Bassett Morgan

[dem bones]

'Bassett Morgan' (Grace Jones, 1885-1974?)

Illustrations:

Harold S. De Lay, Midas, Weird Tales, Nov. 1936.
Quindaro, Demon Doom Of N'Yeng Sen, Weird Tales, Aug. 1929.

Bassett Morgan had thirteen stories published in Weird Tales between July 1926 and Nov. 1936, and contributed to all manner of pulps including Westerns, Romance, Ghost and Oriental titles throughout the same period. There also seems to have been a novel, The Golden Rupee, published in 1935. As Robert A. W. Lowdnes put it, writing in The Weird Tales Collector # 6 (Robert Weinberg, 1980):

Morgan wrote a number of stories centred around the basic theme of a man's (or woman's) brain being transferred to the skull of an ape. None of them is bad, and one is about as good as another. All of them are equally unbelievable, but fun to read ... an excellent Bassett Morgan story which was not about brain transplants was The Wolf Woman, telling of the resurrection of a primitive female trapped in a glazier.

The Weird Tales 13

Laocoon Weird Tales July 1926
Christine Campbell Thomson (ed.) You'll Need A Night Light, 1927
Hugh Lamb (ed.) Star Book Of Horror #2 (Star, 1976)

The Head Weird Tales Feb. 1927

Gray Ghouls Weird Tales July 1927, Sept. 1939

The Wolf Woman Weird Tales Sept. 1927
Dzemianowicz, Weinberg & Greenberg (eds.) Weird Vampire Tales (Gramercy, 1992)

The Skeleton Under The Lamp Weird Tales May. 1928

The Demon Doom Of N Yeng Sen Weird Tales Aug. 1929

The Devils Of Po Sung Weird Tales Dec. 1927, Mar. 1939
Christine Campbell Thomson (ed.) By Daylight Only , Oct. 1929

Bimini Weird Tales Jan. 1929

The Island Of Doom Weird Tales March 1932
Christine Campbell Thomson (ed.) Grim Death, Aug. 1932)

Tiger Dust Weird Tales, Apr. 1933
Christine Campbell Thomson (ed.) Keep on the Light, July, 1933
Short Stories, Feb. 1959

The Vengeance Of Ti Fong Weird Tales Dec. 1934

Black Bagheels Weird Tales Jan. 1935

Midas Weird Tales Nov. 1936

[Calenture]

For just a little while I had mixed feelings about your moving the Gruesome Cargoes threads here, Dem, but now I can see that you've obviously done the right thing. These gorgeous old anthologies deserve more attention than they were getting there.

You won't be surprised at my own first post at this new GC incarnation. The fact that this is still the only Bassett Morgan story in my collection just seems to add to its fascination for me. I suppose it was love at first sight.

Laocoon by Bassett Morgan: I wasn’t happy with my old write-up of this one, which I felt too short, so I re-read it recently and here’s a more detailed take:

The plot, which mixes sea-serpents and brain transplants is both grotesque and absurd; but the build up, with a schooner making its way around the coast of Papua, and Willoughby’s journey upriver is so evocative that by the end of it I was frankly prepared to let Morgan get away with almost anything. Almost even the Chinese who greets him with: “‘You allee samee Mista Will’bee, you come ‘long my boat.’

“Willoughby was led to a launch lying on water so clear that she seemed to be floating on air...

“In the late afternoon, with her engines slowed to half-speed, the launch entered a lagoon, where echoes of her pulsations disturbed boobies on the wreck of an old ship pronged on coral spurs. The lagoon water held gaudy little fish scattering like sparks between skeleton-like roots of drowned trees. Sea life had made the wreck its prey. White decay crept up her sides and she was rooted to an abysmal depth by weed. A small wharf sagged under forest creepers with tendrils trailing in the sea...”

At last he arrives at a palisade where another Chinese tells him that his new employer, Denham, is busy. Denham asks to see Chueng Ching, the student who had accompanied Denham to this retreat, but the servant seems evasive. When Denham appears, Willoughby is shocked by his aged appearance. Later he finds a typescript which details Denham’s loathing of age and death and his speculations as to what might be achieved if a man’s brain was encased in the armoured body of a sea serpent.

For Denham knows there are sea serpents.

As Willoughby reads on he learns the horrifying truth about Chueng Ching. The student had become a leper, and as his body sloughed away, he had pleaded with Denham to transplant his brain into a sea serpent’s skull.

Realising that he’s been called to this remote spot to assist a madman, Willoughby decides to follow Denham that night to his laboratory in a deep tidal cavern where “came the sound of water crashing on rocks, threshed under flails of no wind that ever was”.

At the end of the day, the sheer colour and energy of the narrative outweighs the story’s absurdity. I was surprised going back to the story to see how short it was, and after that, how well it lives up to my memory of it.

My copy of the story is in Hugh Lamb’s 2nd Star Book of Horror Stories.

[dem bones]

May 3, 2008 21:55:26 GMT Calenture said:

For just a little while I had mixed feelings about your moving the Gruesome Cargoes threads here, Dem, but now I can see that you've obviously done the right thing. These gorgeous old anthologies deserve more attention than they were getting there.

Seemed the best thing to do, Rog, as after the initial burst of activity, it just died.

The word on the street has it that Bassett Morgan has yet another brain transplant story included in the Not At Night's - Tiger Dust in Keep On The Light which is one of three i'm still missing!

Sure enough, a consultation of E. F. Bleiler's Guide To Supernatural Fiction confirms:

Villainous Chinese surgeons transplant human brains into orang utans. A were-tiger woman avenges one such operation. Much like the author's "Devils Of Po Sung"

By the sounds of it, it's also much like the author's Island Of Doom and Laocoon, but who's complaining?

Discovering that 'Bassett' was a female author was almost as shocking as learning that Alex White wasn't a bloke!

[dem bones]

Via John Long's New Books: Autumn Catalogue 1934, at back of Guy Endore's The Werewolf Of Paris. From the summary, it doesn't seem as if there's much potential for man-Orangutan brain-transplants, but i'm sure all that seasick and Hymn Singing make up for it.

[helrunar]

'Fly-trap orchids,' said Evans.  'Cultivated and bred for size and ferocity.  Nell trained Little Willie to feed them.'

A stout wall of bamboo supported the trunks of two vines, but their branches had swarmed to trees which were smothered by the parasitic growth.  The flowers were prodigious monstrosities, with a petal spread of three feet like curved scarlet leather, black throats from which came a lethal stench that Mansey felt in sudden dizziness, despite the sea wind blowing briskly that morning.  The horrible flowers swayed like the wobbling heads of dromedaries or inflated hoods of cobras in the direction of the ape and his basket of meat, which his paw tossed in bits to a black throat.  Instantly the petals closed on the meat with a creak like rubbed leather, and a dozen other heads snatched towards that closed maw, their scarlet petals quivering like the jaws of a cat stalking a bird.  They even darted at the ape, which moved nimbly from their touch.

'They can draw blood,' commented Evans, 'as Little Willie found out long ago.  ...'

... Mansey saw the stems, thick as a man's leg, pulsing between closed blooms that hung like yellow gourds, as the flesh was absorbed.

'It's beastly, and I don't see what it proves,' said Mansey.

'Every man has his own hobby,' said Evans.  'The orchids are just a whim of mine.'

Bassett Morgan, Island of Terror  (as published in Not at Night, Arrow Book 1960)

[dem bones]

G. O. Olinick

Bassett Morgan - The Head: (Weird Tales, Feb. 1927). A weird and terrible tale of horror and surgery in the jungle wilderness, by the author of "Laocoon".

Our Lady of inter-race/ sex / species brain transplants (delete as applicable) revisits her pet theme. *

Papau. Phillips, adventurer, SANE SCIENTIST, fatally angers the Chieftain Gwahoo by winning the love of a native girl. On learning of their marriage, Gwahoo decapitates the white man and keeps his head as a trophy. With help of her pet monkey, the Bride of Phillips (she doesn't seem to have a name) steals back the head of her beloved and claims sanctuary in the hut of Dr. Paul Dakens, effectively sealing his doom along with her own.

They attack at midnight.

Dakens opens fire and takes down the Chieftain.

The Blacks scatter.

With Gwahoo abandoned and helpless, Phillips' wife advances, knife in hand, intent on slowly torturing him to death. Dakens intervenes and, in the ensuing struggle, the girl sustains a fatal stab wound. Will the nightmare never end?

Maddened by drink and terrified out of his mind, Dakens acts fast. Opening the craniums of both parties, he transfers the dying girls brain to the head of the Chief. It's a crazy stunt to pull and not the least ethical, but be honest. Faced with the same set of circumstances, wouldn't you do the same?

All this and an Olinick original. It really doesn't get much better!

* See also Island Of Doom, The Devils Of Po Sung, Black Bagheela, Laocoon ....

[helrunar]

I read "Bimini" (in some electronic Weird Tales thunderbag whose name I can't recall offhand) this evening and was quite surprised. It read more like one of Rider Haggard's more mystical yarns than typical Bassett Morgan. I quite enjoyed it, though like several other stories I've read this past week, it didn't really conclude so much as cease to go on. I don't know how else to express this.

I think this may have been among the numerous sources the indefatigable Alan Moore drew upon for one of the more recent installments of his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen saga, but if memory serves, Rider Haggard's She and Ayesha novels were the most obviously evident source. 

H.