EnCrypted Episode 9: 'The Pale Man' by Julius Long
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The American magazine Weird Tales, which first published in 1922, holds an unparalleled position in the history of genre fiction, having done much to popularise horror, sci-fi, fantasy, and that which we might broadly call "weird". A platform for such legends as H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Seabury Quinn, Robert E. Howard, and (later) Ray Bradbury, it served for years as a leading purveyor of short stories.
While lengthy and illustrated page counts would go to star writers like Lovecraft, the magazine was also a treasure trove of minor gems buried between the covers, thankfully preserved for prosperity on the Internet (here, for example, and here). Some of the stories, considered filler at the time, lingered in readers' minds and went on to grow in reputation. The Night Wire by H.F. Arnold, episode 5 of the EnCrypted series, is one such story. This - The Pale Man by Julius Long - is another.
A fairly obscure literary figure, Long was a qualified and practising lawyer who wrote, mainly, detective and horror stories, of which The Pale Man is the best remembered.
It tells the story of a sadsack assistant university professor sent on a forced vacation for the good of his own health. The lonely man, in lieu of any company or other diversion, becomes obsessed with the eccentric behaviour of another hotel resident - a strikingly tall and unnaturally pale man whose identity is only hinted at in the closing paragraphs.
You can read some of Long's other stories here (a lovely little website called Famous (and forgotten) Fiction), alongside biographical information about the author. It seems pertinent, somehow, to note that Long died an untimely death.
Theme music:
The Black Waltz by Scott Buckley | www.scottbuckley.com.au
Music promoted by https://www.chosic.com
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Incidental music:
Open Season by Weary Pines.
Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/weary-pines/open-season License code: IJMJ8WGSKAGY0AMD
Raw Meat by Weary Pines
Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!): https://uppbeat.io/t/weary-pines/raw-meat License code: NCPOEGO3F9OYV09M
Sound effect attributions:
https://freesound.org/
The recording was created using Audacity and distributed via Anchor.
A.M. Burrage, son of one Burrage-of-letters and nephew to another, was a prolific writer of everything from boys' adventure stories and romantic fiction to (as Ex-Private X) war memoir, plying his trade in comics and magazines and occasionally between hard covers, but sadly without achieving either the financial stability or literary esteem he must have sought. His later life was dogged by poor health and he died aged sixty-seven. It's hard not, then, to imagine Burrage identifying with the character of Hewson in his story The Waxwork : a sadsack unsuccessful journalist, barely scratching a living, and thinking a sensationalist piece about the "Murderers' Den" of the waxwork museum could be just the thing to turn his life around. The short story - one of the three or four classic "ghost" stories he is chiefly remembered for - certainly proved successful for Burrage, earning him a place in Dorothy L. Sayers ' Great Stories of Detection, Mystery
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