Under the Moons of Mars: A History and Anthology of the Scientific Romance in the Munsey Magazines, 1912-1920

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  The news got around, and Bob Davis, who had been leaving THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE pretty much in the hands of Metcalf, for once was beside himself with anger. Years later, lines would appear in a letter to Burroughs dated December 29, 1916, "I will never forgive Metcalf for letting Street & Smith get the other story." He excoriated Metcalf for this blunder, and it may very well have been a factor leading to the dismissal of that editor in 1914.

  It was a badly shaken Metcalf who wrote Burroughs February 26, 1913. The news had struck him as "incredible." He wrote Burroughs that he did not regard his action as "friendly." He theorized that it was taken in retaliation for his criticism of Ape Man, and he said if it had been intended to show him up, it had achieved its purpose.

  He felt that Burroughs should have worked the story over and resubmitted it to give him a "square deal" and confirm a "friendly relationship."

  Burroughs spared no feelings in his retort. "I am not writing stories out of friendship," he replied March 1; "I am writing because I have a wife and three children."

  He did not stop there.

  What type of friendship had Metcalf shown in asking for, then thrice rejecting, The Outlaw of Torn?

  What type of friendship had he displayed in begging and pleading for a sequel to Tarzan and then rejecting it?

  What type of friend is it, Burroughs asked, that expects a writer to place himself economically at the mercy of a subjective opinion and then regards it as an unfriendly act to sell a rejected story elsewhere?

  A thoroughly chastened Metcalf asked Burroughs on March 7 to forget anything that may have been said in their exchange of letters and to set a price for first look at future manuscripts.

  The poor judgment Metcalf had shown was now assuming the aspect of a catastrophe.

  The sequel to the most popular story that THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE had ever printed, possibly the most popular story any American magazine had ever printed, was to be published in the pages of a direct competitor.

  Since Burroughs, up to that date, had appeared exclusively in THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, the only place from which NEW STORY MAGAZINE could possibly draw readers would be THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE.

  In an economic sense, had they continued to buy all of Burroughs' production, their word rate to him would have remained low and crept up gradually. Now he was in the position of being able to ask for the best bid from two competitive forces.

  To further their woes, if they lost him completely, the best hope they had of keeping THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE solvent would be gone.

  Edgar Rice Burroughs asked for five cents a word for first look at his stories in a letter of March 10.

  Four days later, Metcalf countered with an offer of two cents a word, which was almost double what Burroughs had been getting.

  On March 17 Burroughs accepted the two-cent rate for the remainder of 1913 only.

  His ready acceptance might have appeared poor business considering his good bargaining position, but as it developed, his instincts were right in not pushing too far too fast. He had submitted The Outlaw of Torn to Sessions for NEW STORY MAGAZINE, and on March 28, 1913, it had been rejected. Street & Smith represented no surer market than Munsey.

  The first story to receive the increased rate was The Cave Girl, a thirty-thousand-word novelette for which he was paid six hundred dollars on April 14. A sissified, anemic young Bostonian is shipwrecked on an uncharted island. The rigors of survival slowly convert him into a superb physical specimen, able to hold his own not only against wildlife but also against a lost tribe of primitives who have survived unknown on that island for ages. He is attracted to Nadara, a lovely island woman whom he takes as a mate. When rescue comes, he avoids it and chooses to remain on the island with the woman he loves. The story ends as the landing party discovers a locket in a skin bag, "To Eugenie Marie Celeste de la Vois, Countess of Crecy, from Henri, her husband." The two had been lost twenty years earlier, and the reader becomes privy to the possibility that "The Cave Girl" may very well prove to be their daughter.

  The Cave Girl was published in three installments, July-September, 1913, with a cover by Clinton Pettee. The timing of publication was calculated to have Burroughs appear in unbroken continuity now that the serialization of Ape Man, under the title of The Return of Tarzan, had commenced with the June, 1913, NEW STORY MAGAZINE, where it would run for seven installments, through December, 1913. They could not prevent any Burroughs fan from buying the competition, but they could see that he had no reason to stop buying THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE.

  The Return of Tarzan was a sectionalized novel, a series of quite skillfully done adventures, which may have been what Metcalf meant when he complained that it lacked "balance." In phase one, a worldly, sophisticated Tarzan (who will even smoke a cigarette) travels from America to France, where he is almost killed in a duel; he conducts espionage among the Arabs; he engages in a victorious battle with a hungry lion; he is thrown into the sea from aboard ship by enemies, to reach the shores of Africa not far from where he was born and establish himself as a chief over a tribe of blacks; and he discovers "the City of Gold," the remnant of drowned Atlantis, whose men have mated with apes and become part-beast. The royal women have kept their bloodlines clean, and La, high priestess, falls in love with Tarzan, a prisoner. He escapes and takes from the ancient city a fabulous treasure in gold. Jane Porter, the girl he loves, has told Clayton she cannot marry him, and returning to Africa, is captured by the beast men of Opar but is saved from sacrifice at the hands of La by Tarzan. They are married, and the story ends.

  Tarzan of the Apes was a scientific romance in spirit, but its sequel was scientific romance in fact, as were in part or wholly a large percentage of the many Tarzan novels to follow. Not only were the Tarzan stories very closely allied with Burroughs' other scientific romances, but in the future Tarzan would visit Pellucidar, scene of a series set in a land at the center of the earth.

  The first three issues of NEW STORY MAGAZINE carrying The Return of Tarzan had full-color covers illustrating the story. The June and August, 1913, covers were by that master of book and magazine illustration, Newell Convers Wyeth. The last was used on the jacket of the first hardcover edition of The Return of Tarzan, published in 1915 by A. C. McClurg. Burroughs so admired it that he wrote to Sessions to see if it were for sale. When Wyeth through Sessions asked one hundred dollars for the original, Burroughs refused, stating tartly, "Evidently he wants it more than I do."

  The reader reaction was evidently so positive on the first installment of The Return of Tarzan that, on July 19, Sessions wrote Burroughs asking to see The Outlaw of Torn again. It was sent to him, and he tried to buy it for three hundred and fifty dollars. The low price was turned down, so on August 12, 1912, Sessions returned the novel to Burroughs, but raised the ante to five hundred dollars.

  Thinking it over, Burroughs decided to accept, with the proviso that he be paid 2VS cents a word if it should prove to be a big hit with the readers. This "deal" was agreed to by Sessions in a letter of August 18 in which he offered a flat $3,000 for another Tarzan story.

  It is puzzling, contrasting the quality of what was being bought and published by the pulp magazines of 1913, why they were so reluctant to give The Outlaw of Torn a home. It involved the reader with its first page and carried him with pleasant color and excitement through to the end. The story, which was begun in the January, 1914, NEW STORY MAGAZINE and ran through to April, never received a cover illustration and was referred to as a "New Serial by the Author of The Return of Tarzan" Overshadowing it was the appearance of Allan and the Holy Flower (published in England as The Holy Flower), the latest novel by H. Rider Haggard, which had begun in the December, 1913, issue of NEW STORY MAGAZINE, in which The Return of Tarzan ended. Allan was Haggard's most popular character next to "She," and his appearance in this novel brought with it many of the romantic, mystical, and lost-race elements that were the author's trademark. It featured three covers, including several by N. C. Wyeth, and ran for seven inst
allments, ending in the June, 1914, number.

  There was no question that Street & Smith was the big pulp competition for Munsey. THE POPULAR MAGAZINE was, at least temporarily, the circulation leader; THE PEOPLE'S MAGAZINE was holding its own; NEW STORY MAGAZINE was featuring the same fantastic and off-trail stories which had previously been primarily a specialty of the Munsey pulps; and now coming up very strong in circulation was TOP-NOTCH MAGAZINE. The TOP-NOTCH MAGAZINE had begun publication with its March 1, 1910, issue, with a format 10% inches high by eight inches wide, thirty-six pages for five cents, with the slogan of "Tops Everything for Boys."

  At first it did not worry Munsey, because its format was identical with that of the dime novels, many of which were still published at that date, and in appearance and policy it was aimed at the early teenagers. The cover boasted that it was "Edited by Burt L. Standish," author of the immensely popular Frank Merriwell series.

  Actually, it was not started with the idea of continuing. The post office had been threatening to cancel the second-class mailing privilege for dime novels for a long time. They contended that even though these were dated and issued on a weekly schedule, they were books and not magazines, because they contained only a single complete novel. Street & Smith decided to issue a magazine identical in format and price with the dime novels, with contents made up of a selection of novelettes, short stories, and a serial. If the post office accepted it, they intended to add a few short features to the back of every dime novel they published and in that manner get around any future possibility of being closed down by a technicality. Gilbert Patten, who wrote the Frank Merriwell series under the name of Burt L. Standish, had offered to edit the magazine, suggesting that his name would give it a connotation of respectability. He conceived the title of TOP-NOTCH MAGAZINE and wrote a number of stories for it about a college hero named Cliff Sterling, under the pen name of Julian St. Dare. He edited the first four numbers, and the magazine, instead of collapsing as expected, began to sell.

  Through office politics, Harry Thomas, a Street & Smith editor, secured control of the magazine and with its November 1, 1910, issue had it converted into a semi-monthly 192-page pulp selling for ten cents—a direct competition to the Munsey magazines for their younger group of readers. By 1913 the magazine appeared three times a month, featuring Jack London, Gilbert Patten, F. Britton Austin, J. S. Fletcher, Bertram Atkey, Octavus Roy Cohen, A. Conan Doyle, William Wallace Cook, Ellis Parker Butler, Johnston McClulley, W. Bert Foster, and many other good authors. The slant was to the high teens, and it went in heavy for sports stories and light on science fiction, though a series of scientific detective stories by Michael White, featuring the dauntless Proteus Raymond, was extremely imaginative, even involving atomic energy in one story.

  It is quite possible that the tendency of the competition gradually to increase frequency of publication was at least in part prompted by the example of THE CAVALIER, which appeared on the newsstand each Saturday, so that the working man who was committed to a five-and-one-half-or 6-day work week could treat himself to weekend entertainment for only ten cents after he cashed his paycheck.

  Following the publication of The Afterglow, by George Allan England, THE CAVALIER appeared to slow down on the quantity and quality of its science fiction. Perhaps it was a difficult job to get enough for a weekly, but more probably it was the result of the great wordage of science fiction featured by THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE, depleting the available supply. During 1913 THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE ran fourteen stories of science fiction in twelve issues, eleven of them novels, and only two of the novels not completed within the calendar year. The wordage encompassed by these stories was somewhere close to 550,000, or almost equivalent to the total wordage of twelve issues of some of today's science-fiction magazines.

  THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE in February, 1913, featured the highly off-trail fantasy The Second Man, by Lee Robinet, a novel in which Ken-more, an American, enters the Canadian forests, to find a segment where a man and a woman are reenacting the legend of Adam and Eve, with a young girl who calls herself Lilith living with them. The animals of the forest seem to be subservient to the will of the somewhat sinister "Adam," and the attempts of Kenmore to fathom this strange situation end with his breaking the hold of Adam on Eve and Lilith. The result is a memorable fantasy, published in hardcovers as The Forest Maiden by Browne & Howell Co., Chicago, in 1914 and selling for $1.25. Veteran fantasy collectors had suspected that Lee Robinet was a pen name, and that it had previously appeared and would again as the author of other non-fantasies, including In-Bad Man and The Bad Man. Robinet was unusual inasmuch as he was the pen name of a pen name. Lee Robinet stories were submitted by Robert Ames Bennet, author of one of the most widely sought-after lost-race novels, Thyra — A Romance of the Polar Pit, published in book form by Holt, New York, in 1901. In that novel, survivors of a Norse party have endured in a great arctic abyss in which also survives a monstrous reptile of the dinosaur period, as well as a subhuman race of men. Less well known is his The Bowl of Baal, a four-part novel in NEW STORY MAGAZINE, November, 1916-February, 1917. The plot is virtually identical with Thyra, except for the locale. An air pilot discovers an unknown city in Arabia, near to which lives a prehistoric lizard that, true to science-fiction tradition, must be dispatched.

  Robert Ames Bennet was the pen name of F. G. Browne, of 315 Keystone Avenue, River Forest, Illinois, and he was paid five hundred dollars for the seventy-thousand-word novel The Second Man on October 30, 1912. The question is raised as to whether there was a further connection between him and the Browne of Browne & Howell, who published The Second Man in book form.

  The Brain Blight, a ninety-thousand-word novel by Jack Harrower, of the discovery of a South American plant that can cause death, mental befuddlement, and loss of will, was printed complete in the March, 1913, issue, and the same issue began a three-part novel, Siren's Island, by J. Earl Clausen, in which a bona-fide siren capable of wondrous miracles is discovered on an island in the Aegean Sea and is brought back to civilization, miracles and all.

  J. Earl Clausen appeared in June with a complete eighty-four-thousand-word novel titled The Black Comet, based on the time-worn but well-handled theme of a comet on apparent collision course with the earth and its effect on the structure of civilization. The Mastodon-Milk-Man, a three-part novel by C. McLean Savage, which began in the same issue, was an early superman story where unusual physical strength is obtained by drinking the milk of a mastodon frozen for ages in the ice.

  June also contained the short story Spawn of Infinitude, by Edward S. Pilsworth, telling of a meteor which strikes the earth, bringing with it spores that grow into tentacled, man-eating plants which are eventually destroyed by an avalanche of snow.

  Without break THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE continued to feed its readers fantasies—Perley Poore Sheehan, former editor of THE SCRAP BOOK, contributing the sixty-eight-thousand-word The Copper Princess complete in the September issue. The mummy of a beautiful Inca princess is brought back to life by the electrical invention of a woman scientist, Marie Pavlovna. It was not too many years since Marie Curie had discovered radium, so it was no longer incredible that a woman might make an important scientific discovery. The girl falls in love with the man she first sees upon awakening and, after a series of adventures, is mortally wounded while killing his enemy with her bare hands. At the end of the story she is again returned to her mummy case as he first saw her. Many of the elements of the scientific romance are found in this tale, but what is lacking is a truly imaginative and colorful background setting.

  The October THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE contained a short science fantasy of a type that would not become popular for another thirty years, of an old man who had an electrical device for killing flies and a great imagination for storytelling. It was titled To Slay at Will, by J. Klinck, but took a distinct second place to "All-Story Table-Talk" in the same issue. "Mr. Burroughs was in town the other day and we had meals together, et cetera," it started, "and
discussed the general condition of literature and the particular state of affairs in the Burroughs Factory. The outlook is very bright for all Mr. Burroughs' friends, because there are several good stories already under way in the foundry and all hands are working overtime."

  Then the announcement was made that A Man Without a Soul, by Edgar Rice Burroughs, would be published complete in the November issue.

  The examination of all evidence strongly suggests that there never was any lunch or dinner with the editors of THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE and Edgar Rice Burroughs. There is no record of such in the comprehensive correspondence of the author, and he would apparently not meet any of them until the middle of 1914, when Bob Davis would pay his expenses to come to New York for a discussion.

  The announcement appears to have been a bit of poetic license, but the Burroughs stories being readied for publication did exist. Of special interest in the readers' department of that issue was "A Martian Glossary," supplied by Edgar Rice Burroughs, of the proper names and common nouns of his Martian stories. It would contain definitions of the following type: "Thark—a Martian city; also a Martian horde"; "Jeddak—an emperor"; "Thoat—a green Martian horse."

  The editor said he was presenting the glossary in anticipation of a third novel in the Martian series to start soon.

  "Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Man Without a Soul—A Story Like Tarzan," blazoned the cover of the November the all-story magazine. The plot had elements that could have made it an extremely powerful novel, but it appeared hastily written. A professor, seeking to make synthetic men, has created twelve which are human parodies and distortions. A thirteenth appears perfect in body and leads the escape of the other "monsters" and then engages in a series of Tarzan-like adventures in the tropics. Despite all his noble attributes, the question of whether he is truly a human arises, the urgency for an answer intensified by a romance that has developed between him and a girl. Eventually, experiment Number 13 turns out to have been a real human with a lapse of memory substituted for a laboratory experiment. The twelve artificial men are killed off in a series of wild adventures.