Harriet Works Corley

Harriet Works Corley (b. Fitchburg, Massachusetts, 24 May 1889; d. New York, New York, 9 February 1954)

newlywed Mrs. Donald Corley

Harriet Evelyn Works was the oldest of four children of Frank Hamilton Works (1861-1905), a contractor and bridge builder, and Bessie Elder Morris (1864-1926), who were married in Biddeford, Maine, on 10 August 1888.  Harriet’s birth in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, was soon followed by that of two sisters, and, in 1897, a brother. By 1900, Bessie Works was institutionalized at the Worcester State Hospital, a lunatic asylum, where she remained for the rest of her life. Harriet and her siblings grew up in Fitchburg, though they were split up after the death of their father from Bright’s Disease in August 1905.

Harriet gravitated to New York, and began contributing to magazines. In November 1912 and January 1914 she contributed poems to Harper’s Magazine.  By 1916 she was known as a writer of children’s stories, and at a dinner party in New York on Thursday, 20 July 1916, she met the architect, artist and writer, Donald Corley (1886-1955). The next day he proposed to her and she accepted, and two days later, on Sunday, 23 July 1916, they were married.  Their hasty courtship and marriage served as fodder for various newspapers.

The marriage apparently did not last long. By June 1917, Donald Corley’s draft registration lists him as unemployed, with a wife and one child, Sheila Brooke Corley (1917-1985). By the time of the 1920 Census, Donald was living in a boarding house, his marital status given as single. Harriet continued writing, now using the byline “Harriet Works Corley”.  The first appearance I have found dates from November 1918, on an article for the New York newspaper The Evening Telegram.  Her writings would appear in various magazines throughout the 1920s and 1930s, including stories in Flynn’s Weekly Detective Fiction (and in its retitled form as Detective Fiction Weekly), Mystery (published by Tower Magazines and sold only in Woolworth stores), and Street and Smith’s Detective Story Magazine; and nonfiction in Photoplay, Everybody’s Magazine, and Good Housekeeping.  Her final story that I have traced appeared in Double Detective in May 1940.  

 

Her two novels were both bylined “H. W. Corley”, and the first, For Love or Money (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1932), concerns an impetuous marriage—here a young woman is asked by a lawyer to marry one of his rich clients, and to give the marriage one year before deciding whether it should be permanent. For Love or Money was published in October 1932; her second and final novel, Spotlight (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1933) appeared only six months later, in April. In the late 1930s, she was working for the Federal Writers’ Project as a district supervisor in Greensboro, North Carolina. 

*updated 10 September 2021

Royal W. Jimerson

Royal W. Jimerson  (b. Minneapolis, Minnesota, 4 September 1895; d. San Francisco, California, 3 August 1958)

Royal Wade Jimerson was the oldest of two children of Herbert W. Jimerson (1865-1964) and Harriet M. Page (1874-1972), who were married in Minneapolis on 7 November 1894.  Royal had one sister, Faith, who was six years younger than himself.

The family moved to Wisconsin before 1910, and Royal was educated at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. For about five years he worked as a reporter on The Minneapolis Star and The Minneapolis Tribune.  He married Mabel Weik (1886-1974) in Chicago on 24 February 1917. At the time he filled out his draft registration card for World War I, Jimerson was a newspaper reporter in Chicago. Jimerson and his wife had two children; their oldest son Herbert was born in Minneapolis in 1917 but died of bronchial pneumonia in 1929.  Their second son, Royal W. Jimerson, Jr., was born in 1920.

In 1925 Jimerson joined The San Francisco Examiner as a rewrite man, and the family moved to California.  He went over to The San Francisco Chronicle in 1935 as a reporter, but later returned to The San Francisco Examiner as financial editor.  In 1938 he was appointed political editor, a position he held until 1954 when he retired because of illness.  He died in San Francisco at the age of 62.

In April 1928 he published a single story in Weird Tales magazine, “Medusa”, with a headpiece illustration by Hugh Rankin.  E.F. Bleiler has noted that it is a modernized version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark”, calling it “well-written, and one of the more effective horror stories of the period.”  It was reprinted by Christine Campbell Thomson in her anthology By Daylight Only (1929), the fifth volume in the British “Not at Night” anthology series. “Medusa” was also reprinted in the May 1938 issue of Weird Tales. It is Jimerson’s only known published work of fiction. 

Jimerson also had two letters in “The Eyrie”, the letter column of Weird Tales, in the January and May 1928 issues. In the latter letter, Jimerson wrote: “Your March issue hits a new high level.  My own preference is for stories that leave something to the imagination, and the March number hits the ball. Its literary quality is about the best you have attain; from cover to cover, the boys have done their job beautifully.”   

NB: Thanks to Alistair Durie and Terence McVicker for assistance on this entry.  

M. Humphreys

M. Humphreys  (fl. 1922-23)

Nothing is know of M. Humphreys, whose name is the byline on one effective horror story which appeared in the May 1923 issue Weird Tales magazine—“The Floor Above”, a story much admired by H.P. Lovecraft. Strangely, when the story was reprinted in the June 1933 issue of Weird Tales, as a classic reprint, the byline appears in the table of contents as “M.L. Humphreys” but not with the story itself, where it is still given as “M. Humphreys”.  In reprints of “The Floor Above”, as in Robert Weinberg’s anthology The Eighth Green Man and Other Strange Folk (1989) as well as in my own H.P. Lovecraft’s Favorite Weird Tales (2005), the middle initial “L” appears as part of the byline.*  I now believe the inclusion of a middle initial to be a mistake, and the proper attribution should read simply “M. Humphreys”.

This is due to the discovery of a second story contemporary with “The Floor Above” also bylined “M. Humphreys”.  This story is entitled “The Baby”, and it appeared in the April 1922 issue of the New York version of Pearson’s Magazine, then edited by Frank Harris.  It is a decidedly unconventional story for its time, the narrative of a ten year old orphaned girl who lives with her unloving uncle, a preacher, who had married a much younger women a few years previously and who has an ecclesiastical future all mapped out for their young baby, Luther. The picture it paints of the dreary lives of the minister and his family would not have been welcomed at many publications in the early 1920s, so kudos to the iconoclast Frank Harris for publishing it. While the story itself is in no way fantastical, there is through it all an undercurrent of fear and horror. 

It still seems to me probable that “M. Humphreys” is a pseudonym.  Both Humphreys stories are well-executed, and therefore unlikely to be the only writings by this person. 

* I also wrote in the headnote to that story that in the June 1933 reprint the name is misspelled “Humphries”, but this assertion, based on information in Sheldon R. Jaffery and Fred Cook’s The Collector’s Index to Weird Tales (1985), is wrong.

Oscar Cook

Oscar Cook (b. Tollington Park, Islington, 17 March 1888; d. Kensington, 23 February 1952)

Richard Martin Oscar Cook, who commonly went by his third name Oscar, was born in greater London, the second son of Henry Adcock Cook (b. 1858), an athletic goods manufacturer, and Alice Cole (b. c. 1861), who were married in the Parish of St. James, Muswell Hill, Middlesex on 30 October 1885. Besides an older brother he had a younger sister.  Little is known of his youth and early adulthood, but he was educated at St. Catherine’s School and the family lived for a time in Broxbourne. At the time of the 1911 Census, Oscar was working as an insurance clerk in Broxbourne. By June 1912, he was nine thousand miles away from home in Borneo, where, finding himself out of a job after a disagreement with his employer at the Beaufort Borneo Rubber Company, he joined the North Borneo Civil Service, in whose employ he remained for about eight years, returning to London in 1920.  Back in England he was encouraged by friends to write a personal memoir of his time in Borneo, and when completed, he took his manuscript to the literary agency Curtis Brown.  There he met agent Christine Campbell Thomson (1897-1985).  Thomson gave his manuscript a more attractive title and proceeded to sell it to British and American publishers.  Borneo: The Stealer of Hearts was published in London by Hurst & Blackett in August 1924, and soon afterwards by Houghton Mifflin of Boston.  Following Thomson’s recommendation that he write about what he knew, Cook published a number of stories set in Borneo in magazines such The Blue Magazine, Hutchinson’s Adventure-Story Magazine, Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story Magazine, and The Novel Magazine.

Oscar Cook and Christine Campbell Thomson were married in London on 30 September 1924. Around this time, for about a year, Cook worked as the editor of two magazines, Hutchinson’s Mystery-Story Magazine and Hutchinson’s Adventure-Story Magazine.  In 1925 Cook acquired a controlling interest in the publishing firm Selwyn & Blount Limited. His wife devised and edited for the firm the very successful “Not at Night” series of horror anthologies, the first of which, titled “Not at Night,” appeared in October 1925.  Less successful on the Selwyn & Blount list were Cook’s own novel The Seventh Wave, published in September 1926, and a reprint of his memoir, Borneo: The Stealer of Hearts, in August 1927. Cook tried his hand at playwriting, and a version in three acts of The Seventh Wave was performed in 1927. 

Selwyn & Blount also published his wife’s novel, His Excellency, in September 1927.  The “Not at Night” series meanwhile had grown by two further volumes, More Not at Night in September 1926 and You’ll Need a Night Light in September 1927, but the success of this series was not enough to keep the firm alive.  In 1928 Selwyn & Blount was acquired by Hutchinson, which continued the profitable “Not at Night” series, making in total twelve volumes, the final being the Not at Night Omnibus (1937).  Thomson continued to edit the series, including tales of her own (under the pseudonym Flavia Richardson) as well as stories by her husband.

In 1928 Cook and Thomson’s only child was born, a son Gervis Hugh Frere Cook, who in adulthood became a navy officer and hyphenated his surname as Frere-Cook.  In the family tradition, Gervis Frere-Cook edited a few books in the 1960s and early 1970s, including The Decorative Arts of the Mariner (1966) and The Decorative Arts of the Christian Church (1972), before his early death in 1974.

Beginning in 1925, Thomson sold American serial rights for four of Cook’s stories to Weird Tales magazine, and these stories were mostly reprints (sometimes under new titles) of tales which had previously appeared in England.  (One Weird Tales story which appears in various indices as by Oscar Cook is actually bylined “Cargray Cook” and is mistakenly included with those by Oscar Cook. This story, titled “On the Highway,” appeared in the January 1925 issue.)  The story which appeared under the title “The Sacred Jars” in Weird Tales in March 1927, and which appeared in England as “When Glister Walked,” is actually an expansion of an episode which had appeared in chapter six of his memoir.  Cook’s best stories are those which are highlighted by the local color of Borneo.  His most famous story is probably “Boomerang,” which was effectively adapted by Rod Serling for a second season episode of Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, where it was retitled “The Caterpillar.” The episode was broadcast on 1 March 1972.

Cook and Thomson’s marriage broke up in 1937, and Oscar Cook died in Kensington at the age of 63 in early 1952. 

NB: An earlier version of this entry appeared in my column “Notes on Neglected Fantasists”, Fastitocalon no. 1 (2010).  

Julian Kilman

Julian Kilman (b. Drummondsville, Ontario, 26 March 1878; d. Gulfport, Florida, 3 April 1954)

Julian Kilman was the pen-name of Leroy Noble Kilman, the elder of the two children of Alva Hamilton Kilman (1853-1916) and his wife Ida M. Kilman (1859-1920s?), née Noble.  His sister was Zella May Kilman (1880-1955).

Kilman immigrated to the United States around 1897, afterwards becoming a U.S. citizen.  He studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and received an A.B. in 1905 and a LL.B. in 1906, after which he was admitted to the bar.  Settling in Buffalo, he was from 1908-1914 an assistant government attorney for the Western District of New York, moving over to the Bureau of Naturalization in 1914 and becoming the District Director of Naturalization in 1925, a position he held until his retirement. 

On 26 July 1910, at Milan, Michigan, he married Cecile Lily Gauntlett (1883-1962). They had two children, Katherine (born circa 1913) and Julian (1915-1990).  Soon after his marriage he began to contribute short stories to magazines, and the bulk of them so far discovered appeared between 1921 and 1930, all with the byline “Julian” Kilman. With his proficiency at the short story, he at times lectured on story writing at the University of Buffalo.

Kilman published six stories in The Black Mask, beginning with “The Peculiar Affair at the Axminster” in the first issue dated April 1920.  More significantly, he published five stories in Weird Tales, also beginning in its very first issue dated March 1923, with “The Mystery of Black Jean”.  Kilman’s stories appeared in the first four issues, and in the sixth, all published in 1923.  The longest tale, “The Golden Caverns” (May 1923), is a lost treasure story set in Brazil, while “The Affair of the Man in Scarlet” concerns an execution in thirteenth century France.  The three other stories are all about murders and crimes.  Marvin Kaye, in The Best of Weird Tales 1923 (1997), considered three of Kilman’s five Weird Tales stories to be among the top works of fiction published in the first year of that magazine’s existence.  However, as well-written and executed as these stories are, the simple truth is that there is very little of the fantastic in them, and as little horror. It seems probable that as Weird Tales found its own niche, Kilman drifted away from being a contributor simply because his work was never a good fit in the first place and because his interests lay elsewhere. 

Over fifty short stories by Kilman are known, but he never published a collection, nor indeed any books at all.  Magazines he contributed to include Midnight Mystery Stories, The Smart Set, Action Stories, Mystery Magazine, Detective Tales, Tropical Adventures, Real Detective Tales, People’s Story Magazine, Brief Stories, The Double Dealer, The American Short Story, 10 Story Book, and others. After 1930 Kilman’s output ceased, save perhaps for a couple of nonfiction pieces in Argosy in 1946 that are bylined “L.N. Kilman”.  Kilman was known also to be an ardent amateur lepidopterist.  He died in Florida, but was buried in Milan, Michigan.  

Paul K. Johnstone

Paul K. Johnstone (b. St. Louis, Missouri, 27 February 1910; d. St. Louis, Missouri, August 1985)

Apparently born Paul Johnson (with his mother’s first name Brigetta), Paul Karlsson Johnstone claimed later in life that his great-uncle was the famous mountain man of the American west, known as “Liver-Eating” Johnson (c. 1824-1901). Little is known of Johnstone’s early life, beyond the details he gave in a jaunty autobiographical sketch when his first short story appeared in Blue Book Magazine in May 1948. Here Johnstone noted that he left Missouri at an early age and “had the inestimable benefit of growing up in Oklahoma, where there was plenty of room for it (6 feet 4 and 240 pounds at latest returns).  Met Indians, oil-men, hijackers, and pistol-packin’ mamas—it was a lively land. At twelve, I had been under fire three times.”  With his mother (his father seems to have been out of the picture by the 1920 Census and dead by the 1930 Census), Johnstone moved back to St. Louis just before the onset of the Depression.  He worked at a number of jobs:  “wheelbarrow chauffeur, ball-player (I never made the pro grade—good hit, but no field), wrestling referee, door-to-door salesman, florist, art student.” His eyesight (“myopic peepers, souvenirs of a childhood bout with typhoid”) prevented him from serving in World War II, but he did work as a guard at a war plant.  He gave his hobbies as “boxing, baseball, and collating Dark Age genealogies, traditions and place-names.” It was this latter interest that would underlay all of his publications.  Years later he would correlate his interests in the fringe of the American Wild West with the older Völkerwanderung of the Germanic tribes in Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries.

His first known publication is a letter in Weird Tales in the April 1927 issue. He began publishing more seriously (as “P.K. Johnstone”) with some letters on “The Victories of Arthur” in 1934 in Notes and Queries.  These were followed in 1938 by the first of more than a dozen contributions to the scholarly journal Antiquities. These include shorter considerations like “Caw of Pictland” (September 1938) and “The Date of Camlann” (March 1950), to longer ones like “Cerdric and His Ancestors” (March 1946) and a book review of The Races of Europe (1939) by Carleton Stevens Cox, under the title “Racial Contexts of Prehistory” (September 1946). His most significant scholarly piece is doubtless “A Consular Chronology of Dark Age Britain”, a summing up of the results of two decades of work (June 1962).  It was intended to form the basis of a projected study of the Brittonic Heroic Age, but the project was never completed.  A short biographical note appeared with the article, certainly to distinguish the American Johnstone from the South African-born British television producer and authority on the archaeology of ships and prehistoric sea-craft, Paul Johnstone (1920-1976), who was then coming to prominence. 

In 1948, the first two of Johnstone’s eight contributions to Blue Book Magazine appeared.  These are the short stories “The Rusted Blade” (May 1948) and “Free Swordsman” (October 1948). They were followed by two further stories in 1949 and one novella in 1950: “The Wall of the Eternal” (May 1949); “High Kindred” (December 1949); and “Up, Red Dragon!” (March 1950).  Johnstone’s final three contributions to Blue Book Magazine were all nonfiction: “Winner Take All” (April 1950); “The Far Land”, about St. Brendan (November 1950); and “Robin Was a Hood” (February 1951), a “true story”.

Johnstone’s career as a fiction-writer culminated with the publication of his only book, the short novel Escape from Attila (New York: Criterion Books, 1969), illustrated by Joseph A. Phelan. It was published (perhaps mistakenly) as a children’s book, probably  because of its heroic and mythological nature.  It tells the story of the escape of two Frankish prisoners, Walter and Hildegundis, from Attila’s army in the middle of the fifth century, and their desperate journey to warn their people of Attila’s planned invasion.  Johnstone combines legendary materials from many sources (and discusses them in a “Historical Note” at the end of the book). His prose is at times weighed down by historical detail, but the tale is enjoyable. 

Late in life Johnstone continued publishing articles on specialist topics. Several appeared in Stonehenge Viewpoint, a kind of new-age newspaper that began as a mail-order catalog but evolved into a small press magazine.  Johnstone’s articles include pieces on “What Language Was Spoken at Stonehenge” (no. 16, First Quarter 1977); “King Arthur’s Silverware” (no. 19, later 1977); and an unfinished posthumously-published two-part piece on “Merlin”  (no. 69, January-February 1986; and no. 70, March-April 1986).   Johnstone also found an audience among role-playing gamers, contributing two articles to Dragon Magazine:  “The Return of Conan Maol” (no. 24, April 1979) and “Origins of the Norse Pantheon” (no. 29, September 1979).

Johnstone’s final scholarly publication, “The Languages of Pictland”, appeared in ESOP: The Epigraphic Society Occasional Publications, volume 13 (1985).  He died in St. Louis in August 1985. 

NB: Thanks to Morgan Holmes for sharing information with me.  

Charles Layng

Charles Layng (b. Cincinnati, Ohio, 10 February 1895; d. Winter Park, Florida, 19 March 1970)

Charles Louis Layng appears in the 1900, 1910, and 1920 U.S. Censuses with his surname given as “Lang”. In all three instances he is listed as living with his aunt and uncle, Louis and Martha Flugel, with his parentage given as Irish (matching that of his aunt Martha Flugel).  His service record for World War I, which gives his last name as Layng, also notes that his was given an honorable discharge on 28 February 1918, with a Surgeon’s Certificate of Disability, judging him as one-hundred percent disabled. By the time of the 1920 Census, he was working as a stenographer for a railroad company. Soon after this he married Margaret Burgoyne (1893-1972), who was also from Cincinnati, and the couple moved to Chicago.

Layng worked as a cub reporter on the Chicago Daily News for a few years before taking on a much higher paying job as the editor of a prosperous trade journal.  His first three books appeared from a Chicago publisher at the beginning of the craze for crossword puzzle books, Layng's Cross-Word Puzzles: First Book (1924); Layng’s Junior Cross-Word Puzzles: First Junior Book (1924); and Layng’s Cross-Word Puzzles: Second Book (1925).  He and his wife regularly traveled to Europe, and for much of the 1930s he contributed to various magazines, including pulps like Real Detective Tales and Mystery Stories, Blue Book, Top-Notch, and Railroad Stories, as well as slicks like Redbook. His third book The Monarch Who Wouldn’t Go Mad (1934), a biography of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria (1830-1916), appeared from another Chicago publisher, Reilly & Lee, after which time his luck with publishers seems to have run out. 

During the late 1930s and 1940s, Layng worked as a foreign correspondent.  While reporting from Munich and Vienna, Layng began a mystery novel, Murder in Munich, which was bought by Doubleday after they saw the first six chapters.  Layng sent them the rest, and heard nothing further.  Returning after the war, he discovered that the man who had bought it had left the firm, and that other editors had decided it was not salable in the U.S. because Americans wouldn’t buy whodunits set in foreign lands. 

After WW II he become involved with the Baker Street Irregulars, a society devoted to the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes.  After submitting an essay to the Baker Street Journal, edited by Edgar W. Smith, Layng was encouraged to write a book of such essays, examining many anomalies in the Sherlock Holmes canon. Smith said he knew a publisher who would be interested in such a book.  But when, some years later, Layng had finished the book, Layng learned that Smith had died, so the project languished. In 1964 Layng sent a copy of the typescript, titled The Game Is Afoot!, to Peter Ruber, who was then corresponding with Layng about his friendship with the Chicago bookman Vincent Starrett, about whom Ruber was writing a biography. Three decades later Ruber found the typescript in his files, and it was published in 1995 by George Vanderburgh under the imprint of the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library.

In the early 1960s Layng and his wife settled in Winter Park, Florida, where Layng died in 1970. 

C. Bryson Taylor

C. Bryson Taylor  (b. Washington, D.C., 7 March 1880; d. New York, c. 9 June 1936)

Charlotte Bryson Taylor was the daughter of John Yeatman Taylor (1829-1911) and Sabella Barr Bryson (1846-1919).  She had a younger brother Andrew Bryson Taylor (1883-1909).  Her father had been medical director of the United States Navy, and retired in 1891 with the rank of Rear Admiral.  Charlotte was educated at private schools in the District of Columbia and in Connecticut.  Her first story appeared in The Overland Monthly in 1898, and by 1900 her newspaper and magazine work had become regular. She always signed her work “C. Bryson Taylor”, presumably to disguise her gender. Based out of Washington D.C., and later out of New York, she published over the span of about a decade numerous stories and articles in popular magazines, most notably in Everybody’s Magazine, but also in Munsey’s Magazine, All-Story Magazine, The Cosmopolitan Magazine and The Delineator. 

Taylor’s first novel was In the Dwellings of the Wilderness (New York:  Henry Holt, 1904), a short fantasy in which archeologists Deane and Merritt and their men unearth the mummy of a high ranking woman from its sealed tomb in Egypt. The evidence suggests that she was walled-in while alive, behind a door marked “forbidden”, in order to trap the devil soul that possessed her.  The next morning the mummy has disappeared—soon afterwards a beautiful woman tries to lure some of the men into the desert. Those who follow her are never seen again. The leader Deane gets lost searching for one of his men, and is attacked by something which bites his shoulder, attempting to suck his blood.  Deane escapes, but the next day he and the expedition leave the desert to its secrets.  This short novel, published in April 1904, is well-written and evocative, an understated but atmospheric tale perhaps influenced by Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars, published in England in June 1903. 

Taylor’s second novel, Nicanor: Teller of Tales (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1906), was illustrated by Troy and Margaret West Kinney, and it is a more ambitious enterprise, if a less lasting one. Set in Britain during the Roman occupation, it tells of Nicanor, the son of a peasant. Nicanor becomes enraptured by the story of the Christ-child, and in retelling it becomes a captivating storyteller himself.  The book was well received at the time of its publication.

Taylor’s brother was killed in an automobile accident in 1909. In 1911, her father, after some years of declining health, shot himself in the head.  Taylor’s published output ceased, and for a while she worked on the staff of Everybody’s Magazine, to which she had been a regular contributor. Taylor married Anderson Oakes Randall (c. 1882-1917) in November 1912.  After her husband’s death in New York in May 1917, she disappeared from public life, and died in early June 1936. She was buried in the family plot near her husband and mother in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn on June 13, 1936.

NB: An earlier version of this entry appeared in my column “Notes on Neglected Fantasists”, Fastitocalon no. 2 (2010). 

Bassett Morgan

Bassett Morgan (b. Chatham, Ontario, 26 November 1884; d. Alameda, California, 28 January 1977)

"Bassett Morgan" and Forrest J. Ackerman

Grace Ethel Jones was the daughter of British-born parents, Edwin Bassett Jones (1846-1916) and Emily Dunkley (1851-1926), whose families emigrated to Canada when they were very young. Grace Jones had two older brothers; the family grew up in Chatham, in southwestern Ontario, where Edwin Jones was Waterworks Superintendent and City Engineer. Grace Jones married Thomas Russell Morgan (1881-1930s?) on 20 August 1905; the couple had one daughter and one son. They emigrated to the United States around 1918, settling in Alameda, California, where Grace Jones Morgan died in 1977 at the age of 92.

Bassett Morgan's first cover
illustration, September 1927 

She is best remembered as a contributor to Weird Tales, in whose pages she published thirteen stories, between 1926 and 1936, under the pen-name “Bassett Morgan,” which was made up of her father’s middle name combined with her own married name.  And though she also contributed to Ghost Stories, most of her writing appeared outside the weird-fiction field in periodicals ranging from The Royal Magazine, Cassell’s Magazine, The Smart Set, Argosy, All-Story, Munsey’s Magazine, Sea Stories, Boy’s Life, Woman’s Journal, Top Notch, and Black Mask, among many others.  She also published three novels, two under her real name and the third under her pseudonym.     

The 1928 New York edition
of Morgan's first book

Salvage All (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1928; London: Grant Richards, 1928), as by Grace Jones Morgan, concerns a young street waif at a British Columbia seaport, and the men who seek to aid or abuse her.  Tents of Shem (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Company, 1930), also published as by Grace Jones Morgan, is a complicated story of a reckless young woman, born of an old Irish family and a San Francisco dancing girl with lax morals, who could not escape her heritage. The Golden Rupee (London: John Long, 1935), as by Bassett Morgan, is a South Sea adventure of young Captain Paradise, who murders a leper and takes the man’s treasure, including an intricately beautiful model of a ship called the “Golden Rupee.”  Captain Paradise has a vessel built to this design, but he is fated never to sail in it, as he is killed by a rival the night before his wedding, and his rival takes the ship. However, the ghost of Captain Paradise still rules over the lives of those who had known him, with tragic results. 

In 1974, under her full name Grace Jones Morgan she introduced and self-published an edition limited to one hundred numbered copies of her father’s autobiography, The Recollections of Edwin Bassett Jones.  This gives some accounts of his amateur archeological work, including his finds of Indian artifacts and of a mastodon.

NB: An earlier version of this entry appeared in my column “Notes on Lost and Forgotten Writers” in All Hallows no. 42 (October 2006). 

Morgan's second and last
cover illustration , January 1935 

A Bibliography of Bassett Morgan's weird fiction: 

Bimini

            Weird Tales, January 1929

            Donald A. Wollheim, ed. Avon Fantasy Reader 10 (1949)

Black Bagheela

            Weird Tales, January 1935

The Demon Doom of N’Yeng Sen

            Weird Tales, August 1929

The Devils of Po Sung

            Weird Tales, December 1927

            T. Everett Harré, ed. Beware After Dark! (1929)

            Christine Campbell Thomson, ed. By Daylight Only (1929)

            Weird Tales, March 1939

            Kurt Singer, ed. Satanic Omnibus (1973)

            Kurt Singer, ed. Shriek (1974)

Gray Ghouls

            Weird Tales, July 1927

            Weird Tales, September 1939

            Donald A. Wollheim, ed. Avon Fantasy Reader 15 (1951)

The Head

            Weird Tales, February 1927

The Island of Doom

            Weird Tales, March 1932

            Christine Campbell Thomson, ed. Grim Death (1932)

            Christine Campbell Thomson, ed. Not at Night (Arrow, 1960)

Laocoon

            Weird Tales, July 1926

            Christine Campbell Thomson, ed. You'll Need a Night Light (1927)

            Herbert Asbury, ed. Not at Night! (1928)

            Weird Tales, December 1937

            Hugh Lamb, ed. Star Book of Horror No. 2 (1976)

Midas

            Weird Tales, November 1936

The Punishment of Barney Muldoon

            Ghost Stories, October 1929 
            Mike Ashley, ed. Phantom Perfumes and Other Shades (2000) 

Rats at the Silver Cheese            

            Oriental Stories, Autumn 1931

 The Skeleton under the Lamp

            Weird Tales, May 1928

Tiger 
           Strange Stories, March 1932

            Startling Mystery Stories, Spring 1969

Tiger Dust

            Weird Tales, April 1933

            Christine Campbell Thomson, ed. Keep on the Light (1933)

            Donald A. Wollheim, ed. Avon Fantasy Reader 12 (1950)

            Weird Tales, January 1954

            Short Stories, Feb. 1959

The Vengeance of Ti Fong

            Weird Tales, December 1934

The Wolf Woman

            Weird Tales,  September 1927

            Robert Weinberg, ed. The Eighth Green Man and Other 

                            Strange Folk (1989)

            Robert Weinberg, Stefan R. Dzemianowicz, Martin H. 

                           Greenberg, eds. Weird Vampire Tales (1992)