Valley of Pretenders. John Russell Fearn
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himself submitting stories unsuccessfully to Gillings under his own name) was using a pseudonym to increase his chances of success.
In this Gillings was initially quite mistaken. Frank Jones was a member of the Blackpool Writers Circle. But the overly-suspicious Gillings remained intractable. He remained equally so when Fearn began to submit mss. by his other friends in the Blackpool Circle, Edgar Spencer and Geoffrey Medley.
On 26th May 1937 Fearn wrote Gillings again:
“You’ll find an MS herewith from Geoff Medley. He lives at the same house as Frank Jones, and, to my mind, has turned out a fairly decent English or Amazing type sf yarn. I suggested he might try you before Amazing and see if you could find room anywhere in a future edition of Tales of Wonder for him. I’ve enclosed a stamped envelope for him. Please write to him direct. Don’t be too hard on the guy. He spent all his Whit Weekend typing on this machine (which he borrowed) in order to complete the yarn. If you think anything of it, OK. No business of mine.”
But Gillings would reject this story, plus Medley’s follow-up effort, “Carcinoma Menace”.
On June 10th 1937 Fearn reported to Gillings:
“Julie thinks that ‘World Without Chance,’ Cross’ first effort, is a first class effort and remarkably like Weinbaum. Same applies to ‘Chameleon Planet,’ which I’ve just completed. If Cross should prove more of a hit than Fearn I’ll be tickled to death!”
Fearn wrote to Gillings again on 19th June 1937:
“I saw Frank Jones the other day and so far his yarns haven’t clicked in the US, because they’re too simple. I’ve read them through and I think they’re pretty good for England. I’m attaching their synopses also. If you think them worthy I’ll get him to send them on.”
I managed to trace and contact Geoffrey Medley a number of years ago, and he told me how he had come to know Fearn:
“Fresh from school at the age of fourteen, I reported to 15, Birley Street, Blackpool, to take up the duties of junior office boy to the pompous Mr. John W. Roberts, Solicitor, Town Councillor and drunkard.…”
Geoff went on to identify the other staff members, including the senior office boy, the common law clerk, the secretary and cashier. He continued:
“…During my five years at Birley Street (we moved from No.15 to No.16, across the road) other junior office boys came and went.… It was some time before I came to know the part-time typist. Full-time there was Marjorie Nixon, plus another girl whose name I forget. But this man was of another world. He showed no knowledge of law, no interest in the clients at the practice, and he seldom spoke to anybody. At irregular intervals he just was there, hawk-nosed, smouldering-eyed, apparently unaware of his surroundings. Usually a cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth, and one eye was half-closed against its rising smoke, as two fingers of each hand pounded the keys of the big, brief-carriage typewriter, churning out abstracts of Title—long, rambling documents—faster than the girls could type with five fingers, and faster than I have ever heard a man type.
“This was John Francis Russell Fearn.
“Gradually I came to know that he did our typing jobs just to eke out, and that his main occupation was writing magazine stories. This was exciting news to a boy who had always been top of his classes in English and who vaguely felt that his own best hope of success was to be a writer. And when Jack learned this he was more than helpful. I came to know Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories, and his contributions to them.…
“I went to his house and used his typewriter to rattle out my own attempts at science fiction stories, which he read through and said were in his opinion worthy of publication. The magazine editors never agreed. In retrospect I think the yarns were too juvenile. The only one I remember now [‘Carcinoma Menace’—editor] was about a cancer sufferer in whom the malignant cells, treated with radiation in an effort to kill them, reacted rather unexpectedly. The radiation triggered off mutations in the cells, and the chap finished up with an intelligent being—malignant, of course—inside him, and taking over. The science was suitably blinding, but the fiction, I fear, was rather lame.” [In point of fact, this plot seems to be an uncanny anticipation of one used by John Kippax (John Hynam) in his powerful short story “It” a full twenty years later in Nebula, November 1958 issue!—editor]
“Sometimes we took a break from writing, largely at Jack’s mother’s instigation, and we all three played Bezique, watched by ‘Benjie,’ their wire-haired terrier.”
By then Medley had joined the Blackpool Writers Circle, where he would also do a stint as Secretary later in 1938 (taking over from Fearn, who had succeeded the now departed Jones). Geoff recalled these days thusly:
“Coming back to the period when I was typing my MSS at the Fearn house, I recall that Jack was working on a ‘straight’ novel in the intervals between writing his science fiction potboilers. It was called Little Winter, and dealt with Blackpool seen from the resident’s viewpoint. I don’t remember his completing it.” {Fearn did in fact complete this during the war, and entrusted it to a literary agency. Unfortunately it never sold, and the MSS was inadvertently destroyed following the death of his widow in 1982—editor}.
“Jack and I were members of the Blackpool Writers’ Circle, which met on one evening each week in Jenkinson’s café, in Talbot Square. Jack was then the only full-time writer in the membership.”
Other members whom Geoff recalled included Edgar Spencer and Arthur Waterhouse Painter (“whose legs were paralyzed”. [Painter became a particular friend of Fearn and his mother, and was a very successful writer of juvenile fiction after the war; he also appeared in the Vargo Statten/British SF Magazine—editor.] Geoff continued his reminiscences:
“The Misses Howe were our most regular attendees. One sister, innocent of make-up, wrote for publications like The Methodist Recorder. The other, more smartly dressed and colourfully powdered, wrote for more romantic women’s magazines.
“We all discussed and criticized the MS. of the evening, giving quite well-reasoned analyses, and being ever mindful of the criteria which the books on writing laid down. All except Jack. He listened gravely, but his own contributions to the criticism were not particularly well argued or explained. All Jack could do, really, was write—and make money by it. The rest of us seldom sold anything.
“I lost touch with Jack during the War, and I outgrew my boyhood interest in science fiction. The brown Bombardier who produced and acted in plays in the Orkney Islands was a different person from the wide-eyed youth who had concocted ‘Carcinoma Menace’. Or nearly. Just once my old science fiction familiarity surfaced. It was on Salisbury Plain. One of our sergeants came back from the mess bubbling over with good news. ‘You know them bombs, Geoff, that they used to bust them dams in Germany—they were over a ton apiece. Well, it’s on the wireless over in the mess, we’ve got a bomb over a hundred times more powerful than them, and do yon know how big it is?’
“I froze. His lead-up could only be to an impressively smaller bomb.
“‘Christ!’ I said. ‘Don’t tell me they’ve already got some form of atomic power.…’
“‘That’s what they said—atomic or something.…’
“‘Now,’ I said, ‘we’re really in trouble.’
“‘You don’t understand, Geoff. We’ve got it—not them.’
“It took a science fiction man, then, to realize what trouble we were in.”
In a letter dated 5th July 1937, the suspicious Gillings told Fearn:
“I’m afraid, as far as my anticipations go, ‘Thornton Ayre’ doesn’t get much of a look in; nor, so far, does your friend Geoff Medley, whose ‘Death From the Star’ is much too advanced. Incidentally, these two write surprisingly complex stuff for amateurs at SF don’t they? Particularly Frank Jones, whose style and ideas are remarkably reminiscent of your own. So much so that in ‘Dark World’ he gives almost word for word the same account of