Series of astronomy columns for the Asheville[N.C.] Gazette-News(February 16–May 17, 1915). The series, as published, consists of thirteen sections, some subdivided into two parts: I. “The Sky and Its Contents” (February 16); II. “The Solar System” (February 20); III. “The Sun” (February 23); IV. “The Inferior Planets” (February 27); V. “Eclipses” (March 2); VI. “The Earth and Its Moon” (March 6); VII. “Mars and the Asteroids” (March 9); VIII. “The Outer Planets” (March 13 and 27); IX. “Comets and Meteors” (March 16 and 30); X. “The Stars” (March 20 and 23); XI. “Clusters and Nebulae” (April 13 and 16); XII. “The Constella
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tions” (April 27 and May 1); XIII. “Telescopes and Observatories” (May 11 and 17). However, the first installment announced the series as consisting of fourteen sections, so it appears that section XIV and, probably, the final segment of XIII are lost. Librarians at the Asheville Public Library report that several issues following May 17 are missing, and it is likely that the missing segments appeared here. In the first installment HPL describes the series as “designed for persons having no previous knowledge of astronomy. Only the simplest and most interesting parts of the subject have here been included.” HPL’s boyhood friend Chester P.Munroe (at this time working in Asheville) probably arranged to have HPL write the articles for the local paper, although there is no documentary evidence to support this assertion. Late in life HPL unearthed the articles and remarked: “…their obsoleteness completely bowled me over. The progress of the science in the last twenty or thirty years had left me utterly behind…” ( SL5.422).
“Mysterious Ship, The.”
Juvenile story (460 words); written 1902. First published in SR;corrected text in Juvenilia: 1897– 1905(1985) and MW
A “strange brig” docks at various ports, with the result that various individuals are found to have disappeared. The ship goes all over the world and deposits its kidnapped individuals at the North Pole. At this point HPL relates a “geographical fact” that “At the N. Pole there exists a vast continent composed of volcanic soil, a portion of which is open to explorers. It is called ‘No-Mans Land.’” Some unnamed individuals find the kidnapped individuals, who then go to their respective homes and are showered with honors.
HPL has prepared this story as a twelve-page booklet, with the imprint: “The Royal Press. 1902.” He is clearly aiming for dramatic concision: some of the nine chapters of the story are no more than twenty-five words in length. A revised or elaborated version of the story has recently been found in the HPL materials collected by August Derleth at Arkham House. This version (still unpublished) fleshes out each chapter to about seventy-five to one hundred words each, so that the total comes to 780 words, almost twice the length of the original.
“Mystery of Murdon Grange, The.”
Round-robin serial tale; apparently “published” in a typewritten manuscript magazine, Hesperia, circulated by HPL in 1918–21. Apparently nonextant.
HPL first describes the item in a letter dated June 27, 1918: “My Hesperiawill be critical & educational in object, though I am ‘sugar-coating’ the first number by ‘printing’ a conclusion of the serial The Mystery of Murdon Grange. …It is outwardly done on the patchwork plan as before—each chapter bears one of my different aliases—Ward Phillips—Ames Dorrance Rowley—L.Theobald, &c.” (SL 1.68). This would seem to suggest that the serial—evidently a parody of a dime-novel mystery— was written entirely by HPL, each chapter or segment affixed with a different pseudonym; but the one segment that has actually been located suggests otherwise. This segment appeared in the amateur journal Spindrift5, No. 1 (Christmas 1917): 26–27, and contains the end of chapter 2 and the beginning of chapter 3; it is signed “B[enjamin] Winskill,” an amateur journalist living in Buxted, Sussex, UK. The journal was edited by Ernest Lionel McKeag of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
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What this suggests is that the story was a round-robin serial, with several different amateurs writing various segments; at best, HPL wrote one or more subsequent chapters in Hesperia,perhaps issuing them as continuations of the serial presumably begun in Spindrift. HPL never mentions “The Mystery of Murdon Grange” in any other extant correspondence, but mentions Hesperiain June 1921 as an ongoing enterprise ( SL1.136). HPL would type several carbon copies of the paper and send each copy on a designated round of circulation to amateurs; HPL appears to allude to it in “Amateur Journalism: Its Possible Needs and Betterment” (a lecture delivered on September 5, 1920): “I myself attempted to circulate [a manuscript magazine] two years ago, yet it disappeared before it could leave New England” ( MW449). No issues of Hesperiahave been found.
“Mystery of the Grave-yard; or, ‘A Dead Man’s Revenge’: A Detective Story, The.” Juvenile story (1,310 words); written c. 1898–99. First published in SR;corrected text in Juvenilia: 1897–1905(1985) and MW
Joseph Burns has died. Burns’s will instructs the rector, Mr. Dobson, to drop a ball in his tomb at a spot marked “A.” He does so and disappears. A man named Bell announces himself at the residence of Dobson’s daughter, saying that he will restore her father for the sum of £10,000. The daughter, thinking fast, calls the police and cries, “Send King John!” King John, arriving in a flash, finds that Bell has jumped out the window. He chases Bell to the train station, but Bell gets on a train as it is pulling out of the station. There is no telegraph service between the town of Mainville, where the action is taking place, and the “large city” of Kent, where the train is headed. King John rushes to a hackney cab office and says to a black hackman that he will give him two dollars (even though pounds were mentioned before) if he can get him to Kent in fifteen minutes. Bell arrives in Kent, meets with his band of desperadoes (which includes a woman named Lindy), and is about to depart with them on a ship when King John dramatically arrives, declaring: “John Bell, I arrest you in the Queen’s name!” At the trial, it is revealed that Dobson had fallen down a trapdoor at the spot marked “A” and had been kept in a “brilliantly lighted, and palatial apartment” until he rescues himself by making a wax impression of the key to the door and makes a dramatic entrance at the trial. Bell is sent to prison for life; Miss Dobson has become Mrs. King John.
The story is clearly influenced by the dime novel, a form of popular fiction widely read by unsophisticated readers from 1860 to the early twentieth century. HPL himself admitted reading several series of adventure stories in dime-novel format, including those focusing on such “heroes” as Nick Carter, Old King Brady, and Prince John. Possibly HPL’s King John is a fusion (at least in name) of Old King Brady and Prince John. (King John is presumably the hero of another lost HPL story written around this time, “John, the Detective.”) Many dime novels suggested the supernatural but explained it away at the end, as HPL’s story does, and many had frenetic, action-packed plots. HPL also attempts a rudimentary form of dialect in the speech of the hackman.