through the timeline of events. Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb in November of 1922, and broke the seal of the tomb’s doorway late that month. The expedition began clearing some of the chambers of the tomb, with the burial chamber itself opened in February of 1923. Now, in December the New York Times reported an incident that supposedly had happened in November, at the tomb’s first opening; at the same time Carter opened the tomb and found statues crowned with golden serpents, a real-life serpent got into his home and frightened his pet canary to death. There has been doubt cast on the incident since, but the point is that according to the Times this was taken by “the native staff” as “a warning from the spirit of the departed King against further intrusion on the privacy of his tomb.”

On March 19, 1923, Carnarvon was bit by a mosquito; after a razor cut, it became infected. He died on April 5. On March 24, a letter from bestselling novelist Marie Corelli had appeared in British and American papers, claiming that a dire punishment awaited any who trespassed in a Pharaoh’s tomb; that they would be cursed, and likely fall afoul of ancient poisons. These ideas are repeated in the Weird Tales piece. Corelli’s notions spread rapidly. And on April 6, the day after Carnarvon’s death, the Glasgow Herald published an interview with Arthur Conan Doyle about Carnarvon in which Doyle speculated that ‘elemental’ spirit-beings of the ancient Egyptians might have killed Carnarvon; when Lady Carnarvon took her husband’s body back to Britain other passengers on her ship cancelled their bookings.

In years to come, the death of anyone even slightly connected to Carter’s expedition would be ascribed to the Pharaoh’s curse. But Carter himself would recover from whatever ailed him and live another sixteen years. What we see in the Weird Tales piece is the beginning of a pop culture superstition, a minor myth that would continue on for decades. What I find notable is how immediate the myth was. As soon as Tutankhamun’s tomb was open, the story of a nonexistent curse spread; and so here we read about it in Weird Tales, only a couple of months after Carnarvon’s death.

Moving on, the next article describes how “Men, Lost At Sea, Live Through Week of Horror.” Two Long Island fishermen were caught in a blizzard and drifted out to sea before being rescued by a schooner a week later. Then “Arrest Woman Accused of Witchcraft” gives us a brief description of the story of Mrs Emily Elhert, arrested by the police for practicing medicine without a license; for two dollars she chanted over her patients and smeared them with an “evil-smelling salve.” I can’t find any information about this case online.

Next comes a two-page nonfiction piece, “The Chair,” with a byline; I’ll describe it after writing about the rest of the briefer articles. After “The Chair” is an article headlined “Rare Music Disappears Mysteriously.” A Chicago violinist took a set of violin manuscripts to a party, and the manuscripts disappeared from the cloak-room. Then comes a section called “The Cauldron,” which again I’ll discuss in a moment.

After the editorial and letter column, among the ads and concluding paragraphs of short stories from earlier in the issue, are the last short nonfiction pieces. On page 116 is “Seek Solution To Sahara Desert Mystery,” in which we’re told that an expedition into the Sahara is being prepared by the Chicago Tribune to seek out the “Tribe of Tauregx, a band of wild Arabs who have never recognized any civilized authority. Both men and women members of the tribe always keep their faces veiled in black.” This sounds a lot like a confused description of the Tuareg, who at the time would have been struggling against French colonisers.

After that article is a piece with no headline or byline telling us: “Light is the fastest-moving thing in the universe. It travels at the speed of 186,326 miles a second. This tremendous speed would carry a person around the earth seven times in one second!” The speed of light in a vacuum had been established fairly closely by the early 18th century.

Page 118 brings us a piece headlined “Men Sing Hymn As They Go To Death.” It is a touch morbid, if attempting some kind of creative evocation of the scene:

Marooned on a floating ice cake in the Missouri River, with all hope of rescue gone, Harvey McIntosh and his brother, Tom, of Mondamin, Iowa, bravely sang, “Nearer My God to Thee,” while the ice floe carried them to a swift and certain death. Their friends lined either side of the river, but were unable to reach them. Night came on, and from the darkness came the strains of the old hymn, which gradually grew fainter and then ended in silence.

Finally, page 120, the last page of the issue, ends with an untitled piece explaining why the Earth is round (gravity).

The short pieces have an interesting variety this issue, at least. Some are straightforward accounts of tragic, if unusual, accidents. Others are brief true-crime accounts. Some describe contemporary paranormal events, as the spiritualist convention and the woman arrested for witchcraft. You could say that the piece about the curse of Tutankhamun participates in a contemporary discourse about the Pharaoh’s tomb and how it is to be thought of; how it is weird.

Generally I’m struck this month by the range of things the non-fiction pieces do. Some are bare-bones reporting, but some try to present a bit of evocative writing, or some level of humour. That’s sensible, in that it expands the range of tones in the magazine, though I can’t find any particularly meaningful complement or contrast between the individual nonfiction pieces and the stories they follow. Still, it’s perhaps a sign of growth in the magazine.

Let’s skip back to that two-page non-fiction article, “The Chair.” It’s written by Dr. Harry E. Mereness, “Former Physician at Sing Sing Prison.” Sing Sing, a large prison 30 miles north of Manhattan, was at the time run by Warden Lewis Lawes, who opposed capital punishment although it was part of his job to oversee executions in the electric chair. “The Chair” is a detailed first-person present-tense recounting of an imagined execution; a text box at the start of the article tells us that Mereness, physician at the prison for six years, “attended sixty-seven executions — a record that has never been equaled.”

The piece is more than a little morbid, or it seems so to me. This is possibly a case of cultural difference; the last state execution in Canada took place in 1962, well before I was born. So I can’t help but read this story as a detailed recounting of the murder of a human being by electrocution. I don’t know how someone from a place where the death penalty is a current reality would read the piece; and I’m not sure how it was meant to be read in 1923. Edwin Baird, Weird Tales’ editor, may have had no political intent and commissioned the piece simply because he felt it fit in with the tone of the magazine — oriented toward death and horror, and holding a recurrent fascination with imprisonment and punishment. But it’s difficult to imagine Mereness had no opinion about the death penalty. The article makes the point that he’s the man who signals for the electricity to be turned on, killing the condemned prisoner.

Still, there’s no obvious attempt to rally opinion for or against executions. The story’s meticulously well-observed — as when it describes the condemned man’s “right trouser leg flapping, grimly ludicrous, for it has been slit up to the knee in order to facilitate the application of the leg electrode” — but doesn’t go into extreme detail. It doesn’t describe the smell other witnesses have described, or the more graphic effects of electricity on flesh. In the end, the piece is legitimately interesting, if only because of Mereness’ background, but is curiously impersonal.

There’s some more nonfiction after “The Chair.” With this issue Weird Tales begins a new feature called “The Cauldron,” soliciting accounts of true brushes with the paranormal from readers, which would be paid for at the normal rate for fiction (“but they must be clean from a moral standpoint,” the editor makes sure to mention). The feature’s edited, or “conducted,” by Preston Langley Hickey, who had an interesting life: newspaper editor, pulp writer, PR man in the movie industry. He hadn’t yet turned 23 when this first installment of “The Cauldron” was published.

There are three anecdotes here, and I don’t know whether they’re actual letters from readers or incidents made up by Hickey or somebody else in the small Weird Tales editorial group. If they are actual submissions, it’s still hard to tell if they’re recounting actual incidents or not. Essentially, these are three fairly short texts that position themselves slightly differently from the fiction in the magazine.

First, a man named Owen King writes about an incident in 1906. He and his wife, summering in the town of North Lamoine, Maine, have a premonition that their sickly infant daughter will die; one night during an electrical storm he and his wife see a ghostly shape descending to the baby; the tale ends “Baby Helen died the next day.” It’s a striking story, rather more dramatic than most accounts of ghostly visitations. It is, to be charitable, surprising that someone would turn their infant daughter’s death into a clearly well-polished tale, and one that they’d sell to a pulp magazine. It sets up the different ways to think about the stories in “The Cauldron.” King could be a real person or could be not; the story could be based on something that happened or not; if it happened, it could have happened just as he tells it or could be a dream or imagination. How much do you want to believe? It’s up to you.

The next tale comes from one Otis Trevor, a reporter in Denver who recounts an incident from 1919. Shot while covering a battle during a strike, under anaesthetic he had a vision of angelic figures in a great hall deciding whether to send him back to Earth or not. In the end the prayers of his wife brought him back, with a message from beyond that “It is the motives behind all actions that are important.”

The last letter comes from one John Burkholz. A riveter who worked on skyscrapers, he was on a job on the twelfth floor of a building when an accident sent him plunging to the street below. Thinking he was falling to his death he closed his eyes; but a truck piled with empty cardboard boxes had pulled in below him, and he survived.

There’s nothing too memorable about the pieces. They’re interesting as something new the magazine’s attempting, perhaps trying to find a new way to describe the weird in the world. The most interesting aspect of them, I think, is deciding how much of them to believe; whether the writers exist or not. It’s a different set of questions than one gets with the rest of the writing in the magazine.

Finally, we come to “The Eyrie,” the editorial and letters section of the issue. Most of the letters deal with the second issue of the magazine; the first two letters praise “Beyond the Door,” by Paul Suter, from that issue, and the third letter is from Suter himself. He praises the printing of the story and Baird’s editing: “May I take the liberty of expressing the opinion that as an editor you are emphatically THERE?” Baird then urges readers to look forward to Suter’s next story, which by happy coincidence is coming in the next issue of Weird Tales.

Conrad A. Brandt writes in asking for more “semi-scientific stories” (science fiction) like the first issue’s “Ooze.” Another writer, Adeline Jugol, criticises the second issue’s cover story “The Whispering Thing” as “the acme of foolish, silly, nonsensical, high-school girl, bucket-of-blood story.” Luckily Baird has another letter-writer who praises the story. ‘Witch Hazel’ of Saint Louis praises the magazine and presents a poem:

Oh, what is more pleasure than a show,
A party, bon bons, or even a beau?
Well, here’s the answer (all readers take heed);
WEIRD TALES and a nice quiet place to read!

Baird prints excerpts from a few more letters. The nature of pulp magazine publishing being what it is, we can’t be sure these were actual letters. But one observes that the writers seem to be an interesting demographic mix. There are older, presumably well-heeled men (“I was in the business section of Des Moines one evening recently when my eye fell upon a copy of Weird Tales”) and younger women (Miss Marguerite Nicholson says “I daren’t let my little brother get the magazine before he does his lessons”). Baird at least wants readers, and possibly advertisers, to be aware that Weird Tales is reaching a varied audience.

There remains to discuss only the editorial for this issue. It’s a striking one. Edwin Baird was not shy about complaining about the submissions he received, and this is an example of that. Specifically, he complains about a recurring characteristic of a lot of the submissions he sees: the prevalence of cats and Chinese people (and, to a lesser extent, rattlesnakes and skulls).

To be clear, he is not complaining about the presence of Chinese characters as such, but about characters being used to, as he says, “suggest the mysticism of the Orient.” One remembers that at about this time (in 1929) author Ronald Knox wrote down ‘Ten Commandments’ for detective writing; the fifth was, translating slightly, that no Chinese person should figure in the story. Knox, like Baird here, was reacting not against the presence of realistic Chinese characters, but against stereotypical sinister Chinese villains inspired by Fu Manchu.

As Baird writes:

We have no prejudices against Chinese characters in fiction, and we have none whatever against cats. For that matter, we haven’t any prejudices of any sort. We’ve published a good many stories about Chinese, and quite a large number about cats, and not a few that featured skulls and rattlesnakes. You’ll find some in this June issue.

Whether one believes he has no prejudices of any sort, his point is clear, I think. The idea of Weird Tales inspires in the mind of hopeful authors the image of the Mysterious Orient. As a result, “every second manuscript we open (and that’s placing the average rather low) is concerned with one or the other, or both, of [cats and Chinese characters].” It is interesting to note that the previous issue had a story, “Jungle Beasts,” about a Chinese cat. Perhaps Baird published it in exasperation.

He also published stories, like the two-part “Moon Terror” last issue and this one, that are straightforward Yellow Peril tales. But while the editorial is not written as one would write it today, to say the least, it’s also clearly not sympathetic to the stereotypes Baird’s seeing in the submissions. And say this: his editorial seems to have worked. Stories exoticising foreign parts of the world would continue to recur in Weird Tales. But sinister Asian villains became much less common. All it took was the editor specifically saying ‘quit sending me this stuff.’

As with a lot of choices behind the magazine, it’s a decision that’s going some distance to define what is weird and what is not. The fourth issue of Weird Tales is a smoother production, on the whole, than the third was, with a few interesting new ideas in its format; specifically, the longer nonfiction article, and even “The Cauldron.” But when we turn to the fiction (as we will in two weeks), we’ll see where the magazine is encountering real problems.

Find all my posts about Weird Tales here!

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Matthew David Surridge is the author of “The Word of Azrael,” from Black Gate 14. You can buy collections of his essays on fantasy novels here and here. His Patreon, hosting a short fiction project based around the lore within a Victorian Book of Days, is here. You can find him on Facebook, or follow his Bluesky account, @bookofdays.