I meant to start into a runthrough of 'Weird Tales' three years ago to celebrate the centennial of its birth but apparently I had other priorities, so I'm easing in a little late. Of course, that's hardly a trivial task as there are series already in motion, multi-part stories that started in earlier issues and authors of note who had been building their names for a while, so I've hopped backward often to read what I missed. I plan on gradually catching up with those older issues. It isn't as vast a task as it seems, given that 'Weird Tales' didn't really stabilise until November 1924 when Farnsworth Wright became its second editor. I'm not that far behind.

There's nothing particular long in this issue, the two novellas broken up over multiple issues. 'The Devil-Ray' is the new one, with the first of its three parts here. 'The Derelict Mine' is the existing one, on its second instalment of three. Otherwise, there are two novelettes, the cover story, 'The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee', and a first sequel to the previous issue's short story, 'Duval's Weird Experiment'. Paul Duval returns here and would again for a third outing in December 1926. Other than those, everything is a short story or poem, with even the Jules de Grandin story the former, as the shortest and least substantial of the series thus far.

'The Ghosts of Steamboat Coulee' is the cover story and it's a good one from Arthur J. Burks. He's a prolific writer, one of those who racked up a million words a year and whose quality thus varied immensely, but I had a blast with this one. It's his sixth story for 'Weird Tales', not including a five part series of 'Strange Tales from Santo Domingo', and it's an unusual one, a weird western and a ghost story wrapped up together. It's easy to see through some parts of it but it doesn't matter a jot. Burks keeps layering on the trauma. His protagonist is a soldier dying slowly from the effects of walking through a village in Flanders without a gas mask who now has to deal with a heady mix of snakes, bobcats, isolation, ghosts, murder and eventually arrest. I liked it a lot.

I liked the first part of Joel Martin Nichols, Jr.'s 'The Devil-Ray', but it's very much a setup for the story still to come. We're in the Austrian countryside with a bunch of American thieves looking at a ten foot wide strip of dead grass and the various dead creatures inside it. They've come for the Hapsburg crown jewels they believe are kept either in Castle Blennerhof or the nearby villa. The suggestion is a half a million, without identifying whether that's pounds, dollars, maybe Austrian schillings. What's the exchange rate on that in the era of the euro? The dead strip is surely due to the actions of a mysterious plane, but there's also a gigantic automobile, a mined drawbridge and a hefty dose of weird science. Only one of the thieves will return next month for part two.

So to the latest Jules de Grandin, which is rather a disappointment. The French professor debuted in October 1925 and has continued unabated ever since, this being his fifth adventure. I absolutely adored the first three gruesome entries though the convenient fourth was a clear step down. This is another one but it's also the shortest by far and that's telling. It's 'The Dead Hand' and it owes a great deal to Poe's 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar'. de Grandin and Dr. Trowbridge take a look at a couple of robberies, where the thief wasn't seen but a floating hand was. It wraps up far too quickly and easily and it's all clearly not up to the standard of the first three stories.

Filling the final page of this story is a message that the publisher will supply copies of each of the four earlier issues of 'Weird Tales' that featured Jules de Grandin stories for 25c a pop, post-paid. Do you think Popular Fiction Publishing Company would still honour that if I wrote to them today? There's no expiry date listed for the offer. Then again, they were bought in 1938 and I'm sure that I'd need to follow quite the trail to figure out who owns them today.

The next three stories are pretty routine, two from regular contributors and one from a famous name appearing for the first time. Frank Owen's 'The Silent Trees' is a dreamlike story built on a Chinese folk legend and set in Canton. The narrator goes with Yuan Yung to the island of Lun Pei Lo, which has been uncannily silent after death stopped her singing. It's an opium dream, or is it? 'The Man Who Was Saved' is an entirely average story about a sea monster from B. W. Sliney. One man survives the 'Scudder' being grabbed by the 'Pacific Belle', only to become the one man who survives the 'Pacific Belle'. It could easily grow into a sort of Wandering Jew legend by way of the Unsinkable Molly Brown, but it doesn't have the ambition to do that.

That leaves the debutant, a certain August W. Derleth. I was surprised to see him pop up so early in 'Weird Tales'. He already sounds like H. P. Lovecraft in the opening, featuring a letter from the late Sir Harry Everett Barclay of London, written at his moorland summer home. That home is the Bat's Belfry of the title, a nickname given Lorhville Manor, former home of Baronet Lohrville and still home to an agreeable collection of old books. Barclay apparently dies both of terror and loss of blood, which ought to sound mysterious but doesn't because it's clearly a vampire story. It isn't a great one, but Derleth would be back and he'd improve.

So to the Paul Duval sequel. As we read in the previous issue, he developed a novel ray that makes the souls of the departed not just visible to us but accessible for interaction. Appropriately given that, Duval died in the first story but returns here anyway because his lifeless body escapes from Baird's Sanitarium and his soul would very much like to be reunited with it. That will take the help of Dr. Henry Chaptel, Duval's friend, who gets to experience the Other Side himself this time out. The story is 'Queen of the Vortex' and we meet the titular lady and learn plenty about the Second Cycle, in which all is thought. This isn't unenjoyable but it's outrageous fantasy in the vein of 'The Girl in the Golden Atom' and other Ray Cummings stories.

Up next is the eleventh 'Weird Story Reprint', this time 'The Werewolf' by H. B. Marryat. He's the author better known as Frederick Marryat or Captain Marryat, author of 'Mr. Midshipman Easy', 'The Children of the New Forest' and 'The Phantom Ship', and this is a story taken from the latter, where it was known as 'The White Wolf of the Hartz Mountains'. It's entirely traditional but then it was written in 1839 and is apparently the earliest story to feature a female werewolf. I liked it anyway, as part fairy tale, part folk warning and part horror story.

If you hadn't read it between 1839 and 1926, it follows Krantz, a rich serf, from rural Transylvania to rural Germany, to which he travels with his three children after killing his wife and their lord in bed together. Caesar, Hermann and Marcella are just nine, seven and five when we meet them at the foot of a great mountain, up which their father hunts a great white wolf. He eventually finds a lost father and daughter from Transylvania instead, who tell a similar story. Wilfred of Barnsdorf turns out to be Krantz's second cousin and, after time passes, weds young Christina to an odd vow her father requires. The rest isn't too surprising to us now but probably was in 1839 and still holds plenty of power today.

The Henry S. Whitehead story, 'Across the Gulf', is a relatively mild one for him. It was his seventh story for 'Weird Tales' but it would be his next one that would make his name. I'm looking forward to 'Jumbee' in September. This story, about a Scottish lawyer whose mother dies but returns in his dreams to comfort him, contrary to the legend that dreaming about your dead mother presages disaster, isn't remotely in the same class. It's surrounded by a couple of short poems, a second by Charles Baudelaire in translation by Clark Ashton Smith, who has only appeared thus far in 'Weird Tales' in verse, and a debut from A. Leslie called 'The Moon Dance'. Both are decent. Neither does much more.

Returning to short stories, there are three more before 'The Derelict Mine' continues and they're a varied set. Edith Lyle Ragsdale's 'Vials of Wrath' is quick, powerful and brutal and somehow gets away with its setting without being tagged racist. It's the story of Jim Carson, a cadaverous figure on the verge of the death for which he's ached for seven years, and it tells of his missionary era in Africa when he loved the locals in his flock but eventually faced off against medicine man Mogo, a practioner of "the most revolting forms of voodooism". He practices cannibalism, human sacrifice and wages "war against the spread of civilization and religion". We're likely to read the latter just a little different nowadays but the rest is as abhorrent today as it was in 1926. It's a revenge story and a powerful one, also the last of three from Ragsdale.

'The Experiment of Erich Weigert' by Sewell Peaslee Wright gets brutal as well, but in a different way, one clearly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe. Mr. Saylor lectures about radio and Erich Weigert, "a mysterious recluse with scientific learnings" hears him and invites him to tour his own laboratory. Saylor is looking forward to "transmission of photographs by radio", which sounds like television; someone show him 'Jersey Shore' quickly. Weigert's working on thought transmission, which ends up colliding with the obvious fact that Saylor and Vera Weigert, Erich's wife, fall madly in love.

That leaves James Cocks's 'The Confession of a Madman', which is an odd tale that perfectly fits a tagline like the one 'Weird Tales' boasts: "the unique magazine". We're in Padstow, Cornwall, as a ship hits the Dunebar. Tom Edivinn once again demonstrates his heroism by rescuing the one man he finds in the tempestuous sea but then tells a story in the Cornish Arms that night that puts an entirely different spin on things. He'll be sixty at Christmas, he says, but he was insane for ten full years from twenty-five to thirty-five. He claims that he really spent those ten years as a different person, a boy called Hyrum May, whose young death released him back into his own body. If you're sharp, you'll see where this story is going to go. I appreciated its singular approach.

And, with quick mention for the famous Jean Lahors poem, 'The Dance of Death', which wraps up this issue as easily the most effective such this month, what's left is the second of three parts of 'The Derelict Mine' by Frank A. Mochnant. The first part, in the previous issue, really took its time and never got past mildly spooky. We're still in Australia but it feels like we're in Paris because it milks the mindset of 'The Phantom of the Opera', merely in the derelict mine of the title instead of the Paris Opera. Of course, we're focused on both James Seymour Geraldtons this time out, the uncle clearly having plans for the nephew which we'll have to wait until the final part to grasp.

I've been talking about the ads in my other pulp reviews, so should do the same here. There's just one before the contents, from LaSalle Extension University, which apparently wants "men to keep pace with R. B. Cook". Who he, you ask? Well, in 1919, he was a bookkeeper. In 1923, after training through LaSalle, he was directing salesforce of seventy salesmen for B. A. Railton Company. It's a busy ad, with more text than any story page here. The only other full page ad is the back cover, a bit of a cheat because it's the publisher hawking a dozen detective story books for a buck. That's a buck for all of them, not each.

Otherwise, there are a slew of tiny ads, including a classified seeking railway postal clerks and two separate ones seeking song poems. I love song poems and hadn't realised they went back this far. The tiny ads mostly offer the usual snake oil, not just for blackheads but also, well, pep, courtesy of Castleberry's Morning Glory Special Tablets. Oh my! We can find happiness by ordering one 512 page book called 'Safe Counsel' in a plain wrapper, cure our tobacco or snuff habit for a buck and a half or even obtain "Success, Wealth and Happiness" with the "Rare and beautiful Talisman Ring" offered for $3.95.

What shocked me most were the gun ads, plural. Whether we're ordering a 25 calibre pistol from the Universal Sales Co. for $6.95 or one of a choice from the Edwards Import Trading Group, $8.95 or $9.65, we don't have to pay now. They'll both send guns just because we asked them to, as long as we pay the postman. "SEND NO MONEY." Just "Pay on Delivery Plus Postage" or "Pay Postman. Our Price, Plus Postage". The rest of the world looks at the U.S. right now and despairs about the lack of gun laws. What must they have thought in 1926!

Next month: 'The Derelict Mine' concludes and 'The Devil-Ray' continues. The cover story will be a Howard R. Marsh story called 'The Foot Fetish', which is absolutely not about what you think. ~~ Hal C F Astell