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Editor, Dorothy McIlwraith; Associate Editor, Lamont Buchanan

Fiction:
Quest of a Noble Tiger • short story by Frank Owen ∗
The Statue • short story by James Causey ∗
One-Man Boat • short story by Alice-Mary Schnirring ∗∗∗
The Two Moons of Tranquillia • novelette by Arthur Leo Zagat ∗
Say a Prayer for Harvey • short story by John J. Wallace ∗
Bindings Deluxe • short story by David H. Keller ∗∗+
Seventh Sister • short story by Mary Elizabeth Counselman ∗∗+
The Eager Dragon • novelette by Robert Bloch ∗∗+
McElwin’s Glass • short story by August Derleth ∗
Repayment • short story by Seabury Quinn ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by A. R. Tilburne
Interior artwork • by A. R. Tilburne (x2), Boris Dolgov (x4), uncredited (x2), John Giunta (x2), Damon Knight, Irwin J. Weill, Andrew Brosnatch, column headings by Hannes Bok
The Shape of Thrills to Come
After an Air Raid • poem by Dorothy Quick
Superstitions and Taboos • essay by Irwin J. Weill
The Eyrie • essay by The Editor, Arthur Leo Zagat, and by Seabury Quinn
Weird Tales Club • letters and listings

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The last Weird Tales I read was the March 1940 issue—the final one with Farnsworth Wright as editor. This number sees us almost three years into Dorothy McIlwraith’s reign, another leg of the magazine’s long decline.¹

The fiction leads off with Quest of a Noble Tiger by Frank Owen. This starts with Richard Trent, one of the “Flying Tigers” baling out of his fighter over China.² Initially he is unconscious as he falls but recovers and deploys his parachute. He floats with the wind, and the stars fade from sight. Eventually, he lands in a rocky blackness and hears a repeated phrase, “This is the hour of mistfeeding”, which eventually lulls him to sleep.
Trent later wakes in a bed and meets a Chinese man called Mu Lin, who tells him that he has parachuted into a secret land and he must die, but not before being honoured for fighting for China. After this bombshell there is a lot of chatter about various subjects (Mu Lin talks about his people and their history, and conducts a verbal sparring match with Trent, all of which slows the story down dreadfully).
Later on Mu Lin speaks about flies in amber, and how his beloved underwent a similar process. They go to see her, and Mu Lin states that one day he will set the amber on fire and set her free. Needless to say (spoiler), Trent has become infatuated, and shortly returns to do just that. The girl comes alive and kisses Trent. Mu Lin discovers them and attacks him; the girl flees to the river and dives in. Trent escapes and dives in after her, but while swimming underwater passes out.
The story ends with him coming back to consciousness in the normal world thinking it had all been a dream, but he finds her kingfisher hair pin in his hand.
There is no real story here, just over much description and an arbitrary series of events (some of which are not explained: why was she in the amber, and why did she run?) It is also too slow-moving, and a strange choice of story with which to start the issue.

The Statue by James Causey starts with a loan shark called Winters putting the squeeze on an indebted artist. The latter has given Winters the unfinished statue of a young child as security and he asks to see it once more before it is sold. Winters agrees. However, when the artist asks if he can finish the sculpture, Winters refuses. The artist ominously replies that, nevertheless, it will be finished in a week. He leaves, and dies in a vehicle accident shortly afterwards.
Thereafter Winters hears scratching noises at night, and notices changes to the hands of the statue. Once these are fully formed (spoiler) they provide a predictable conclusion.

One-Man Boat by Alice-Mary Schnirring³ tells of a man called Chambers who buys a boat with an unhappy history—the original owner committed suicide, and a subsequent owner drowned. Nevertheless Chambers completes the purchase and then talks to the last owner, who warns him about strange goings on and specifically tells him not to sail the boat alone. But one night Chambers sets off sets off on a solo voyage. . . .
This is a very straightforward story with a predictable end but I found it an engaging and well done piece—the setting and nautical stuff is convincing, and it is well paced. It also has a good last line.

The Two Moons of Tranquillia by Arthur Leo Zagat starts with a military man called George Carson visiting his old newspaperman boss “Pop.” Carson is a widower and has placed his child Pete (for the duration of the war) with a couple he found from a newspaper advertisement so he could serve in the war. However, he points out to Pop that the ad has appeared again, and he doesn’t understand why as he knows the couple do not have room for more children. The pair examine Pete’s letters to his father and note various similarities—it is as if parts of the letters have been copied from earlier ones. The two decide to go to the couple’s house to investigate, and a female reporter called Helen Clark is roped in (she is Pop’s divorcee daughter and has a daughter Kay that they can use in their cover story).
On the journey out George and Helen are in the back of the car and the Kay is in the front. George and Helen do not get on and they argue about the war, and what can be said in front of the children:

[George] laughed, shortly, bitterly. “What have I now to show my son, to bring home to him? ‘Congratulate your old man, Pete. Today I dropped a depthbomb and blasted a submarine—’”
“Gee!” Kay broke in, wide-eyed. “Gee, did you? That’s swell. Was it a German one?”
“Kay! You—”
“No, Mrs. Clark. It’s no use.” George came around to her daughter, his lips—only his lips—smiling. “Yes, it was a German, Kay. We know, because some things came up to the top of the water, splintered wood, shattered— Well, things that float.
“One was a kit box that must have belonged to one of the sailors. It was watertight and among the other things in it there was a picture of a blonde little girl, about your age only she had a little button of a nose and pigtails. On the picture was written, ‘Komm bald demem Elsa zuruck, Vater,’ which in English means, ‘Come back soon to your Elsa, father,’ but Elsa’s father won’t ever come back to her because I killed him. Isn’t that a pity?”
Kay nodded, speechless for once. “Oh,”
George exclaimed. “I forgot! We’re certain it was that very submarine which torpedoed the ship that had almost brought the little boy I was talking about safe to America. It might even have been Elsa’s father who aimed the torpedo.”
“That’s different. I’m glad you killed him. I’m awful glad.”
There was an incoherent sound in Helen’s throat, then— “You— You’re despicable, George Carson!”
He swung back to her. “Of course I am. So are we all. We’re all trapped in a despicable, brutal world and there’s no escape, no longer the slightest possibility of escape for me or you or Kay or Pete—Pete,” he repeated, the name a groan, and he sank back into his corner, hands closing into tight fists on his thighs.  p. 40-41

When they get near to the house they stop, and the two men go to reconnoitre. On the way there they see Pete’s abandoned model plane, and note it has been there for some time.
When they finally get to the house the three adults meet the Barretts, an elderly and kindly couple it seems, and what appears like a normal house, albeit one with the inventor husband’s high tech kitchen. As they are leaving at the end of their visit, Pop challenges the husband, John Barratt, about Peter when they are interrupted by rumbling noises and vibrations. It turns out that Kay has triggered a mechanism in one of the house’s small rooms and vanished. John Barrett passes out in the confusion.
The three go back into the house and find the mechanism that caused Kay to vanish. They flick the switch—and find themselves transported to what seems like a dark cave, where they find Kay. When they try to operate the mechanism to return they find it doesn’t work, and so they make their way out of the cave to find it is night outside. The sky is filled with strange constellations.
Up until this point the story isn’t bad but the second half isn’t as good. In this part they hear singing, which leads them to a village full of children where they find Pete. When they question him they find out that the village, called Tranquillia, appears to be a utopian experiment set up by the elderly couple. John Barrett turns up at the end of the chapter and we get a lot of talking heads about the invention that brought them here, and the non-violent utopia they are trying to set up. There are one or two more gimmicks and twists, and some preaching/changing of hearts before the end. These latter events are not really credible and smack of wishful thinking.
It is an interesting piece for its utopian/pacifistic viewpoint, but not a great story.

Say a Prayer for Harvey by John J. Wallace is a short squib that tells of a psychologist’s patient who can mentally transport himself anywhere he can imagine. After the psychologist receives a couple of demonstrations (the patient vanishes and later reappears with evidence), he provides a suggestion to deal with the patient’s dominating wife. Pleasant enough but very slight.

Bindings Deluxe by David H. Keller is the first of two pieces in the magazine that are somewhat problematical. The story starts with two men in a Turkish bathhouse where, during the course of their conversation, we find that both are bookbinders and that the older man deeply dislikes women. As they are talking the narrator sees something odd on the older man’s back (see the illustration above) and decides to pursue his acquaintance after they leave the baths to discover the story behind it.
When the narrator later visits the older man at his home we get more misogynistic comments before he tells the story of how he got the tattoo on his back. He begins with an account of an international bookbinding association he founded in his younger years which, at one point and against his will, admitted a female member who later became an object of mockery when she delivered a talk on bookbinding using citations from Encyclopaedia Britannica. In subsequent years fewer and fewer of the bookbinders appear at the annual meetings. . . .
After doing some detective work, the older man later discovers they all went to Spain before disappearing—and then gets a letter inviting him there too! He soon finds himself being seduced in the home of the female bookbinder.
This is all rather ridiculous, but if you can ignore is flaws you will be rewarded with an entertainingly grisly ending and a nice last line. I’ll be interested to see what Weird Tales’ many female readers have to say about this one in future letter columns.

The other problematical piece is Seventh Sister by Mary Elizabeth Counselman, which depicts a poor black family in the Deep South. The mother is in labour with the seventh sister of the tale, while the father is passed out drunk on the kitchen floor. There are multiple references in the story to “pickaninnies,” “darkies,” “negroes,” and a couple of “niggers” thrown in as well. That said, the latter epithet is used between the black family and friends in reference to themselves, and Counselman’s tale is, apart from its racist language and stereotypical viewpoint, not unsympathetic to the family or the albino seventh sister (who, ironically, is the outcast of the piece).
The tale itself has a spooky beginning:

That night a squinch-owl hollered. And somewhere beyond the state highway, a dog howled three times. More than that, one of the martins, nesting in the gourd-pole in front of the cabin, got into the house and beat its brains out against the walls before anyone could set it free.
Three Signs! Small wonder that at sundown Mattie Sue was writhing in agony of premature childbirth. Not even the two greased axes, which Ressie and Clarabelle—her oldest unmarried daughters, aged fifteen and seventeen—had placed under her bed to cut the pain, did any good.
“Oh, Lawsy—Mammy done took bad!” Ressie whimpered.
She hovered over the fat groaning black woman on the bed, eyewhites large and frightened in her pretty negro face. Ressie had seen many of her brothers and sisters come into the world. But always before, Mattie Sue had borne as easily and naturally as a cat.  p. 77

During the birth the mother dies and the child is shunned, not only because of the death of the mother but because the daughter is also albino, and a seventh sister, which latter supposedly gives it conjure magic powers. The midwives tell the elder sister to hide the baby in the corn crib and feed it goat’s milk. This state of affairs persists until the white landowner Cap’n Jim intervenes, and then the child is at least partially included in the family.
This state of affairs persists throughout her early years, but her situation worsens one day when she points at a bird while playing a shooting game with the other children: the bird plummets to the ground, bloodied. Later, as word of her powers gets around, a trade in mojos (charms) develops, but this later backfires when her father hears of one sold to an acquaintance without him seeing the money. He pursues her, and tries to beat her, which causes him to double over in pain. Cap’n Jim arrives and reckons Dody has appendicitis, and rushes him to the hospital.
The rest of the story (spoiler) pivots around an act of kindness by Cap’n Jim, when he quiets the girl’s nervousness on Dody’s return from hospital and also gives her a toy doll. Later she attempts to repay the favour (unknown to Cap’n Jim) by creating a conjure/voodoo doll of his troublesome mother-in-law, whose interference will upset Jim’s life and lead to the eviction of seventh sister’s family.
The story has a doubly tragic ending.
I rather liked some parts of this colourful tale—sections reminded me of Manly Wade Wellman’s later fantasy work—but some may struggle to get past its language and viewpoint.

The Eager Dragon by Robert Bloch starts with the narrator in a bar getting drunk:

Now I am not the type of personality who pries into other people’s affairs. Particularly in a place like this, where it is not safe to shake hands with strangers unless you have heavy insurance on your fingers.
So after gulping my sixth anti-freeze, I slide off the stool to go home. I do not intend to speak to these jerks, but one of them turns around and gabbles at me.
“I beg your pardon,” he says, very polite. “But you have your foot caught in a cuspidor.”
If there is anything I’m a sucker for, it’s politeness. Besides, when I look down I see that I have indeed stuck my left foot into one of Thin Tommy’s finger-bowls.
“Thank you for the information,” I tell the stranger. “I hardly notice such a thing because I expect to walk a little funny after drinking the stuff they serve here.”
“It is vile, isn’t it?” says the first stranger. “Won’t you have another one with me?”
Well, who can refuse such a courteous invitation? I sit down again and manage to get my Thom McCan out of the cigarpond, and the two strangers pour me a shot, and before you can say Jack Robinson I am too stinko to pronounce it.
That is how it happens I get so gabby, I guess.  p. 89

After the two strangers (who are travelling book salesmen) complain about how boring the town is, the narrator takes offence and tells the men about a recent visit to his farm by a time-travelling knight who left his war-horse behind. When he takes the pair home to see it they find a huge egg instead. In their alcoholic stupor it seems like a good idea to sleep on the egg to hatch it. A dragon subsequently emerges and, after the threesome concludes a deal to exploit the commercial opportunities of the creature, the two salesmen leave to contact circus owners in the city.
The rest of this admittedly corny but entertaining story involves a precocious runaway child called Edgar, and the care and feeding of dragons, which requires massive quantities of beer and thus involves Tommy, the local gangster barman, who makes many deliveries and becomes increasingly suspicious. The child is kept around as he may reveal the secret, and the gangster barman may decide to acquire the dragon for himself if he finds out about it:

Thin Tommy just grunts. It is a normal sound, because he is built like a hog, with a strain of wild boar. He is called Thin Tommy because he weighs in at 300 pounds on the latest police blotter. Besides being a very unpleasant hunk of lard to look at, he is also an unpleasant personality to do business with. He runs his tavern, but also throws the scare into local yokels so they pay him protection money in these parts. In fact, Thin Tommy is what is vulgarly termed a hoodlum. My own term for him would be about twenty years.  p. 97

Meanwhile, the dragon gets bigger and bigger, and produces proportionally more flames.
Matters develop to a climactic scene which (spoiler) involves the child’s identity and his subsequent kidnap by Thin Tommy, and the narrator and Herman the dragon going to the rescue. The fate of the dragon provides a weak ending to what was, until that point, quite a good story.

McElwin’s Glass by August Derleth is about a man called McElwin who buys a telescope from a curio shop and discovers that it lets him look forward and backward in time. He gives up his stage show as a magician and becomes a fortune-teller. However, McElwin soon notices that he cannot foretell everyone’s future, and some of the scenes show a missing figure (there is only the bride visible in one marriage scene for instance). Cue an elderly distant relative who visits and explains to McElwin that the telescope will only show the futures of people related or connected to him in some way. Moreover the old man cautions that McElwin should give up the telescope and take another path in life. When the old man is rebuffed, he asks that McElwin leave the telescope to him in his will. You’d think that this latter request would raise a red flag for McElwin but he blunders on.
The rest of the story (spoiler) involves his marriage to a wealthy heiress who quickly turns into the bane of his life. One day she badgers him when he has just finished cleaning his target pistol (bad timing). McElwin flees the crime scene, and a police pursuit and a terminal leap from a train follow.
This is a contrived piece with an idiot protagonist.

Repayment by Seabury Quinn has an unnecessary set-up page where Gans Field, his wife, and a friend are having dinner in New York during an evening in the Fall. Field launches into a story about an entitled and vaguely unpleasant ex-pat in Algiers who invites a snake charmer into his house to perform. After the performance the ex-pat grabs the snake charmer’s instrument and plays a tune to make the snakes dance. The snake charmer tells him the snakes resent “wrong charming” and (spoiler) will repay him with death—and so they do.
This is a short and too straightforward setup/resolution story, but some of the parts are not bad:

At college it was pretty much the same. If Dirk didn’t make Phi Beta Kappa he did make Rho Tau Epsilon, which had a lot more social significance, and to whose chapter house his father gave a completely equipped indoor squash court. When several of the boys blind-dated chorus girls and Dirk found that the femme he’d drawn possessed less charm and beauty than the belle his roommate had he calmly exchanged partners, and his roommate, mindful of the loans he’d made and those he hoped to make in future, registered no complaint. Neither did the girl. She knew which side her bread was buttered on and had the not unusual feminine desire to spread some sugar on the butter.  p. 114

Above the basket’s open top something had risen like a nervous jack-in-the-box that jerked from sight almost as soon as it inhaled the outside air. Yet in the fleeting fraction of a second that it showed Vanlderstein had seen the glimmer of a pair of little bead-bright eyes, the outlines of a cone-shaped head and the quick flicker of a forked tongue. A chill of sudden vague, indefinite fear went rippling up his spine, beginning at the small of his back and continuing until he felt the short hair on his neck commence to rise and bristle like the hackles of a startled dog. There was a chilled sensation in his forearms, and little pits of goose-flesh dimpled in his skin. The age-old fear of every mammal for the serpent had laid hold on him.  p. 116

The eye-catching Cover is by A. R. Tilburne, who also contributes a couple of interior illustrations (the first is merely okay but the one for the Quinn story is quite good). I liked nearly all the other Interior artwork, the best of which is by Boris Dolgov. His illustration for the Derleth is probably the best, but I also liked his double spread for the Bloch (it’s the first humorous piece of his I can remember seeing, and it strikes me that this could have happily appeared alongside Edd Cartier’s in Unknown). His piece for the Zagat story would have been better without drawing John Barrett as a KKK member (not in the story). I note in passing that Dolgov’s work in this issue was what made me pick up this number and read it, and he is now one of my 1944 Retro Hugo nominations.
Of the others, I particularly liked both the Knight piece for the Counselman story, and the uncredited piece for the Wallace.
The Shape of Thrills to Come is a better attempt than usual of a “Coming Soon” feature (usually a couple of hurriedly written paragraphs):

After an Air Raid by Dorothy Quick is a short verse about the death of two lovers and how they meet up in the afterlife.

Superstitions and Taboos by Irwin J. Weill comprises of two pages of illustrations and a few paragraphs of folklore (or superstitious nonsense, depending on your view of this kind of thing).
The Eyrie leads off with Arthur Leo Zagat’s short afterword to his story, which includes this:

There is nothing mystic in the way Two Moons came to be written. It is the way all the hundreds of yarns that have come from my typewriter have created themselves. I find my characters among people I know, people like you, your neighbors and friends. Real people. I invent a situation for them, involve them in it, and then I sit back and watch what happens. To the persons of my stories I am demigod, creator, only in so far as I confront them with the necessity for decision and action, for all the rest I am no less aloof an observer than you, my readers.  p. 120

After this there is an explanation by Seabury Quinn about why there are no witches in Ireland (in response to a reader enquiry), and a short bio of new writer James Causey. There is a reader poll at bottom, but sadly no letters of comment about the content of previous issues.

The Weird Tales Club prints three letters (two are a little flaky, being concerned with supernatural phenomena), and a list of new members which includes Hugh Hefner (Playboy) and Arthur Saha (Donald Wollheim’s Best of the Year co-editor).

I thought that this issue felt a bit musty and old-fashioned, but it has a handful of stories that are of interest.
PS I see that there are four Ray Bradbury stories in the next five issues, as well as Robert Bloch’s Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper, so that is something to look forward to.  ●

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1. Robert Weinberg, The Weird Tales Story, Wildside Press, 1977, p. 43.

2. Wikipedia says the “Flying Tigers” were “The First American Volunteer Group (AVG) of the Chinese Air Force in 1941–1942 [. . .] composed of pilots from the United States Army Air Corps (USAAC), Navy (USN), and Marine Corps (USMC), recruited under presidential authority and commanded by Claire Lee Chennault.”

3. There is little or no information on the web about Alice-Mary Schnirring beyond her ISFDB entry, and a page on Google Books showing that Robert L. Fish dedicated his book A Gross Carriage of Justice to her: “This book is affectionately dedicated to the memory of Alice-Mary Schnirring The Mouse That Roared.”
This was the fourth out of six stories she contributed to Weird Tales in the early forties.  ●