Adventure Tales #4. Seabury Quinn
ADVENTURE TALES (SPRING 2007 / Vol. 1, No. 4)
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2007 by Wildside Press, LLC. All rights reserved.
Publisher: Wildside Press, LLC
Editor: John Gregory Betancourt
Associate Editors: Darrell Schweitzer
Assistant Editor: P.D. Cacek
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THE BLOTTER, by the Editor
As I reported in the second issue of Adventure Tales, Rich Harvey’s annual pulp convention, PulpAdventurecon, is my favorite convention. (I don’t get out much, but I make a point of attending this one every year.) The one-day event is primarily a dealers’ room (this year it overflowed into two rooms) where attendees wander around, shopping for pulp magazines, books, and other vintage collectibles while chatting. Wildside Press usually has a dealer’s table, and this year I brought my older son, Ian (age 12). My wife predicted that he would be bored, but she was 100% wrong—he loved every aspect of the show. He decided to collect memorabilia featuring The Shadow, and although the original pulp magazines were out of his price range, he managed to pick up two posters, a bunch of toys from the Alec Baldwin movie, and several sets of Old Time Radio records with adventures of The Shadow (Orson Welles is his favorite Shadow), Mandrake the Magician, and several others.
The men at the next table did give Ian quite a few bargains. They were selling off a large collection of Shadow, Phantom, and other pulp hero merchandise which their father had accumulated. But that only fed my son’s sense of excitement. Now that he’s thoroughly hooked, I don’t think Ian will miss another PulpAdventurecon, either.
Even though Rich Harvey reported a slight dip in attendance, I think con-goers are getting younger rather than older. I saw quite a few fans in their 20s and 30s. It bodes well for the future.
For info on PulpAdventurecon, visit Rich Harvey’s web site, <www.boldventurepress.com>.
We have another great theme issue this time: stories from authors who appeared in the classic Weird Tales magazine (but not stories from Weird Tales)!
Our lineup this time starts with Seabury Quinn. Quinn was the most prolific author in the history of Weird Tales, famous for his Jules de Grandin psychic detective yarns as well as many stand-alones. But he also wrote prolifically in other genres. Here we have a mystery with more than a few weird overtones.
Edwin Baird is represented with two stories. Not only was Baird a Chicago writer, but the very first editor of WT. He was the one who introduced the world to weird fiction and poetry from H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, and hundreds of others.
E. Hoffmann Price claimed the distinction of being the only person who met both H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard…and was an accomplished pulp writer on his own for many decades. His story, “Every Man a King,” comes from one of the “spicy” pulps, Speed Adventure, (as Spicy Adventure was renamed late in its life).
John D. Swain’s “The Mad Detective” is one of his non-fantasies, in this case a gripping mystery.
And last but not least, here is Robert E. Howard’s thrill-packed novelet of Eastern intrigue, “Son of the White Wolf.” Enjoy!
John Gregory Betancourt
THE MONKEY GOD, by Seabury Quinn
Professor Harvey Forrester was having a beastly time. He had confided as much to himself more than once in the past twenty-four hours, and each passing minute confirmed the truth of it.
The Professor did not dance, and the younger members of the company fox-trotted from breakfast to luncheon, from luncheon to dinner and from dinner to bedtime. The Professor did not care for music, except classical compositions or the simple folk songs of primitive peoples, and the Milsted house was filled with the cacophonies of jazz from radio and phonograph all day and three-quarters of the night. The Professor despised bridge as a moronic substitute for intelligent conversation, and the older members of the company played for a cent a point from dinner till midnight with the avidity of professional gamblers.
The Professor was having a beastly time.
But old Horatio Milsted, in honor of whose son the house party was given, possessed one of the finest collections of oriental curios in the country, wherefore Forrester had accepted the invitation tendered him and Rosalie Osterhaut, his ward; for he greatly desired to examine a certain statuette of Hanuman, the Monkey God, which was the supreme jewel in the collection that Milsted had inherited from a sea-roving (and none too scrupulous) grandsire.
Two days—forty-eight interminable hours of fox trotting, syncopated music and card-ruffling—the Professor had endured, and as yet had not caught sight of the little monkey god’s effigy. Each time he broached the subject to Milsted his host put him off with some excuse. The house party would break up the following morning, and meantime the Professor cooled his back against the wall of the Milsted drawing room while his anger rose hot and seething within him.
“Oh, Professor Forrester,” whispered Arabella Milsted, the host’s unmarried sister, in the irritatingly high, thin voice possessed by so many short, fat women, “you look so romantically aloof standing there all by yourself. Tell me, don’t you ever unbend, even for a teeny, tinsy moment?” She looked archly at him above the serrated edge of her black fan and simpered with bovine coquettishness.
“Do you know,” she went on in a more confidential whisper, her little, pale-blue eyes growing circular with sudden seriousness, “I have a presentiment—a premonition—that something terrible is going to happen?”
“Umpf?” growled Forrester noncommittally, gazing first at the obese damsel, then across the crowded dance floor in an effort to descry an exit. “Umpf!”
“Yes —” Miss Milsted, who would never again see forty, but dressed in a manner becoming to twenty, and talked chiefly in Italics, replied—“oh, yes; I’m very psychic, you know. Poor dear Mamma used to say —”
Poor dear Mamma’s profound observations will never be known to posterity, for at that moment Horatio Milsted, looking anything but the urbane host, strode into the drawing room and commanded sharply, “Shut off that infernal music!”
“Hear, hear!” murmured the Professor under his breath.
Young Carmody, a vapid-faced youth in too-fashionably cut dinner clothes, who stood nearest the radio, turned the rheostat, and the lively dance tune expired with a dismal squawk.
“Someone has been tampering with my collection,” Milsted announced in a hard, metallic voice. “Some infernal thief has stolen a priceless