The table of contents of the fourth issue of Weird Tales boasts of sixteen thrilling short stories, two of them two-parters, and “two complete novelettes.” It also promises “Interesting, Odd, and Weird Happenings.” Having dealt with the happenings previously, let’s look at the fiction.

The first story, as advertised on the cover, is Paul Ellsworth Triem’s “The Evening Wolves.” The cover claims it’s a novel, which as short as it is it certainly is not, although it is one of the two-part tales. The conclusion will come in the next issue, but I’ll write about the whole story here for the sake of convenience. Triem was in the previous issue of Weird Tales with his short tale “Vials of Insects,” an interesting if not entirely successful attempt by a white man in the 1920s to present a Chinese hero; “The Evening Wolves” tries something similar, though again I don’t think it entirely works.

It begins with a man named Colonel Knight going to a meeting in a mysterious basement room in San Francisco’s Chinatown. He meets a man named Ah Wing; Knight’s looking for help, and Ah Wing’s apparently someone in a position to give it to him, though why that should be is never made too clear beyond the observation that Ah Wing “work[s] outside the laws of man.” Knight’s a former jewel thief who’s been running for five years from his own former gang, the Evening Wolves. These five hardened killers are after him for a piece of jewellery, the Resurrection Pendant, that he stole firstly from a great philanthropist and then from them. The theft brought about the philanthropist’s doom, but Knight thought he’d able to get away clean with the Pendant. Instead his once-allies have chased him ever since, and now, with his vision failing, he’s sought the help of Ah Wing.

We soon see that the Evening Wolves in fact have pursued Knight to Ah Wing’s lair; Ah Wing takes Knight to safety, returns to confront the Wolves, and so begins a series of chases and mysteries pitting Ah Wing against the robbers. Soon the story comes to revolve around two houses a little outside the city, one owned by Ah Wing, where he hosts Knight and the Pendant, and the other a short distance away where the Wolves set up a base to watch Knight. Ah Wing, by the use of various traps, stratagems, and moderately high-tech gear, begins eliminating the Wolves one by one. The story comes to a climax back in San Francisco, as Ah Wing gambles his life against that of the Wolves’ leader, and assorted revelations come out about his true motivation.

There are some nice moments of pulp action in the story. But Ah Wing’s traps are a little facile — a gimmicked window, a snake in a basement, and so forth. And he’s a bit too competent; you never really think the Wolves have a chance against him, although the story does move quick enough and the Wolves are scuzzy enough that there’s still some pulpy thrills in watching them get taken apart.

The story mostly works because Ah Wing’s an interesting character. Triem holds back from telling us why he does what he does until fairly late in the story. That plays into Triem’s interest in using Chinese-villain archetypes as a way to undermine those archetypes, but it also gives us an ambiguous figure to follow through the tale. In that context, his competence and the way his traps always seem to pay off become suspenseful; should we be cheering for this guy?

Triem starts the story with Knight’s point of view, creating an effect oddly like Big Trouble In Little China, where the white guy we start out following turns out not to be the protagonist. Working out what’s happening in the tale, and what sort of structure we’re looking at, is one of the real pleasures in the fiction. On a structural level, Triem handles shifts between points of view well, and picks the most interesting perspective for the story at any given moment.

I did think that in the end Ah Wing was underdeveloped and underexplored. His dialogue and characteristics too often echo the stereotypes Triem’s otherwise subverting; he is, in the end, a scheming Chinese genius with an array of sinister traps and a subterranean hideout. His motivation turns out not to be what we expect, but for me at least Triem’s trying to use fundamentally racist imagery in a non-racist way, and while the attempt’s interesting, it doesn’t quite work.

Similarly, by birth Ah Wing’s half-Chinese and half-white, but although shunned by his Chinese community as a child because of his mixed heritage (as we eventually find out), he was basically raised Chinese and identifies as such. So the multiracial aspect of the character doesn’t really come into play; it helps set up some of his backstory, but doesn’t affect his choices or self-presentation. There’s nothing exactly wrong with it, and this is not really the sort of story that lives in the nuances of its characterisation, but it does feel like something of a missed opportunity.

All together, the story seems to me a respectable attempt at telling a pulp action story that subverts some noxious stereotypes of its era. It’s flawed, but has its heart in the right place, and the craft is fairly strong. I have some reservations about the plotting, specifically in the death-traps the story gives us. But then it’s fair to say that we’ve had a hundred years of writing about death-traps since this story was published, and if it seems a touch unpolished now, that’s perhaps to be expected. A graver reservation is whether the Evening Wolves really come alive as villains or as memorable personalities. I think they serve their part in the story, but there’s a valid critique that more resourceful villains would have made a more memorable tale. Either way, I don’t think “The Evening Wolves” quite has the level of berserk strangeness or precise horror the most striking Weird Tales stories so far have had, but it is an interesting pulp adventure that at least provokes thought about stereotypes and what works and what does not.

The next story effectively does something similar, but I doubt it was deliberate. “Desert Madness,” by Harold Freeman Miners, follows Stanley Ross, a young New Yorker who has come to the American desert country to recuperate from disease and get over a broken heart. One day, wandering in a canyon, he stumbles on a beautiful woman shackled to the canyon wall. He frees her, and the mystery she represents draws him into a strange and violent situation.

As it turns out, the beautiful woman, Virginia Carver, has a wealthy uncle, Arthur Ward, whose mental health is deteriorating fast. Ward means to marry Virginia to loathsome but wealthy Larson Beebe, and he’s got a couple of gunmen to make sure things go the way he plans. Virginia resisted nevertheless, which led Ward to imprison her in the canyon. Since Stanley helped her, Ward’s paranoia tells him Stanley’s one of his (nonexistent) enemies. Stanley has to overcome Ward and his flunkies; then, as it turns out, he has to plan an escape from Ward’s house while watched by an armed Beebe, determined to take Virginia as his own.

Or, more precisely, Stanley doesn’t have to do these things. Also present in Ward’s compound is Wong, a Chinese servant who speaks in phonetically-rendered broken English. When Stanley’s first captured, Wong rescues him from a trap involving several snakes, and gets him a gun, and sets up one of Ward’s gunmen to be ambushed. Then, at the climax of the story, Wong figures out how to get out of the compound (by a complex and unlikely scheme involving two kites), and, at the final confrontation with Beebe, kills the villain. Describe the action, and it sounds like Wong’s the hero. But we never get to see things from his perspective, and don’t really get a sense of him as a character.

Characterisation in general is the weakest part of the story. Stanley’s a straightforward hero, Beebe an uninteresting villain, Ward a villain with an underdeveloped backstory. Virginia’s arguably the most underwritten character, flat even for a pulp ingenue, never able to make a meaningful choice or take meaningful action to drive the story beyond resisting marriage with Beebe. And it’s notable that the sexual violence the story implies is almost always phrased in the form of Beebe wanting to marry Virginia (whose name becomes overspecific to the point of parody in this context). There is a feeling of Victorian melodrama to the story, the danger both overheated and overly general; the phrase “a fate worse than death” is used unironically.

The best moment of the story comes when Stanley bursts in on Ward and Beebe in the middle of threatening Virginia, with a cry of “Not yet, Ward! First, you’ll settle with me!” The description of a pulp hero is generic but satisfyingly archetypal:

Stanley Ross stood in the doorway. But it was not the Stanley Ross, urbane, bored, carefree, who, a few days before, had whimsically sought adventure up an unknown canyon trail. He had found adventure now, and it had used him roughly. His face and hands were grimy. His clothes were dirty and torn. One sleeve had been almost rent from his shoulder. His hair was riotously disheveled and clotted with blood. Down one side of his face extended a great splash of dirty dried blood.

In his right hand was an ugly-looking automatic, and in his face and eyes was a look of savage fury.

That’s about what you want in an adventurer. You can almost see the image as a pulp cover. Make Stanley a bit more bronze and he could be Doc Savage.

Alas, bronze he is not, and the story settles back down and proceeds along. The confrontation with Ward is brief and fatal (for Ward), the gunsels are killed, and so the second half sets up the conflict with Beebe only for Wong to save the day repeatedly. Given the flatness of the story, one wonders if the whole thing’s a semi-pastiche. Is Miners sending up the standard image of pulp heroism by having a Chinese guy really do everything? It’s possible, I suppose, but the story’s so straight-faced it’s difficult to credit. It’s a kind of cleverness alien to the rest of the tale. It read more like Miners trying to find ways out of narrative problems he’s set himself, and coming back to Wong as his most reliable solution.

In the end, the story wastes an interesting opening idea with poor pacing, poor plotting, and underwritten characters. The style’s not especially engaging, and while it isn’t the worst story in the issue, as we’ll see, that’s far from saying it’s good.

I can’t honestly call the next story good, either, but at least there’s a certain kind of fun in it. Hamilton Craigie, who has had a story in every issue of Weird Tales so far, returns with “The Jailer of Souls.” It’s a weird western, although how weird doesn’t become obvious until fairly far in.

As the story opens, adventurer and world-traveller Black Steve Annister is on a train to the town of Dry Bone (look, it was the 1920s) in search of his missing father. There are threatening men, dire warnings: “tar-and-feathers is just a picnic with that gang; they’re a stemwinding bunch of assassins, I’ll say!” Disembarking at Dry Bone throws him into a whirl of action. Someone tries to break into his room. A crooked lawyer tries to hire him, and he goes along with it. There are fistfights, gunfights, mysterious clues.

The plot doesn’t, in the end, make much sense. I’m not sure that’s the point. Craigie gives us a fun story about a two-fisted hero with an emotional stake in events, exploring a town full of secrets and bad guys, with hints of a bigger scheme and the supernatural. Asking whether the bad guys absolutely need to go to the elaborate lengths they do to take Annister down is asking the wrong question. The action’s the point.

As Annister stalks through the town “southwest of the law,” he encounters hints of a sinister organisation bound up with the bad guys: “a name, or, rather, a symbol, the name and the symbol of masked and hooded violence, and it was ‘S. S. S.’” There’s not much elaboration of the S. S. S., and I can only assume it’s a sideways glance at the K. K. K.; it’s a loose end that never pays off, but it’s eye-catching. It’s described as being involved, in an unspecified way, with a crooked lawyer named Hamilton Rook, and with some corporation acting against local ranchers. Or, as Craigie puts it:

… a great Company, an Octopus indeed, which, with Hamilton Rook as its agent, planned nothing less than the ruthless despoiling of those independent cattle men who, out of a desert of sand and sage, had won a living for their stock and for themselves, the rear guard of the order, now, as it seemed, indeed, caught in the far-flung tentacles of a monster, unscrupulous and without soul.

You might say that’s not good writing, and you’d be absolutely correct. But at its best (“a desert of sand and sage”) it’s the kind of overheated prose that makes pulp good fun. Consider also this paragraph, quickly introducing some minor villains:

At the club, as the afternoon wore on to evening, he had met four or five men: Beaton, the county judge, a red-faced tippler with, on the surface, a heartiness that was repellant; Lunn, the hotel proprietor, a vast, asthmatic man with a small, porcine eye; Daventry, the Land Commissioner, whose British accent, Annister noticed, would on occasion flatten to a high, nasal whining that was reminiscent of Sag Harbor or Buzzards Bay.

These characters aren’t significant. Craigie needs to give Annister some named opponents to boss around faceless mooks, and here they are. But the small details work. Each of them gets a characteristic that fixes them in the reader’s mind and distinguishes them from each other. It’s not high art, but it is good technique.

Still, this is far from a good story. If the prose sometimes reaches manic heights, mostly it’s both exclamatory and wooden. And sometimes repetitive: “Annister, in his day, had seen some queer corners and some tight places; in Rangoon, for example, he had penetrated to a certain dark house in a dim backwater stinking and dark with the darkness of midnight even at high noon.” You might get away with one ‘dark’ besides the ‘darkness’ compound, but two is clearly overdoing it.

And there’s some racism, directed against Indigenous Ecuadoreans (of all people) and East Indians (including a deeply odd reference to sati which suggests Craigie doesn’t know what it is). The latter’s bound up with one of the stranger aspects of the story. At some moments of the story Annister encounters moments hinting at the supernatural, as when he encounters one sinister-looking chap:

Annister, pausing a moment at the corner of the street, was conscious of a feeling of coldness, like a bleak wind of the spirit, as if death, in passing, had touched him, and gone on.

For the face of the man whom he had seen had been like the face of a damned soul, unhuman, Satanic in its sheer, visible malevolence. So might Satan himself have looked, after the Fall.

Again a repetitive sentence, but at least this one’s about Satan. Who is an unusual character to find in a Western. But then the mystery of Annister’s father is tied up with the mystery of the disappearance of some other men across the country, and one of those claims to have returned in a completely different body. What’s going on?

It turns out that the sinister man Annister glimpsed, whom he had previously met during that dark adventure in Rangoon, is a master of the dark art of “Dermatology,” particularly in its surgical aspect: “it’s been done in India, I believe; practiced there to an extent unknown here, of course.” In fact plastic surgery was advancing quite a bit in 1923, as surgeons tried to repair damage done by weapons in World War I. At any rate, here plastic surgery becomes something sinister and supernatural, justifying the title “Jailer of Souls” — because the surgeon jails the soul within a new body, you see.

“The Jailer of Souls” is crude, overheated, and overlong, but it is sporadically fun. It’s not well-written, but at its best it gives you the sort of thrill you want from a two-fisted pulp adventure. Which is, after all, what it’s aiming at.

Next comes “Jack O’Mystery,” by Edwin MacLaren, which wastes a great title on a poor and pedestrian tale. Billed as “A Modern Ghost Story,” it starts with a young wealthy woman named Mrs. Peyton (she never gets a first name), who hires a private detective named Herbert Barry to look into a mystery at the new house she and her husband have bought: a ghost has scared away the servants, and is ordering them to leave. Barry, we’re told, solves the basics of the mystery from what Peyton tells him, which gives the story away, telling us that there’s nothing supernatural here while also not giving us more than one suspect.

Barry goes to the house, posing as Peyton’s new servant, and sees the ghost. He confirms what he suspected, but does not reveal the truth. Peyton’s husband, morbidly afraid of ghosts, had not wanted to buy the new house, where a murder-suicide had recently taken place; Scott Peyton is “the most superstitious man alive,” specifically, we are told, a Southerner whose mammy filled his head as a child with tales of “ha’nts.” But the end of the story sees an unprompted reconciliation with his wife, and a promise that the ghost will be seen no more. For, as everyone who reads the story will have guessed, the ghost was always Scott Peyton.

To scare his wife out of the house Peyton lied about seeing ghosts, dressed up in a King Lear costume, and used his master key to get easily through locked doors. There are some logical issues here; for example, when Mrs. Peyton sees the ghost, he seems to vanish from the room in a way that remains unexplained. But that’s all right, as she also forgets that she has a large dog in the house.

The writing is flat and lacking in atmosphere. The mystery makes no sense. The characters are one-dimensional, and Barry, our nominal protagonist, does nothing to bring about a resolution of events. The story’s simply a complete misfire.

The next story’s a two-pager (a bit less than 2000 words) by Adam Hull Shirk called “Osiris.” Shirk had written extensively for several years for magazines like Snappy Stories; the FictionMags bibliography suggests he was silent for a few years before returning to fiction with Weird Tales, for whom he’d write several stories over the next couple of years. He’d then move on to screenwriting before an early death in 1931.

“Osiris” isn’t terribly original, and it’s so brief it can’t be said to be much of a story, but it’s at least reasonably effective at creating atmosphere. A first-person narrator, Madden, tells us he’ll reveal the truth around the death of Egyptologist Sir Richard Parmenter. Madden turns out to be Parmenter’s ‘counselor,’ called by Parmenter on a stormy night to draw up a brief will. Parmenter then tells him a tale of his last trip to Egypt, where Parmenter found the tomb of Osiris, the Egyptian god, who Parmenter reveals once walked the Earth as a mortal man. Parmenter opened the tomb, and the sarcophagus within, and fled at the horror he saw. And, having told this tale, he collapses before Madden’s eyes, dead; and Madden sees a thing in the shadows of the corner of the room before fleeing into the storm.

The story’s slender, but at least doesn’t outstay its welcome. Some details are a little odd, if not beyond what one might expect of a 1920s archaeologist with oddball theories — Parmenter insists that Osiris is often depicted with a bull’s head, which he isn’t, but which I suppose could be some sort of confusion with Apis. The ending’s abrupt, but the story lives in its brevity. And because it’s so brief, it works. It’s not flawless, but it’s one of the better efforts this issue.

Next is “The Well,” by Julian Kilman, the other writer besides Hamilton Craigie to have a story in every one of the first four issues of Weird Tales. This is the story of Jeremiah Hubbard, a farmer and a big, angry man who has kept up a feud with his neighbour, Harper, for four years. One day Hubbard snaps, kills Harper, and throws his body in a well nearby. But events conspire to keep bringing him back to the well, one coincidence after another causing him to risk discovery of the corpse. In the end, he throws himself into the well.

It’s an abrupt conclusion, and doesn’t really work. The construction of the story’s odd, overall, bristling with details that don’t seem to do anything for the tale — the depiction of Hubbard and his wife not speaking to one another, the occasional appearance of a preacher who prays with Hubbard’s wife and daughter, the strange knowingness of Harper’s daughter. These things almost work to build a meaningful subtext, and do go some way to building an atmosphere and individual sense for the tale, but don’t ultimately set up the sudden turn the ending takes. You can see what Kilman’s aiming for with the story. But the inexorable build isn’t really there, and the sense of psychological tension ratcheting up doesn’t come across, so the ending feels forced. It’s almost quite a good tale, but doesn’t come together.

Next is Otis Adelbert Kline’s “The Phantom Wolfhound.” Kline had the first two-part story in the magazine, “The Thing of a Thousand Shapes” in the first two issues, and by this time was working in the editorial offices of Weird Tales. “The Phantom Wolfhound” isn’t a terribly good story, but does have the distinction of introducing a character who’ll star in a series of stories — only three stories, and only two of them in Weird Tales; but it is a first for the magazine.

The character is Doctor Dorp, whose exact medical degree is unspecified but is apparently a parapsychologist with a book called Investigations of Materialization Phenomena to his credit. The story opens as his friend, private detective Harry Hoyne, brings a strange case to him: a man named Ritsky believes he’s being haunted by the ghost of a dog he shot two years ago. The ghost has slowly grown larger and more threatening over this time; Ritsky’s always been able to dispel it by turning on the light, but servants keep overhearing the unearthly noise the apparition makes and tend to quit as a result.

Dorp obtains some basic facts about Risky’s home and family, then sets off to set up cameras and investigate the premises for himself. That evening, Hoyne and Dorp witness the ghost. They learn the cause of the haunting, but too late: Ritsky dies of fright. As we learn in a coda, this was just as well, for he was in the middle of an unnecessarily drawn-out plan of cold-blooded murder.

The story’s underdeveloped on a plot level. There’s no mystery to it, no red herrings, nothing but a quick walk-through of the standard occult detective template: a man describes a supernatural problem to the detective; the detective investigates; problem solved. Here the ends are tied up too neatly, while at the same time leaving a character who should be central to the story undeveloped and without even a line of dialogue.

But then, all the characters in the story are underdeveloped. Ritsky’s a cipher; what we end up being told about him at the end of the story doesn’t seem like a necessary and logical extrapolation from what we see of him earlier on, while also not being specifically contradictory. And there’s a bland mention of Ritsky as being at one point the “editor of a radical newspaper in New York,” which seems like a striking contradiction to the otherwise upper-class life and background of him and his family.

Dorp gets even less background. There’s nothing distinctive about him at all. He doesn’t even get any physical description (his second story will give him a Van Dyke beard). He has no personal connection to the events of the story, nor in the end does he even show any sense of triumph at a theory proved.

There is a fundamentally slapdash feel to the story. It nods in the directions of familiar plot beats and story shapes, but can’t be bothered to put any effort into developing them. It ties up more or less neatly, by means of brute force exposition, but never builds atmosphere. There is, again, nothing to recommend here.

“The Phantom Wolfhound” is followed by the reprint of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which I covered a couple weeks ago, and the second part of “The Moon Terror,” which I wrote about when I dealt with issue 3. After them comes “The Man the Law Forgot,” by Walter Noble Burns. Burns had published stories as early as 1904, and would have new work see print as late as 1931, the year before his death, but this is his only appearance in The Unique Magazine. He’s probably best known today as the writer whose semi-fictional books brought Billy the Kid and the gunfight at the OK Corral back to general awareness.

“The Man the Law Forgot” is an odd story that doesn’t really work. When Guisseppi, a poor young man who lives in a large American city, is executed following a robbery that turned into a murder case, the death by hanging doesn’t take. Given a new lease on life, Guisseppi hunts down and kills the gang leader who led him into a life of crime. Expecting another murder conviction, he’s surprised when the judge rules that as he legally died after the first execution, Guisseppi’s now entirely outside the law. He cannot be punished, but also cannot interact with the state in any other way — no paperwork of any sort. We see him try to put his life together and fail, and try to build a relationship with the love of his life and fail, and then an ending happens.

The story’s oddly structured, ambling along, with most of its dramatic action early on and even most of that skipped over briefly. The most evocative moment is when Guisseppi sings to his lady-love Rosina, and we get an extended description of the power of his song. Which comes out of nowhere and leads to nothing; you can see how it might have implied a life blighted by crime and criminal surroundings, but the story doesn’t even nod in that direction. Nor does it investigate Guisseppi’s situation in any coherent dramatic fashion.

It doesn’t help that the situation itself is unbelievable. Even in 1923 there had already been cases of people declared legally dead while actually still living; one imagines that the aftermath of World War I would have provided several instances. The idea of a dead man being declared a total outlaw, beyond the reach of the state, isn’t credible. If it had been necessary to get at some interesting dramatic idea, or interesting plot scenario, or original action beat, perhaps one might have overlooked it. There’s nothing like that.

The story’s overlong, the prose is simplistic, the characters are flat and stereotyped — superstitious Italians, a bluff Irish cop, a virtuous sweetheart — and even beyond the tastelessness of the stereotypes is the lack of imagination. In the end there’s a violent conclusion out of the blue, and it’s difficult to care.

That story’s followed by “The Blade of Vengeance,” by George Warburton Lewis, which unfortunately is the case of a strong title unsupported by the plot. Warburton had already led an interesting life by the time this story was published; he’d also had a story, “The Return of Paul Slavsky,” in the first issue of Weird Tales. He’ll have another next issue, along with a total of three stories in three consecutive issues of Weird Tales’ sister magazine Detective Tales. This story, in fact, like many of the stories this issue, reads like it could have been intended for Detective Tales. There’s nothing supernatural, and not much you could really call weird.

It opens with exposition about wealthy Henry Fayne, who “had renounced innumerable bachelor friendships” to marry Leanor, who turned out to be “a captivating adventuress.” After an inevitable divorce, humiliated by Leanor’s infidelity, Fayne disappeared. Five years later, Leanor’s in Panama, where she meets the narrator, recently discharged from a sanitarium following a case of dengue. The narrator contrives to meet her, they agree to go boating on the dangerous Devil’s Channel, and they hire a boat piloted by a vagabond who gives his name as Sisson.

The ship is caught by the treacherous currents of the Channel, the narrator abandons ship and gets to safety, but Sisson reveals to Leanor he’s actually the long-missing Henry Fayne, who has been plotting his revenge. She says she’s weary of life and wants to die. Knowing that, he saves them both, believing they will get back together. But that night Leanor reveals to the narrator she’ll have Fayne thrown into the local lunatic asylum in the morning. Fayne overhears this, and at the end of the story the narrator finds Leanor dead, with Fayne’s hunting-knife in her heart.

It’s a plot-intensive story, but never rises above the level of a poorly-written domestic dispute. The characters are flat, and the backstory of the narrator is baffling. It’s legitimately difficult to decipher if (as he at one point suggests to Leanor) he’s a detective in Fayne’s employ or not. If he is, it’s difficult to see why he should tell her; if he isn’t it’s difficult to see how he knew who she was, and how he knew some of what transpired on the boat.

But the point of view is generally clumsy, and even assuming the narrator’s got a deeper connection to events than he lets on it’s difficult to understand how he knows some of the things he does. Specifically, early on there’s a section in Leanor’s head, describing her emotions and reflections. Even if she had told the narrator some of this later on, he should know enough of her to be suspicious of anything she says.

Given that the plot’s largely made up of coincidence, there’s certainly a temptation to read the story as the product of an unreliable narrator. But the story needs to be entirely reconstructed in the reader’s head to make sense, and I don’t see that there’s enough in the text as it exists for that to be possible. I don’t think Lewis intended that level of sophistication, either, although it’s tempting to think he was trying for something like that. The story at times seems aware of the misogyny in its conception of Leanor, notably when the narrator mentions “thanking my lucky stars for the happy dispensation that had made me an adventurer instead of an ‘adventuress.’” But, again, there isn’t to my eye the consistency of a coherent theme. It’s not undermining tropes, only repeating them.

The eponymous blade of vengeance isn’t mentioned before the last paragraphs, so the title puts the emphasis in a strange place. The story’s clumsy in conception, the prose lacking, the characters flat and unengaging. Add to this some casual racism toward the end, and there’s simply nothing to recommend here.

Next comes “The Gray Death,” from Loual B. Sugarman, the only story Sugarman, a graphic artist, would have in the magazine. There’s apparently a letter extant in which Weird Tales editor Edwin Baird mentions that this story look a lot of editorial work to get “into shape,” but the final result reads well enough. It’s a tale one man tells another to explain his fear and hatred of the colour grey. The tale-teller’s a scientist who went exploring far along the Amazon with his mentor Von Housmann.

We know from early on that the narrator will end up having to shoot Von Hausmann; the tale is the working-out of events, explaining why the narrator has to shoot a man he respects and admires, and how he comes to hate greyness. The main flaw in the story is that once the explorers find a voracious and quick-spreading field of grey fungi, the answers to both questions present themselves. Things work out as you expect: the discovery; the probing of the discovery, and the forming of theories; an accident that almost costs the narrator his foot; another accident, leading to the inevitable tragedy so heavily foreshadowed.

It’s not a bad story. There are two main problems, I think. The first is that Von Hausmann’s dialogue is written in an eye-dialect, with his heavy German accent spelled out. This has the effect of making him read like a comedy character, undermining much of the suspense and pathos of the story. The second problem is that the fungi doesn’t quite make sense. It eats everything except for silica, and is kept bounded in the Amazon only by some fortuitously-placed stretches of sand. Fair enough, except when it doesn’t get food it goes dormant and then dies very swiftly. So how does it stay alive within the narrow bounds of its terrain?

The story at least doesn’t focus too much on the whys and wherefores of the fungi, so we can assume there is some kind of answer even if our narrator doesn’t bother to specify it. Otherwise, the story flows well, and there’s an interesting wrinkle in the way the narrator reveres the memory of Von Hausmann while also recounting his casual racism; I’m not sure it’s intended to emphasise the narrator’s subjectivity, but it has that effect. The conclusion’s memorably grisly, and the tale doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s solid enough work.

It’s followed by “The Voice in the Fog,” by veteran pulp writer Henry Leverage. It’s the tale of Paul Richter, chief engineer on the oil tanker Seriphus. When a young but poor marine electrician starts courting his 27-year-old daughter, Richter takes against him, and ultimately traps him in the engines aboard ship, leaving him to his death. But things don’t turn out so simply. Bad luck bedevils the Seriphus, and after the ship rescues some men from the wreck of a Japanese freighter, things take a surprising turn.

This is solid work in many ways. The writing’s clipped, and there’s a tension between Richter, his captain, and his second engineer that keeps things moving and engaging. The only real problem is that the resolution and main plot turn on an extreme coincidence. But there’s also this: the impact of Richter’s choices and actions with respect to his daughter’s suitor become muted because the technology he’s working with is dated and (at least to me) unfamiliar. You don’t really know what Richter’s doing, and have to extrapolate the meaning of his actions from the results. A bit more description would have helped the story land more solidly, though it might have also compromised the speed and tautness which are some of its more interesting characteristics. Overall, a decent piece, though one with no supernatural or weird aspect to it at all.

Next is Hugh Thomason’s “The Invisible Terror,” which the magazine for some reason bills as “An Uncanny Tale of the Jungle.” I have no idea why this description was added, as the story clearly takes place among cottonwoods and alfalfa plants, and in every way appears to be a tale of the west. It may be that Edwin Baird was trying to distract readers from the story’s clear ancestor.

The plot’s simple enough. Cattleman and mine owner Jess Benson comes across a dead body in a thicket of plum bushes, apparently killed by a wild animal. He tells the local sheriff and coroner, who have found dead bodies of humans and animals over the past several weeks, killed by some animal like a wolf but larger. The thing has never been seen, though, and the lawmen have reason to believe the creature’s invisible. And so the sheriff concocts a solution, waiting that night by a nearby watering hole for the beast, and when it appears spraying it with whitewash to make it visible — at which point he shoots it, and it falls, gravely wounded, into the depths of the pool.

There’s a first time for everything, as they say, and this must be one of the early examples in fiction of an invisible antagonist being caught by being sprayed with something to make it visible. There’s not much to the story beyond this possible innovation, though there’s also nothing egregiously wrong with it. The major issue is that the story borrows from an obvious predecessor, to the point that it reads almost as a poor sequel,

Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing” is set at a rural coroner’s inquest into the death of a hermit named Henry Morgan, who it turns out was killed by an invisible beast. That story’s very good, with fine sardonic humour and some clever metatextual playing-about with truth and fiction and journalism. It also has some lines and ideas in it borrowed in cruder form by Thomason in this story: the invisible beast obscuring the stars against the night sky, for example, and the idea of colours that aren’t visible to the human eye just as certain sounds are inaudible to the human ear. Beyond that, Bierce’s story is brisker, smarter, far better structured, and much more evocative. “The Invisible Terror” is acceptable if somewhat dull on its own, but comparison to “The Damned Thing” does it no favours at all.

Next comes “The Escape,” by Helen Rowe Henze, who would go on to have quite a career as a poet. It’s a brief and straightforward story about a man diagnosed with appendicitis. The man, Donaldson, killed his wife ten years previously, and avoided suspicion. But he feels a perverse desire to confess, and so avoids alcohol and sleeping beside anyone in case he speak in his sleep. The operation for appendicitis would involve a general anaesthetic, so he avoids it until he faints inn the street due to the pain. Waking in pain, he asks if he spoke while sleeping, is told he had not, but doubts the answer. And so, fearing life imprisonment, he hangs himself.

The idea’s simple enough, and the attempt at focussing on Donaldson’s mental state is strong. I didn’t find it quite evocative enough or interesting enough to work, though, and there’s an air of melodrama which not only undercuts the character focus but also makes the resolution of the plot too morally pat. I think the story’d be much stronger with more editing, paring it back and removing some of the exclamation points that insist on the weight of sentences that shouldn’t need the help of punctuation to land.

Tarleton Collier’s “The Siren” follows. Collier was another prolific pulp writer, and “The Siren” is a simple, short, effective story with a twist ending that works. Joe Wilson is a man in a railway work camp suffering from fever. He sneaks away from medical supervision to a nearby stream where he finds a woman he apparently knows. Most of the story is their dialogue, as she draws him to her, and tries to get him to drink the water of the stream. He does, and collapses, and the twist at the end is that that the river’s polluted with typhoid bacteria.

It’s short enough that the idea works. A stray word early on sets up the twist ending so it doesn’t come out of nowhere, and the figure of the woman remains ambiguous — is she a symbol of the fever, or a literal siren? Either way, she’s obviously sinister from her first appearance, and there’s a reasonable criticism that in this way the story’s too obvious. I do find it interesting that she’s given minimal physical description, for all that she has her hooks deep in Joe; the reader can decide for themselves how to visualise her, and that works. Overall, not a flawless story, but a solid one.

The last piece of fiction in the issue is “The Madman,” by Herbert Hipwell. Hipwell’s only known published story, it’s set in a small university town where brawls between locals and students are frequent happenings. The leader of the townies, Peter Stubbs, gets hired by the medical school as a live-in caretaker, leading one of the students, Chic Channing, to enlist the narrator in a plan to play a practical joke on Stubbs. They’ll sneak into the medical school and pretend to be corpses under sheets, then in the middle of the night, when Stubbs is all alone, they’ll appear to rise from the dead. They end up in the company of a real corpse, a dead maniac from the local asylum; but Stubbs, taking no chances, ties the bodies down with rope. And then the maniac turns out not to be dead but resting. His mania, it turns out, gives him great strength, and he easily snaps the ropes, driving Stubbs away and grabbing the narrator before collapsing.

Stubbs is left with lasting trauma, to a lesser extent so is the narrator, while the maniac dies after his collapse and “his gaunt skeleton was one of the principal decorations at our graduation dance.” It’s not an aggressively awful story, but doesn’t add up to much. The madman rises and falls at plot-convenient intervals, the sense of Stubbs’ terror doesn’t come off, and indeed Stubbs remains vestigial as a character. Perhaps the most notable moment is the point when the students are bound by the rope while the madman prowls around. Luckily for the plot, the maniac snaps the ropes for no obvious reason, and events unfold from there.

Not an especially rewarding tale, then, but by the standards of this issue not too bad. The stories in this fourth issue of Weird Tales simply aren’t that good. Few can even be said to be consistent from start to finish. And surprisingly few have any fantastic or science-fictional element. Horror is more common, but the issue’s still a mixed bag in terms of how we now define genre.

Presumably by this point Baird had run through a good chunk of whatever inventory of stories he started out with, and is drawing from the slush pile to fill out the magazine. He couldn’t pay much, due to the magazine’s strained finances, so I suspect he wouldn’t be able to commission many stories from established writers. All of which is to say that it’s normal for the tonal unity of the first couple of issues to fade, and I think there is overall less of a focus on mania and imprisonment in the magazine’s fiction. It does still have a clear interest in what one might call extreme mental states and in unusual situations. But while the editorial side of the magazine is building an identity, the fiction doesn’t generate much of a sense of what makes the Unique Magazine unique.

The real problem for Weird Tales is that this issue is worse than the last issue, which wasn’t as good as the issue before, which wasn’t as good as the issue before. Barring the Poe reprint, there aren’t any stories here on a level with “The Floor Above” in the May issue or “Beyond the Door” in the April issue. Baird has a small stable of writers he’s turned to for multiple stories over these issues, but the quality of their output is variable. One might reasonably conclude that the health of the magazine will depend on finding at least one contributor who can regularly produce high-quality material every month. As it happens, that contributor will appear next month, if only in the letters column.

Find all my posts about Weird Tales here!

---

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.