I’ve been pleased to discover a new and previously unknown story by Lovecraft’s friend and fellow writer Everett McNeil. I wrote the book on McNeil and his career in fiction and movie writing, and I never found a hint of “A Descendant of the Vikings” (written circa 1906, as it was announced then, and published 12th December 1907 in The Youth’s Companion).

It’s a boy’s hunting tale in one large broadsheet page, in which Norwegian boy Thor hunts a killer grizzly bear for a 200 dollar reward.

McNeil had grown up in Dunkirk, a small Wisconsin town of 2,000 New Englanders and Norwegians — so he would have known many lads like this.

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Also new on Archive.org, the trade-journal The Writer for October 1924 announced that McNeil was one of the Triple-X prize winners. Winning a $100 prize for another unknown story titled “The Lost Dutchman”. The $5,000-total open contest appears to have been to launch the successful Triple-X men’s action-adventure fiction magazine from Fawcett.

I’d suspect this tale related to The Lost Dutchman mine, and that on publication it became the snappier titled “The Lost Gold of Mad Wolf Gulch”. It appeared as a two-parter published in Triple-X magazine for January 1925 and February 1925. I had known about this one from listings, and it sounds like a western with a mining element. He was also keen on real wolf attacks (his mother had often told her real-life tale of experiencing attack). So I wouldn’t be surprised if a starving wolf pack made an appearance in “The Lost Gold of Mad Wolf Gulch”. Assuming Fawcett paid the prize on publication, McNeil might have had the cheque cashed by March 1925, easing his worrisome financial situation a bit in time for springtime 1925. So the prize payment adds another small bit of data to the story of the Kalem Club during the years that Lovecraft was in New York.

Triple-X proved a useful market for McNeil, and he landed the following there. Thus showing ‘the gang’ that ‘the old fuddy-duddy’ could still hold his own in a substantial new action-adventure magazine…

* “Battle of the Stings”.
* “The Vale of Vengeance”.
* “The Lost Gold of Mad Wolf Gulch”.
* “California’s First Gold” (appears to have been his vivid six-page history of the earliest gold strike, later included in a 1928 schools reader).
* “The Duping of Scarnose” (posthumous).