When I wrote my book on the life and work of H.P. Lovecraft’s cherished friend and correspondent McNeil, Good Old Mac: Henry Everett McNeil, 1862—1929 (2013), some of McNeil’s books were not yet scanned and online. Since 2013, a few more books have appeared online:
1903: I’ve very pleased to see that the Library of Congress has placed his Dickon Bend the Bow, and other wonder tales online in a very good scan, uploaded in summer 2017. This is his early-career collection of his original ‘wonder-tales’ for younger children. Not included in Dickon was his short dream-fantasy for children, “Where the Great Red Owl Lived” (1903), which I reprinted in my book on McNeil.
1908: The historical adventure novel The Boy Forty-niners. Two young boys go in search of gold in 1849. They journey with the pioneers… “across the prairies and the mountains in a ‘prairie schooner’ [wagon] and came, at last, to the freshly opened gold fields of California”. “McNeil’s Boy Forty-niners, and Fighting with Fremont are never on the shelves [because they are so popular]” — reported the New Orleans Library Annual Report for 1911.
1919: Buried Treasure, a tale of an old house. Here McNeil tried a new publisher, Duffield, rather than his usual Dutton. Duffield obviously prompted him to this ‘commercial’ publisher-driven detour away from his usual historical epics for boys. The probable failure of Buried Treasure in the girls’ market seems to have coincided with the onset of his severe poverty and his move to the notorious Hell’s Kitchen, NYC. His modest apartment there, soon to become the regular meeting-place of the Lovecraft Circle, would become the ‘ground-zero’ of modern horror.
During the writing of my book on McNeil I managed to get a cheap 1920 edition of Buried Treasure in print (it had a standalone ghost-story section shoehorned into the plot), and I wrote in my book on McNeil and his work…
“The distinct lack of survival of the book on the current second-hand market does suggest sales were lower than expected. What may have let the book down, in the eyes of McNeil’s fans, was the radical departure from his normal subject matter: the novel wrangles a cast of a dozen children rather than his usual one or two boys; the group is led by a jolly woman aunt; the girls of the group are in the lead for much of the time; the ghost involved is that of a girl; there is an elderly female to be rescued from a dastardly male lawyer; and there is even a sub-plot involving a broken doll. Buried Treasure has no journey across wild landscapes, no interaction between striving boys and valiant adventurous men, no desperate odds, and not much history. This uncharacteristic novel has the hallmarks of a publisher who has dictated a heavy distortion of a writer’s natural subject-matter and approach, probably with a cynical eye on ‘the market’ and ‘what sells’. Buried Treasure is workmanlike and entertaining, but McNeil’s avid audience must have felt a little peeved after spending good pocket-money for such a ‘girl-ified’ book — a book of a type that already saturated the market.” [My footnote for the latter claim: “See the review by Angelo Patri given at the end of this book, for an indication of the relatively rare nature of good boys-only novels in the children’s book market of that time.”]
Also uploaded summer 2017, a late 1924 letter as published in Weird Tales for January 1925. The letter championed Frank Belknap Long…
“Everett McNeil, of New York City, in explaining his vote for “The Desert Lich” by Frank Belknap Long, Jr. [Weird Tales, Nov 1924], writes: “A good tale of this kind is a difficult thing to write. It is difficult to give it just the proper perspective, so that no part stands out with disproportionate prominence; to put into it that subtle feel of horror and weirdness that attracts, instead of repulses, the imagination, that makes the reader shudder, and yet read on. It is difficult for the author, when picturing the weird or horrible, to exercise a proper repression, to go so far and then to stop, leaving the rest to the readers’ imagination. These difficulties I think Mr. Long has overcome with unusual skill. In addition, I like the way he has put his story into words. There is personality in his style. In short, I think this story an unusually good tale of its kind, and I feel that it is no more than fair that, when he does a good piece of work, he should be told that it is good work. Hence this letter. Congratulations on your ‘new’ Weird Tales. Success!!”
Long had most likely known McNeil since about 1920 or 1921, probably firstly via visits to McNeil’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment in the company of Morton, Morton having almost certainly met McNeil at Dench’s gatherings (which were held near the wharves of Sheepshead Bay). Lovecraft first saw McNeil at a Dench gathering in 1922, and shortly after went with Long to visit McNeil in Hell’s Kitchen.
Books by McNeil still not online, due to questionable copyright renewals:
Tonty of the Iron Hand.
Daniel du Luth, or Adventuring on the Great Lakes.
For the Glory of France.
The Shadow of the Iroquois.
The Shores of Adventure, or, Exploring in the New World with Jacques Cartier.
The later post-Tonty novels appear to have had their copyrights erroneously renewed as if they were translations rather than fiction (since they are fictionally claimed as ‘translations’ in the frontispieces, to give them added veracity in the eyes of their boy readers). For instance…“© on translation; Myron L. McNeil”, renewed 31st May 1957 for The Shores of Adventure. These ‘renewals’ may be the reason the later books are not yet scanned and online. But the books are surely now in the public domain, as McNeil died in 1929.
Update: Now online to borrow from Archive.org…
The Shadow of the Iroquois (1928)
The Shores of Adventure (1929)
