Lamont Buchanan

Lamont Buchanan (b. New York City, 6 March 1919; d. New York City, 21 April 2015)
 

Lamont Buchanan in his mid to late 80s

 

Charles Lamont Buchanan, Jr., who went by his middle name, was the second of two children and the only son of Charles Lamont Buchanan (1884-1962), a music, art and drama critic, and his first wife, Anita Marshall Dominick (1881-1967), who were married in New York on 11 June 1911. Their first child was a daughter, Jane, some four or five years older than her brother. The Buchanans were divorced and Charles's second wife was Elizabeth Ellis, who survived him.  As "Charles Lamont Buchanan" the father had published a small booklet of poetry, Preludes in Shade (1902), limited to fifty copies from handmade plates.  He worked as a newspaperman first in Hartford, Connecticut, and later in New York.

Lamont Buchanan is remembered primarily as an  "Associate Editor" at Weird Tales under Dorothy McIlwraith's editorship.  After some newspaper work, Buchanan's tenure at Weird Tales ran from the November 1942 issue through the September 1949 one. He worked at the same time for Short Stories, which was also edited by McIlwraith. By 1946, Buchanan was doing most of the work on Weird Tales, according to some notices in Writer's Digest. Between 1947 and 1956 Buchanan also published some thirteen illustrated books of nonfiction, covering topics of sports to politics.  A complete list, with their descriptive subtitles, includes:

The Story of Football in Text and Pictures (1947)

The Story of Basketball in Text and Pictures (1948)

People and Politics: The Pictorial History of the American Two-Party System (1948)

A Pictorial History of the Confederacy (1951)

The World Series and Highlights of Baseball: in Text and Over 250 Pictures (1951)

The Story of Tennis in Text and Pictures (1951)

A Pictorial History of the Confederacy (1951)

The Flying Years (1953)

The Kentucky Derby Story in Text and 140 Illustrations (1953)

The Pictorial Baseball Instructor; with Forty Magic Rules to Help You Play Any Position Better in Little League, College Play, Major League (1954)

Steel Trails and Iron Horses: A Pageant of American Railroading (1955)

Ballot for Americans: A Pictorial History of American Elections and Electioneering with the Top Political Personalities, 1789-1956 (1956)

Ships of Steam (1956)

In the Bronx in 1952, Lamont Buchanan married Jean Milligan (1919-2004) who is reported to have been his high school sweetheart.  What makes this especially interesting is that researcher Sam Moskowitz noted in the 1970s that the pay records for Weird Tales showed that "Jean Milligan" was the payee for some thirty-six stories published in Weird Tales that were bylined "Allison V. Harding."  Initially it was believed that Milligan was the author of these tales, which correlated closely with Buchanan's tenure as Associate Editor at Weird Tales, and at Short Stories, where six additional Harding stories appeared. (The details are given in the Allison V. Harding entry at this blog: click here.) More recently, however, it has been suggested that Buchanan wrote the stories and had the payment sent to his future wife. Evidence that supports this conclusion can be found in the author blurb on his second book, The Story of Basketball in Text and Pictures (1948), which reads:

"As one of the earliest contributors to the big pictorial magazines, he is a firm believer in the text and picture method of telling a story. Besides being a prolific writer of short stories and articles for various publications, Mr. Buchanan has authored network radio scripts, and is also a full-time magazine editor." 

Nothing is at present known about Buchanan's radio scripts, and there are no known short stories under his byline, though for nonfiction he is known to have contributed articles to Liberty and Argosy in 1945 (the piece in Argosy was co-written with his friend and predecessor at Weird Tales, Lynn Perkins), and to Radio and Television News in 1950. Of more interest is Buchanan's article "What Makes the Action Story Go" in Writer's Year Book in 1945, a collection of tips for writers. The idea of Buchanan being "a prolific writer of short stories" would fit with the idea that he wrote the Allison V. Harding stories. 

After 1956 Buchanan and his wife virtually disappeared from public life. They lived in a rent-controlled apartment in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan for at least five decades.  After an incident in 2004 of both Buchanan and his wife falling and calling out for help, they were moved into an Upper West Side nursing home. Jean Milligan Buchanan died shortly thereafter, in December 2004. Lamont Buchanan lived on for more than ten years, and after his death at the age of 96 in 2015 it was discovered that he had amassed a fortune of over fifteen million dollars, presumably through investments, for he and his wife were known to live frugally. He left no will (and he and Milligan had had no children), but a search turned up a single living blood-relative, an estranged niece, the only child of his sister Jane, from her first marriage to Robert B. Sinclair. 

A few years before Buchanan's death, an unpublished interview from 1940 with reclusive author J.D. Salinger (1919-2010) surfaced, and the news reports claimed that Buchanan had arranged the interview and known Salinger. The claim was also made that Buchanan may have been the inspiration (or partially so) for Salinger's most famous literary character, Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye (1951). Any close examination makes this assertion seem very dubious. 

Allison V. Harding

Allison V. Harding (either Jean Milligan, b. Cleveland, Ohio, 31 May 1919; d. New York City, 6 December 2004; or Charles Lamont Buchanan, b. New York City, 6 March 1919; d. New York City, 21 April 2015)

The byline “Allison V. Harding” has long been known as a regular contributor to Weird Tales magazine in the 1940s, and the mystery behind the pseudonym has frustrated many readers. In the 1970s, Sam Moskowitz acquired some of the surviving financial records of Weird Tales and its companionly-edited magazine Short Stories, and from them he learned that the person who was paid for the "Allison V. Harding" stories was named Jean Milligan, who as of 1954 lived in the Sutton Place neighborhood of Manhattan. Moskowitz believed she was already dead, and that she had been an attorney. Both suppositions appear to be wrong. 

Jean Milligan was the youngest of three daughters of John Raymond Milligan (1885-1959), a 1907 graduate of Amherst College who became an investment banker and was a partner in the private Cleveland banking house Tillotson & Walcott, and Beatrice Isabel Humphrey (1886-1938), a graduate of Smith College, who had married around 1909.  Jean’s sisters were Mary Louise Milligan (1910-1949), who attended Vassar and married an attorney, and Katherine Milligan (1914-1973), who married first a businessman and later an industrial engineer. 

Around 1927, the Milligan family moved from Ohio to New Canaan, Connecticut, and John R. Milligan took a position with Edward B. Smith & Company in New York. Later he worked for the Banker’s Trust until his retirement in 1950.  Little is known of Jean’s education, but in the early 1940s she is listed in New Canaan city directories as a student.  At the same time, another student living in New Canaan was [Charles] Lamont Buchanan (1919-2015) who would eventually become Jean’s husband. They are reputed to have been high school sweethearts, but it is impossible at present to guess which schools they may have attended, or what degrees they might have attained.  With the November 1942 issue of Weird Tales magazine, Buchanan became the Associate Editor under Dorothy McIlwraith. Weird Tales appeared six times a year, every other month. At the same time, McIlwraith also edited (presumably with Buchanan as subordinate) Short Stories, which came out twice a month for most of the 1940s (it became a monthly in April 1949). Buchanan’s final issue as Associate Editor of Weird Tales was dated September 1949.    

Thirty-six stories bylined Allison V. Harding appeared in Weird Tales magazine, beginning with “The Unfriendly World” (July 1943) and ending with “Scope” (January 1951).  Six Allison V. Harding stories appeared in Short Stories, ranging from “Night without Darkness” (September 10, 1944) to “Corpse on a Vacation” (January 1950). According to the New York City Marriage Licenses Index, Jean Milligan married Lamont Buchanan in the Bronx in 1952. Harding ceased publishing soon after Buchanan left Weird Tales. It has been suggested (first by Terence E. Hanley) that the writer of the "Allison V. Harding" stories was not Milligan but her future husband, Lamont Buchanan. This seems entirely possible and plausible.(For some tentative evidence, see this blog's entry on Buchanan.)

Buchanan himself published some thirteen books between 1947 and 1956, mostly to do with sports or history, before disappearing from public view along with his wife. Milligan’s family was wealthy, and Buchanan’s  maternal grandmother seems also to have had some wealth (his father was a familiarly-known music, art and drama critic). After their marriage, Buchanan and Milligan lived frugally for decades in the same rent-controlled apartment that Milligan had lived in since the early 1940s. They had no children, and in 2004, they were both moved into an Upper West Side nursing home, where Milligan died a short time later.  After Buchanan's death in 2015 at the age of 96, it was discovered that he had amassed a fortune of over fifteen million dollars.  

Whether they were written by Buchanan or Milligan, posterity has not looked kindly on the Allison V. Harding stories, tending to view them as second-rate filler. Robert Weinberg, in his The Weird Tales Story (1977), called them "undistinguished works that filled up space and were quickly forgotten" (p. 45).  The tales are not without some favorable qualities, usually in terms of atmosphere, but the characters are one-dimensional, and the plots are at times silly. Cumulatively the defects overshadow any more positive traits.

Of the contributions to Weird Tales, one of the more interesting tales is “The Damp Man” (July 1947), in which a young female swimmer is stalked by a large fat man with a fleshy dead-white face. A newspaperman takes it upon himself to protect the girl.  The atmosphere in the stalking scenes is handled fairly well, but the Damp Man is revealed to be Lother Remsdorf, Jr., a millionaire who is not like other men, but who has water in his veins rather than blood.  When Remsdorf follows the girl northwards, he freezes to death in the cold weather.  Remsdorf reappeared in two sequels, “The Damp Man Returns” (September 1947) and “The Damp Man Again” (May 1949).   Other representative Harding tales include “The Murderous Steam Shovel” (November 1945), in which a malevolent steam shovel haunts its operator and his wife, and “Take the Z Train” (March 1950), in which a man boards a train and encounters his younger selves, apparently as the summation of his life. Harding’s stories are rarely reprinted by anthologists.  

Cover by John Giunta, illustrating the third Damp Man story (May 1949)

NB: some of the above is based on the Harding entry I wrote for Supernatural Literature of the World (2005), edited by S.T. Joshi and Stefan Dziemianowicz. This entry last updated in 2017.