In February of 1950, Vincent Starrett seemed surprised and a little insecure writing an introduction for The Best Science Fiction Stories, 1950. His essay at the beginning of the book reflects his unease and is titled, “A Sort of Introduction.” 

Thinking it over, Starrett reflected that in his youth, the distinctions among genres had not yet made an impact on him. So maybe he did belong in a SF anthology. Here’s how he related his own “there and back again” tale of enjoying speculative fiction, staring with his boyhood reading.

If there is one word that will describe my preferred reading in that enchanted pocket of time, perhaps the word is Mystery, which included ghosts, buried treasure, solitary horsemen, sunken continents, and lovely ladies guarded by monsters; but almost any aspect of the world’s quest for new horizons stood high on my list. … The convenient term science-fiction had not then been invented, I believe; but in large part that is what I was reading. 

Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle were high on his youthful reading list. But, as sometimes happens, Starrett’s tastes changed as he aged. He found himself attracted to stories of detectives and historical adventures, rather than tales of speculation and fantasy. He would dip back into the science fiction realm every once in a while, but came away disappointed.

“What little I read of it, after Doyle and Wells, bored me considerably, and I suspect that much of it was pretty awful.”

Then a curious thing happened. The detective story in the U.S. took a sharp turn away from tales of ratiocination into the hard-boiled school, with gunfire, loose women and tough shamuses who used their fists as often as their brains. Starrett liked Dashiell Hammett, but not his successors who “have been, in my opinion, almost miraculously bad.”

As a result, Starrett turned his mind back to science fiction, or as he more poetically puts it, “I have been coquetting with an earlier love.” He cites Ray Bradbury and Frederic Brown as “two men of letters whom I particularly enjoy.”

Perhaps he wasn’t as out of place among the rocket ships as he thought. 

The Menace of Mars

Starrett speaks as if the world of speculative fiction is one he didn’t dabble in himself. I wonder if he forgot (or wanted everyone else to forget) about this odd little piece he wrote with Otto McFeeley back in 1922. While the cover illustration to the Chicago Ledger for Saturday, February 4, 1922 shows an image that never comes up in the story, there’s no doubt about the fact that this far-fetched tale is part “X-Files,” part John Buchan-style chase.

Since I’ve written about this story elsewhere, I’ll not spend a lot of time on it now. It’s hard to say how much of this story is Starrett’s idea, and how much came from co-author McFeeley. Nonetheless, it’s got a “Earthmen talking to Martians” plot that drives the action. “The Menace of Mars” would fit nicely into an anthology of proto-science fiction.

But let us move on to a bigger work that is solely Starrett’s idea and was, in his mind, a masterpiece.

Seaports in the Moon

Starrett’s seeming discomfort is a little surprising. His first novel was certainly a speculative fiction piece that would be classified on the sf/fantasy shelves these days. Seaports in the Moon, published in 1928, is a meditation on what would happen if the famous folks in the past found themselves in possession of water from the Fountain of Youth.

Starrett weaves historical and fictional characters together, saying that as a child, he made no distinction between them in his reading. Like The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, the chapters in Seaports are largely stand-alone pieces and come across as small observations on human nature, which Starrett does not view with high regard. Treachery, trickery and thievery are found here in vast supply, all told in a wry tone. The connective tissue among the chapters is a sample of the magical fountain’s water, which passes down through the ages. It rarely brings happiness and often provokes grief. One example: A whole chapter is given over to what Edgar Alan Poe did when he gained possession of the magical water vial. It does not have a happy ending.

Eventually, the final few drops of the elixir make their way to the one place Starrett would have loved to see it: the shop of a wise and kindly Chicago rare book dealer (big surprise, right?).

The book’s fanciful title came from an obscure essay by one of Starrett’s idols: poet and essayist Richard LaGallienne. In his 1896 book, Prose Fancies, LaGallienne rebels against those who call the moon a dead planet, “a cosmic ship littered with the skeletons of its crew, from which every rat of vitality has long since escaped.” Not so, says the poet.

For me the moon is a country of great seaports, whither all the ships of our dreams come home. From all quarters of the world, every day of the week, there are ships sailing to the moon. . . .

He describes the ways of getting to the moon, whether through dreams or drugs or death. The Black Captain, like Charon, takes the spirits on board and flies them through the night to the living moon.

As I write, the moon looks down at me like a Madonna from the great canvas of the sky. She seems beautiful with the beauty of all the eyes that have looked up at her, sad with all the tears of all those eyes; like a silver bowl brimming with the tears of dead lovers she seems. Yes, there are seaports in the moon, there are ships to take us there.

Starrett, whose romantic, bookish nature was colored by a lifetime of penny scrimping and bare bones living, obviously was drawn to LaGallienne’s fancies.

A big fan of the fantastic novels of James Branch Cabell, Starrett hoped his novel would match Cabell’s in sales.

It did not. For the rest of his life, Starrett would say that Seaports in the Moon was his best book and lamented its near anonymity.

While some genre historians note its place in the history of fantasy literature, few consider it a monumental book that helped drive the form in new directions.

A personal note before moving on: My copy of Seaports is unique, I believe, in that Starrett has added a paragraph to the end of the novel, as you can see here.

Coffins for Two

The more that I think about it, the more connections I find between Starrett and the early years of speculative fiction, an arena that often included weird stories and dream-filled or nightmarish poetry. (You have to hunt through old pulps to find some of these stories, although many were collected and published by George Vanderburgh at his Battered Silicon Dispatch Box press.)

During Starrett’s lifetime, there were two collections of his work that show his fondness for the offbeat, the weird, the recherché.

Starrett collected the best of this early work into an anthology with the delicious title of Coffins for Two: Stories of Life, Death, Love and Other Mysteries. Published in 1924 in Chicago by the booksellers Pascal Covici and Billy McGee, the stories were first published in pulps like Smart Set, Wayside Tales and All’s Well. As was true of so many of his early works, Starrett later would call these his juvenile efforts. It’s true that you can feel the influence of Arthur Machen, Robert Louis Stevenson and, maybe, even a little Arthur Conan Doyle in them.

Take, for example, the deliciously grotesque “The Head of Cromwell.” 

Cromwell’s head was placed on a pike after his execution. This much is historic truth. But, in that “darkest hour before the dark cold dawn” the head dislodges itself from the pike where King James II had ordered it to be placed as a warning to all others who displease His Majesty. Despite the fact that it is no longer attached to a body, Cromwell’s head fell at the feet of a drunken Londoner, then “bounded toward the street.”

The next morning “a shivering tradesman, taking down his shutters on the outskirts of the town, was horrified to see a human skull “come bounding toward him over the cobbles.” The skull continues along like this for some time, eventually making its way into a shop of oddities, where it is purchased only to become the tobacco bowl for a philosophical Brit. 

“Death, like life, has its histories, and man often terminates his strange vicissitudes on earth only to enter on other mutations still stranger in the grave,” he tells a journalist who has somehow figured out the tobacco skull’s origins. “I wonder, now, that no one ever has undertaken the posthumous memoirs of the great.”

Starrett, of course, knew others who HAD told these tales, although with a far more light-hearted spirit. John Kendrick Bangs and his Associated Shades novels come to mind, and Starrett would have been familiar with them if only for The Pursuit of the House-Boat, Being Some Further Account of the Divers Doings of the Associated Shades, Under the Leadership of Sherlock Holmes, Esq. It’s a fun read. Look it up if you don’t have a copy.

Coffins for Two is still sought by some collectors, but the collection is largely unknown today. Like so much of Starrett’s fiction, changing times and tastes left these tales of the outré out of fashion.

It would be four decades before the stories were seen again.

The Quick and the Dead

Forty years after Coffins for Two, Starrett’s second collection of eerie tales would be published, this time in 1965 by his friend and fellow Baker Street Irregular August Derleth. There were some repeated tales chrome Coffins for Two, such as “The Head of Cromwell.” But there are other stories here too like “Penelope,” the story of a man whose world is literally turned upside down by a star in the sky.

And then there is “The Sinless Village.” In this one, a newspaper reporter tracks down a man known as “old Traherne,” who died and stayed that way for nearly two days before waking up and getting back to living. For Traherne, this included walking around with a live rubber plant.

Yes, a rubber plant.

Then things get really weird. But you’ll have to hunt that one down for yourself.

The Quick and the Dead also has “Footsteps of Fear,” one of my favorite of his tales. Starrett wrote many murder mystery stories, and in most of them, he has a detective like Jimmie Lavender or Walter Ghost pick up clues and find the killer. “Footsteps of Fear” is different. It is not so much a whodunit, as it is a whathappensnext. We know that Dr B. Edward Loxley killed his wife. It says so right in the first sentence.

Loxley not only commits the perfect murder, he also constructs the perfect way to hide afterwards, taking up residence in one of Chicago’s towering office buildings as William Drayham, rare book dealer. Loxley/Drayham never needs to leave his building. The skyscraper serves all his needs from a place to live to restaurants, and even a dry cleaners.

But the one thing Loxley/Drayham didn’t count on was his growing sense of dread as it appears the world is catching up with his lawlessness.

If you’ve read Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” you have some idea of what comes next.

It must have pleased Starrett to have some of his non-Sherlockian work in print once again. By 1965, he was 79 years old and felt the world had forgotten his eerie short stories.

Copies of The Quick and the Dead can still be found and it’s worth hunting down.

These days, Starrett’s work in the realm of the weird is largely forgotten. But to the collector, there are curious items buried in bookshops, moldering books and pulp magazines just oozing life, all waiting to be resurrected and consumed by an eager buyer.More about that next time.