Burks, Arthur J. 1898-1974

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BURKS, Arthur J. 1898-1974

(Estil Critchie, Burke MacArthur)

PERSONAL: Born September 13, 1898, in Waterville, WA; died May 13, 1974, in Lancaster, PA; son of Richard Watts (a homesteader and farmer) and Lura Ellen (Toler) Burks; married Blanche Fidelia, March 23, 1918 (divorced 1934); married Lorna Doone Martinsen (died 1945); married Ruth Graver (Kauffman) Buckwalter, Aug. 22, 1947; children: (first marriage) Phillip Charles, Wasle Carmen, Arlene Mary, Gladys Lura. Politics: Democrat. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, golf, filmmaking.

CAREER: Douglas County, WA, deputy treasurer, 1916-17. Bureau of the Census, receiving clerk, 1919-21. Military service: United States Marine Corps, 1917-19, 1921-28, senior aide de camp to General Smedley D. Butler, beginning 1927; achieved rank of first lieutenant; returned to active duty as captain, 1941-46; Marine Corps Reserve, second lieutenant, 1919-21, lieutenant colonel, 1946.

AWARDS, HONORS: Outstanding Religious Books designation, American Library Association, 1952, for Bells above the Amazon; award from Understanding, Inc., Oregon unit, 1970; Genie Award, International Festivals Inc., 1974.

WRITINGS:

(With Gen. Smedley D. Butler) Walter Garvin inMexico, Dorrance (Philadelphia, PA), 1927.

(As Burke MacArthur) Rivers into Wilderness, Mohawk Press (New York, NY), 1932.

Land of Checkerboard Families, Coward-McCann (New York, NY), 1932.

Here Are My People, Funk & Wagnalls (New York, NY), 1934.

(With Commander S. M. Riis) Yankee Komisar, Speller (New York, NY), 1935.

The Great Amen, Egmont Press (New York, NY), 1938.

Who Do You Think You Are? F. Orlin Tremaine Co. (New York, NY), 1939.

(Editor) Lorna Doone Burks, I Die Daily, Rockport Press (New York, NY), 1946.

(With Vera Bisbee Underhill) Creating Hooked Rugs, Coward-McCann (New York, NY), 1951.

Bells above the Amazon, McKay (New York, NY), 1951.

The Great Mirror, Gerald G. Swan (London, England), 1952.

(With Marian Funk Smith) Children at the Window: AHandbook for the Guidance of Retarded Children, Pegasus (Buffalo, NY), 1953.

Look behind You, Shroud (Buffalo, NY), 1954.

(With Estelle Latta) The Great Rascal, State Publishing Co. (St. Louis, MO), 1955.

You and Military Service, State Publishing Co. (St. Louis, MO), 1955.

(With Marion Funk Smith) Teaching the Slow-learningChild, Harper (New York, NY), 1954.

(With William Harper Wilson) The Chicken and the Egg, Coward-McCann (New York, NY), 1955.

(With Bess Bingaman Loomis) The Return of BenjaminFranklin, State Publishing Co. (St. Louis, MO), 1955.

(With Estelle Latta) The Great Rascal, State Publishing Co. (St. Louis, MO), 1955.

Untitled Littles: The Story of the Needleworld Guild ofAmerica, Coward-McCann (New York, NY), 1955.

(As Burke MacArthur) Psychic Journey: The Making of a Seer, Tarnhelm (Lakemont, GA), 1962.

Monitors, 1964.

Open Wide the Portals, 1964.

Black Medicine, Arkham House (Sauk City, WI), 1966.

Waken the Dreamer: Children of the Southern Cross, Maryknoll Publications (Maryknoll, NY), 1968.

En-Don, The Ageless Wisdom, Douglas-West (Los Angeles, CA), 1973.

The Casket, Tarnhelm (Lakemont, GA), 1973.

Contributor to periodicals, sometimes under pseudonym Estil Critchie.

SIDELIGHTS: Arthur J. Burks, a prolific writer of fiction and nonfiction, wrote or cowrote more than thirty-five books and 1,200 short stories over a half century. He appeared frequently in the pulp-fiction magazines of the early-to-mid-twentieth century, writing in virtually every genre, from horror to science fiction, mystery, western, adventure, war, and romance. Burks's work sometimes appeared in up to ten magazines per month, under his own name and several pseudonyms.

Between 1930 and 1940 Burks wrote up to two million words per year, a pace so rapid that he earned the nickname "Speed Merchant of the Pulps." In "Quantity Production," a feature piece he wrote for Writer's Digest in 1937, he unashamedly called himself a "hack" and described his output as near-pathological: "I like to write, I have to write or go mad. And the more I want to write the faster words tumble over themselves to get onto paper."

Burks began publishing in the early 1920s, while serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, and turned to writing full-time in 1928. His first notable sales were for the pulp magazine Weird Tales, which published his "Strange Tales of Santo Domingo" series begun under the pseudonym Estil Critchie. The stories, spiced with the local color Burks experienced during his tour of duty in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, typify weird adventures of their time, stereotypically treating island natives as superstitious primitives. "Burks pandered to reader tastes for the exotic, portraying the islands as lands of enchantment where magic is not uncommon," Stefan Dziemianowicz wrote in the St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost, and Gothic Writers. "Although his depictions of blacks as brutal savages are difficult to digest today, they were integral to his portrait of an island culture shaped by primitive superstitions rooted in occult truths."

Over the next decade, Burks established a reputation for infusing stock pulp thrillers with menace. In the letters column of the March 1928 Weird Tales, horror writer H. P. Lovecraft commended "The Bells of Oceana," for having "the genuine thrill of Outsideness." Burks was also innovative with his narration. In his history The Weird Tales Story, Robert Weinberg praised the unexpected plot twist in Burks' "The Room of Shadows," "a short masterpiece of unsuspected horror." August Derleth, in his notes for the anthology Who Knocks?, wrote that Burks' contribution to the early issues of Weird Tales "was of uniformly high quality and, if at time marred by obvious pulpisms, nevertheless carried an authentic shudder."

Burks' sole collection of stories originally penned for the pulps, Black Medicine, earned similar accolades. Vincent Starrett, in Books Today, called the book "a collection of off-trail tales guaranteed to keep restless readers up nights." Brian Stableford, in Horror Literature: A Reader's Guide, called the selections "routine shockers," but found them "sometimes slightly enlivened . . . by a modicum of historical research." Burks effectively shaped stories with generic plots and conventional characters to accommodate different popular fiction markets. His space operas for the science-fiction magazines included his heroic tales of Josh McNab, published in Astounding Stories. McNab was, as Alva Rogers wrote in A Requiem for Astounding, "a space-going counterpart of every Scottish engineer that in popular Saturday Evening Post-type fiction sailed the earthly oceans in battered tramps steamers." Unusual series characters added originality; for example, in Clues, a pulp mystery magazine, Burks featured Harlan Dyce, a former circus midget turned detective, and Eddie Kelly, a blind ex-boxer who also solves crimes.

Burks' forté was the shudder pulp tale, in which heroes and heroines face apparently supernatural threats. His suffocating dread and innovative weird menaces distinguished his contributions to Horror Stories, Terror Tales, Dime Mystery and other shudder pulps. "At their best," Robert Kenneth Jones wrote in his study The Shudder Pulps, "they caught the reader in an ocean swell of anticipation and beached him breathless and limp. They had an ingenuous manner that made the characters seem very human. They always felt right.'"

Burks' reputation for authenticity extended to his other writing. Land of Checkerboard Families, a collection of sketches based on his experiences in Santo Domingo, earned praise from F. T. Marsh in Books. "If the reader manages to keep his feet on the ground amidst the welter of dramatic recitals, bearing in mind that Burks is selecting from his experience only the more exciting, horrible, grotesque, thrilling and mysterious episodes while omitting the stretches of commonplace routine that lay between them, he should be able to learn a good deal about the island Republic and its people."

Burks drew from his family's pioneer history in two of his books. Rivers into Wilderness, published under the pseudonym Burke MacArthur, is a homesteading tale from a boy's perspective that drew praise for its harsh realism. A New York Times reviewer wrote that while, "Now and then one is aware of something merely literary in the writing, or of something unnecessary or pre-arranged in the book's plan," the novel "is not a book a book to be lightly and casually forgotten." Of Here Are My People, an embellished history of four Burks generations, the same reviewer added that "Burks is a practiced writer and he has arranged his material in a form best calculated to hold the attention of his reader, even at the expense of strict chronology," but warned: "you will need to go far to find a chronicle simpler or more direct than this one, more honestly conceived or more faithfully set down."

Burks returned to the Marines during World War II. He wrote fiction again after the war, but his postwar fiction is less regarded. E. F. Bleiler, in his Guide to Supernatural Fiction, dismissed the content of Look behind You, a collection of stories similar in theme and treatment to Burks' early Weird Tales efforts, as "one of the low points in American fan publishing."

Burks, in his last twenty-five years, wrote and lectured frequently about religion, metaphysics, and the occult. Reviewing Bells above the Amazon, his biography of Father Hugo Mense, Hubert Herring wrote in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review, "The reader will appreciate what Mr. Burks has been able to tell about a wise and gentle priest."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Ashley, Mike, Who's Who in Horror and Fantasy Fiction, Elm Tree Books (London, England), 1977.

Barron, Neil, editor, Horror Literature: A Reader'sGuide, Garland (New York, NY), 1990.

Bleiler, E. F., The Guide to Supernatural Fiction, Kent State University Press (Kent, Ohio), 1983.

Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls, editors, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, St. Martin's (New York, NY), 1993.

Derleth, August, editor, Who Knocks? Twenty Masterpieces of the Spectral for the Connoisseur, Rinehart (New York, NY), 1946.

Goulart, Ron, The Dime Detectives, Mysterious Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Gruber, Frank, The Pulp Jungle, Sherbourne Press (Los Angeles, CA), 1967.

Jones, Robert Kenneth, The Shudder Pulps: A History of the Weird Menace Magazines of the 1930s, FAX (West Linn, OR), 1975.
National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Volume 58, White (New York, NY), 1979.

Pringle, David, editor, The St. James Guide to Horror,Ghost, and Gothic Writers, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Rogers, Alva,A Requiem for Astounding, Advent (Chicago, IL), 1964.

Weinberg, Robert, The Weird Tales Story, FAX (West Linn, OR), 1977.