Murray Leinster

by Billiee J. Stallings; Jo-an J. Evans

  In the summer before the election, Will gave a lift to a man walking by the side of the road on his way to the Court House. Many people still walked everywhere in those days, and drivers were expected to pick them up. Since Will drove into the village twice a day for the mail, he did a lot of transporting of neighbors and always enjoyed the opportunity for conversation. Since the suitability of a Catholic for president was a major concern at the time, the subject often came up. On this particular day, his passenger expressed his worries, and Will discussed, in his usual thorough manner, Catholicism in general, why there was no chance of the pope running the country from Rome, and some of his own beliefs. His passenger scratched his head, thought a bit, and finally said, “Mr. Jenkins, I don’t understand how you can believe something that just ain’t so.”

  The whole country was suspicious of Catholics at that time. Although the activities of the Ku Klux Klan had diminished in the 1870s, there was a second Klan started around 1915. Members opposed minorities, including blacks and Jews, labor unions and Roman Catholics. This time it was a national organization, not restricted to the South and very strong in other areas of the country, but there is no doubt that there were members and sympathizers in Gloucester.

  When Alanson Crosby, a good friend of Will’s, was editor of the weekly Gloucester Gazette, he printed something that offended the Klan, and they threatened him. Will and Mary invited him and his wife to stay at Ardudwy in Clay Bank where outside floodlights could be turned on offering some protection. They did stay, but, fortunately, the Klan did not turn up.

  Lewis E. Allen, editor of the Gazette when Alanson Crosby was on leave writing a book (and later Will’s brother-in-law), came to Gloucester from Ohio State University’s School of Journalism. He kept in touch with Charles E. Yost, his former editor at the Fayette Review in Ohio, writing about Gloucester and what was going on there. He received the following letter from Yost dated November 16, 1928, which said in part:

  I do not think you need to fear [those] people. If they are at all like the Ku Klux here, all you need to do is keep a sharp lookout behind after dark. And yet, a mob like that has about as much sense as an angleworm. It may be well for you to go armed. I would hate to have you get into trouble and possibly shot by such people. It wouldn’t be so bad to get shot by an intelligent civilized man, but such a bunch, no.

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  Will took his typewriter anywhere. Here he is in the master bedroom circa 1930.

  Perhaps because of the isolation of the house, Will did keep a gun. It was an automatic pistol, and he slept with it under his pillow and carried it in the glove compartment of the car when he traveled. It seemed very out of character for a man who, though he loved living in the country, in some ways never really adapted to it. He did not hunt or fish. When he got up every morning, he put on a white shirt and tie, and, except in hottest weather, a jacket, and sat down at his typewriter as if he were in an office in the city.

  Will’s own children were well aware that the gun was a “do not touch,” but one time when relatives were visiting, a young cousin found it and shot it through the bathroom door, fortunately missing everyone. After that, Will was more careful about putting it away.

  A third daughter, Wenllian Louise Jenkins, was born in 1928. Will said Mary had promised him twin boys for his birthday, June 16, and, instead, he got another girl two days early on June 14. He said her name was the Welsh feminine for William (it isn’t), and she was nicknamed “Billy.” Will called her “Bill.” Later, in her teens, she changed the spelling of “Billy” to a more feminine “Billee,” but Will continued all his life to spell her nickname “Billy.”

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  Will told Billee that she was named after her 14th great-grandmother and that the Welsh name started with a “G.” However, he used the spelling without the “G” for the supposed ancestor when he typed the version of the family tree that went beyond Governor John Jenkins back to Colwyn of Ardudwy. He probably preferred the spelling without the “G” as it was closer to William.

  Later research on the name Gwenllian shows that it was the name of the daughter of the last real prince of Wales, Prince Llywelyn, who was killed by order of King Edward I of England, December 11, 1282. The infant princess was a threat to the crown, but her life was spared, and she was banished to a priory in Lincolnshire where she died in 1377. The king took the title prince of Wales for his eldest son, where it remains.

  Work continued on Ardudwy, the Clay Bank house, but sometimes things did not progress fast enough to suit Mary. When she wanted to open up the living room by removing a wall, and, it didn’t happen quickly enough, she got impatient. One morning, Will woke up to loud noise and found her attacking the wall with a hammer.

  Clay Bank house around the late 1930s.

  Dining room fireplace at Ardudwy.

  Reliable electricity had been added when a Delco plant was installed in one of the ancient outbuildings on the property. It was a type of generator that used batteries to supply the house with electricity. From then on, the building was referred to as the power house. (The Rural Electrification Act bringing electric power to unserved areas was signed in 1936 during Franklin Five • Marriage: The 1920s

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  Roosevelt’s presidency.) The outhouse or outdoor toilet that Will called the escusado was retired, and indoor plumbing was installed in a small room they had playfully labeled the Neckers’ Nook. The new bathroom was papered with silver building paper and called the can.

  Eventually, there were installed a new roof, new dormers and bay windows, and the screened porch was glassed in. To entertain the children, Will and Mary painted murals in the kitchen showing dinosaurs picnicking. Later they stripped the paint from the doors and woodwork, as well as from the 1820 mantels, and added knotty pine panels to the end walls of the living and dining room. They were interested in making a comfortable home, not restoring a museum, and like many other homeowners in the 1920s and 1930s, they embraced the charm of spinning wheels, cobbler’s benches, braided rugs and ladder back chairs. They took a colonial house and made it Colonial Revival in the fashion made famous by Wallace Nutting. They made it comfortable and livable.

  Will used his inventiveness in household projects. He converted doors to the kitchen and bathroom into extra storage by adding shelves to the full thickness of the doorjamb with slats to keep things from falling out.

  Will knew a little Spanish (therefore the escusado), and a smattering of other languages including Latin. Will’s brain was like a sponge. He was a quick study and loved to learn new things. Mary’s brother John had married Carmen DuBlan, daughter of a proud Mexican family reputed to be descended from Emperor Maximilian’s finance minister, Ignacio DuBlan. He probably picked up his knowledge of Spanish from those in-laws, and he loved to drop in words or phrases like escusado for toilet and the admonition to the children

  “en boca cerrada, no entran moscas” (“flies do not fly in a closed mouth”).

  The family tradition was that the DuBlan family was angry when their son married a gringo and sent the mother and three children back to New York when he died. Carmen was a translator at the League of Nations. Her brother

  “Natcho” was a wannabe writer who mixed with the same literary crowd that Will had belonged to in New York. Will and Natcho carried on a correspondence by letter over many years while Natcho traveled back and forth to Mexico and Venezuela on various jobs, planning stories, novels and plays that never quite came to completion. This relationship was probably the origin of Will’s stories of being involved in the early 20th century Mexican revolution.

  Will’s family having grown to five, he retired the old Packard and bought a seven passenger Pierce Arrow. He was so proud of this car that he kept a floor mat as a souvenir after it was sold, showing it to his daughter Jo-an many years later. Around the same time, he bought Mary a gray squirrel coat and the older girls muskrat coats
with raccoon collars. Life was good.

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  Betty, Mary and Billee in the Pierce Arrow at left, Mary and Will standing center, Rudy Mandola, far right, with unidentified friends circa 1930.

  Then a tragedy occurred. On October 1, 1929, when Will’s brother George Jr., was 39 years old, he died of appendicitis in Newark, New Jersey, where he was living with his mother, Mamie. As is common in such times, Will needed to find someone to blame and turned on his mother. He accused her of not getting a doctor to treat George, but instead, sitting around with her Christian Scientist friends and praying over him.

  Mamie had always been an Episcopalian, but, lonely in Newark and away from family and friends in Portsmouth where she had lived all her life, she had found friends and companionship in the local Christian Science Reading Room. Although Will was in Gloucester in southern Virginia and nowhere near Newark at the time of George’s illness, he decided that, because of these friendships, George had not had proper medical treatment. Sadly, death from appendicitis was not uncommon in those days before antibiotics. One of Mary’s young nieces died of appendicitis at around the same time, but Will did not consider this, and his grief at his brother George’s death made him irrational. For years, Will would tell people: “My mother killed my brother.” There was a second issue. Will insisted that George was married to a friend of theirs named Helen Hysell. George had been helping to support Mamie, but Will wanted the money George left to her at his death given to Helen and was outraged when she refused.

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  There is no documentation of any kind that there was ever a wedding between Helen and George. Will’s wife, Mary, always said firmly that they were never married. Supporting that belief is that the 1930 census records (a year after George died) show Helen Hysell (not Jenkins) living with her mother in Essex County, New Jersey. Mamie said to a granddaughter years later,

  “George told me he didn’t have to marry that woman.” Perhaps it was Will’s strong puritanical streak that made him believe that what must have been a close, possibly intimate, relationship between George and Helen needed to have included marriage. He had an old fashioned, almost Victorian view of women and once told his granddaughter Gail, “When I grew up, it was immoral to kiss a woman above her wrist.” One of his editors, unsuccessfully trying to get him to spice up his stories said, “Will Jenkins doesn’t believe in sex.” That probably stood him in good stead in later years with Astounding Science-Fiction. Kay Tarrant, assistant editor in John Campbell’s day, was notoriously straight laced and blue-penciled anything the slightest bit questionable. Although Will’s speech was colorful and his kitchen stories legend, his published stories were strictly family rated, and he never gave her a problem.

  Helen Hysell appears as one of the authors of “The Day of the Dead” (Chapter 6) along with Will, Leslie Burton Blades, Rosalind Blades, George B. Jenkins, Jr., and Cynthia Wooloford, which was printed in Black Mask Magazine in July 1921. In the 1920 census, she listed her occupation as “magazine writer,” however, only one other published piece can be traced to this name, a sketch, “Conquest,” that appeared in The Smart Set in April 1921.

  Leslie Burton Blades published several stories between 1919 and 1928 in magazines such as All-Story, Telling Tales, Munsey’s, Breezy Stories, The Danger Trail and Argosy-All-Story Weekly. There is no trace of publications by Rosalind Blades. Cynthia Woolford [ sic] had a 10-line sketch in the March 1922 issue of Snappy Stories. Her name rang a bell with Will’s daughter Billee, who remembered her mother tearfully telling her that Will had been madly in love with someone else before they were married and her name was Cynthia. Coincidence?

  Against all evidence, Will would not let go of his conviction that George and Helen had been husband and wife. He called her “Helen Jenkins” when he listed her as co-author of a story, “Lethion,” that was printed in Complete Detective Novel Magazine in April 1933. Sadly, as a result of this dispute, Will did not speak to his mother for over twenty years, although for much of that time they lived barely forty miles apart. So traumatic was this event that, fifty years after George died, people who knew the family were still asking, “Do you think they were married?”

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  Mamie was, of course, devastated by George’s death. Although she never referred to the estrangement with Will when her granddaughter Billee later reconnected with her, Mamie may have remembered George’s words to her when Will married. “We must be kind to Mary. She has to live with Will.” After 17 years in Newark, Mamie returned to Portsmouth when George died.

  She lived to be 96, dying in 1959. She was buried in Elmwood Cemetery in Norfolk next to him. On her tombstone is inscribed “George’s mother.”

  • SIX •

  The 1930s

  The birth of Astounding Stories in January 1930, with Murray Leinster’s

  “Tanks” in the first issue, launched a 36-year relationship that continued until 1966 when Analog (the latest of its various names) published “Quarantine World.”

  William Clayton started the magazine under the name Astounding Stories of Super Science with Harry Bates as the first editor. Bates had been working for Clayton editing his adventure magazines. He is best remembered as the author of Farewell to the Master, which was made into the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951. Many consider it the best science fiction movie of all time. It was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1983 and

  remade in 2008.

  Clayton’s other publications in -

  cluded Snappy Stories, where Will had

  been appearing regularly. Astounding

  Stories was a breakthrough in science

  fiction publishing in that it regularly

  paid two cents a word on acceptance.

  Murray Leinster rated four cents a

  word. The usual going rate for “the

  pulps” had continued to be half-a-cent

  a word paid on publication, and the

  date of publication was indefinite.

  This increase was important because

  Will and his family lived from check

  to check, and the Jenkins girls grew up

  hearing, “We’ll do that next check.”

  “Tanks,” published in January

  Will and a favorite pipe circa 1935.

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  1930, is set in 1932 during a war between the United States and “The Yellow Empire.” Fogs of gas and vast armadas of tanks, supported by air cover including helicopters, are used by both sides. The infantry has little role. Two bitter infantrymen with disdain for tanks tell the story and have a large part in the victory. The story was very popular with readers and often considered to be one of the best published in the early Astounding Stories.

  After “Tanks” came “Murder Madness,” Will’s only serial in Clayton’s Astounding Stories of Super Science. It was published in four parts beginning in May 1930 and later in hardcover as a straight mystery (Brewer and Warren, 1931). It was about an attempted South American takeover involving a drug that would turn its victims into homicidal maniacs.

  Later stories were “The Fifth Dimension Catapult,” January 1931, and its sequel “The Fifth Dimension Tube,” January 1933, which warranted the cover picture and author’s name. Isaac Asimov named “The Fifth Dimension Tube” as one of his favorite Leinster stories. Rarely reprinted, the novel combines a brilliant professor-inventor, his beautiful daughter and a handsome potential suitor with racketeers, general greed, treachery, a desperate small town police chief, and a giant lizard wearing a golden collar. It is classic vintage Leinster.

  “Morale,” published in December 1931, predicted a conflict in 1942 when a super tank called The Wabbly invades New Jersey, and the enemy seeks to win by breaking the civilians’ morale. Spookily ahead of its time, it pred
icts the significant role of propaganda and the sustaining of morale in a future war. Will could not have predicted the possibility of his own involvement in this role. It came in 1942 when he joined the Office of War Information, a newly formed government agency that had this responsibility.

  Clayton went bankrupt in 1933, and his last issue of Astounding Stories of Super Science was dated March 1933. It contained “Invasion,” a story that depicted a struggle between Russia and the United States. Murray Leinster’s name was on the cover, and Jack Williamson’s “Salvage in Space” was the featured story.

  Street and Smith purchased Astounding. They immediately installed F.

  Orlin Tremaine as the editor, moving him over from Clayton’s publishing house. There was scarcely a hiccup between the publishing of “Invasion” in March 1933 and “Beyond the Sphinxes’ Cave” in November 1933 when Tremaine took over.

  “Beyond the Sphinxes’ Cave” assumes that the ancient gods of Greece are real and living here on earth. It merited a splendid cover, complete with a warrior in ancient Greek fighting garb who holds a gorgon’s head shooting rays from its eyes toward a figure wearing hazardous materials protective

  Sphinx cover on Astounding Stories (copyright © 1933 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc., reprinted by permission of Dell Magazines, a division of Penny Publications).

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  garments that include a gas mask. He was standing close to a golden-thong-clad beauty. Murray Leinster’s name was prominently displayed.

  Tremaine had no science fiction experience when he got the job but was generally liked and respected. Fred Pohl says in his book The Way the Future Was (Ballantine Books, 1978), “Tremaine was no scientist and he was likely to come up with some galumphing horrors, but the virtue of that defect was that he was able to publish some pretty fascinating stuff that any scientifically trained person would never touch.”