A Dreamer & A Visionary; H.P. Lovecraft in His Time

It should not be assumed that dime novels were merely action thrillers, although many of them were; there were westerns (Deadwood Dick from Beadle & Adams; Diamond Dick from Street & Smith), detective or espionage stories (Nick Carter from Street & Smith; Old King Brady from Frank Tousey), tales of high school and college life (Frank Merriwell from Street & Smith), and even pious tales of moral uprightness (Horatio Alger, Jr, wrote prolifically for Street & Smith in the 1890s). Their principal features were their price, their format (paper covers, 128 pages or less), and, in general, their action-packed narrative style. The leading dime novel series were, of course, priced at 10 cents, although there was a wide array of smaller books, called ‘nickel libraries’, at 5 cents aimed at younger readers.

It is one of the great paradoxes of Lovecraft’s entire literary career that he could, on the one hand, absorb the highest aesthetic fruits of Western culture—Greek and Latin literature, Shakespeare, the poetry of Keats and Shelley—and at the same time go slumming in the cheapest dregs of popular fiction. Throughout his life Lovecraft vigorously defended the literary value of the weird tale (unlike some modern critics who misguidedly vaunt both the good and the bad, the aesthetically polished and the mechanically hackneyed, as representative of ‘popular culture’—as if there is any merit to what masses of half-literate people like to read), and he adamantly, and rightly, refused to consider the weird work found in dime novels and pulp magazines as genuine literature; but this did not prevent him from voraciously lapping up these lesser products. Lovecraft knew that he was reading trash, but he read it anyway.

Among the dime novel series Lovecraft admits to reading were Pluck and Luck (Tousey, 1898f.), Brave and Bold (Street & Smith, 1903f.), Frank Reade (Tousey, 1892–98, 1903f.), Jesse James Stories (Street & Smith, 1901f.), Nick Carter (Street & Smith, 1886f.), and Old King Brady (featured first in the New York Detective Library (Tousey, 1885–99), then, along with his son Young King Brady, in Secret Service (1899–1912)).

Old King Brady may be the most interesting of the lot for our purposes, since the hero of ‘The Mystery of the Grave-yard’ is one King John, described as ‘a famous western detective’. Old King Brady was not a western character, but he was a detective. Moreover, Beadle had a series detective, Prince John (written by Joseph E. Badger, Jr), in the early 1890s. I do not know whether King John—even in terms of his name—is some sort of fusion of Old King Brady and Prince John, but he is certainly a dime novel detective.

And ‘The Mystery of the Grave-yard’ is a miniature dime novel, pure and simple. The action is nothing if not fast-paced. In twelve relatively short chapters (some as little as fifty words in length) we read a lurid story involving kidnapping, a trap-door in a tomb, and other flamboyant details. King John not only solves the mystery but ends up marrying the kidnapped woman.

‘The Mysterious Ship’ is the latest of the surviving juvenilia, and by far the most disappointing. This story—consisting of nine very brief chapters, some as short as twenty-five words and none longer than seventy-five words—is so dry and clipped that it led L. Sprague de Camp to think it ‘an outline rather than a story’.⁵ This seems unlikely given the elaborate ‘publishing’ procedures Lovecraft has undertaken for this work. In the first place, we here encounter Lovecraft’s first surviving typescript, a text of twelve pages enclosed in a little booklet. This could not have been typed on the 1906 Remington that served Lovecraft for the rest of his life, but must have been some similar behemoth belonging to his grandfather or perhaps even his father. Moreover, there is a sort of gauze cloth cover with a drawing of a ship in pen on it, and another drawing of a ship on the back cover. The imprint on the title page is ‘The Royal Press. 1902’. It is obvious that Lovecraft is aiming for a sort of dramatic terseness in this narrative; but the result is mere confusion as to what exactly happens.