Draconda and Others: Resurrecting a forgotten Weird Tales talent

Draconda and Others by John Martin Leahy

For modern-day fans of the classic pulp magazine Weird Tales, few websites will be found that exceed the depth and breadth of the one created by Terence E. Hanley; namely, Tellers of Weird Tales. Encyclopedic in scope, the site is a virtual godsend for all lovers of the so-called “Unique Magazine.” In just the Weird Tales Authors section of the website, Hanley gives full biographies of (by my rough count) 460+ authors who contributed to the magazine during its first legendary incarnation (1923 – ’54), as well as to the current day. Curiously, Hanley has so far chosen not to discuss some of Weird Tales’ most famous mainstays: H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Seabury Quinn, Henry Kuttner and Robert Bloch. Still, the roster of little-known authors whom he does discuss is fairly overwhelming. And yet, there is one seldom-spoken-of writer – one whom I just recently discovered myself – also absent from Hanley’s roll call; namely, John Martin Leahy. And if you are just learning about Leahy here for the first time, the reason for that may be easily understood.

John Martin Leahy was born in Washington State in 1886 and, during his five-year career as a writer, came out with three novels – Draconda (1923), The Living Death (1925) and Drome (1927) – as well as four short stories. Of these seven works, only The Living Death did not make an initial appearance in Weird Tales magazine. Making matters difficult for latter-day readers is the fact that the majority of those seven works have never been reissued (except for in the Weird Tales facsimiles released by Girasol Collectables), or at best, reissued only once. But fortunately for us today, the works of John Martin Leahy have been recently resurrected, in 2024, in two handsome volumes by the Seattle-based imprint Sarnath Press. Volume 1, Draconda and Others, contains the 1923 novel and those four stories, as well as a typically erudite introduction by weird-fiction authority S. T. Joshi; Volume 2, The Living Death and Drome, contains the other two novels. I will be limiting my remarks here to Volume 1 and will hopefully be sharing some thoughts on Volume 2 at a future date. Leahy, as abundantly demonstrated in this first collection, was assuredly a writer of promise, and even Joshi admits that the author decided to stop creating for reasons entirely unknown today. All we seem to know is that Leahy later worked at the Puget Basket & Package Company in Seattle, painted as a hobby (indeed, he himself supplied the cover art for the hardcover reprint of Drome in 1952), and lived as a reclusive bachelor. Leahy ultimately passed away in 1967, at the age of 80.

Okay, let’s take a look now at Draconda itself. This novel turned out to be Leahy’s longest, and initially appeared as a six-part serial in Weird Tales’ November 1923 and January, February, March (the same issue that featured Lovecraft’s famous story “The Rats in the Walls”), April, and May/June/July 1924 issues. His serial failed to cop the cover art on any one of those six issues, whereas a trio of Harry Houdini stories did receive the cover treatment on those last three! Draconda is narrated to us by one Rider Farnermain, a deeply religious Christian who is often to be seen debating his scientist friend Henry Quainfan on matters of evolution and man’s place in the universe. But when we first encounter the pair, they are discussing the possibility of love at first sight, of all things, with the materialist scientist admitting to having long harbored a perfect image of his dream woman … a woman whom he feels he must have known in a previous life, or will eventually encounter. But other matters soon put such daydreaming out of the scientist’s thoughts. Quainfan, remarkably enough, had recently invented a completely novel antigravitic substance, with which he hopes to soon construct a ship to carry himself, Farnermain, and his lab assistant, Morgan St. Cloud, to no less a destination than the planet Venus! (Those antigravitic shields with which his eventual ship, the Hornet, are comprised may recall to some readers the Cavorite of H. G. Wells’ 1901 classic The First Men in the Moon.) And so, in a little under 10 months, the lemon-shaped Hornet is a fait accompli, and off our trio goes, eventually reaching their destination after 16 days of space travel.

Once arrived on the surface of the unexplored world, Quainfan & Co. discover, to their surprise, a planet in many respects similar to their own, with breathable air and an “equable” climate, if a bit on the hot side. Flora and fauna, to the scientist’s dismay, are also very much like those on Earth, upending his cherished theories of evolution. The men build a raft so as to do a little exploring on a nearby river, and while they are thus engaged, disaster strikes, when a meteorite just happens to destroy the Hornet. Marooned now, the men sail off into the unknown. They eventually encounter the humanoid residents of Venus and are shown several of the planet’s ruined cities. In time, they are told that the planet’s queen, Draconda, wishes to meet them. A delegation headed by the nobleman Ta Antom, aka The Wolf, arrives to escort them to the queen’s capital city of Loom, but en route there, our heroes are shown a religious ceremony in the city of Polom. Quainfan’s rescue of Mynine, a young blonde woman who was about to be offered up in sacrifice, leads to some pretty serious fighting between our three explorers and the enraged populace. Yet more trouble arises when the duplicitous Wolf immures the trio and Mynine in an underground sepulcher, but in time, Loom is finally reached, and the men get to meet the queen. Draconda, as it turns out, is not only the most beautiful brunette they have ever seen, but indeed (you guessed it!) the very dream woman whom Quainfan had envisioned all his life! And she, it seems, falls just as instantly in love with him. This fact enrages the lusty Mynine, and she thus plots with the hateful high priest Sallysherib, leading to a colossal civil war involving tens of thousands of men. Our heroes, naturally, fight on the side of Draconda in this extremely bloody conflict, with the fate of all Venus hanging in the balance…

As you may have noticed, Draconda is a curious melding of the lost world/lost race tale and speculative, Radium Age sci-fi. The book is very much indebted to the works of the great H. Rider Haggard, “The Father of the Lost Race Novel,” incorporating as it does such elements as eternal love, reincarnation, a blonde and a brunette vying for the love of our (seemingly irresistible) hero, and queen vs. priest intrigue. The Haggard character Nyleptha (from his 1887 classic Allan Quatermain) is even quoted at one point. And then there’s the matter of our narrator’s name, Rider Farnermain, which combines bits of both Haggard’s and his most enduring character’s names! Draconda even speaks in the cod-archaic style (“But whither wilt thou go? … Here thou wilt have all that thou mayest desire…”) that Ayesha, in Haggard’s four She novels, employed. But whereas Ayesha was several millennia old, Draconda can only claim a mere 125 years, after seven perfectly remembered reincarnations! Unfortunately, homages aside, the novice Leahy here was nowhere near as powerful and original a storyteller as Haggard, but more on that in a moment.

Draconda stakes its claim to being a thinking man’s adventure story, not only with its incessant allusions to and quotes from some of history’s greatest minds – Swinburne, Thomas Moore, Jonathan Swift, Keats, Kipling, Shakespeare, Poe, Anacreon – but by dint of the intellectual debates that Quainfan and Farnermain, and Draconda and Farnermain, are ever involved in. And to its credit, the “sense of wonder” that was so highly esteemed by readers of science fiction during its Radium and Golden Ages is very much in evidence here. And so, as our narrator gazes out of the port window of the Hornet, he tells us:

…those awful velvety deeps of nothing crushed my soul into infinitesimalness with their placid, unchanging terribleness. One cannot, I believe, imagine the terrible thing that is in that abyss of space; one must see it to know. And no man on earth has ever seen it…

As might be expected, Leahy’s novel offers up any number of well-done sequences: the rafting journey, for example, undoubtedly the book’s single most atmospheric stretch, before any Venusians are encountered; the brutal and unequal fight our heroes wage against the populace at that Polon temple; the extremely claustrophobic time that our trio suffers in the sepulcher underground; and finally, the well-depicted final battle in that Venusian civil war, with Draconda and Mynine leading their respective armies.

Okay, so much for the good news. Unfortunately, as I mentioned, Leahy was no Haggard, and his first go as a writer displays any number of the telltale signs of the beginner, although assuredly one of great promise. For one thing, he is guilty of several instances of “info dumping,” and the first 50 or so pages of his book can often feel like something of a slog. In those 50 pages, Leahy regales us with seemingly every fact known to science concerning Venus in 1923, name-checking over a dozen astronomers and their theories regarding the planet’s rotation, atmosphere, axial tilt, and on and on. I thus had to laugh when our narrator tells us “But an end to speculation, or this (awful thought) will read like a scientific treatise, instead of what it is – a narrative of unparalleled but sober fact.” (“Too late,” I couldn’t help thinking!) Also typical for many new writers, Leahy, at least in this, his first published work, tries to impress the reader with a laying on of 10-cent words. Thus, better have your unabridged dictionary handy to tackle such doozies as “tillicum,” “pachycephalic,” “cerebrine,” “poetaster,” “bouleversement,” “hygrometric,” “tellurian,” “ontogeny,” “homological,” “gink,” “flocculence,” “ontogenetic,” “hypogeal,” “peradventure,” “extraforaneous,” “pendragon,” “hetaera,” “canephore,” “dehortation,” “epicedium,” “anadromous,” “aetiologist,” “teleologist,” “stola,” “percipient,” “ampyx,” “anagogetical,” “anagnorisis,” “whilom,” “mathesis,” “anacalypsis,” “noumena” and “stephane.” And the author is not above making up his own words, as well (or is “enzone” actually a word?). Fortunately, in the four short stories that appear later in this volume, Leahy does rein in his penchant for overwhelming vocabulary, making for a decided improvement in readability.

The author also, in Draconda, tends to go overboard at times with the flowery language, and many passages come off as being overwritten. And so, the reader will often encounter a sentence such as this:

…Draconda with her olive complexion, hair of raven blackness and eyes as dark and lovely and mysterious as the starry deeps of heaven – eyes in which shone the stars of immortality and Paradise, those orbs that will shed their splendor undimmed when the stars are cold…

You get the idea. On occasion, though, Leahy seems to get lost in his verbiage and winds up giving us an ungrammatical sentence such as this:

The temple, which is a colossal naos and the work of that vanished people, rather plain but replete with frowning majesty, and in excellent condition, about a mile from the city and stands alone.

How’s that for a word salad?

And while I’m carping, it must be said that Leahy’s first novel is way too dependent not only on coincidence, but on double coincidence. Thus, Henry Quainfan finds his fantasy woman on Venus, and it turns out that Morgan St. Cloud had known Draconda (in one of her previous incarnations) as well! And by the way, what are the odds of a meteorite hitting Venus at the precise spot where our heroes had landed their ship? Astronomically small, I’d venture to say. Oh … I don’t know whether or not to call this a coincidence, but was it really necessary for St. Cloud and our narrator to share the same favorite exclamatory oath … namely, “Great Jupiter Ammon”? Another problem that this reader had with Draconda was the book’s jerky pacing. Every time the story finally seemed to be building up an actual head of steam, another info dump or philosophical discussion would bring matters to a screeching halt. And finally, there’s the matter of scientific accuracy … or inaccuracies, I should more precisely say. Not that these were Leahy’s fault per se; I’m sure he employed the best astronomical data available to him a century ago. But when he blithely tells us that our Earth lies in the center of the Milky Way, the modern reader will have to laugh. Ditto when we learn what a pleasant place Venus is to live on! In reality, of course, our Earth is situated in one of the galaxy’s outlying arms, and Venus has an atmosphere mainly comprised of carbon dioxide and an average surface temperature of 867 degrees F. (making it even worse than Ft. Lauderdale in early August!). So readers should certainly not go in here expecting a scrupulous adherence to scientific fact. But you probably knew that already, right?

Still, despite its many faults, Draconda most definitely has its moments. The fine folks at Sarnath Press are to be thanked for its belated resurrection; a novel that had been in publishing limbo for over a century, and presented here in book form for the first time. Too bad about all the typos, though.

And then there are those four short stories, each of which is also of decided interest. “The Voices From the Cliff” initially appeared in the April 1925 issue of Weird Tales (the issue that also saw the debut of the Lovecraft story entitled “The Music of Erich Zann”) and was reprinted 28 years later, in the 1953 anthology Science and Sorcery. In this tale, a man murders his bride by throwing her off a cliff, and the crime is solved by the crack detective/scientist Guy Oxford. Or perhaps “solved” is not quite the correct word to use here, since Oxford actually witnessed the homicide happen … even though he was on a ship a full 80 miles out at sea when it occurred! How is this possible, you might wonder. Well, a reasonably convincing scientific explanation is offered, let’s just say, bringing this succinct yet pleasing tale to a close.

In the extremely atmospheric story “The Voice of Bills” (from the October 1926 Weird Tales), a man named Slickmer pumps four bullets into the body of his enemy, Bills, and buries him deep in the Washington woods (an area that Leahy apparently knew well). But once returned to his cabin, Slickmer begins hearing suspicious noises, and imagining things, and growing increasingly suspicious of some nearby campers, until he is on the verge of a complete mental crack-up. An ironic ending is the capper of this creepy little tale.

Up next is the story that is probably the closest thing to a well-known piece that Leahy ever did, for the simple reason that it has been anthologized quite often. “In Amundsen’s Tent” originally appeared in the January 1928 Weird Tales and was Lovecraft’s favorite story in that issue (although he also professed to not being a fan of Leahy’s style). It is thought today that this Leahy tale might very well have been an inspiration for Lovecraft’s novella “At the Mountains of Madness,” which he wrote in 1931, as well as for John W. Campbell’s classic novella “Who Goes There?” (1938). In this hugely gripping story, a trio of Antarctic explorers discovers, in the tent left behind by Roald Amundsen (the Norwegian whose team was the first to reach the South Pole, in 1911), some kind of alien monstrosity, which begins to hunt and kill them! The alien whatzit is never described by Leahy here, but the reader’s imagination should have no trouble at all filling in the details. This is a tough, no-nonsense science fiction thriller told in a very taut style. It’s hard to believe, thus, that it was penned by the same author who had given us Draconda. This is one story that is regarded as a classic for good reason!

Finally, we have Leahy’s last published piece of work, “The Isle of the Fairy Morgana” (Weird Tales, February 1928). Here, we meet a man, Cuthbert Griwold, who, while sailing in his sloop near lonely Flang Island, in the Bering Sea, comes upon a castaway. In another unbelievable Leahy coincidence, this emaciated wreck of a man turns out to be none other than Ferdinand Chantrell, aka Handsome Ferdy, who had run away with Griswold’s wife sometime earlier! The cuckolded husband, thus, after some sadistic repartee, hauls out his revolver and slowly pumps Ferdy with no fewer than 10 bullets. He then dumps the body from a high cliff into the sea, feeling 100% safe after perpetrating this crime on the lonely barren island. But once again, who should arrive on the scene but our old friend Guy Oxford, who has again witnessed the crime although being, at the time it occurred, 35 miles away at sea! Yes, this story is indeed very similar to “The Voices From the Cliff,” and the scientific rationale is also strikingly similar. Still, it remains an entertaining story, and the descriptions of that desolate island in the windswept Bering Sea make it an atmospheric one, as well.

So there you have it … one Radium Age lost-race novel with a quartet of mystery, horror and sci-fi tales to round things out. All told, it is quite a little package, despite, as I mentioned, the manifold faults. I now look forward to reading the second Leahy volume in Sarnath Press’ catalog, The Living Death and Drome. Hopefully, the two novels in it will exhibit the same maturity of style that Leahy’s shorter pieces did, and with less of the flowery prose and fewer 10-cent words than had obtained in Draconda. Stay tuned…