Fritz Leiber's "Spider Mansion" and the Old Hand [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

Fritz Leiber was an innovator. If he wrote in a genre, he always tried to do something to improve that type of storytelling. This desire to do more than the same old thing won him many awards (five Hugos, a Nebula, and a World Fantasy Award, as well as the Gandalf for Lifetime Achievement) and accolades in the decades after the old pulps had crumbled to dust. But during the 1940s and '50s, originality had a price.

Take Weird Tales for example. Leiber's most famous early horror story did not appear in "The Unique Magazine." "Smoke Ghost," which featured a spirit of evil created by a modern city, appeared in Unknown Worlds (October 1941) where John W Campbell pushed the definition of modern fantasy. Leiber wanted to write horror fiction using some of the same ideas as HP Lovecraft (though never in a slavish pastiche kind of way), taking the boogie men out of the haunted castles and European forests and bringing them to the streets of America. There was only one problem. Innovation courts rejection.

This was the simple economic truth of the pulp era. Fritz Leiber was not some wealthy heir, despite his father being the famous actor Fritz Leiber Sr. He needed the money the pulps provided. So do you innovate or imitate? This question drove Fritz to talk to other pulpsters. In Discovering Modern Horror Fiction II, Michael E Stamm explains:

"...At the time Leiber was having trouble finding a metier that would guarantee consistent sales to Weird Tales, then the best and certainly most famous market for horror fiction. In talking to an Old Hand who'd been selling to WT for years, Leiber got a list of the sort of things the magazine could be expected to like in weird fiction: giant spiders, mad scientists, lonely haunted houses, giant dwarfs, innocent bystanders, etc. As an experiment - with definite humorous overtones - Fritz Leiber put all of these disparate elements into one story - "Spider Mansion" - and submitted it to Weird Tales - which bought it immediately."

The plot of "Spider Mansion" (Weird Tales, September 1942) is familiar to anyone who has seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A man and his mate end up in a creepy mansion, wanting to do nothing more than leave. The inhabitants of the house are weird and creepy. Secrets eventually unveil a terrible truth that the couple discover, then flee. The owner of the house is not Frankenfurter but Malcolm Orne, a famed midget who has mysteriously grown into a giant. With Orne is his beautiful wife, Cynthia, a figure right out of an Ann Radcliffe gothic novel.

The narrator and his wife Helen come to the house during a storm, eat a mysterious dinner during which Orne explains how his dead brother Martin had created a formula that controls size. Their host leaves the table to deal with his mastiff, though the sounds the listeners hear are those of shuffling and skittering. During the absence Cynthia gives the couple a secret message written on her hankie in lipstick. It says "Get out. For your lives."

Intending to rescue Cynthia, the narrator discovers the secret of Orne House. The woman has been placed in a giant spider's web, which also contains Martin Orne, not dead but twisted by his ordeal in the web. Using grease and a sword from the mansion's hallway, the narrator frees the captives but Malcolm Orne appears. He has the unconscious Helen. The narrator engages Orne's pet giant spider while the two brothers fight. Malcolm crushes his brother's skull with his giant strength but dies when the wounded spider attacks him. The room catches on fire and the visitors and Cynthia Orne flee.

This scenario contains so many gothic props that the reader suspects the author of a touch of parody. As Stamm puts it, it has "definite humorous overtones." Stamm also points out the story doesn't read like Leiber at all. John Pelan counters this in the introduction to The Black Gondolier and Other Stories (2001). "Spider Mansion" despite its gothic trappings is still a story of science gone wrong, a theme Leiber would use again.

I've tried to discover who the Old Hand is but haven't found any thing definite. Looking at the excellent stats in "Who Wrote the Most?" by Terence E. Hanley at Tellers of Weird Tales and thinking about the publication date, September 1942, this eliminates HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard (who had died), and Clark Ashton Smith (who had retired and certainly wouldn't have made those suggestions anyway. He too struggled with innovation vs imitation.) In 1942, Henry Kuttner, Paul Ernst and Manly Wade Wellman had sold to WT but wouldn't be considered "old hands." Ray Bradbury, Allison V Harding, and Frank Owen all came after or started about the same time as Leiber.

This leaves some likelier suspects, starting with Seabury Quinn. He wrote the most stories for WT, at 145. The author of the most popular series, the Jules de Grandin occult detective stories, there is a good chance that he was the old hand. De Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge meet many mad scientists and misshapen freaks in Harrisonville, New Jersey. But would Quinn have been so kind to his competition? Unlike many of the "Lovecraft Circle" he wasn't involved in literary games of Cthulhu Mythos, sharing and swapping ideas, but was a hard working editor for the funeral industry.

The second most prolific writer was August Derleth (101 stories). He would have been more likely, also being a correspondent of HP Lovecraft. Derleth would publish Leiber's first book, Night's Black Agents in 1947. But Auggie wrote ghost stories like the classic "Mr. George" under his pseudonym, Stephen Grendon. The list of weird topics doesn't sound like his work. I think Derleth would have been more likely to direct Leiber towards Lovecraftian pastiche or English ghost stories in the MR James mode.

Edmond Hamilton, at number three, with 76 stories, is another good possibility. Hamilton's very first story at WT featured a giant invisible spider in "The Monster-God of Mamurth." Ed also wrote the most and best science fiction in the magazine, which would have appealed to Leiber. The advice doesn't sound like the ideas Hamilton would have promoted though. He didn't write gothic retread, but liked to explore sf and fantasy ideas. His "The Metal Giants" (December 1926) was one of the first killer robot stories. "He That Hath Wings" (July 1938) invented the idea of a mutant with wings (not Stan Lee). Hamilton was an innovator who found a home at Weird Tales, but even he would leave the pulps four years later to write Superman comics.

Robert Bloch, HP Lovecraft's protege, wrote 66 stories for Weird Tales. He started out doing Lovecraft pastiche, but slowly found his own thing. By 1942, Bloch was writing in his famous style of black humor with "A Sorcerer Runs For Sheriff" and "The Eager Dragon." He was also writing longer, more advanced pieces like "Hell on Earth." Again, I doubt he would have handed Fritz such antiquated advice as mad scientists and giant dwarfs. He was moving away from this type of tale and could only have applauded stories like "Smoke Ghost."

After Seabury Quinn, the most likely candidate for the Old Hand is Arthur J Burks at 29 stories. His score isn't that high, but Burks was one of the million-words-a-year men, writing for many different pulps. He bragged that he could generate a new plot from any ordinary household object. ("Oh no, the Egg Whisk of Doom!") The advice given Fritz sounds more like a recipe for the shudder pulps and Burks knew them well, having written a couple dozens tales for magazines like Horror Stories and Thrilling Mystery. The plot of an average shudder pulp story involved a supernatural-appearing situation that would be revealed at the end to be the work of a crazed dwarf.

No matter who the Old Hand was, Fritz Leiber only published eight stories with Weird Tales. After "Spider Mansion," Leiber wrote a few gems like "The Hound" (November 1942) in which he used Lovecraftian themes (along with the same title as a Lovecraft story), but in an urban setting. "The Dead Man" (November 1950) was the last of his WT stories. Editorial inflexibility at WT lost them one Leiber classic written in these years, the novel Conjure Wife (1943), setting the standard for modern urban horror. It appeared in John W Campbell's Unknown Worlds. Like with the sword-and-sorcery team of Fafhrd and Grey Mouser, Weird Tales had their chance, but passed on what would in retrospect be some of Leiber's best early work.

[UPDATE: GW Thomas solves the mystery of the Old Hand in the comments below.]

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Ted White's Fantastic: Short Heroic Fantasy [Guest Post]

By GW Thomas

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction began its life as The Magazine of Fantasy. By the second issue the words "and Science Fiction" had been added. Why? Because no pure Fantasy magazine had ever made it past five issues. Weird Tales had been more Horror than Fantasy. Unknown published John W Campbell's version of Fantasy, but a brand for Science Fiction readers, almost an anti-Fantasy at times. Cele Goldsmith and the long-running Fantastic knew this too and the mix had always been heavier to the SF side. During the early 1960s Goldsmith cultivated Sword and Sorcery writers like Fritz Leiber, bringing him back to magazine publishing with new Fafhrd and Grey Mouser tales. She also brought in new writers like John Jakes with Brak the Barbarian and Roger Zelazny with Dilvish the Damned. This continued until June 1965 when Goldsmith (now Lalli) left the publication when Fantastic was sold to Sol Cohen, with a change from monthly to a bi-monthly schedule.

Laili was replaced by Joseph Ross (Joseph Wrzos) who inherited a huge stockpile of stories from the old days of the Pulps. Fantastic became a reprint magazine, its first new issue containing only one original story, the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tale "Stardock". Ross published the small reserve of Fantasy tales purchased before the switch that included Avram Davidson's classic novel The Phoenix and the Mirror and "The Bells of Shoredan" by Zelazny. Amongst the reprints was the Pusadian tale "The Eye of Tandyla" by L Sprague de Camp (from Fantastic Adventures, May 1951). But Ross wasn't long for the position, being replaced by Harry Harrison and later Barry N Malzberg. Both Harrison and Malzberg would leave over the reprints that plagued the magazine. They wanted to edit a magazine of new, modern Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Fantastic needed a new editor. One who could present both quality Science Fiction and Fantasy. Cohen was willing to sell his reprints in other formats and leave the new editor to his work. A choice was found with Robert Silverberg's help: junior editor from FaSF, Ted White. For ten years White would create a magazine that featured intriguing works of Fantasy as well as decorate it with great artists including Jeff Jones, Mike Kaluta, Ken Kelly, Harry Roland, and Stephen Fabian (and occasionally Joe Staton's pieces that remind me of DoodleArt). And this with the major handicap of low pay, for Fantastic offered its writers only one-cent a word in a marketplace that usually paid three to five cents. By cultivating new writers and snapping up gems where he could, White offered stories that often were chosen for the Year's Best Fantasy collections and even won the occasional award.

White's debut was April 1969 and its contents were not spectacular, chosen by others. The only hint of what was to come was Fritz Leiber's review column on ER Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros. It would have to wait until December 1969 before a truly interesting Fantasy would appear. This was Piers Anthony's Arabian Nights inspired Hasan, which Anthony supported with an essay on Arabesque Fantasy.

April 1970 saw another Fafhrd and Gray Mouser tale, a series dating back to Goldsmith but one that White was happy to continue. "The Snow Women" is a tale of Fafhrd's youth set in the cold north. Two more would follow in later years, "Trapped in the Shadowlands" (November 1973) and "Under the Thumbs of the Gods" (April 1975). At this time Leiber was collecting his tales into the first collections of Lankhmar and the new material would later be included.

Also in the April 1970 issue was John Brunner's "The Wager Lost by Winning," part of his Traveller in Black series, of which he would continue with "Dread Empire" (April 1971). Brunner, a British author known for his Science Fiction, created something different in these tales of the odd little wizard who roams the world, and they would win him a place in the Thieves' World alumni eight years later.

June 1971 featured a new non-fiction series, "Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers" by L Sprague De Camp. This series of articles looked at classic Fantasy authors including Robert E Howard, HP Lovecraft, Fletcher Pratt, William Morris, L Ron Hubbard, TH White and JRR Tolkien, running off and on until 1976. These pieces offered intriguing insight into the lives and trials of Fantasy writers, leading de Camp to write the first major biographies of both Lovecraft (Lovecraft: A Biography), 1975) and Howard (Dark Valley Destiny, 1983).

February 1972 saw the first of the Michael Moorcock stories to appear in Fantastic, with "The Sleeping Sorceress" starring the albino superstar, Elric of Melnibone. Later the same year, Count Brass featuring Dorian Hawkmoon would appear in August 1972. Both characters would become one as Moorcock melded his multiverse together to include everyone from Elric to Sojan to Jerry Cornelius.

White published the magazine versions of several good heroic fantasy novels during his decade: The Crimson Witch (October 1970) by Dean R Koontz, which feels more like Sword and Planet, like Ted White's own "Wolf Quest" (April 1971), "The Forges of Nainland are Cold" by Avram Davidson (Ursus of Ultima Thule in book form) in August 1972, The Fallible Fiend by L Sprague de Camp (December 1972-February 1973), part of his Novaria series, "The Son of Black Morca" by Alexei and Cory Panshin (Earthmagic in paperback) in April-July 1973, The White Bull by Fred Saberhagen (November 1976) who was moving away from the robotic Berserkers to become a Fantasy bestseller, and The Last Rainbow by Parke Godwin (July 1978). All of which would populate the book racks of the 1980s.

August 1972 saw the beginning of a series of new Conan pastiches by L Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter. "The Witches of the Mist" (August 1972), "The Black Sphinx of Nebthu" (July 1973), "Red Moon of Zembabwei" (July 1974), and "Shadows in the Skull" (February 1975), all of which form Conan of Aquilonia. Lin Carter groused in his intros to Year's Best Fantasy about this book, which had been stuck in legal limbo with the collapse of Lancer. Finally free, it appeared serially in Fantastic then in paperback in 1977.

Several other Sword and Sorcery series got a new start or a first start in Fantastic. Lin Carter wrote new tales of Thongor's youth with "Black Hawk of Valkarth" (September 1974), "The City in the Jewel" (December 1975) and "Black Moonlight" (November 1976). He also offered posthumous collaborations with masters Robert E Howard in "The Tower of Time" (June 1975) - a James Allison reincarnation story - and with Clark Ashton Smith in verbose Mythos-heavy pieces, "The Scroll of Morloc" (October 1975) and "The Stair in the Crypt" (August 1976). The February 1977 issue featured an interview with Lin Carter that was informative about his days on the Ballantine Fantasy series and other Fantasy goings-on in the 1960s and 1970s.

Brian Lumley published some of his first Primal Lands tales, part Lovecraftian horror, part Sword and Sorcery in Fantastic. These included "Tharquest and the Lamia Orbiquita" (November 1976) and "How Kank Thad Returned to Bhur-esh" (June 1977) . Lumley's Fantasy harkens back to Weird Tales and the works of HP Lovecraft's Dreamlands and Clark Ashton Smith's sardonic fantasies.

Another good start was made by Australian writer Keith Taylor, who wrote about wandering singer and swordsman Felimid mac Fel. These stories were the embryonic form of the book Bard, which Taylor began under the pseudonym Denis More. "Fugitives in Winter" (October 1975), "The Forest of Andred" (November 1976), and "Buried Silver" (February 1977) form the first part of the series that went on to contain five volumes with further tales in the new Weird Tales in the 1990s.

Other heroic fantasy pieces included "The Holding of Kolymar" (October 1972) by Gardner F Fox, "The Night of Dreadful Silence" (September 1973) by Glen Cook, destined for fame with his Black Company in the 1980s, "Death from the Sea" by Harvey Schreiber (August 1975), "Two Setting Suns" (May 1976) by Karl Edward Wagner, part of the Kane series , and "Nemesis Place" (April 1978) by David Drake, featuring Dama and Vettius, Drake's two Roman heroes.

Not all of White's choices were Sword and Sorcery. He published the wonderful "Will-o-Wisp"(September-November 1974) by Thomas Burnett Swann, "War of the Magicians" (November 1973) by William Rostler, "The Dragon of Nor-Tali" (February 1975) by Juanita Coulsen, "The Lonely Songs of Loren Dorr" (May 1976) by George RR Martin (long before Game of Thrones) and "A Malady of Magicks" (October 1978) by Craig Shaw Gardner, beginning the popular humorous Fantasy series featuring Ebenezum.

By the end of 1978 Fantastic was on a quarterly schedule and losing readership. White had grown more dissatisfied with Sol Cohen, wanting to take the magazine into the slick market. He also wanted a raise. January 1979 was his last issue before he left to edit Heavy Metal magazine. He was replaced with neophyte Elinor Mavor. Another period of reprints followed and the look of the magazine declined. Mavor was finding her feet with new authors like Wayne Wightman, Brad Linaweaver and artists like Janny Wurts. She published Stephen Fabian's graphic story "Daemon" (July 1979-July 1980), but the only gem to appear before amalgamation with Amazing Stories was the two part serial of The White Isle by Darrell Schweister, with illustrations by Gary Freeman, in the April and July 1980 issues. A last gasp of wonder before Fantastic was gone. It was the end of an era, but too few even knew what was lost. Other magazines would attempt to do what Ted White had done, through self sacrifice and continuous networking, but none would ever be such a haven for short heroic fantasy again.

GW Thomas has appeared in over 400 different books, magazines and ezines including The Writer, Writer's Digest, Black October Magazine and Contact. His website is gwthomas.org. He is editor of Dark Worlds magazine.

Misty swordsmen hate cephalopods

By Geoff Taylor [Pulp Covers]

Tarzan 101 | Authorized Sequels

Celebrating Tarzan's 101st anniversary by walking through Scott Tracy Griffin's Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration.

There have been countless unauthorized stories and fanfictions about Tarzan over the decades, but Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. has put its stamp of approval on only ten novels so far featuring the ape man written by someone other than Burroughs. Griffin actually only mentions nine, but another has been published since Griffin's book and I've included it below.

Tarzan and the Valley of Gold by Fritz Leiber (1966)

The first authorized, non-Burroughs Tarzan book was actually the novelization of the Mike Henry movie, Tarzan and the Valley of Gold. Like any good novelization, Hugo-winner Leiber (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser) included several elements from Clare Huggaker's original script that didn't make it into the movie, including a carwash fight and using submachinegun bolos to bring down a helicopter.

Tarzan Alive by Philip José Farmer (1972)

An Adventureblog reader emailed to ask if I would consider doing a separate blog post on Tarzan Alive, that's how important this book is to Tarzan fans. I'm looking for an angle of attack on that, but in the meantime, Tarzan Alive (subtitled: "The Definitive Biography of Lord Greystoke") was written by another Hugo-winner (multiple times, in addition to a couple of Nebulas, a Locas, and various Lifetime Achievements).

Farmer's best known works are his World of Tiers and Riverworld series, but he's probably most famous for his Wold Newton theory, the idea that all the greatest adventure heroes (from Captain Blood and Sherlock Holmes to James Bond and Nero Wolfe) not only live in the same universe, but are mostly related to each other. Farmer first presented that idea in Tarzan Alive and continued it in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life.

Tarzan Alive is written as if Tarzan was an actual, historical person whom Burroughs fictionalized in order to protect the ape man's privacy. Farmer takes the role of a biographer who looks into other branches of the Clayton family tree while also exploring the factual possibility of Burroughs' ideas.

Bunduki by J.T. Edson (1975)

Edson was mostly known for Westerns when he approached ERB, Inc. about using Tarzan in one of his novels. A fan of crossovers and Farmer's Wold Newton idea, Edson loved including historical (Wyatt Earp, for instance) and other people's fictional characters (hello, Marshal Dillon) in his stories. He also created a complicated genealogy that connected many of his own characters, including James Allenvale "Bunduki" Gunn, cousin of the hero of Edson's Rockabye Country series.

Bunduki also happens to be married to Dawn Drummond-Clayton, Tarzan's great-granddaughter and the grandniece of Bulldog Drummond. Bunduki met Dawn when his parents were killed in the Mau Mau Uprising (an historical conflict that took place in Kenya in the '50s) and he was adopted by Tarzan and Jane. During the novel, Bunduki and Dawn are abducted by aliens and taken to the world of Zillikian, located on the other side of the sun in the same orbit as Earth.

Edson wrote four more novels in the series (Bunduki and Dawn, Sacrifice for the Quagga God, Fearless Master of the Jungle, and the unpublished Amazons of Zillikian) as well as four short story prequels set on Earth, but his ERB, Inc. contracted having ended, he left out any references to Tarzan in them.

Tarzan: The Lost Adventure by Joe Lansdale (1995)

The only book on this list that I've read (so far), The Lost Adventure was originally serialized by Dark Horse Comics in four volumes. Based on an unfinished manuscript by Burroughs, the editions had covers by Arthur Suydam and interior illustrations by Thomas Yeates, Charles Vess, Gary Gianni, and Michael Kaluta.

Lansdale (Bubba Ho-Tep) didn't just finish Burroughs' story, but rewrote it in his own voice. That said, it's got an authentic Burroughs feel to it with two groups invading the jungle to look for a lost city. The good group is led by a professor and his daughter, and there's an evil group of deserters from the French Foreign Legion. Jad-bal-ja and Nkima also make appearances.

The whole story has since been collected in one volume.

Tarzan: The Epic Adventures by R.A. Salvatore (1996)

Salvatore (TSR's Forgotten Realms series) wrote the novelization of the pilot for the Tarzan: The Epic Adventures TV show. The pilot itself was a loose retelling of Burroughs' The Return of Tarzan mixed with a trip to Pellucidar.

The Dark Heart of Time by Philip José Farmer (1999)

Not a sequel to Tarzan Alive, Farmer's second Tarzan book is all about Burroughs' fictional character. It's set between Tarzan the Untamed and Tarzan the Terrible and reveals additional details about Tarzan's search for Jane in those books.

Though this was his only other official Tarzan novel, Farmer also wrote unauthorized stories in which Tarzan met Sherlock Holmes ("The Adventure of the Peerless Peer") and Doc Savage (the Nine trilogy: A Feast Unknown, Lord of the Trees, and The Mad Goblin).

Another unauthorized book, the time travel story called Time's Last Gift, references the Wold Newton universe while also serving as a prequel to Farmer's trilogy about prehistoric Opar (Hadon of Ancient Opar, Flight to Opar, and The Song of Kwasin).

Tarzan: The Greystoke Legacy by Andy Briggs (2011)

I know Briggs as the writer on the last couple of issues of the comics adaptation of Kong: King of Skull Island, but I'm curious about his authorized reboot of the Tarzan legend for the Young Adult audience. I talked briefly with him about it when it was announced a couple of years ago, but haven't gotten around to reading it yet. In The Greystoke Legacy, he reimagines Tarzan as a modern teenager stranded in the jungle. With a strong environmental theme, the book recasts Jane as the daughter of the boss at an illegal logging camp.

Tarzan: The Jungle Warrior by Andy Briggs (2012)

The sequel to Greystoke Legacy has young Jane digging into Tarzan's past while the ape boy tracks Nikolas Rokoff, a hunter who's poached a baby gorilla.

Jane: The Woman Who Loved Tarzan by Robin Maxwell (2012)

Maxwell (The Secret Diary of Anne Boleyn) is best known for her historical novels, but she turned her research to early Twentieth Century Africa for this retelling of Tarzan's story from Jane's perspective.

Tarzan: The Savage Lands by Andy Briggs (2013)

The third in Brigg's YA series introduces Opar and La to the updated series.