As we wing toward the middle of 2019, it’s time for a survey of interesting texts set to enter the public domain in early 2020. Here I first look at nations, such as the UK, which follow “the 70 year rule”, the author having died in 1949. Then I look at the 50-year rule nations. Then I note some material in the forthcoming “published 1924 in the U.S.” release.
70-year rule:
* H. Bedford-Jones. Prolific pulp writer for the ‘slicks’, mainly historical adventure stories, but he also wrote for Farnsworth Wright’s Oriental Stories. I see that at least one anthology of his work has been published in recent years, The House of Skulls and other Tales from the Pulps (2006), so I assume he’s still a good read.
* Hervey Allen. Author of the filmed novel Anthony Adverse, and several colonial-era novels, all probably no longer to modern tastes. However he also wrote Israfel, a 1926 biography of Poe.
* Dame Una Constance Pope-Hennessy, British author of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849: A Critical Biography (1934). Spliced with Hervey Allen’s Poe biography (above) and with the two heavily abridged, one might have for the text for a new graphic novel on Poe’s life?
* Tod Robbins. A writer of accomplished and ghoulish horror stories, including the story said to have inspired the movie Freaks (1932).
* Arthur Leo Zagat. He seems to have been a prolific crank-’em-out pulp writer, including some stories that appeared in science-fiction pulps such as Thrilling Wonder Stories and Astounding.
* Jessie Douglas Kerruish. British Manx author of a ‘psychic/occult detective’ meets werewolf book, The Undying Monster (1922). Set in Sussex (the south of England) in modern times, but laced with northern lore and antiquarian touches. Later filmed as a 1942 war-time quota movie with John Howard, in what the veteran movie critic Halliwell calls a… “Silly but well-photographed and directed minor horror on wolf-man lines”. S.T. Joshi considered the novel worthy and said it… “is one of the more elaborate werewolf tales of the early twentieth century and shows the inventive extremes to which writers were resorting in their effort to revitalize a classic horror theme.” Kerruish had three stories in the Not At Night horror anthologies of the 1930s (“Gold Of Hermodike”, “Wonderful Tune”, “The Seven-Locked Room”), and my digging into the copyright registrations reveals a story “‘Twelve miles above the earth’, in John o’ London’s weekly, Nov. 1, 1930″ which could be science fiction or one of the wave of ‘future air-power’ stories that emerged at this time. Also “The Making of a Martyr”, seemingly a story about a very slow poisoning over many years. The last work was Babylonian Nights’ Entertainments (1932), in which a dozen of the best stories from all over the most Ancient world are collected for the entertainment of an insomniac Babylonian king, and re-told for him (via Kerruish) — a Theosophist review considered that most of these re-tellings had “spirit and life” and that Kerruish had done well to “capture the spirit of the ancient Near East”.
* Norbert Davis. American detective fiction author of the 1930s and 40s. Said to be a fun and non-realist writer of detective fiction, and sometimes he ventured into outright detective-comedy. Overshadowed today by the cynical ‘hardboiled’ detective writers preferred by post-1960s critics of the genre.
* Sir Malcolm Fraser. His 1911 story collection The Trail of the Dead was said to be “ingeniously constructed” and The Bookman hailed it as “full of thrilling incident and exciting adventure”. Seems to be vaguely in the Sherlock Holmes mould? Sounds like something that the RPG gamer crowd might consider using, today? The book can possibly be had as a $20 reprint here.
* Rex. E. Beach. Several conventional but stirring adventure novels set in Alaska, later filmed as American movies with big stars.
* Richard Connell. Known for the castaway man-hunter story “The Most Dangerous Game”, aka “The Hounds of Zaroff”, which was filmed several times.
* William Price Drury. A substantial British historical novelist who seems to have stuck to military and naval themes.
* Will Cuppy, satirical humourist and prolific reviewer. Author of humour books such as How to Tell Your Friends from the Apes, and How to Be a Hermit, done in the ‘snappy patter’ style which appealed to the New Yorkers of the 1920s — but which is difficult to appreciate today.
* Hugh Kingsmill. Compiled two anthologies of invective and verbal abuse. Wrote some early and rather creaky-sounding British science-fiction novels of the ‘lost race’ type. His collection The English Genius: a survey of the English achievement and character (1938) was only as editor, so won’t be out of copyright.
* Joseph Charles Mardrus, French translator of the Arabian Nights. The modern book The Arabian Nights: A Companion called it… “a portrait of a fantasy Orient, compounded of opium reveries, jewelled dissipation, lost paradises, melancholy opulence”. “Hailed as a triumph” by literary men such as Gide, but quickly quibbled over by scholars. Sounds great, but it’s in French only.
* Robert Ripley, of “Ripley’s Believe it or Not” fame. I’d assume that he wrote his books with a team, so they may not be coming out of copyright. The estate may also try to tie up the valuable name in legal knots.
50-year rule:
Places with a 50 year copyright term get; Richmal Crompton (the Just William books about a rascally English schoolboy); Jack Kerouac (the near-unreadable Beat Generation stream-of-consciousness novel On the Road); John Wyndham (Day of the Triffids and other classic British science-fiction); and… the pulp-ageddon that is the release of the works of the most popular Weird Tales writer, one Seabury Quinn. If you can be content with a nation-limited release, Quinn’s story Roads is probably the most likely to make a satisfactory graphic novel or animation.
The “1924” release:
In the USA, everything published in the U.S. in 1924 will enter the public domain. Frank Belknap Long’s first story “The Desert Lich” appeared November 1924, so that should become available for desert-themed anthologies and dramatised audio readings. Perhaps paired with Lovecraft’s “Nameless City”, which has a somewhat similar desert setting. S.T. Joshi summarises “Lich” as… “a non-supernatural conte cruel in which a man who had sold an unfaithful wife is forced to lie in a sarcophagus with her corpse.”
Lowell Thomas’s With Lawrence in Arabia (1924) sounds like it might make the basis of a new graphic novel of Lawrence of Arabia.
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s science-fiction dystopia We, in its first English translation.
Also Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and the Ant Men.
As for Lovecraft, 1924 brought publication of: “The Shunned House”; “The Rats in the Walls”, the notorious Eddy necrophilia collaboration “The Loved Dead”; and the ghost-written Houdini tale “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs”. The 1924 date may spring the lock on re-publication via automated copyright-checking systems such as Amazon, for the latter two collaborations.
New: George Laswell, a pen and ink artist with the fine picture book titled Corners and Characters of Rhode Island (1924).
