Ghost Stories

Carl Richard Jacobi

Carl Richard Jacobi was an American journalist and author. He wrote short stories in the horror and fantasy genres for the pulp magazine market, appearing in such pulps of the bizarre and uncanny as Thrilling, Ghost Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Strange Stories. He also wrote stories crime and adventure which appeared in such pulps as Thrilling Adventures, Complete Stories, Top-Notch, Short Stories, The Skipper, Doc Savage and Dime Adventures Magazine. He also produced some science fiction, mainly space opera, published in such magazines as Planet Stories. He was one of the last surviving pulp-fictioneers to have contributed to the legendary American horror magazine Weird Tales during its "glory days" (the 1920s and 1930s). His stories have been translated into French, Swedish, Danish and Dutch.
Jacobi was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1904 and lived there throughout his life. He was a lifelong bachelor. He was a voracious reader, gulping down at an early age quantities of Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, H.G. Wells as well as the Frank Merriwell and Tom Swift boys' adventure yarns. He was always a writer; at his junior high school he earned good pocket-money concocting his own 'dime novels' (short story booklets) and selling them to fellow students as 10 cents-a-piece.
He attended the University of Minnesota from 1927 to 1930, majoring in English Literature, where he began his writing career in campus magazines and was an undergraduate classmate of Donald Wandrei. He wrote of this period on Thrilling Wonder Stories (June 1939) that "I tried to divide my time between rhetoric courses and the geology lab. As an underclassman I was somewhat undecided whether future life would find me studying rocks and fossils or simply pounding a typewriter. The typewriter won." His first stories were published while he was at the University. Long before graduation he made his first professional sale, a short detective tale, "Rumbling Cannon", to Secret Service Stories. This ought to have paid around fifty dollars but Jacobi received nothing since the pulp folded soon after the story was published. The last of the stories he published while at university, "Moss Island", was a graduate's contribution to The Quest of Central High School, and "Mive" (which won a college-wide contest judged by Margaret Culkin Banning), published in the University of Minnesota's The Minnesota Quarterly. Both stories were later sold to Amazing Stories (Winter 1932) and Weird Tales respectively and marked his debut in professional magazines. "Mive" (Weird Tales, 1932) brought him payment of 25 dollars. "Mive" was praised by H. P. Lovecraft in his letter to Jacobi of Feb 27, 1932: "Mive please me immensely, and I told Wright that I was glad to see at least one story whose weirdness of incident was made convincing by adequate emotional preparation and suitably developed atmosphere." Lovecraft commended Jacobi's work to Derleth and thereby helped set up the long-term relationship Arkham House would have with Jacobi.
Beginning in 1928, Jacobi corresponded with adventure-pulp veteran Arthur O. Friel.
His early story "The Monument" (1932) was submitted only once—to Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales. It was not submitted subsequently but was discovered in a filing cabinet when R. Dixon Smith was researching his biography Lost in the Rentharpian Hills: Spanning the Decades with Carl Jacobi (1985) and finally saw print when included by Smith in Smoke of the Snake (1994)