Edith Birkhead

Edith Birkhead (b. Harrowgate, Yorkshire, 28 November 1888; d. Clifton, Bristol, 14 June 1951)

Edith Birkhead was the daughter of Robert Dax Birkhead (1836-1908), a commercial traveler, and his wife Mary Jemima Taylor (1848-1921), who were married in Barnsley, Yorkshire, in the summer of 1869.  She was the youngest of seven children, and had four sisters and two brothers.

She was educated at South Liverpool High School, Liverpool College, Huyton, and entered the University of Liverpool in October 1906 (B.A. 1910, Honours in English Literature; M.A. 1911), with further study of English Literature at Liverpool under the William Noble Fellowship for 1916-17 and 1917-18.*

Birkhead's first and most important book was the result of her research fellowship. The Tale of Terror: A Study of the Gothic Romance (London:  Constable, [April] 1921) is one of the first extended works of scholarship covering the beginnings of the gothic romance in the late eighteenth century up to modern times.  (Dorothy Scarborough's The Supernatural in Modern English Fiction had come out in 1917.)  An undated American edition of The Tale of Terror came out from E.P. Dutton around July 1921, made up of sheets imported from England with a cancel title. Birkhead's preface is dated December 1920, which has resulted in bibliographical references erroneously stating that the book was published in 1920.

The review in The Times Literary Supplement, 5 May 1921,  was by Virginia Woolf. The New York Times Book Review gave the book a full-page review by noted critic Brander Matthews in the issue for 25 September 1921. Both reviews are positive about what Birkhead achieved, but both wished that she might have expanded her scope a bit. A few years later, H.P. Lovecraft, when writing his essay "Supernatural Horror in Literature" (1927), relied heavily on Birkhead's book, especially with regard to early gothic writers covered in its first five chapters. 

By 1920, Birkhead was Assistant Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Bristol. By 1930 her position had been elevated to Lecturer, and later, Senior Lecturer.

Birkhead did not publish much. Her first known work was an essay on "Imagery and Style in Shelley," published in Primitiæ: Essays in English Literature (1912) by students of the University of Liverpool. An essay on "Sentiment and Sensibility in the Eighteenth Century Novel" appeared in Essays and Studies by Member of the English Association (1925), and a second, small book was Christina Rosetti & Her Poetry (1930).

Birkhead never married, and her estate of over six thousand pounds was left to another "spinster," Anne Mackenzie Couper (c. 1888-1966).

One of her older sisters was Alice Birkhead (b. Heaton Moor, Lancashire, 22 June 1880; d. Golders Green, Middlesex, 22 September 1918), who was a teacher of art and painting at a girls' college.  Alice Birkhead also published several books, including two novels The Master Knot (1908) and Shifting Sands (1914), along with popular histories Tales of Irish History (1910), Stories of American History (1912), The Story of the French Revolution (1913), Heroes of Modern Europe (1913), Marie Antoinette (1914), and Peter the Great (1915).


*Information courtesy of the University Archivist, The University of Liverpool.

Elizabeth Whiteley

Elizabeth Whiteley (b. reg. Halifax, Yorkshire, Jan-Mar 1879; untraced after c.1906)

Elizabeth Whiteley was the second child of Thomas Whiteley (1847-1893), a house painter, and Dorothy Gratton (1847-1912), who were married in Derbyshire in early 1874. Their first child had been a son, John Henry Whiteley (1875-1880).

In 1894, after her husband's death, Dorothy Whiteley married James Hutchinson (1844-1919), a wool sorter who was a widower with one son, Henry Hutchinson (1871-1962).  The family made their home in central Halifax.  In the 1901 UK Census, Elizabeth is listed as a music teacher. She was also, according to a 1905 profile in Yorkshire Notes and Queries, a vocalist and  a solo violinist of considerable ability. She also apparently contributed many short stories to the local papers.

Her only book was the novel, The Devil's Throne (London:  Digby, Long, [October] 1903), one which George Locke listed as "a forerunner of the mystical but very imaginative type of interplanetary which was to culminate in David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus." Some reviews give some flavor of the book:

On the title-page we find the words "And lo! I beheld a serpent-throne, and a beauteous woman." On the vellum square, over which the two characters are poring as the story opens, was written in cabalistic letters a description of "The Devil's Throne," which was hidden behind the orb of the lambent moon. Thither they fare in the flying machine which is ready made for the purpose, and before long we are in a phantasmagoria in which we distinguish at intervals Circe, Marcus Aurelius, and the two investigators. For sheer extravagance this story surpasses anything we have met with in recent fiction.  The Academy and Literature, 21 November 1903

In The Devil's Throne, a father and daughter set out on a series of adventures in a wonderful airship, reaching all sorts of extraordinary countries in the clouds, encountering a tribe of feathered dwarfs and other marvellous creatures, and undergoing all sorts of strange hardships and transformations in the ethereal regions. The Bookseller, 6 November 1903

A singular and thrilling story. The story of a "she-devil" disguised as a beautiful and attractive woman who lures men to destruction.  The Bristol Mercury, from a Digby, Long catalogue

Presumably on the basis of her published novel, Elizabeth was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature on 27 April 1904.  In the Royal Society of Literature "List of Fellows" for 1906 the following entry appears:

Mrs. Elizabeth Boyle (formerly Miss Elizabeth Whiteley), 9, Orange Street, Bloemfontein, O.E.C., South Africa. 

After this migration to southern Africa she disappears from public information. I can find no record of her marriage or death, and would welcome any knowledge of her later life.

Vincent McHugh

Vincent McHugh (b. Providence, Rhode Island, 23 December 1904; d. Sacramento, California, 23 January 1983)

Vincent Joseph McHugh was the eldest child  of Michael Joseph McHugh (1868-1946), a printer and an amateur painter, and his wife, Mary Esther, née Young (1874-1916), who were married on 5 August 1903. The family was of Irish- and Scotch-American stock. Vincent had two brothers and one sister.

Vincent was raised Roman Catholic and educated at La Salle Academy and Providence College, where he spent one year. He later noted that he was "forced out of the latter institution for reasons not unlike Shelley's in similar circumstances.  I had been very reluctant to bring up my non-religious views." He worked at odd jobs but felt that the four years he spent as a public library messenger had probably decided his taste.  From the age of seventeen, he wrote book reviews for the Double Dealer of New Orleans.  He began a first novel at age twenty.

He moved to New York City in 1928, and worked there writing for newspapers and magazines. Around 1929 he married a woman named Lillian (1910-2009); they had no children.  His first book was a novel, Touch Me Not (1930), followed by four other novels, including Sing Before Breakfast (1933), and The Victory (1947). A short story "Parish of Cockroaches" (Story, March 1934) appeared in The Best Short Stories 1935, edited by Edward J. O'Brien. The Blue Hen's Chickens (1947) is a collection of poetry. Alpha: The Mutabilities (1958) is a small press poetry booklet.

Two of McHugh's novels are fantastical in nature.  Caleb Catlum's America (New York:  Stackpole Sons, 1936) is a mix of tall tales and satire.  The eponymous folk hero Caleb Catlum, who was born in 1798, tells the story of his first one hundred years and his friendships with some well-known historical figures, like Ben Franklin, Tom Jefferson, Huck Finn, Sam Clemens, Dan'l Boone, Buffalo Bill, and Uncle Remus. It was mostly well-received and quickly went into multiple printings.

I Am Thinking of My Darling (New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1943) was a bestseller. In this novel a strange affliction has settled upon the inhabitants of New York City, a kind of epidemic that starts with a low-grade fever and brings with it the loss of all inhibitions, conventions, and hatred. The authorities try to suppress the outbreak, while the "victims" seek to share their new happiness.  The novel was filmed in 1968 as What's So Bad About Feeling Good?, starring George Peppard, Mary Tyler Moore, Susan St. John and Dom Deluise. 

Through the 1930s and 1950s McHugh had a large number of varied jobs. He was editor-in-chief of the Federal Writers' Project in New York City, and oversaw the New York Panorama and New York City Guide, both published in 1939. For some years he was a staff writer at the New Yorker. He taught a course on the "Technique of the Novel" at New York University, and worked as a writer-director of some propaganda films for the Office of War Information.  In 1944 he moved to California and became a contract writer for Paramount Pictures, leaving after the minimum ten weeks even though he was offered a renewal. He spent several months in the South Pacific as a merchant marine correspondent (this experience provided the basis for his novel The Victory, and the related 1953 paperback collection of short stories, Edge of the World), before returning to New York. From 1948 to 1952 he lectured and taught at various writer's conferences and colleges in New Mexico, Colorado, Missouri, and New Hampshire. His nonfiction book Primer of the Novel was published in 1950, and at this time he contributed a number of sea stories to Argosy. He moved to San Francisco in December 1952.

He had divorced his first wife in 1945, and thereafter married at least two more times. One marriage (c. 1948) was to Adeliza Sorenson (1912-2003), of St. George, Utah, an artist known familiarly as Addie. The marriage also ended in divorce, and McHugh was married again, on 5 February 1965, to Patricia A. Tool (b. 1927) in San Francisco. They settled in Sacramento.

McHugh's last three books were small press translations, with C.H. Kwock, from the Chinese: Why I Live on the Mountain: 30 Chinese Poems from the Great Dynasties (1958), The Lady and the Hermit: 30 Chinese Poems (1962), and Old Friend from Far Away: 150 Chinese Poems from the Great Dynasties (1980).

McHugh died of respiratory complications at a hospital in Sacramento.  His body was cremated.

J. Aubrey Tyson

J. Aubrey Tyson in 1903

J. Aubrey Tyson (b. Philadelphia, 6 March 1870; d. New York City, 16 October 1930)

John Aubrey Tyson was the son of Clifton Walter Tyson (1847-1931), a stenographer, and his first wife, Joanna Fannie Doyle (1847-c.1890).  John Aubrey Tyson had two younger brothers.

He became a journalist, and worked for various newspapers in the northeast over his career. He married Catherine Josephine Brophy, who had come from England, in Manhattan on 25 November 1896.  They had one daughter, and were later divorced around 1905. Tyson remarried. His second wife, fifteen years his junior, was named Violet; they also had one daughter.

Tyson's first known story appeared in a newspaper in October 1895.  It was quickly followed by "The Dexter Bells," which appeared in the December 1895 issue of the British magazine The Ludgate.  From then on through the late teens he contributed a large number of stories and serials to the popular fiction and pulp magazines, including Pearson's Magazine, Argosy, Munsey's Magazine, The All-Story Magazine, The Railroad Man's Magazine, The Scrap Book, Snappy Stories, and Top-Notch Magazine.

The 1923 Macmillan dust-wrapper

Tyson's first of four books was The Stirrup Cup (1903), a fictional story of the the courtship and marriage of Aaron Burr. His second book was The Scarlet Tanager (1922), a story of espionage and diplomatic intrigue set around the year 1930. It seems to have been moderately successful, so that the same publisher soon issued his third book The Barge of Haunted Lives (New York:  Macmillan, 1923; London: Mills and Boon, 1924). This was not in fact a new story, for it had been serialized in The All-Story Magazine from November 1908 through April 1909. It begins intriguingly, and the setting is a barge anchored off Long Island, where nine men and one woman, most of whom do not know each other, have been brought together by their host to tell their respective stories so that the haunted aspects of their lives become clear to all.  The guests are known to each other only by descriptive names such as the One-eyed Duck Hunter, the Veiled Aeronaut, the Sentimental Gargoyle, the Decapitated Man, the Fugitive Bridegroom, and others.

The book (likely inspired in form by the nested stories in Robert Louis Stevenson's New Arabian Nights) begins promisingly, but as successive tales are told the implausibilities and sheer artificialities of the novel's construction become increasingly distracting to the reader. The whole scenario is complicated and convoluted well before it reaches the end. Many of the intertwined stories are tales of adventure, and though the book has a reputation for supernatural content, this is very much overstated.  For instance, to one teller, a certain woman appeared to be a vampire, but we quickly learn that was not the case.  Overall this is standard pulp-magazine fare, but it goes on far too long.

Tyson's final book was a detective novel, Rhododendron Man (1930).  The central mystery is that an unknown person stood in the rhododendron bushes outside a library window and shot and killed Lloyd Gasperson.  Dashiell Hammett reviewed the book in the New York Evening Post, citing faults and irrelevancies similar to those that mar the tales told in The Barge of Haunted Lives:

An unskillfully wrought affair that should not baffle you. The author overlooks one howling clue pointing straight at the guilty person. The story starts with a kidnapping that has not much to do with the rest of the plot and then passes on to the murder of Lloyd Gasperson, which has not anything to do with the kidnapping." (21 June 1930)

On 16 October 1930, Tyson's dead body was found at the foot of a tree in Central Park in New York City.  Beside him was a bottle which the police said had previously contained poison.  In his pockets were rejection slips from various magazine publishers. 

Robert Baker Elder

Robert Baker Elder (b. Auburn, California, 7 July 1915; d. Auburn, California, 18 June 2008)

Robert Baker Elder was the younger of two sons of Joseph Lillard Elder (1869-1958), an Auburn Mayor, and his wife Sarah Elizabeth "Bessie" Baker (1874-1960).  He was a lifelong resident of Auburn, California, save for the time he spent in the military, from February 1942 through October 1945, during World War II.  His service was in the Pacific.

After graduating from high school in the early 1930s, he went to work for the local newspaper, The Auburn Journal.  He resumed this job after his war service.  He also contributed to the National Parks Magazine, and published four novels through vanity publishers.  These include The Sheriff of Sycamore Flat (published in July 1952), Whom the Gods Destroy (April 1953), Rattlesnake Dick (August 1954), and Banner House (August 2002). Rattlesnake Dick was reissued by a trade publisher, Dembner Books, in 1982.

The Sheriff of Sycamore Flat is a comedy set in a small western town, where a young woman, educated in Boston, returns with notions of new women's rights that cause turmoil.  Whom the Gods Destroy is a short novel about a misanthropic veteran named John Fielden Spencer, returned from the recent war, who wants only to live alone in the mountains away from people. The book has little plot, but is filled mainly with dialogue about concepts such as freedom and individuality, as Spencer argues with his well-meaning friends before removing himself from human society.  Rattlesnake Dick is about an Auburn historical figure who masterminded a 1856 robbery of a Wells Fargo mule train. Banner House is a novel of the Gold Rush era. 

Elder had long known of Auburn's other writer, poet and Weird Tales writer Clark Ashton Smith (1893-1961), but he didn't become friends with Smith until after he covered Smith's November 1954 marriage to Carol Jones Dorman for the local newspaper.  Smith, he discovered, identified with the protagonist of Elder's novel Whom the Gods Destroy, and called the book his "soul biography." Significantly, in the late 1950s, Elder recorded Smith readings some of his own poems—these tapes are the only known surviving recordings of Smith's voice. The poems were chosen at random from Smith's recent collections, The Dark Chateau (1951) and Spells and Philtres (1958). In 1995 Necronomicon Press issued a selection of the recordings as a cassette titled Live from Auburn: The Elder Tapes, with a recorded introduction by Elder himself about his friendship with Smith. In his later years, Elder was known for welcoming Smith aficionados when they visited Auburn. He died a few week shy of his ninety-third birthday. 

H. Frankish

H. Frankish (b. Kirmington, Lincolnshire, England, 12 March 1873; d. Hampstead, London, 24 June 1918)

The byline "H. Frankish" appeared on only one book, and has long been thought to be a pseudonym, but an entry in The Literary Year-book for 1917 confirms that the author was indeed named H. Frankish.

Harold Frankish was the second son of William John Frankish (1840-1886), a gentleman farmer, and his wife Louisa Ann, née Raven (1849-1914), who were married in 1869 and who settled in Kirmington, Lancashire. He had three brothers and two sisters. 

Harold matriculated at Worcester College, Oxford, in October 1892 (B.A. 1896), and was further educated at Oxford (Bachelor of Medicine, 1900; Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery, 1906). He also received the Diploma of Fellow at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1906.  He married Ethel Beatrice Symons in Dunton-Cum-Doughton, Norfolk, on 18 April 1897.  His book was published in 1913, and he died at the North Western Hospital in Hampstead in 1918. His estate of over eight thousand pounds was probated to his youngest brother, Arthur Rupert Frankish (1884-1960).

His single book was Dr. Cunliffe, Investigator (London:  Heath, Cranton & Ouseley, [May 1913]).  It is a collection of seven stories about the titular Dr. Cunliffe, an egotistical Oxford-educated medical doctor who has developed extraordinary physical strength. Cunliffe investigates strange happenings, often assisting Scotland Yard.  The seven adventures are sensational, and mostly science fiction of some sort. In one, a scientist has invented a machine that disintegrates people. In another a strange creature has emerged out of a recently fallen meteorite, and the creature is killing local children. Another story tells of a partial brain transplant from a death-row criminal into an ape's cranium. A contemporary review of the book notes:

"The quality of imagination is not lacking in these rather blood-curdling detective stories, but the author has not troubled greatly about plausibility, and he generally discloses the plot too early. The investigator himself, who relates the adventures, is somewhat pretentious, and the writing is not improved by the frequent use of cliches." The Atheneum, 1913

The publisher Heath, Cranton & Ouseley is believed to have been a vanity press, so the print-run was probably very small, and Dr. Cunliffe, Investigator has been a legendary rarity for many years, particularly among detective fiction collectors.  The short-lived small press Thomas Loring announced in 2006 a forthcoming reprint, but it never appeared. And unfortunately none of the seven stories have ever been anthologized.

Mrs. Jack McLaren

Mrs. Jack McLaren (b. Sandhurst, Victoria, Australia, 1887; d. London, 3 April 1946)

Born Ada Elizabeth McKenzie, she was the daughter of William Kenneth McKenzie (1850-1920), a merchant, and his wife, Elizabeth Ann, née Stoker (1854-1930).  She had six brothers and three sisters.

On 21 February 1912, she married Captain Edmund Fox Moore (1884-1917), the oldest son of Notley Moore (1858-1922), the Chief Police Magistrate of Melbourne.  Her husband was killed in battle in Flanders in World War I.  They had three sons.

On 19 August 1924, she married the Melbourne writer John McLaren (1887-1954), who published as Jack McLaren.  In 1925 the couple moved to London, which remained their base for the rest of their lives.

She published her one novel Which Hath Been (London: Cecil Palmer, 1926) bylined as by "Mrs. Jack McLaren."  It is, as it is subtitled, a novel of reincarnation. The young London artist Patricia Leigh meets some benefactors who tell her she is the reincarnation of a Syrian woman from two thousand years earlier.  She is given to read a manuscript of a tragic love story, titled "Karan the Syrian," and this text takes up about half of the novel, before the plot returns to modern times where Patricia is able to atone for the mistakes of her previous incarnation in her present situation. The metaphysical blather is overdone, and the romance aspect is paramount. A "second edition, new and revised" of Which Hath Been was published by Philip Allan in 1936, and the blurb on the front flap of the dust-wrapper signals the intended audience: "the book, with its emotional intensity, should strongly appeal to every woman."

Mrs. Jack McLaren died at the Homeopathic Hospital in Great Ormand Street, London.