Astounding printed an additional four stories and a five-part serial of Will’s before 1938 when Tremaine was moved up in the hierarchy, and 27-year-old John Campbell took over as editor. These included some of the most important of his career. “Sidewise in Time” appeared in June 1934 and is generally accepted to be the first story in science fiction presenting the concept of a parallel universe.
Will used the title for a collection he edited in 1950 (Shasta Publishers, 1950) and dedicated the book to “F. Orlin Tremaine who presided at the birth of the title story.” Will says in the introduction to the book, “I think I can honestly say that I wrote these yarns for fun. It happens that I like to fool around with ideas like some people do with drill-presses or vegetable gardens or blondes. It’s a hobby.”
He goes on to tell the story of its origin.
Being the sort of person I am, an explanation of the cosmos which ignores pattern in events — ignoring purpose — simply doesn’t hold water long enough for swallowing. I also believe in free will. To reconcile the two, one day, I set to work to design a maze for a rat, in which he would have absolutely free choice, over and over again, of two paths, and yet would have to come out of a pre-posed exit. It’s easiest when you use two levels, by the way. It worked out amusingly enough. But when I started to give him more that two choices, I began to need extra dimensions to design the thing in and that gave me a charming background of practical data when one day Orlin Tremaine — then the editor of Astounding Stories— mourned over the fact that all the changes had been rung on the time travel theme. Travel forward in time had been done to death. Ditto backward in time.
“Ah,” I said nonchalantly, “but how about traveling sidewise in time?” I sketched for him a multi-dimensional universe in which everything that possibly could happen, somewhere did, and everything that could have happened, had.
What happened was chaos in which Roman soldiers marched into Joplin, Missouri, dinosaurs roamed the streets of Atlanta, Georgia, and flocks of passenger pigeons, extinct since the early 1900s, filled the skies. Pickett’s charge succeeded at Gettysburg, and the Confederacy was alive and well.
Will made the protagonist a professor at a “jerkwater” college in Fred-Six • The 1930s
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ericksburg, Virginia, who anticipated the cataclysm and proceeded to take advantage of it.
Will has been accused of racism because of his descriptions of scenes of Roman slavery used in the story, and of pandering to his Southern roots, using the story to perpetuate an unrequited Southern desire for the actual winning of the war by the South. For Will, making this change in history was undoubtedly what he called a twist, what he always looked for as a basis for a good story. Professor Minott was an anti-hero, typical of the evil geniuses Will used in his plots from his first stories. Saving the world was up to the scientists and mathematicians left with the job of replicating Minott’s work for the common good.
Joe Rico, who edited the collection First Contacts: The Essential Murray Leinster which includes “Sidewise in Time,” says he discussed Will and race relations with Hannibal King. King is African American and painted the cover art for First Contacts. King agreed that for a Southerner of this period, Will was ahead of his time.
“Sidewise in Time” has been reprinted in at least eight anthologies. The Sidewise Awards for Alternate History, created in 1995 by Steven H. Silver, Evelyn C. Leeper and Robert B. Schmunk, take the name from this Murray Leinster story. The awards recognize the best alternate history story and alternate story novel of the year. The awards are given at Worldcon, one for the long form and one for the short form.
“Proxima Centauri” appeared in Astounding, March 1, 1935. In this story, a spaceship takes generations to travel to the stars, requiring it to be completely self-sustaining. Will explains the birth of the story in this same introduction to the book Sidewise in Time.
“Proxima Centauri” came out of two separate speculations. (I read science fiction for the same reason I write it. I like the stuff.) I’d read a yarn that didn’t convince me and I began to debate what non-mammalian creature I could believe might develop a culture. Insects are out, for me. They are complicated machines with built-in reflexes. (You dig up a mining-wasp grub some day — I have — and watch the food-mother wasp trample all over the grub, hysterically looking for but can’t recognize because she can’t find the tunnel that ought to lead to him.) Reptiles and fishes don’t click with me. I can’t imagine emotions in gentlemen fish who haven’t even a fin-waving acquaintance with their wives. No
... the creatures I did devise are possibly just as unlikely, but I think they are pleasantly gruesome. And the Adastra was designed for interstellar travel at less than the speed of light. Other people have written about self-sustaining space-craft since. Perhaps before. I don’t know. Anyhow, there’s the yarn.
Isaac Asimov included both stories in his anthology Before the Golden Age. He commented in his introduction to the story “Sidewise in Time” in 66
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that book that its alternate-history theme affected not only his science fiction but also his serious writing. He credited “Proxima Centauri” with influencing his first novel, Pebbles in the Sky.
“The Fourth-dimensional Demonstrator” came out in December of that same year. It is a great example of Will’s humor. He could have been having fun thinking of the short story “Pigs Is Pigs” written in 1905 by Ellis Parker Butler. “Pigs Is Pigs” was made into a small book and reprinted extensively.
Will had it on his shelf, enjoyed it very much, and shared it with his children.
In the story, a railway agent has received a shipment of two guinea pigs, and the customer wants to pay the pet rate, 25 cents, rather than livestock rate, 30 cents. While the argument continues, the guinea pigs keep reproducing, and the station is overrun with pigs and piglets.
In Will’s story, a young man, in the throes of poverty, finds his uncle’s invention, a machine that duplicates whatever is exposed to it. He and his fiancé, Daisy, decide to duplicate dollar bills, but things go awry, and, soon the room, and later the yard, is filled with Daisys, copies of her pet kangaroo, Arthur, and a few stray identical policemen.
Following that, The Incredible Invasion came out in five parts, August through December 1936. The invasion was spawned in the fourth dimension, and Will brought his usual solid speculative science to the story of treachery and suspense. It was brought up to date to include Russia as a threat and published as The Other Side of Here in 1955 in an Ace Double, backed by A.
E. van Vogt’s One Against Eternity.
After Gernsback lost Amazing Stories to bankruptcy in 1929 (it was eventually taken over by Bernarr Macfadden’s Macfadden Publishing), Will started selling some stories there. “Power Planet,” which appeared in the January 1931
edition of Amazing Stories, is notable because the energy supply concept for the power-generating space station he describes is a first. It was followed by three more stories in the 1930s and then no more until the 1950s.
In addition to these magazines, Will continued to sell frequently to other genre pulps, such as Munsey’s Detective Fiction Weekly, beginning with “The Square Guy” published June 8, 1929, under the Will F. Jenkins byline. The Man Who Feared was printed in four parts from August 9 through August 30, 1930, also under the Will F. Jenkins byline. It was released in hardcover in 1942 by Gateway in New York. Will continued to appear in that magazine regularly through 1935.
When Black Bat Detective Mysteries came out in October 1933, Will was there with a brand new character, the Black Bat. As Murray Leinster, he had Black Bat stories in all of the six issues that were published. They were “The Body in the Taxi,” “The Coney Island Murders,” “The Hollywood Murders,” Six • The 1930s
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“Murder at First Night,” “The Maniac Murders,” and “The Warehouse Murders.” Black Bat’s real name was never mentioned.
Ned Pines revived t
he character in his Thrilling Publications, using another author, for a magazine called Black Book Detective. This Black Bat was identified as a former district attorney named Anthony Quinn, who became a crime fighter after being blinded by acid.
Lurton Blassingame, who was Robert A. Heinlein’s agent for a time, wrote a piece in the January 1937 Writer’s Digest on “The Detective Fiction Market.” In it he said there were 31 active, prompt-paying magazines that printed detective fiction exclusively. He divided them into groups and laid out some rules for cracking the market. He identified “Crime Thrillers,”
“Semi-Smooth Paper Detective Magazines,” “Characterization Detective Tales,” “Emotional Stories,” and those dedicated to “Fast Action and Color.” Detective Fiction Weekly, Black Mask, and Detective Story were in the
“Semi-Smooth Paper” category, and Will wrote for all of them. He also sold to Orlin Tremaine’s “Fast Action and Color” magazine Clues.
Blassingame gave hopeful writers the same advice other experts have given them over and over. Read, read, read the magazines you want to sell to, and study their stories. Learn the editorial policies of the magazines.
Will continued writing westerns. Doubleday-Page’s West printed Dead Man’s Shoes in four parts in March and April of 1931. It was made into a movie entitled Border Devils starring Harry Carey and Gabby Hayes in 1932. When Alfred H. King, Inc., brought it out in hardcover under the title Mexican Trail in 1933 , they listed the author as Will F. Jenkins because Murray Leinster already had a name in book publishing for his previous mystery novels, Murder Madness and Scalps.
Will typed away at his Remington, keeping up his volume and selling to every magazine he could. However, he did stay away from stories of the occult and supernatural. He told Ronald Payne ( The Last Murray Leinster Interview, Waves Press, Richmond, VA, 1982) that he thought they stayed in the writer’s subconscious and could be destructive.
He was able to follow his goal and support his family with his writing during the years of the Great Depression although there was the problem of getting paid. He sold plenty of stories, but magazines had to pay the printer and pay for the paper, or they were out of business. The authors, who had little choice, were the last to receive their money.
He continued to enjoy the close, home-focused life he had made, cocooned with family and enjoying the visits by extended family and friends.
Mary’s younger sister Adeline had a special reason to visit. Lewis Allen, the bachelor editor of the Gloucester Gazette, had told Will, “If Mary has a
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sister, I’d like to meet her.” Adeline was barely five feet tall, with her sister’s sparkling brown eyes, a heart shaped face and the cupid’s bow mouth made famous by Mary Pickford. Allen, as he was called, was pretty sharp himself, with hair slicked straight back and with distinctively expressive arched eyebrows. Adeline came down from New York, and they hit it off. When Allen was a little slow in proposing, Will had an idea.
“Just put your suitcases at the bottom of the stairs the next time he comes and tell him you’re leaving,” he told her. It worked and they married in 1931.
They were frequent visitors after that, especially on holidays, and their daughter, Adeline, four years younger than Billee, sometimes seemed like the next sister in line.
Will’s pattern of calling Lewis Allen by his last name was a remnant of a habit in the New York literary crowd of calling their colleagues by their last name, perhaps gotten from the Brits and their public school tradition. After twenty years of marriage, Lewis Allen (whom the Jenkins girls had always referred to as “Uncle Allen”) asked his wife if she would please call him
“Lewis.”
In 1928, when Little Mary was six, Mary and Will decided against send-
“Little Adeline” and Billee at Clay Bank.
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ing her to the Gloucester public school, but instead hired a local teacher, Miss Grace Stubblefield, to come to the house to teach her using the Calvert home school materials. Thinking, “Why not?” they started Betty a year later when she was four years old and Billee three years after that, when she was also four. This catapulted Betty and Billee three years ahead of their class through high school, and for Billee, into college. So by 1932, all three children were climbing the stairs to the schoolroom. It was furnished with child-sized colonial furniture made of walnut by a local African American carpenter, Jeff Booth, who was known for his fine reproductions. Nobody had to leave home even for the day.
The Calvert materials were outstanding. From a very early age, the children were exposed to the classics, art, science and Greek and Roman history.
Some classics were rewritten in simple form for the very earliest years. Ever the scientist, Will would supplement the astronomy lessons with night views of the moon using his telescope. He used his microscope to show water from a flower vase on a slide to explain amoeba and paramecia. Will enjoyed showing the children how to make silhouettes of flowers and leaves with the sun and blueprint paper. He was the classic person who, when you ask him what time it is, tells you how to make a watch. Sometimes the children would avoid asking him questions, because they didn’t want to sit through a long explanation.
Art and architecture materials from the Calvert School were so good that Will bragged that the girls could identify the work of different artists when they were taken to the National Gallery in Washington. There were excursions to Washington and to opera and theater at the Mosque Theater in Richmond, where Billee remembers, as a small child, falling asleep in everything from Carmen to La Traviata. She also remembers her first play, in 1939, The Philadelphia Story with Katharine Hepburn, Joseph Cotton and Van Heflin, also at the Mosque Theater. In spite of the 60-mile trip, the girls were taken to Richmond for dancing lessons.
As there was no nearby Catholic church, the girls’ religious upbringing was pretty well confined to baptism in Sacred Heart Cathedral in Richmond, Easter services there, and knowing their parents were Catholic. Will decided to remedy that, and in 1937 the three girls, aged 9, 12 and 15, received First Communion and were confirmed. Will became one of the founders of St.
Therese’s Catholic Church, when it was built in Gloucester in 1938, and was proud that his youngest daughter, Jo-an, born in September of that year, was the first girl baptized in the new parish with her name inscribed on the cor-nerstone.
Will loved family life. Dr. L. V. “Happy” Morgan, local pharmacist,
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Will, Betty, Mary and Little Mary on their York River dock.
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friend and father of Virginia delegate Harvey Morgan, who initiated “Will F. Jenkins Day” in June 2009, spoke to the family at Will’s funeral. “I used to see Will walking around the Court House with you three little girls and I would say to myself, ‘There goes a happy man.’” The daily routine was set on a schedule. In cool weather, Will would get up in the morning, stoke up the furnace and light the fire in the living room fireplace. The fireplace in the dining room was lit for dinner, and the one in Mary and Will’s bedroom was rarely used. He would make coffee and take a cup to Mary in bed. For breakfast, the children always had oatmeal, and at least one developed a life-long aversion to it. School would be in session in the morning. Dinner was in the middle of the day — always a hot meal with meat and potatoes (Will didn’t like rice) and two vegetables. Will had his greens served on a separate plate soaked in vinegar. There was always dessert —
usually cake. Will’s first choice was chocolate.
He loved chocolate and made fudge with his children and, later, grandchildren. He frequently told the children about the time, when he was a small boy, that he had carefully cut the chocolate frosting off to save it for last, and it was whisked away by someone who thought he didn’t like it. He warned them: “Be careful about saving for last!”
> His fudge recipe has been handed down in the family.
2 1⁄2 squares unsweetened chocolate
2 cups sugar
1 cup milk
2 tbs. Karo corn syrup
1 tsp. vanilla extract (or flavor of choice, he liked to vary with lemon, orange, and rum!)
5 tbs. butter
Heat first 3 ingredients until a drop forms a soft ball in cold water.
Add last 3 and beat until it starts to harden. Pour in buttered glass baking dish.
The evening meal was light. Will often planned little treats for Mary and loved to arrange a supper plate for her, a toasted sandwich cut on the diagonal with pickles and olives artfully arranged.
Will thrived on this regular schedule, although he kept his own hours, often writing late into the night. He exasperated Mary by putting the kettle on the electric stove for a late cup of tea and, too engrossed in his work to hear the whistle when it boiled, finally getting to the stove to find the water had boiled away and the bottom of the kettle had melted.
There were two never-changing events on weekdays. Twice a day Will 72
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jumped into the car and drove the eight miles to the Court House to pick up the mail. He could have walked down the hill to the Clay Bank Post Office, but it was important to him to meet the meet the earlier delivery at the main post office. Was there a check, letter of acceptance or rejection, or important correspondence? Who knew what possible treasure waited in Box 212?
The trips were combined with other errands. Will did the grocery shopping at Martin’s store and, if Mary forgot something, she could call Central in the telephone office on the second floor just across the street from the post office. Central had a good view of what was going on, and she might say, “I just saw Mr. Jenkins coming out of the bank and crossing the street. He might be over to Martin’s right now.” Mary would then ask to be connected to the store.
Between Christmas and the New Year was particularly busy with, tradi-tionally, several days of open house with many guests and plentiful food. For the children, Christmas always started a couple of days before the 25th. Billee remembers it as always a sunny day, December cold but not freezing. The three girls would start out with Will, he carrying an ax, to look for a tree in the woods, a short walk down the dirt road that passed the house. Bursting with excitement, they would run ahead, but not too far, searching for a small clearing where the cedars would have room to spread out and grow fat and thick. Christmas trees at Clay Bank were always cedars, prickly with a familiar pungent scent. When they had finally found the perfect tree, Will would cut it down, and the group would search again, this time for holly branches, the ones with the most berries. For mistletoe, an obliging neighbor might know where there was a clump growing high in an oak tree, and he would get his shotgun and shoot down a few sprigs.
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