In June 2020, an excellent reprint publisher called Armchair
Fiction released a compilation of 16 stories from Weird Tales titled
Allison V. Harding: The Forgotten Queen of Horror. The publisher claims
that Harding was actually a woman named Jean Milligan who lived from
1919 to 2004, a fact backed up by business records from the offices of
Weird Tales showing that Ms. Milligan was paid for the stories bearing
Harding’s name.
So Jean Milligan was the talented horror author behind the Allison V. Harding name, right?
Interestingly, it’s not that simple.
A blog called Tellers of Weird Tales did some valuable legwork in 2011 calling the Milligan-Harding
connection into question. The evidence is laid out below.
It turns out that Ms. Milligan was married to a mainstream author
named Lamont Buchanan who wrote serious books about baseball and
American history. Meanwhile, his bride was never known to write anything
before or after the eruption of 33 stories using the Harding pseudonym.
Evidently, Mr. Buchanan also had a steady paycheck during the
relevant window of time. What did he do? He was the Associate Editor of
Weird Tales. If Mr. Buchanan wrote stories for his employer’s magazine,
it would have been standard practice to utilize a pseudonym for those
stories to not clog up the masthead with his own name. Moreover, he was
an author of serious books who wouldn’t want his brand sullied by
overtly writing for the pulps. Is it possible that Mr. Buchanan was
actually Allison V. Harding and he submitted the stories as if they were
coming from his non-author wife?
If these suspicions are valid, why would Mr. Buchanan use a woman’s
name for his horror story pseudonym? I can only speculate, but during
the key years, the Weird Tales Managing Editor (Mr. Buchanan’s boss) was
Dorothy McIlwraith, a woman. This egalitarian editorial hierarchy might
have been the perfect place to have a faux female contributor of
stories for the consumption of the magazine’s mostly male readership.
It’s also possible that Mr. Buchanan was double-laundering his
stories through both the Harding pseudonym and his wife’s name as the
submitter. Maybe his boss, Ms. McIlwraith, didn’t even know that her
subordinate was the man behind the stories. If so, that’s a fun little
scam worthy of a pulp magazine story of its own.
The best way to put this conspiracy theory to a test is to have
Paperback Warrior read a sample of the stories and determine if they
were written by a man or woman.
Here are the capsule reviews of the three stories we DNA tested:
The Frightened Engineer
In this Lovecraft-inspired story, a turnpike construction project
is derailed by Hill 96. Under normal circumstances, dynamite and
earth-moving equipment would be used to grade the hill for the highway.
In this case, it’s almost as if Hill 96 does not want to be disturbed -
as if it were alive. This was a very fun story - like a good Twilight
Zone episode - but not particularly terrifying.
The Underbody
The anthology’s cover art is the illustration that originally
accompanied this story in Weird Tales. It’s about a boy who finds a man
stuck in the soil of a shallow hole behind his house. When the boy
brings his father out to see the man in the hole, he’s disappeared. The
boy takes to calling the reappearing dirt-man, Mr. Mole. This story was
legitimately unsettling and scary - exactly what I seek in pulp horror.
The Damp Man
This was the author’s most popular story spawning two sequels
appearing in Weird Tales. A female swimming champion turns to a male
reporter for help because she is being stalked by a frightening large
man in a dark suit. The stalker is absolutely vile, moist, and menacing.
Great horror story.
DNA Test Results:
There is no way hell that these stories were written by a woman of
1940s America. The first two stories have no female characters at all,
and the even the third story is told through a male’s eyes. Furthermore,
“The Frightened Engineer” has many technical details about turnpike
road construction, a stereotypically manly pursuit in the 1940s.
Another large factor supporting this conclusion is that these
stories are really good, even excellent. Without question, a female
author was capable of excellence. However, I’m not buying for a second
that the talented author of these stories threw her typewriter out the
window without authoring another published word for the next 53 years of
her life.
Regardless of the true authorship, pulp horror fans will enjoy the
Armchair Fiction collection of Allison V. Harding stories. Whether or
not the author is the “Queen” of horror is up for debate, but the
quality of these stories is not.
Buy a copy of this book HERE
Hi, guys. Greg Luce here from Armchair Fiction. Thanks for taking an interest in our stuff. We think the Harding collection is a great set of stories. LOVED YOUR PODCAST ABOUT THE BOOK! Thanks again. Regarding your speculation that Harding might have actually been a man (her husband), I would say it's certainly within the realm of possibility. I'd actually heard something similar to that before, namely, that some of the stories were written by her, while other stories were written by him. It's all speculation though, and I don't suppose we'll ever know the truth. However, I would point out one thing, there are a significant number of female authors of that era who wrote in a manner that might be considered "masculine." This is because the overwhelming audience in those days for a magazine like Weird Tales or Amazing Stories, or even for the speculative fiction genres in general, were men (not so much anymore); so it makes sense in that regard that Harding might have authored all these stories. One of the best examples I can think of is Andre Norton. She, like Harding, wrote almost exclusively to a male audience—at least in her early years, which were very close time-wise to Harding. I read probably 15-20 of her early novels when I was a young adult and they were all very masculine in their approach—in fact, for quite some time I thought Norton was indeed a man. Anyway, it's something to consider. Thanks again for your great coverage!
ReplyDeleteActually it's not true that Jean Milligan never published anything fictional under her byline. I personally found a fictional story coauthored by her in her high school newspaper in New Canaan CT. And she was the secretary of the school Literary Club which suggests she had an active interest in writing. She also had a nuanced sense of humor in high school--in her yearbook she was called "The Girl Who Laughed." While it's possible that Lamont wrote the stories, I agree with Mr. Luce, that you can't make that determination based on style. Lamont abandoned writing after penning a very small number of nonfiction books. The Damp Man concerns a woman stalked by a creepy man--isn't that a topic that could be argued as something a woman would write. As if there truly was such a thing. Women write male protagonists or from a male POV in order to sell stories, as men do. Whether Jean wrote the stories in collaboration with Lamont remains possible, but I find it disappointing that so many rush to dismiss Jean's authorship in whole or in part of the Allison V. Harding stories without any hard facts.
ReplyDeleteIn conjunction with Scott Nicolay, I did considerable research into Jean Milligan a few years ago, and I have to support Mr. Luce's comment that the Allison V. Harding stories could well have been written by Jean or a combination of Jean and Lamont. It's not true that there is no evidence that Jean wrote fiction. I personally went to New Canaan CT and discovered fiction written by her in her high school newspaper/yearbook. She was also secretary of the Literary Club. And that her fellow students considered her to appreciate a good sense of humor is suggested by her yearbook caption as "the girl who laughs." So while she might have been drawn to Lamont for literary reasons, these and other findings suggest she at least aspired to be a writer herself. As for not writing again, well, Lamont wrote a few work-for-hire histories of sports and the Civil War and never wrote again after the 1950s. So abandoning writing would apply equally there. Of course, how does one really know if someone prone to using a pseudonym abandoned writing? Though Lamont came from a very rich family and left a fortune when he died--so they didn't have to write to learn a living. We might however know the answer if any Weird Tales amateur historian had bothered to approach Jean and Lamont for an interview while they were alive. Phone book records show that they lived in the same New York apartment from their marriage in the early 50s (after Weird Tales--they weren't married when the AVH stories were published) until Jean's death in 2004, and Lamont until 2010 or so. Sigh.
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