The first issue of Astounding Science Fiction I ever bought, was a Christmas issue. I don’t recall any stories about Christmas in it, but I recall the cover by Frank Kelly Freas, that caught the feeling of the season.
It was not easy to produce seasonal stories for the pulps. For one thing, most pulps – at least monthly ones – had to be printed three or more months before a specific issue appeared. Therefore, to sell a story specifically aimed for publication in December, you pretty much had to write it in June or July and sell it by the end of August.
Yet plenty of pulps did carry seasonal fiction. It was, of course, more commonplace in the early years when so many of the pulps were weekly. An issue of a magazine specifically on sale during the week of Christmas would not have remained competitive had it not in some way reflected the festive spirit at least on its cover. And many of them, especially those published by Street and Smith, made staunch efforts to carry the fiction to go with those covers. Some of the most enjoyable holiday issues ever produced were issues of Western Stories, The Popular and Top Notch. Indeed, the holiday issues of those titles, especially Western Story, are collectible for their covers if nothing else.
But there is something else. The stories. We sent out holiday stories selected from those and other magazines to some of our favorite pulp readers, and this is what we got back.
:: Page
Page:
In the late thirties, as criticism of the shudder pulps rose and their sales declined, some of them offered a macabre alternative to the sadism and other excesses of the weird menace formula, the so-called ‘defective detectives.’ Across the pages of the mystery pulps there marched and hobbled an army of the lame and deformed, the exotically afflicted, of all shapes, sizes and conditions.
D.L. Champion’s “Inspector Allhoff” would certainly appear to be one of the strongest entries in this faddish sweepstakes, except for the fact that all 29 of adventures appeared not in Terror Tales or Horror Stories, but in Dime Detective, Popular’s top-flight competitor to Black Mask. Now Adventure House has collected, under the editorship of Alfred Jan and Bill Blackbeard, 14 of these stories dating from July, 1938 to October, 1941. The collection, called Footprints on a Brain is a hefty pulp-sized 208 pages selling for $16.95. I highly recommend it to both pulp collectors and detective story fans.
There is a belief among many writers and especially among editors and publishers, that any story must deal with likeable characters. Of course this is, strictly speaking, true. Although many readers prefer characters they can like, a strong proportion of them will settle for characters they find fascinating. There are, for example, no “likeable” characters in Macbeth. Detective fiction may not be filled with detectives who are less than likeable but who still draw a readership, but there are a few. The Allhoff series is perhaps the strongest example of that. Not Inspector Allhoff, and certainly not his assistants who may be as hopelessly pathetic as any two cops in the history of pulp fiction.
Several years before the opening of this series (five or six years depending on which story you read), Allhoff led a raid on the hideout of some wanted criminals. Informants had told the police that the crooks had the front door covered with a Tommy gun, so Allhoff sends rookie named Battersly in through the back way to take out the ambush. Battersly panics and runs. Allhoff breaks down the door, rushes in and is shot in the legs some twenty times, resulting in the amputation of both legs just above the knees.
Allhoff continues as a sort of consultant with the department (the commissioner thinks Allhoff has the best brain on the force). Allhoff insists on having Battersly appointed as his assistant simply so he can make the poor man’s life a living hell. A sergeant named Simmonds who came up through the ranks with Allhoff is assigned ostensibly to do the paperwork, but actually to keep the two men from killing each other. Allhoff is bitter and vengeful, Battersly a coward and Simmonds a fool. All three are drenched with self-pity.
And wouldn’t you know it? The collection includes from the December, 1939 issue of Dime Detective, a story called “A Corpse for Christmas.”
As Christmas approaches and Simmonds is trying to think of some way to get Allhoff to give Battersly extra time off so he can return home for the holidays, Allhoff’s tenement apartment is visited by a wealthy young lady delivering Christmas dinners to the unfortunate. Allhoff takes this as an insult and the woman’s smug superiority does nothing to soothe those turbulent waters. “You wouldn’t want your pride to deprive you of two fat legs, would you?” Allhoff goes berserk.
Later that day, Allhoff and his two assistants are called out on a murder. And who to their wondering eyes should be one of the suspects but the young lady who tried to deliver a Christmas turkey to the Inspector. When Allhoff asks her whereabouts at the time of the murder, she produces a doozey of an alibi. She was at Allhoff’s as she (and they) could recall because she happened to ask Simmonds the time.
If you don’t make your characters likeable, you have to at least make them interesting, or give them a goal your readers can easily understand. Allhoff’s goal? To prove that the woman is the murderer.
There isn’t much Christmas spirit in Allhoff, and he manages to ruin the holidays not only for the murderer but for Battersly as well.
Still, these stories are fascinating. Champion is a skilled writer remembered mainly as one of the writers of the “Phantom Detective” novels. His stories usually reward a close reading. He was not writing for the ages here, but he respected his readers and put as much work as he could afford to while still managing to produce enough wordage to live on.
Interestingly, he pays close attention to the time of year in which every story takes place, and each one reflects the season in which it is published. A story published in August, for example, would have Simmonds complaining about the heat, while one in February would have snow on the ground.
But he pays very close attention to the requirements of his formula. With so bitter a lead character, it’s necessary to pick a formula and stick to it. The one he chooses is simple and popular: a murder occurs and is seemingly solved. Only Allhoff sees past the obvious to the more subtle truth. Sergeant Simmonds, who has known Allhoff for years always believes that it’s Allhoff who’s mistaken, though Allhoff always turns out to be right.
This starts to become annoying after a few stories, but then a strange thing happens. You begin to understand that Simmonds so dislikes Allhoff that he can’t face the fact that Allhoff is usually right. I told you Simmonds was stupid, didn’t I?
::Page
Keith D. Troop:
There is something about tales of the Old West. The world is so black and white. Everything is either right or wrong and every person is either good or bad with anything falling to the middle ground automatically being lumped to the bad side. It is one of the things that I have always liked about westerns but it is also one of the things that eventually left me bored with them.
I have the same general problem with Christmas stories. They are always going to turn out one way and rightfully so, as why would I want to read a Christmas story that did anything but turn out the way it was supposed to?
It is for this reason that I was so delighted to read a story in the December 22, 1922 issue of Western Story Magazine. (Although I’m not exactly sure the Old West was even old in 1922.) Appropriately enough for the time of year that the issue was published, this issue has within it western Christmas stories. The particular story that I enjoyed was called “The Yuletide Trail” by A.M. Chisholm. In it, you have all the standard truths about what is right and wrong and the various characters who, while knowing the difference between the two, still have some trouble with some fence straddling on the issue.
In the story there is one standout gentleman who used to be on one side of the fence but eventually found his home on the other side. This particular gentleman is a cobbler named “Luther Martin” and he has the distinction of being the only Christian in the former boomtown of Yellow Horse. His resolute call to the other more sinful residents of the town is met with indifference at first, but over time he is taken as an institution to himself and a necessary and welcome part of Yellow Horse.
This is accomplished at least in part by Martin’s friendship with another of the town’s more prominent citizens, the town’s leading bad man, “Mr. William Stevens.” Their friendship is somewhat facilitated by the fact that they both hailed from the same part of Tennessee and that they share a generally cantankerous nature. In time they become like father and son to each other and wind up a great personal comfort to each other.
Don’t get me wrong. There are still plenty of people willing to allow Mr. Stevens to send them to the local graveyard, which works out well because it is only at funerals that Mr. Martin has the undivided attention of the town’s unruly populace. But somewhere in the middle of all the rough housing and stage robbing, a Christmas story breaks out. It’s still manly enough that it continues to be enjoyable, but it gets mushy enough that you could share it with your female significant other and be thought of as sensitive.
In all there is a lot here for even the most jaded of western fans. The dialogue seems authentic although I’m not sure anyone anywhere ever really talked like that. It makes me wonder what kind of things the pulp E-magazines of the future will quote us as saying.
The story has the prerequisite blinding snow storm and the tearful reunions with a warm dialogue and religious flavor that will have you questioning the righteousness of your own actions. It’s a good story and it makes one long for the holidays which really stinks as I’m writing this in July, but anticipation is the magic ingredient to enjoying Christmas so I suppose even this is a good thing. I wonder, if I go to bed now will that get Santa here any sooner?
Merry Christmas.
::Keith D. Troop
Ralph Casson:
The cover to the December 15, 1926 issue of Top-Notch Magazine, refers to William Wallace Cook’s story 
“Christmas by Proxy” a “colorful novel of the festive season,” and it is that. Well, some purists may complain about the use of the word “novel” on something short enough to leave room for anything else in a single issue, but to heck with them. This story was a surprise worthy of the season it celebrates.
“Johnny Cardew,” though he lived to be sixty-five, never celebrated Christmas. He passed his first Christmas in a prairie schooner and his parents simply lost track of the time. Still trekking across the country a year later, they were fooled by the calendar again. A growing family and other circumstances interfered with observances until their deaths left Johnny living with a tight-fisted old skinflint who didn’t believe in Christmas. Cardew didn’t stay there long but he found himself embarked on a life of adventure that seemed to crowd Christmas out if the picture. Finally he decides to celebrate Christmas with a vengeance.
Living now in Arizona where he has discovered a mine, he determines to play Santa Claus to the town’s underprivileged Mexican children. Injured in a car accident, he dies just days before Christmas.
Now the mine – which Cardew had named “The Christmas Mine” – is left to his two brothers-in-law, and two nephews. The trouble is that Cardew’s former partner, whose interest was bought out by Cardew some time ago, has produced a codicil to the will that may leave him the lion’s share of the mine. He’s willing to be bought out again, but at a lot more than Johnny gave him.
Furthermore, the two brothers-in-law are required to stay at the mine over Christmas, ignoring the holiday and the celebration altogether.
Not so the nephews, however, so a plan is evolved. They will go out and celebrate Christmas with their loved ones and tell their uncles about it later, therefore “Christmas by Proxy.”
Hal Farnham sets out for his home and almost at once is plunged into some strange circumstances that convince him that there is some sort of crooked plot in the works to steal the mine from himself and his uncles and cousin.
This is no novel in the sense we ordinarily think of, it being only 38 pages long. But those 38 pages pack a heck of a lot of story. At first the circumstances that cause Farnham to smell a rat seem a little too coincidental, perhaps, but as we find out what they are, it turns out they’re not coincidental after all. The story is wonderfully plotted, with a strong and original idea behind it. It truly lived up to the name of the magazine that published it, Top-Notch.
:: Ralph Casson
Jerry Burge:
Ask any semi-literate person on the street to name a science fiction writer and he is likely to come up with one of these four names: Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein or Isaac Asimov. Asimov achieved his fame. I suspect, more because of his non-fiction popular science books than his rather bland stories about robots and cozily encapsulated space-farers.
“Christmas on Ganymede,” written very early in Asimov’s career (Startling Stories, January 1941), is something else.
As we all learned in primary school, Ganymede is the seventh satellite of Jupiter, the third of the Galilean moons. It is the eighth largest body in orbit around the sun, larger than both Mercury and Pluto. It is an icy world, with a thin atmosphere. Ganymede is an important source of oxite and the primary source of quality karen leaves. The intelligent natives, known as “ossies” because of their resemblance to the Terran ostrich, are employed to mine the oxite and gather the karen leaves.
As Christmas approaches, Olaf Johnson, an employee of the Ganymedan Products Corporation, works up a strong case of holiday spirit. He spends a lot of his time decorating for Christmas and telling the ossie workers tales of Santa Claus, reindeer and flying sleighs. The ossies are excited by the idea of a flying bringer of gifts and decide that they will only continue working for the company if Santa Claus will visit each of them.
Since the Ganymede station is already behind in its quotas of oxite and karen leaves, this development does not exactly make the manager happy with Olaf. Finding himself appointed to a committee of one to pacify the ossies and get them back to work, Olaf decided to give them a visit from Santa Claus.
He finds an old sleigh in stores and adds gravo-repulsors and compressed air jets to make it fly. He affixes a platform in front on which he perches several drunken spiny-backs, native quadrupeds, with fake antlers. Olaf himself, suitably accoutered, portrays Santa Claus.
The ossies’ first visit from St. Nicholas is a hilarious catastrophe, but the ossies are pleased and excited – especially with their gifts. The catch is that they now want Santa to bring gifts every year – which doesn’t seem like much of a problem until Olaf finds out what “every year” means to the ossies.
I must confess that the story was much more enjoyable than I expected from Asimov. It’s well-written by most pulp standards; it’s well thought out; and it’s genuinely funny. The characterization is barely sufficient, but entirely appropriate to the story. This and another humorous story of about the same period – “Robot AL-76 Goes Astray” Amazing Stories, February 1942 – lead me to wonder what kind of writer Isaac Asimov might have been if he had not fallen so completely under the spell of John W. Campbell Jr. (the remarkable editor of Astounding Science Fiction – later Analog). Just an idle thought.
:: Jerry Burge
Page:
How do you describe Seabury Quinn? Well, he puts me to mind, if he puts me to mind of anyone other than Seabury Quinn – which he really shouldn’t – of another pulp writer, Theodore Roscoe. They both have good, strong, straightforward writing styles that they use to tell fascinating well-constructed adventure yarns of almost any sort. They could both create vivid, colorful characters. (They both wrote famous series with French heroes: Roscoe’s Argosy Legionnaire Thibaut Corday, Quinn’s Weird Tales phantom fighter Jules de Grandin). Roscoe’s quirky endings often elevated his stories. No one wrote more satisfying stories generally than Quinn. Maybe it’s silly to compare them; I’m probably crazy. I think what they most have in common is that they’re uncommonly good writers who produced strong stories with a variety of good backgrounds, and neither one of them is nearly so widely read as he ought to be, not these days they aren’t.
Quinn wrote a wide variety of stories for Weird Tales. Historicals, contemporary yarns, adventure, mysteries, all with an appropriate twist of horror or fantasy. He is most famous, of course, for his ghost-hunter Jules de Grandin, but even his stories of that marvelously enthusiastic opponent of all things truly evil seem to miss no corner of the full range of supernatural menace.
It was, perhaps, in the January, 1938 issue of Weird Tales that Quinn went furthest afield, with a story called “Roads.”
Two thousand years ago in Roman-occupied Judea, a Norseman, Claus, a gladiator in the service of King Herod saves a husband and wife and their infant son from soldiers under the orders of Herod to slay all firstborn male children of Jewish parents. From seemingly nowherem a coice informs Claus that his service has earned him a special reward. At some time in the future he will be given the opportunity to provide a great service to the world. Odin and the other old gods are dead and a new world has been born.
The years pass. Claus is no longer a gladiator but a soldier, now in the service of Lucius Pontius Pilate. Claus shows no signs of the passing years, however. Caiaphas, the chef priest of the Jews brings a young prophet before Pilate on charges of sedition. Pilate is certain the man is harmless but gives in to the priest and sentences the man to death. The next day, when the man is crucified, Pilate orders Claus to hang a sign on the cross proclaiming him King of the Jews, an insult to Caiaphas. Claus takes mercy on the young man’s suffering and, with a spear, ends his torment.
In the upheavals that follow the crucifixion, Claus saves the life of a beautiful courtesan of Magdela. When he would turn the woman away, the voice speaks to him again, telling him to take her as his wifebecause she will aid him in the still yet to be named service he is to perform as his life’s work. Together, as the decades become centuries, they travel north across Europe, neither showing any signs of aging, until finally, Claus fulfils the destiny he was singled out for: bringing joy to children the world over at Christmas.
A Christmas story in Weird Tales? In the magazine where Cthulhu lumbered forth from sunken R’lyeh and Conan the Cimmerian fought and wenched his way through the Hyborean age? Weird Tales, the home of Clark Ashton Smith? The magazine that gave us the first published professional fiction of Tennessee Williams and Edmond Hamilton, of C.L. Moore and Robert Bloch? The magazine where, in the forties, a youngster named Ray Bradbury published dark classic after dark classic? Weird Tales? Publishing a Christmas story? About Santa Claus?
You better believe they did. And a fine one, too, with wonderful illustrations by Virgil Finlay.
In 1947 Atkham House published a revised version of the story (again with Finlay illustrations) in a small hardback priced at $2.00, which I recently found without dust jacket but otherwise in impeccable condition for $20.00. (The story was also included in Leo Margulies’ paperback anthology Worlds of Weird [Pyramid Books RI125, 1965] which I believe was ghost edited by Sam Moskowitz.) Which means if you want to read it, it might not be easy, but you can probably find it. It’s worth the search.
Which is all there is so say – about that. About other things, just let me wish you very happy holidays and a Joyous New Year. And to quote a rather popular fictional character whose words would, I am sure, be echoed by both Jules de Grandin and Claus, “God bless us every one!”
:: Page
