Johnston McCulley, Alias
Seth Bailey
[Originally
appeared in the Oakland Tribune, May
20, 1923]
If you have ever
read stories written by Harrington Strong, John Mack Stone, Walter Pierson or
Camden Stuart, you have read works by the author about whom this article is
written – Johnston McCulley.
But few authors
boast as many as four nom de plumes, and few with as many as Johnston McCulley.
Some of his best known stories and books are “Broadway Babs”, “The Mark of
Zorro”, “The Masked Woman” and “The Black Star”. His most interesting creations
were “Thubway Tham” and “Zorro”, who have left more laughs and tears in their
wake than any other creation by this star of fiction.
“Thubway Tham”
was created quite by accident. McCulley was in New York and not getting on any
too well when he received a hurry-up call from one of the magazine editors he
knew, asking for a story to fill a certain portion of a magazine (few words illegible here) in a few days.
McCulley sat down at his typewriter and whistled. He had everything with which
to produce what the magazine editor wanted except the story itself. He had imagination,
courage and the willingness to work. So at random he banged at the typewriter
keys, grinding out something that had come into his mind only that morning. It
was but an incident that had occurred on the subway – a mere nothing at all to
anyone else. But it had left a suggestion in McCulley’s mind, and his
imagination had pounced on it and seized it by the throat. It had been so
recent that his mind had not ample time to treat it justly. The seed had been
sown but the proper time had not elapsed to allow it to spring into life.
As the
typewriter keys recorded the grain of thoughts, pinning them together in a
ripping story, there came into the scene from out of nowhere the character of
Thubway Tham. There was a strong appeal for more of him, and the next week saw
Johnston McCulley wrestling with his latest character. He has since written
more than one hundred tales, using the same character, all of which have
appeared in magazines.
McCulley created
the character of Zorro in “The Curse of Capistrano”. He studied the old
Californian mission empire for years, and has written several stories dealing
with mission times. Zorro was intended to reflect the spirit of the caballero
of the times, and to everyone’s satisfaction he did. Douglas Fairbanks made his
greatest screen success with Zorro.
One of the
interesting things about Johnston McCulley is his source of plots. Most writers
have a particular source for their plots, usually from association with the
things about which they like best to write. But not so with McCulley.
Everything and everywhere is his source. He looks for plots while fishing or
motoring, or while digging in the garden. There is nothing prosaic or
commonplace in all the world (few words
illegible here). There’s a plot in the peculiar facial expression of the
man he meets on the street, or (few words
illegible here) song. Love, hate, greed, revenge, self-sacrifice have a
million angles each. “Combine two or three, mix with a few characters, and you
have a plot,” he says.
McCulley is very
successfully married, so successfully married that he calls himself the
one-half-of-one-percenter. His other ninety-nine and one-half per cent is also
constantly on the alert for suggestions (one-half-of-one-percenter will help
the one-half-of-one-percenter in his daily task of writing successfully. His
only children are brain children, but they cause him as much combined worry and
joy as real ones, he asserts.
Calling at his
home, 1939 ½ Argyle Avenue, one might find McCulley pounding away at the typewriter,
or on the same day a week later he might be working in his garden back of the
house, out fishing or motoring. He has not set a schedule for work. In writing
long stories, he usually begins work soon after breakfast and works until late
at night, with time off for meals. He will often, after finishing one story,
putter around in the garden, or do some repair work on his car until 10 o’clock
in the morning, or three or four in the afternoon, then sit down and write a
new tale, writing until he is tired. Some days he works all day, other days but
half a day, and some days not at all. He is subject to loafing spells of
several days at a stretch, and sometimes weeks. He dignifies these spells with
the title of “slump”. Whenever he gets into a “slump”, he usually goes fishing
till he finds the “slump” wearing off.
Most of his
plots are thought out at bedtime, generally just after retiring. He carries the
plot over until morning and if it then appears to be as good as he believed it
to be the night before, he gets up (few
words illegible here).
“What kind of a
story is easiest for you to write?” I asked him.
“That in which I
am interested myself,” he replied, “rather than the one written to fill some
editorial request. Swift-moving romance is the easiest, particularly of olden
times. Detective and mystery tales are the hardest, though I have written
hundreds of them. They are more like work than anything else.”
(few words illegible here) time, as
possible, when he is not subject to a “slump”, at work in his studio, but he
does not forget that he owes some of his time to his wife and home. He aims to
spend as much time with the other half of the family as he does in his studio.
Fishing is his
middle name, be it trout or sea fishing. He has plotted many a tale whipping a
stream. Of this recreation, he says:
“If mentally
tired, I can get more rest and real pleasure out of fishing than anything else
I might do. I don’t care much for hunting. I don’t get half the kick from
firing a gun at a running deer as I get when a trout strikes my fly. Man!
That’s sport. It takes greater skill to fish than to hunt. Here is a statement
that I suppose would cause an argument most anywhere, but that’s my way of
looking at it.”
He is what you
might call an auto fiend. Nothing suits him better, and nothing will lure him
away from his work quicker, than a long auto trip across the country. When he
breaks camp in the morning, he looks at his speedometer, and when he reaches
camp at night, his first act is to record the day’s mileage. He prides himself
in covering a greater distance quicker than someone else can cover it.
If you were to
ask him why he doesn’t play golf he would give you several legitimate reasons.
“I’m not old
enough for golf yet. When I’m eighty perhaps I’ll fall for it.”
McCulley spent
much of his early life in newspaper work – fourteen years, to be exact, in
Chicago, Peoria, Columbus, Kansas City, Portland, Seattle, San Diego, Los
Angeles and Denver. He travelled the road that many others have travelled,
restless, looking for some new environment; then he began to write
successfully.
“Do you
attribute your success to newspaper training?” I asked him.
“Absolutely,” he
replied promptly, as though he had reached the conclusion some time ago. “The
newspaper man, if he be a live one, meets all sorts and conditions of persons
and learns to analyze men and motives. Thus he learns to create characters and
(one word illegible here). He mixes
with the saintly and sinful, priest and (one
word illegible here), sees virtue and vice in equal portion. In after years
as he writes fiction, he is pretty liable to know what he’s talking about. He
will make a cop talk a police argot and he won’t have a society leader drinking
tea out of a saucer. If more motion picture people had been newspaper men we
wouldn’t see so many laughable breaks in the films.”
McCulley was
born in Ottawa, Illinois, February 2, 1883, according to his pedigree in “Who’s
Who”. He sold his first story while a cub reporter. It was a Goldfield yarn,
written during the rush there. He sent it to Karl Edward Harriman of the Red
Book, who immediately bought it. It was not the first one he had written. The
first one eventually went into a sewer after it had been returned four times.
The Goldfield story was his second. Possessed with new vigor, he wrote six
more, and fizzled on all of them. Then he settled down to business. He watched
carefully and learned his own faults. He never met an editor personally until
he had sold two million words of fiction. This should smash the popular idea
that a new writer must have a pull to get into print.
He reads about a
dozen books a month by other authors and glances through all the magazines to
watch the work of others and to keep tab on the ever changing market, noting
changes in policy as indicated to him, changes in the style of stories that are
popular, changes regarding length, and so on.
McCulley’s
advice to aspiring authors is briefly as follows:
“Have a story to
write, and be sure you have a story before you commence to write one. That is
where the average beginner falls down. (Couple
of sentences illegible here). The beginner often is inclined to start too
slow and never wants to quit when the story is done. You can have a snappy
ending and be true to life at the same time.”
“Why seek to
depress folks who have enough depression in the ordinary routine of their
lives? Express contentment and happiness and the might of right without going
to extremes and writing stuff of the silly happy life.”
“Give the public
action. That’s what it wants – lots of it. Give them romance, the downfall of
ulterior motives and the triumph of right. This can just as easily be done in a
murder mystery tale the same as in a story of Biblical times, and in an
entertaining manner instead of like a sermon.”
“The novice can
gain much by reading much. He must get some idea of how others do it – don’t
copy them, but get into the swing of telling stories the way the public. This
swing can best be understood from reading popular stories or books, that have
met with instant favor by the public. The (few
words illegible here) is the big feature, but the way it is told is ninety
percent of the success of the writer.”
“The beginner is
going to have many of his manuscripts returned, but that is no reason why he
should quit. When a manuscript comes back, it is a sure shot that something is
wrong with it. There is some fault in it that caused it to be rejected. He may
have written his story properly, or told it properly (few words illegible here) the wrong magazine. But a story properly
written and told properly usually draws more consideration than a printed
rejection slip. So it pays to dig into it and discover for one’s self wherein
the trouble lies. After this discovery is made, it is quite an easy matter to
correct one’s faults.”
McCulley was
asked who, in his opinion, were the three leading authors of America, to which
he replied:
“Booth
Tarkington, who mingles realism and romance as none other; Joseph Hergesheimer,
the best living imitator of dead and gone Europeans, Joseph C. Lincoln, who
digs down to bedrock and comes up with the genuine roots of humor.”
Every author
whom I’ve asked that question, to date, has added just one other to the list,
and McCulley did not fail in keeping up to standard.
“Those, of
course, in addition to myself,” he ended.
