The Princess, the Speed-King, and the Sultan of Llang-Llang
How Three Writers Pulled Off the Wildest Hoax of the Jazz Age
by John Locke
  2026
        Some people should never meet. Some islands should go undiscovered. Some dreams should never come true. But some rules bend to desire. And some stories beg to be told.
        In 1928, Princess Der Ling, the living remnant of China’s overthrown dynasty, draped in imperial robes, worked tirelessly to fulfill her outsized ambitions, determined to kindle a love affair between East and West through bestsellers, movies, and even grander things. Her two accomplices matched her drive. Pulp writer and former marine, Arthur J. Burks, burned to be the best writer in New York City, while reluctantly gaining a reputation as the fastest. Bob McLean’s inheritance of a remote island off the coast of Borneo, with a harem of forty wives, had made him a worldwide media sensation, but that ended badly, and the proud hack craved a new thrill.
        In league, these unlikely conspirators looked beyond their scruples and reached for forbidden stars. In the red hot get rich quick anything goes world of the Jazz Age, their strange alchemy brought the impossible to life.
        Told here for the first time, this a saga of writers behaving badly as only writers can. It's also a story about the crazy colors of the Jazz Age, the emergence of the reading culture, and the rise of the pulps in their era of greatest growth. Includes new history on Weird Tales, science fiction, adventure, air, detective pulps, and much more. Illustrated with rare photos and other materials.


The Thing's Incredible! The Secret Origins of Weird Tales
by John Locke
  2018
        The Thing’s Incredible! is a sweeping revisionist history of the founding of Weird Tales, one of the most influential and entertaining pulp magazines of them all. Its first two years (1923-24) was a period of tumult and controversy unequaled in the pulps, before or since, an experience so painful to its creators that they immediately banished their memories to secrecy, their code of silence suppressing the story for almost a century. Here at last is the true saga, the unraveling of the many twisted threads which have bound the creation of Weird Tales in mystery.
        Who were Henneberger and Lansinger, the co-founders, and what circuitous chain of events brought about their doomed destiny? How did the first editor, the outspoken and uncontrollable Edwin Baird, become the wild man of the pulps? What dark secrets lay buried in second editor Farnsworth Wright’s haunted past that he never dared speak of? What was the significance of the constantly mutating “reorganization” that united two legends, world-famous magician Houdini and horror author H.P. Lovecraft, into a grand nexus of weird? How did Henneberger lose control of his slow-motion disaster of a magazine? And how did an all-out war behind the scenes lead to the long peace of the Wright years?
        This is the grand story of the challenges in establishing a radical, new magazine in the early 1920s—and not just any magazine, but the immortal Weird Tales.

both books available in hardbound, softbound, or ebook

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softbound

hardbound

REVIEWS:

"Brimming with new insights and extensive research, The Thing's Incredible! carries the added advantage of extreme readability. Author Locke not only keeps the pace swift throughout; he also makes sure the names here emerge from the pages as authentic people, complex and three-dimensional. This heretofore untold real-life origin story of the greatest horror magazine of all, Weird Tales, will fascinate anyone with even a remote interest in its subject. A deeply entertaining and satisfying work that delivers in every way."--John Wooley, author of Ghost Band and Wes Craven: A Man and His Nightmares