Lovecraft was not the only one ghostwriting popular fiction for Houdini in the mid 1920s. A new book on the topic is The Zanetti Mystery: Plus candidates for ghostwriting the story (December 2021). The book is a $25 paperback, and is shipping now.

The author republishes the ‘Houdini’ detective thriller novel The Zanetti Mystery (1925), with the original magazine serial illustrations, apparently for the first time since it appeared. He also asks, and with new research… ‘who was the likely ghostwriter?’ Candidates include Eddy Jr. and Lovecraft himself. But they are not the only candidates, and it seems to me a little unlikely that an ‘Eddy + Lovecraft lightly revising’ detective novel could have escaped notice until now. True, Lovecraft was experimenting with speed-writing a detective-like tale at about this time (“Red Hook”), but there was a romance element to The Zanetti Mystery which would not have been congenial.

That said, some Tentaclii readers may still be interested in this new book’s evaluation of the most-likely authorship.