During the Second World War H.P. Lovecraft’s friend and fellow writer Frank Belknap Long penned a series of pulp entertainment science-fiction tales of one John Carstairs. Carstairs was the Curator of the Interplanetary Botanical Gardens… and occasional Botanical Detective. Young, but dapper and eminent. As you might expect, weird and wonderful mobile plants feature heavily. As such, I guess the hero’s spectacle-wearing probably serves both for the close-inspection of leaves and flowers, and as useful eye-protection against venom, deadly pollens and trailing stingers. Long was likely drawing on his own real-life fascination with the rearing and keeping of fancy fish (see the Lovecraft letters), and possibly an affection for the many hothouses of the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Perhaps, after Lovecraft’s death, he later also raised a collection of carnivorous plants?
The series ended along with the war in summer 1945.
A few years after the end of the war, as paper rationing eased, it was partly collected in a nice 1949 hardback. I’ve colour-shifted the hardback jacket toward red, as I can’t believe a publisher of the late 1940s would issue a boys’ book in pink. It must have faded.
In 1959 it was issued as a cheap British paperback, to launch a branded series of fantasy reprints, and with a cover keyed to both the ‘six-gun cowboy’ and Superman crazes of the time. So I find that my statement a few posts ago, that Long only ever had the two Panther paperback collections here in the UK, was wrong. He also had this.
A L.W. Currey page for the book describes the contents as “a fix-up novel”, so I’m guessing new linking passages might have been added?
The tales obviously don’t satisfy hardcore detective-story buffs, if one review is anything to judge by. But a decade ago pulp fan Jerry House reviewed the one-volume reprint of this series…
For me, the great thing about these stories is the sheer inventiveness of the many vegetative creatures that Long has created. Their diversity is stunning. As a writer, Long could blow both hot and cold, and there’s far more heat here than cold. This may not be everyone’s cup-of-tea, but if you like pulp — and say ‘to heck with a lot of logic’ — give this one a try.
Sounds fun. The series is partly free at Archive.org, if you want to sample some. In order:
“Plants Must Slay”. (also found in the anthology Saint’s Choice of Impossible Crimes)
“Satellite of Peril”.
“The Ether Robots”. *
“The Heavy Man”. *
“The Hollow World” (long novella)
* = not in the 1959 reprint book, according to the TOCs. None of the missing are in The Early Long, and only “Wobblies in the Moon” is in one of the ebook ‘megapacks’ on Amazon.
Ramble House currently has the full set in ebook for $6, though regrettably not on Amazon. The page blurb for this states that “The Heavy Man” and “Wobblies in the Moon” had been left out of the 1949 book. But the table-of-contents for both print editions has “The Heavy Man” and “The Ether Robots” as being left out. Can the TOCs for both have been astray? The ebook’s new introduction also states that “the second and third stories were reversed in sequence”. Who knows? Anyway, the ebook has the order correct, and I’ve followed its TOC order in the above links.
The ebook introduction by Richard A. Lupoff is also interesting for a brief insight into Lovecraft. Lupoff recalls one long rooftop conversation with Long…
Our conversation drifted to other topics. These included his friendship with Lovecraft, and the relationship between Lovecraft and his arch-nemesis, the German-American agent George Sylvester Viereck. “It took only the mention of Viereck’s name and Howard’s face would turn beet red, his neck would swell until you thought he was going to burst, and he would practically foam at the mouth!”
One wonders what might have caused such resentment? Viereck was a Massachusetts writer who became a notorious ‘agent’ of the German state. Most likely it was his First World War pro-German publishing activities that would have set the Anglophile Lovecraft against him…
During the First World War he edited a German-sponsored weekly magazine, The Fatherland with a claimed circulation of 80,000. In August 1918, a lynch mob stormed Viereck’s house in Mount Vernon [a suburb of New York City], forcing him to seek refuge in a New York City hotel. In 1919, shortly after the Great War, he was expelled from the Poetry Society of America.
I would say that Viereck’s Germanophilic activities were what drew HPL’s ire. As I recall, Viereck later did work for the Third Reich.
Zelazny and REH both admired Viereck’s poetry and prose.
Yes, the ‘Germanophilic’ activities were said to be in both periods. It seems most likely, though, that it was the First World War activity that raised Lovecraft’s enduring ire.
“Zelazny and REH both admired” is a touch vague. Is it possible to pin that admiration to particular volumes/poems, and dates?
Ah, found it. There is more Howard scholarship online that I had thought…
“I’ve about decided that the only American poets worth much are Sidney Lanier, Poe and Viereck” (REH, 1926 letter to Clyde Smith). On January 1927 REH asked another correspondent “How many really classical poets have we produced? Lanier, Poe, Viereck – and who else.” – suggesting that hearing the “classical” style from a modern American was one reason for the admiration. He also admired the poetry for its fusionary quality… “Viereck more nearly approaches a compromise [between poetry and science] than any poet I know about” (February 1928). In 1929 he is more qualified… “I detest as men, John L. Sullivan, Oscar Wilde and George Sylvester Viereck, but I enjoy their creations”. In 1932 Viereck is apparently in a list of favourite poets sent by REH to Lovecraft – it would be interesting to know how Lovecraft responded to the name.
Looking for this led me to discover that the novel Lovecraft’s Book (1985) features Viereck as a key figure, and that Lovecraft’s Book is by Richard A. Lupoff – who gives the Long anecdote above.
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Having looked into the matter, I’m now fairly sure we can discount this supposed Lupoff/Long memoir. However, it’s interesting that R.E. Howard had an interest in Viereck’s poetry, circa 1926-32. One wonders if Viereck managed to somewhat rehabilitate himself in the first half of the 1920s? I guess there must be a biography of him somewhere, which might illuminate his literary work as well as the dark political angles.
There is quite a bit out there on Viereck, but I haven’t read any of it in a couple of years. Zelazny was a big fan of Viereck’s “Wandering Jew” novels.
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