Garnett Radcliffe (1898-1971) did seven stories for Weird Tales. These were all between 1951-1954, so in the declining years of the magazine. Radcliffe had an impressive career before ever appearing in Weird Tales, so it may have been a bit of a come-down for him. He sold to Argosy, novel serials like “London Skies Are Falling” (January 15-February 19, 1938) as well to The Passing Show, Pearson’s, Esquire, The Strand and John Bull. Born in Ireland, Radcliffe made it in England as well as selling to the detective Pulps in the US. Unlike so many Weirdies, take Robert S. Carr or Tennessee Williams for instance, Radcliffe was not finding his first sale with WT but later in his career. After the demise of Weird Tales, Radcliffe sold his horror tales to Argosy UK.
Readers should not expect great Lovecraftian horror from Radcliffe, nor Clark Ashton Smith-esque style. He was an adventure writer at heart, who sold occasional Science Fiction and Horror pieces much as Nelson S. Bond did around the same time.
His first sale to WT was “Camel Vengeance” (September 1951).
The tale is narrated by an officer stuck in the dry and unpleasant Aden. Into the life of the colonials comes Rosemary Anderson, daughter of the Protectorate Police chief. She is a large, pleasant gal who does amazing camel imitations. Everyone is taken with her comedy and copies her. The camels around the colony are not so impressed.
Rosemary gets it into her head she wants to ride a camel. This proves difficult when she is almost killed by a camel in the market. Later she hires a Bedouin to let her ride Shaitan, lord of the camels. At first everything is fine but Rosemary, as always, mocks the beast. Shaitan takes off like a rocket into the desert.
All the men go looking for her. With the help of her dog, Neb, they find her in the camel cemetery. Surrounded by Shaitan and other camels, she is imitating a vulture. The men chase away the camels, who seem to be laughing at them. Later, after returning to England, now married to Howlett, and electric shock therapy, Rosemary is returned to her normal self. The narrator gives most of the credit her dog, Neb.
There is one creepy moment when Rosemary is dancing about in a graveyard surrounded by vengeful camels, but that is about it for Horror. This is far cry from Lovecraft’s “Imprisoned With the Pharaohs”. Radcliffe shows his professional skill describing the locale and the life of the Brits living there. All of his stories here have that quality.
“The Monkey Ship” (March 1952) has a rich philanthropist, Edmund L. Donovan sending a shipload of moneys to America for scientific experimentation. He is applauded for his gift to Science. The ship, Dawn of Hope, sets off while Ed and his wife, Christabel, visit Rangoon with their two children. When an old priest of the monkey-god swats on their lawn, Ed chases him off.
After this his children come down with fever. They refuse to drink because they say everything tastes like salt water. They get worse and worse until the couple turn the ship around and free the monkeys. Their doctor claims it is the penicillin he gave the children but the parents know otherwise. A rather obvious fantasy tale but again saved by Radcliffe’s handling of setting. The use of animals in his stories will continue.
“Dark Laughter” (May 1952) is a tale of weird Africa. Felton goes to the dark continent to search for Dr. Luke, the most popular scholar at Elizabeth University. Unable to sleep he seeks out the man on duty to take his place. Featherstone, the sentry, is dead. Felton almost dies too because a noose comes out of the dark and strangles him.
When he wakes, he is in a cave and guest of a strange white man. It is Dr. Luke but he has become a feral thing. He tells Felton of the Masters and their benevolence. When night comes again, other men who worship the Masters come, fierce black men who want to kill the intruder. Dr. Luke warns them off but they attack eventually. This time he is saved by the Masters, gigantic gorillas who kill the jealous worshipers. Felton runs off and is found by his party. They hear him rant on about Dr. Luke but think he just has jungle nerves.
Once again Radcliffe has an animal as part of the story but the atmosphere this time is much more worthy of Weird Tales. The Masters being apes was a ruined surprise because of Eberle’s illustration. Still, the author manages a good chill with Dr. Luke’s mania. (I remember John Wyndham using a similar idea in “Exiles of Asperus”, a space opera story with alien space bats.)
“The Gloves” (January 1953) sees a change in the types of stories Radcliffe chose to tell. This story is nothing but an old-fashioned ghost story, not much different than the majority of those told by August Derleth. The big difference here is the English setting is not some kind of Anglophilia as in Derleth’s case, but simply where Radcliffe lived and wrote about. The tale has a man buy a pair of second hand gloves. They are in very good condition except for a circular brown stain in each cuff.
The gloves get put in drawers, in which the man thinks rats have been doing gymnastics. The reader, unlike the narrator, realizes the gloves are trying to escape. When the sleeping man hears fingers drumming on the window, we know what fingers and why. Eventually the gloves disappear (escape) and the purchaser hears from the man who sold him the gloves, Mr. Robinson. The fellow who pawned the gloves, a petty thief named Joe Larkin, has been found dead, strangled. It turns out he stole the gloves from a Colonel Belcher-Price, a man who had had his wrists severed in a traffic accident. “I’ll leave the reader to draw his or her own conclusions….” Adequately done but nothing unusual for WT.
W. H. Silvey’s illustration for this story looks like the aliens drawn by Frank Kelly Freas. It also doesn’t have much to do with the story.
“The Vengeance of Kali Mai” (May 1953) takes us back to the jungle, this time to India. Kenneth Shand desires the voluptuous Bonda but her price is high. She will only love the man who can bring her the Bo necklace. Shand goes in search. He finds the antiquary, Dr. Ruskine. He tells Shand where the gigantic necklace is to be found, in an obscure temple guarded by no one. Shand follows his directions and sees the idol of Kali Mai with the necklace. Ruskine explained that the goddess guards her own. As Shand leans in to untie the necklace, the idol’s arms grab and choke him. The idol is a mechanical device. It breaks and Shand survives. He takes the necklace to Bonda. She accepts him. They go to bed. Shand dreams he is back in Kali Mai’s hands, choking. He strangles the goddess, but it is actually Bonda. Her terrible dead face smiles with its tongue hanging out, just like Kali Mai’s. Radcliffe leaves enough doubt that the story could be explained without magic but ….
“The Beetle” (September 1953) is another animal story. The policeman, Detective Scott, must face his boss, Inspector Knowles. He has lost his man, the strangler known as Captain Y. He had followed Y into a pub where he was to meet his next victim, Mrs. Banbury. A little monkey, who was lost in the street, also wanders in. The animal perches itself on Banbury’s shoulder. Captain Y curses it in Hindi while pretending to be an animal lover. Scott knows the Captain’s history, which included shooting sacred monkeys in India and defying the priests of the monkey-god, Harathi Ram.
Then the strange thing happens that the policeman can’t explain to his boss. Y disappears as the monkey goes to the fire and chases a beetle around the grate. Some of the bar customers think it is a bat or a mouse, but Scott thinks it looks like a miniature man. The customers try to save the beetle monkey snatches it and eats it. Scott can not account how the strangler escaped with only one watched exit.
Later Captain Y’s body is found by the railway tracks. He has been terribly mangled. Inspector Knowles decides the man escaped and threw himself into the oncoming train. Scott knows better but let’s the old man have it his way. Radcliffe returns to the monkey-god from “The Monkey Ship” but for weirder results.
“You Should Be Careful” (January 1954) is another ghost story in the English model. The narrator and his roommate, a Scots fellow named Jock Gillman, rent a low-class house as college students. Their rough housing breaks the basin that the landlady is loathe to see broken. The two men scour the second hand shops for a replacement. They find a nice one that has the initials “S. P.” carved in the bottom.
Later Jock begins to complain about his roommate’s sleepwalking. The narrator denies doing such thing. The two row about it. Jock begins to lose sleep and becomes grumpier. Then after Christmas the final event happens. Both men see a small, trim man at the basin washing his hands over and over. The narrator goes to bed and wakes up to find Jock has hung himself in the night.
The narrator leaves the rental and later reads in Clayton’s Magazine a piece on Solomon Posmansky, the hangman at the Warren Street Prison. He was a prim little fellow who called his condemned “appointments” and washed his hands obsessively. At his death all his property had been sold. “When I read that I knew what — and who — we had brought into our room.”
The adventure oriented nature of Radcliffe’s yarns certainly did not surprise Dorothy McIlwraith, the editor of Weird Tales. Radcliffe had appeared in Short Stories as early as January 1932. His last for that magazine was “Serpents Can’t Fly” (Short Stories, May 10, 1940). McIlwraith had worked for Doubleday since 1914, becoming top editor of Short Stories in 1936. After his Horror tale writing, Radcliffe returned to the adventure magazines.
