(January 11, 1893 - November 30, 1942)
By Peter Ruber
"I have killed a thousand men. In the dark alleys of small towns I have waylaid and slugged them; on foggy streets of sleeping cities I have clubbed and knifed them; in the dens of the tenderloin and the hideouts of gangsters I have shot them in cold blood; on the rolling pampas of the Argentine I have murdered them with my bola; on our own Western plains I have fanned them with my six-gun; aboard ships on every sea, in waterfront dives of every port, in tall city buildings and in quiet suburban homes, I have wrenched from my victims their last agonized cries, watched expressions of incredulity spread across their tortured faces. I have killed all these men in all these places -- for a penny a word...."
"This diabolical career," the anonymous writer continued, "was entered upon willingly ten years ago, yet it is difficult to decide at whose door the blame should be placed."
In these opening lines from "A Penny A Word," a very bitter confession published in the April 1936 issue of H. L. Mencken's American Mercury, an author laments how writing for the pulp fiction magazines had destroyed his ability and enthusiasm to write serious fiction.
The authorship of this article has been debated on and off by literary historians for more than sixty-five years. Some believed it had been written by Mencken himself, given his attitudes towards the pulp fiction magazines and the editorial slants of the American Mercury. But when I began to piece together Anthony M. Rud's life, too many signposts and thinly-veiled autobiographical references within the article (provided to me by Richard Bleiler, senior research librarian at the University of Connecticut, Storrs) pointed to him and no other writer of his time.
One key disclosure the anonymous author made was that he drifted between editing pulp and writing for the pulp magazines he had come to despise. Seduced by the quick paycheck and the challenge of switching genres from one story to the next, unlike a great many others, Rud was writing with the knowledge that he was capable of very good work; he was the master chef forced to flip burgers for a living. Writers such as August Derleth, Vincent Starrett, L. Sprague de Camp, and a few others could live with this; but it seems to have preyed on Rud, perhaps because of his essentially white collar background and Ivy League affiliations.
* * *
From 1910 to the mid-1920s, Chicago was a literary Mecca second only to New York. For scores of writers the likes of Ben Hecht, Burton Rascoe, H. Bedford-Jones, Meyer Levin, MacKinlay Kantor, it was a temporary way station to gain experience writing for the city's many newspapers, trade publications, and fiction magazines, before they moved on to (hopefully) greener pastures like New York or Hollywood.
Then there were the Chicago-born writers who began their literary careers in the Windy City, and later moved on. One such person was Anthony Melville Rud, whose fiction (and euphonious name, which rhymes with "bud" not "rude") has intrigued this writer for a number of years, since he began researching The Last Bookman, his 1968 biography of Vincent Starrett.
Starrett sent this intriguing 1921 letter to Burton Rascoe, who already had departed for New York to become managing editor of McCall's. It read: "I have met the faunful Tony (Anthony M.) Rud, who lives within half a mile of me, and we discussed you until you will not need ear muffs this winter."
Earlier that year, Starrett had written an amusing paragraph about Rud for his "Chicago Letter" column in the July 1921 issue of The Double Dealer:
"Anthony M. Rud is a writer of short stories for the popular magazines. He is also a neighbor of mine, and the son of my doctor. I had never met the son, but believing in the duty of a veteran of letters to encourage beginners with friendly criticism and applause, I set out to call upon this young man. A maid met me at the front door, and informed me that Mr. Rud was spending the winter in Florida with his family, and had not yet returned! This is the end of the story, except that I am still wondering how this sort of thing is done, for it costs money to spend the winter in Florida, and I, too, am a writer."
Starrett did not know that in his early years as a writer, Anthony M. Rud, his wife, Elizabeth, and three small children (Anthony G., Betsy and Suzanne), lived in his parents' 9-room house at 535 North Central Avenue, Austin, Illinois (just outside Chicago's North Side), and could therefore afford to vacation in the warmer climates of Florida, Louisiana and Alabama during the winter months.
By 1921, Rud was in his fifth year of professional writing and an accepted member of Chicago's literary fraternity. The emerging records of his bibliography show that his earliest work consisted of articles for such magazines as Illustrated World, Technology World, Scientific American, Literary Digest, and short fiction for popular story magazines as Argosy, The Green Book Magazine, Detective Story Magazine, Short Stories, Smith's Magazine and Black Mask. There had even been a sale in 1919 to the Saturday Evening Post, one of the toughest fiction markets in the country.
Rud was also writing books. A non-fiction work entitled What We Learned About Wood, had been published in Philadelphia in 1919 by Curtis. I have been unable to find a copy and cannot speak of its content, but suspect it was a contract assignment to keep the revenue pipeline filled. In addition to his growing list of short stories, Rud had novel-length fiction in development. He would write four novels during the 1920 decade. All were published by Doubleday, Page & Co. and its paperback imprint, Garden City Publishing Co.
Three were lurid-covered paperback originals -- The Last Grubstake (1922), The Devil's Heirloom (1924) and The Sentence of the Six-Gun (1926) -- and a serious novel, The Second Generation (1923), published simultaneously in England by Heinemann, which attracted much critical attention, and ranked high in Harper's fiction contest that year. Burton Rascoe strongly promoted the book to Harper's editors and almost succeeded in having it win the magazine's contest.
The book concerns a second generation Scandinavian family's life on a tobacco farm in southern Wisconsin, and Rud drew heavily on background information provided by his father, a Norwegian immigrant, whose life is fascinating in its own right.
The following information is taken from a letter Anthony M. Rud sent to Albert O. Barton in the 1930s, who was writing an article about books written by Norwegian-American novelists Alexander Corstvet and Anthony M. Rud for volume 6 of the Norwegian-American Historical Association (NAHA) archives. That article can be found at the NAHA URL hosted on the St. Olaf University (Northfield, MN) web site:
http://www.naha.stolaf.edu/publications/volume06/vol06_9.htm
Anthony M. Rud's letter, reproduced in that article, states that his father, Dr. Anthony Rud, was born in Kongsberg, near Mt. Gausta, Norway, and came alone to America at the age of 12 [ca. 1875], as soon as he had completed grammar school. He lived for five years on Kongshonong prairie, seven miles north of Edgerton, and two miles south of Rockdale, Dane county (at that time Clinton), southeast of Madison, Wisconsin.
From age 17 to 20 he raised three crops of tobacco on shares, and was very successful. He worked his way through Milton prep and two years of Milton College, getting his B.S. degree in 1887. After that, Northwestern Medical College, the Physicians and Surgeons of New York and on to Berlin and Vienna. In 1891 he received his M.D. degree from Northwestern University Medical School and also his M.S. from Milton.
Rud went on to say his mother, Alice [Piper] Rud, was Chicago-born and that her mother was a Canadian. There are no details of how they met, but since Alice Rud was also a doctor, it is highly possibly that they graduated Northwestern Medical College together, and married soon after graduation.
They had two children: Anthony Melville Rud, born on January 11, 1893, and a daughter Natalie, born 1895. Anthony M. Rud was educated at St. John's military academy, Delafield, Wisconsin, Dartmouth College and Rush Medical College, Chicago. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1914, but quit medical school after two years because blood and dissecting made him squeamish.
"My father also lacked interest in pursuing a medical career," says Anthony Gordon Rud, Sr. (who prefers to be called Tony Rud), and who celebrated his 81st birthday in July, 2002. "The girl he liked [Elizabeth Zwilling] didn't want to be married to a doctor, so he quit Rush Medical College and set out to do what really interested him -- to be a writer. He had sold some pieces to a few magazines while still in school and that encouraged him."
In a December 1923 profile in Action Stories, Rud mentions that he had been associate editor of a national magazine for several years, and we believe that may have Illustrated World, where a score of his articles appeared between 1916-1917 with such intriguing titles as "Flying Wheel of Death," "New Weapons Against Spotted Death," "Railroad to Hudson Bay," Submarine Killer," "Unusual Vacation Stunts," "Why Your Eyes Have No Expression," and "Trapping the Pirate U-Boat."
When Anthony and Elizabeth first married, both worked and had their own apartment; but when their children began to arrive, his earnings as a freelance writer provided an erratic existence at best, and they moved into his parents' home until 1924. By then, Anthony M. Rud's literary reputation was well established, for Harry E. Maule, the legendary editor of Doubleday's Short Story magazine, and the senior editor of Doubleday's Crime Club, lured the young author away from Chicago to work as an editor at the company's newly-built Country Life Press, Garden City, Long Island, New York. Out of these offices Doubleday, Page & Co. edited and published its consumer and fiction magazines, and an extensive line of paperback novels.
Anthony M. Rud purchased a small house about a block from the Doubleday offices. The family would live there for the next two and a half years before buying a larger home in the northern section of the town called Nassau Boulevard. Tony Rud recalls, "This was a big white house with a study on the second floor where my father hung out, played the mandolin, smoked pipes and cigarettes, and typed like mad."
There was a significant slowdown in Rud's fiction output for the next several years. Editorial work dominated his responsibilities and the score of stories and one novel he would write while working for Doubleday, were all published by company-owned magazines -- Short Stories and The Frontier, which later was renamed Frontier Stories. Whether he wrote an occasional non-genre story for Doubleday's consumer publications isn't known or for other pulp magazines with any frequency, has yet to be discovered. Only one story in the May 1927 issue of Everybody's ("Devil-Tails") came out during his final months at Doubleday, Page & Co. When "Pudding Stone" appeared in the August issue, Rud had already taken over as editor of Adventure, Everybody's sister magazine published by Butterick Publishing Co.
Although he didn't write any stories for Adventure during his two and a half year tenure, he sold 4 more to Everybody's and two novelettes to Argosy --"The Albino Ogre" (Nov. 3, 1928) and "The Big Casino" (May 18, 1929). Within a few months of leaving Adventure, he sold Argosy a 4-part serial novel, "Strong Man," which began in the May 31, 1930 issue; then 34 more stories over the next few years, making that his most prolific market. Detective Fiction Weekly, three years later, was become a close second.
Tony Rud tells us that his father also sold fiction (and possibly articles) to the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Evening Post during his Adventure years. Many big city newspapers in the first half of the 20th century purchased original fiction or fiction peddled by syndicates such as McClure's or the Hearst-owned King Features Syndicate. The Hearst organization also distributed a Sunday supplement called The American Weekly to all their newspapers, which carried at least one serial during the 1930s. Other syndicates purchased second serial rights to fiction published in pulp or slick paper magazine and sold those supplements to papers such as the Philadelphia Record, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, etc., as they did comic strips. From 1916-1960, for instance, the Boston Globe published one of the largest fiction supplements called The Boston Sunday Globe Magazine. For popular authors these became additional revenue streams, and there is evidence that Rud worked these markets during his lifetime. However, finding newspapers that archived these supplements on microfilms is almost impossible.
When Everybody's circulation began to falter, Butterick gave Rud the additional assignment of closing down that magazine and merging it into Romance magazine. My colleague Victor Berch of Brandeis University noted this when he saw Rud's name briefly in the editorial slot on microfilms of Everybody's and Romance for early 1929.
Though the suburban lifestyle in snobbish Garden City was different from the big-city atmosphere of Chicago, the Rud family adapted. Both he and his wife had come from socially prominent families, and Elizabeth Rud became an active member in several local clubs. For Anthony M. Rud, however, not having regular contact with all his former literary colleagues and feeling trapped in what he and others called the pulp jungle, it became a time for brooding and excessive drinking that would later impact his family and career.
When Burton Rascoe worked at McCall's, he would occasionally take the train to Garden City for dinner and conversation with the Ruds. Sherwood Anderson also made the journey during his occasional visits to New York. Tony Rud remembers Burton Rascoe as a brilliant literary critic who could not speak without stammering. "It would take him five minutes to get out a paragraph," he said. "What he said was always perceptive and sometimes funny. But it was painful to listen to him speak."
When Anderson, then considered America's finest story writer, lived in New York for a while in the 1930s, he let Anthony M. Rud persuade him to come to Garden City and speak before a ladies' club. "Before my father drove him to this prissy meeting, which I recall was being held at the very straight-laced Episcopal cathedral, they stopped for one too many drinks at a local speakeasy, and arrived chattering in loud, slurred voices, shocking the entire group. My mother was there and refused to acknowledge them. I learned later it was not a very auspicious occasion."
He also made acquaintances with new writers, such as Roy de S. Horn, a popular and prolific adventure-story writer, who lived a block from the Rud home and became his closest friend.
A graduate of Annapolis, Horn had served in the First World War. "He lost an eye," the author's son told us, "not in combat, but during a training exercise. He was a gunnery officer, or something like that, and the weapon misfired. He was a champion fencer at the time and he was going to be in the Olympics. The accident ruined that."
Over the years the Ruds and Horns often vacationed together at Lost Lake in Maine and spent their days fishing. Tony Rud recalls that when he was in the Navy during WW II, he frequently ran into graduates from Annapolis, who said, "'Oh, yes, Commander Horn.' He had a very lovely daughter, which they remembered distinctly. Roy de S. Horn was an interesting guy." Despite losing one eye, Horn remained a Navy reservist and returned to active duty at Annapolis to help train the Navy's officer corps.
One occasional visitor was George Allan England, and Tony Rud to this day remembers his last appearance at their Garden City home in the fall of 1935. England had just lost his bid to become governor of Maine on the Socialist Party ticket and said he was planning to take a cruise to the South Pacific on a sailing vessel; and he offered to take young Tony Rud along as a cabin boy.
"I was thrilled," he recalls, and ran out of the room to tell his sisters. Later that evening his mother had the difficult job of explaining to the young boy why he could not go.
England was an exceptionally good writer of adventure and science-fiction stories who has yet to get his due, and at first I thought it was odd that he and Anthony M. Rud got along so well as they did. The two men were on opposite poles of the political spectrum. A Harvard graduate and a prolific writer for the pulps, England had been a notorious Socialist most his life. Rud, on the other hand, a life-long conservative Republican, became almost Teutonic during the early 1930s, when Hitler first came to power in Germany on a platform to bring his country out of a deep recession. As time went on and the dictator's true motives of dominating Europe emerged, Rud became a staunch Roosevelt Liberal in his political thinking.
Their common ground was writing for the same markets and Rud had purchased one England short story and a serial novel in 1928 when he was editor of Adventure. Also, both men often used science themes in their work. England's were more in the H. G. Wells school of "scientifiction," which came to be known as "science fiction"; Rud's stories drew on medical and scientific knowledge to create pseudo-science.
The narrator in Rud's classic story, "Ooze," describes pseudo-science as "...a yarn, based on solid fact in the field of astronomy, chemistry, anthropology or whatnot, which carries to logical conclusion unproved theories of men who devote their lives to searching out further nadirs of fact...In certain fashion these men are allies of science. Often they visualize something which had not been imagined even by the best of men from whom they secure data, thus opening new horizons of possibility."
Sometimes both men mined similar pseudo-scientific plots suggested earlier by H. G. Wells. In 1909 England had written a novel called "The House of Transmutation," in which a scientist transforms a gorilla into a man through a series of surgical operations. In "Ooze," a scientist creates a protoplasm, that if injected into animals would make them grow to huge proportions and thus help increase the world's food supply. But the experiment goes awry and leads to unimaginable horrors.
In Rud's "White Fires" (Argosy, Apr. 14, 1934), an exiled surgeon hiding in the jungles offers a king's ransom in uncut diamonds to a gangster if he would get his former partner out of Illinois State Penitentiary and smuggle him to South America. The partner had been arrested after it was discovered the two surgeons had taken two incurably ill men and surgically transformed them into a single living human being. Once those opening paragraphs ended, the story itself took on different proportions. The surgeon exiled in the jungle had brought along his partner's young son and raised him, creating an educated but naive Tarzan-like character who then dominates this novelette-length story as he discovers under strange circumstances the ways of the white man, and romance.
Anthony M. Rud's reading tastes were very catholic and the books and authors he admired indirectly influenced the genre stories he wrote. Among the classics, he liked a number of short stories by Guy de Maupassant, and he regarded The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas two of the greatest adventure stories ever written. He also liked Thorne Smith, creator of the amusing Topper stories, W. C. Tuttle's western stories, which he published regularly in Adventure, and P. G. Wodehouse.
"I remember that he especially liked Wodehouse," the author's son recalls. "He got me to like him, too, and I collected him all my life, because my father spoke so highly and admiringly of him."
Although most of Anthony M. Rud's fiction output was market driven, he was very intense about his writing and demanded quiet around the house. He would become vocally annoyed if his children ran through the house with their friends screeching and slamming doors. If he wasn't on deadline, he would write only in the mornings. He'd rise before dawn, put over a pot of coffee to brew, then go down to the basement during cold weather to remove the previous day's ashes and shovel coal into the furnace to warm the house. His den overlooked the front yard and he would write until noon, using only the forefinger of each hand.
"It was hard to imagine how anyone could type so quickly using only two fingers," says Tony Rud, the longtime editor of the Berkshire Eagle, a weekly newspaper published in Pittsfield, Mass. Like others toiling the pulp fiction markets, Anthony M. Rud preferred to write novelettes over short stories, because he was being paid by the word.
Tony Rud says times were good during the late 1920s. His father made an excellent salary as editor of Adventure, one of the more prestigious pulp fiction magazines. He was earning extra income through his writings, and was taking flying lessons at Roosevelt Field around the time Lindbergh made his solo flight across the Atlantic. Both his and his wife's parents were sending them small checks regularly, and Elizabeth Rud felt guilty about receiving those checks when they were doing so well.
Like her husband, Elizabeth Rud was an avid reader and would bring back four or five books from the library every week. "She particularly liked German writers," says Tony Rud. "I learned later she was of German stock. Her grandparents were Amish. She had some very odd ideas. Her maiden name was Zwilling, which means twins."
The good times came to a crashing halt when Anthony M. Rud was terminated as the editor of Adventure in January 1930. The reasons are unclear as to whether it was over differences in editorial policy, the need to cut staff salaries as the Great Depression began, or whether binge drinking had begun to affect his work on the magazine. One hint that might support this possibility was that in the late spring or early summer 1929, the family drove down to Valparaiso, Florida, near the Gulf of Mexico, where they stayed at the home of Anthony M. Rud's sister Natalie and her husband James Hatcher. The author was checked into a Pensacola rehab center for an indeterminate stay. Elizabeth Rud and the children stayed in Valparaiso for three months, then moved to the Rud family home outside Chicago for another two or three months, before returning to Garden City. It wasn't until later that Tony Rud learned that his father was being treated for his alcoholism.
When Rud left as Adventure magazine's 4th editor, every fiction magazine was feeling a pinch. They slimmed down from an average of 176-192 pages to 128 pages or less. Some increased the type size so editors bought fewer stories to fill the reduced number of pages. Inventories of stories that had been paid for were used up before new ones were purchased. But still magazines folded like flies, and bankruptcies widely impacted writers.
According to a May 13, 1933 New York Times article, covering a weekly meeting of the American Fiction Guild, which had been formed two years earlier by pulp fiction writer Arthur J. Burks, and which in that year had chapters in every major city to help writers keep on top of changing market dynamics, the available markets had dwindled from 73 magazines to 33. And Anthony M. Rud, like scores of other well-known writers, was without regular markets.
It was particularly tight during 1930-1932, Tony Rud remembers. His father held a variety of jobs selling Studebaker cars and Electrolux vacuum cleaners to supplement his meager earnings from occasional story sales. It was a time when those small family checks came in handy. "My mother would say, 'Now we can pay the water bill' -- or whatever."
Magazine markets began to rebound in 1933. Publishing groups like Street & Smith, Frank A. Munsey & Co., Columbia Publications, Fiction House, and Popular Publications began to buy out faltering rivals and launch new magazines. But even top-tier writers like H. Bedford-Jones and Max Brand, who had previously been paid five cents to ten cents a word, were cut to two and three cents a word, and glad to get it. Most of the fiction writers, however, slaved for a penny a word and sometimes less.
For Anthony M. Rud the returning markets forced him into his most productive writing period. Somehow he had managed thus far to survive the bleakest period of the Depression and pay the house mortgage, with a struggle.
As mentioned earlier, he became an active contributor again to Argosy, and opened new markets in Detective Fiction Weekly, Thrilling Adventures and other magazines, with a succession of stories and serials.
Two serials he sold to Detective Fiction Weekly --"The Rose Bath Riddle" and "The Stuffed Men" -- were published in hardcovers by Macauley in 1934. A third detective novel, House of the Damned, had been published as a book-length novel in the Feb/Mar issue of Two-Books Detective Magazine as "The Death Messenger." They were his first books in eight years, and the last to be published under his own name.
He wrote other intriguing serials for Detective Fiction Weekly -- "The Strange Scent of Murder," "The Golden Magnet Murders" and "Terror Cave." At Thrilling Adventures there was "Frozen Face" in the fall of 1932, and "Dry River Ranch" in the summer of 1933.
By 1937, despite his prolific writing streak, Anthony M. Rud's world fell apart. His youngest daughter, Suzanne, was seriously ill with hyperthyroidism and required hospitalization. There wasn't enough income to pay the house mortgage and the mounting medical bills, and the bank foreclosed.
Tony Rud says, "By that time the house was in bad repair, unpainted and very un-Garden-City-like." Old family friends, the Ralph Perrys, who had moved to the Berkshires in Massachusetts, found a rental home for the Ruds, got Suzanne into a hospital in Sharon, Connecticut, for long-term care, and generally helped the family get back on its feet. Ralph R. Perry (1895-?), a naval man and traveler, was a prolific contributor to the pulp magazines. He sold more than 50 stories to Argosy and two dozen to Adventure, nearly half of which were purchased when Rud was its editor.
"I got a scholarship at Berkshire School in Sheffield where I boarded for two years," Tony Rud said, "away from the troubles at home. AMR was binge drinking quite a bit -- a habit he didn't shake completely, I believe, until a year before his death in New York of an aneurysm. In that last year he didn't drink, looked tan and fit from vegetable gardening every afternoon in Sheffield, and was about as healthy-looking as I ever remembered."
After spending one full year in that little house on Rannapo Road in Sheffield, Anthony M. Rud rented a white farmhouse on Under Mountain Road, Sheffield, for the summer months. "I could walk home from Berkshire School on weekends," Tony Rud remembers. "It was a great place but had no central heating, only a potbelly stove in the big hall. Every fall, my parents would move down to New York for the winter."
In early fall of 1938, the family rented an apartment on Christopher Street in Greenwich Village, and Rud found a job as editor of Street & Smith's Detective Story Magazine. Some months later, he was also appointed the uncredited editor of Clues, which had lost its editor, and he became involved in a controversy with management over the publication of Donald Wandrei's science-fiction detective stories featuring Cyrus North. First management liked the series, then they decided Clues should not publish any stories with a SF theme. This information was provided by D. H. Olson, the Minneapolis-based Wandrei expert, from letters Wandrei had sent to his father and Wisconsin writer August Derleth.
With musical chairs in full swing in Street & Smith's editorial departments, Rud seems to have left the publisher in summer of 1939, and the family returned to their rented farmhouse in Sheffield. They spent one more winter in the Greenwich Village apartment before moving uptown to 419 West 119th Street, just off Amsterdam Ave. It was a private apartment house that has since been taken over by Columbia University, where Rud over the next year or two enrolled in several courses on radio scriptwriting. Although better paying than the pulps, radio work was not as steady as the magazine market, and Rud did not appear to pursue work in broadcasting.
The exact dates of Rud's tenure at Detective Story Magazine won't be known until microfilms of the magazine's contents pages can be checked. But it's fairly certain he left Street & Smith by the summer of 1939, an event that did not appear to impact Rud unduly; he simply cranked out more fiction for the syndicates and the pulp magazines, including a considerable number for the New York Daily News.
Rud must have been fairly active because he developed several pseudonyms -- Anson Piper and Ray McGillivray. Piper had been his mother's maiden name. Nothing is known about the McGillivray pen name. Rud used Anson Piper for at least three western novels published in book form, but only the first, Black Creek Buckaroo, published in 1941 by William Morrow Co., came out during his lifetime. It was abridged for a Belmont paperback edition in 1964.
The other two Piper titles were Blue Bonnet Range (1946) and Painted Ghost (1947), and were published posthumously in hardcover in London by Swan. Neither book had prior U.S. publication, and there are no details of how their publication came about. Black Creek Buckaroo was copyright 1941 by Columbia Publications, Inc., which published several Western pulps around that time. That might indicate the publisher had also purchased all rights.
Although Rud's financial situation stabilized by 1940, he must have had nagging doubts about the direction his literary career had taken.
He had written only one serious, critically acclaimed novel during his 25 years as a professional writer -- The Second Generation -- which, even a dozen or more years after its 1923 publication, was still remembered. Of the book, one critic said, "Mr. Rud has the utter detachment from his characters which is characteristic of Knut [Pedersen] Hamsun [the Norwegian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1920]. Parts of 'The Second Generation' seem like Hamsun; they have the same rootedness in the soil. Mr. Rud writes of a Scandinavian community whose grinding of its sons into richer dirt for the soil is tragedy for him. He paints in all the details of his background."
In describing the book's leading characters, Rud told the Norwegian-American Historical Association, "In a certain measure, Leif's experiences were my father's, somewhat dramatized. Einar is a fictional character patterned after an old bonde [*sic*] I knew in Iowa. Dr. Rand was very closely drawn from a real country doctor of the region north of Edgerton. Rock county and southern Dane is, of course, the scene of much of the tale. Freida, for one, really lived there. I worked for a time on her place in the tobacco fields." One suspects that Rud did so during several summer vacations while attending the military academy and Dartmouth College.
Whether years of pulp fiction destroyed Rud's ability to write serious fiction again is something for critics to argue. I haven't noticed any fall-off in the quality of his writing as he grew older. If anything, his narrative became slicker, more compelling, and his facility to switch from one genre to another had not diminished over time.
Therefore I wonder if The Second Generation, a novel largely influenced by his father's early life as an immigrant pioneer, was the limit of his interest in writing regional literature. Conversely, whether his continuing need to churn out popular fiction during the last ten years of his life prevented him from devoting significant to write a sequel to The Second Generation. We will never know for certain, because this large, strapping man, standing six-two and weighing around 210, took ill on November 28 and was taken to Polychinic Hospital, 343 West 50th Street. A heart attack ended his life two days later at age 49.
Had he continued to write, there is every possibility that Rud may have returned to the soil for a future novel or two -- or perhaps to contemporary themes of men and women struggling with life's problems, in addition to escapist entertainments. Had he lived out the 1940 decade and into the next, the decline of the pulp fiction magazines would have dictated a career change -- either to writing paperback originals, which replaced the pulps -- or serious fiction for the hardcover publishers. He was at his peak at that time, and he would have followed his fortunes. Certainly, his literary skills were above most of his genre-writing colleagues, who transitioned out of the rough-paper magazines.
* * *
Anthony M. Rud's adventure stories tend to be low-key rather than filled with the explosive action his colleagues dished out. He builds suspense slowly, deliberately, often focusing on tightly knit narrative rather than hard-hitting dialogue to move a story forward to a sudden and unexpected climax. This storytelling approach works equally well for adventure stories like "White Fires" (Argosy, Apr. 14, 1934), weird tales like "A Square of Canvas" (WT, Apr. 1923) and SF stories like "The Molten Bullet" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, June, 1937), and many others.
Having said that, Rud was not above mixing genres (horror with adventure) or injecting bizarre science into detective stories, by drawing upon his extensive knowledge of science, biology and medicine. In his essay, "Anthony M. Rud's Weird Tales" (Attic Revivals, 1983), Bernard A. Drew said that Rud created horrors which were both preposterous yet sound feasible. Notable examples are his novels The Rose Bath Riddle, House of the Damned and The Stuffed Men.
According to the publisher, The Macauley Company, these novels feature "Jigger" Masters, "a new personality in detective fiction," who went on to appear in other serials in Detective Fiction Weekly between 1933 and 1935: "The Strange Scent of Murder," "The Golden Magnet Murders," "Terror Cave," and in a number of short stories and novelettes. "Jigger" Masters actually made his debut in an 8-part series of short stories from March 1918 to October 1918 in The Green Book Magazine, making him Rud's first series character. More than likely he appeared in other stories over the next fifteen years before he made a sizable splash in Detective Fiction Weekly.
In The Rose Bath Riddle, the publisher's promotion copy said Masters faces super-criminals who deal death with chemical magic. "Imagine a victim frozen to death in a scalding bath! That is only one of the baffling strands in the web of murder! Jigger meets science with science, and a shrewdness that reaches genius; and the outcome is a bookful of unequalled thrills."
And if that doesn't grab your interest, try The Stuffed Men, in which bodies are found with their insides turned into a straw-like substance. Of this book, a New York Times reviewer commented, "To impart a semblance of verisimilitude to these steep and violent doings, the author resorts to a [good] deal of pseudo-scientific hocus-pocus which is apt to startle and awe the uninformed reader. If the story is essentially preposterous, it is never dull and the medley of perilous situations out of which Masters fights his way have moments of unique weirdness and tension."
The Springfield (Mass.) Union wrote, "To those who love hair-raising, breathtaking mysteries, Rud's books will give many interesting moments."
What makes these mysteries and others from the 1930s fun reading is that Rud never took his plots seriously. They're often filled with black humor and satirical dialogue, and would have made great B-mystery movies at the time.
While Rud drew on his scientific and medical knowledge, he also set stories in the Cajan [he preferred this spelling variant of Cajun] country of southern Alabama, a region and people that interested him for their patois, their old legends and possible backdrops for unusual weird tales. Perhaps his most famous story with a Cajan setting was "Ooze." It appeared in the March 1923 inaugural issue of Weird Tales and has since become a classic in weird literature. The magazine reprinted this story a record three times over the next 60 years, and it has appeared in four anthologies. It's interesting to note that "Ooze" is the only Rud story ever to appear in an anthology.
Why that should be is not certain. But during the last half of the 20th century, collectors and anthology editors focused more attention on science-fiction and horror writers who had produced a critical mass of stories in these genres. Rud's output was mostly mystery, western and adventure fiction, and writers of those genres became largely ignored and forgotten over time. Notable examples of similar neglect are such prolific writers are W. C. Tuttle and H. Bedford-Jones.
Anthony M. Rud's literary output was significantly less than these men: 10 books and an estimated 200-300 stories versus 90 books and 800-plus stories for Tuttle; and 85 books and more than 1300 stories for Bedford-Jones. But it must be remembered that his writing career lasted less than 25 years (due to his untimely death), and almost 10 of those years were spent working as an editor for various publishers and magazines. That restricted how much time he had available for writing. Quantity of output, however, is not always a reliable way to measure quality.
Though he wrote his share of clunkers, which were churned out for a quick paycheck, the majority of his stories tend to be very literate. That suggests he cared about his craft, even when he wrote to entertain the public. What he left behind for future generations to discover should not be ignored. There are many Anthony M. Rud stories worth hunting up for the pure enjoyment of reading.
Copyright by Peter Ruber 2002
Links:
A bibliography for Anthony Rud's work, compiled by Richard Bleiler, Peter Ruber and Victor Berch, is available elsewhere on The Pulp Rack. Click here to check it out.
Posted by ds at December 6, 2002 03:57 PM
