Is anyone familiar with this obsure SCI-FI author?
My only reference to him is in a book by Ron Goulart, who says that the Beemis estate had selected him (Goulart) had been selected to finish a number of Beemis’s unfinished stories.
Apparently, he wrote stories similar to those of Edwin Lester Arnold and Edgar Rice Burroughs. His hero (whose name I don’t recall, although it seems as though it was something like “Hyacinth,” which is a rather macho-sounding name) ends up on the planet Venus after standing too close to a pool, and the evaporating water took him up with it.
(Arnold’s Gulliver Jones got to Mars on a flying carpet, and Burroughs’s John Carter heard a “snap.”)
In the 20+ years that I came across this story in a Ron Goulart book, I have yet to come across any other reference to this author–or any of the stories that Goulart had been tasked with finishing.
Never heard of him, but Edgar Rice Burroughs
is one of my favorites.
**At The Earth’s Core **
and **The Gods Of Mars And The Warlord Of Mars ** stand out.
I’ve known Ron Goulart for years, and I gotta tell you that “Arthur Wright Beemis” has the stench of “Goulart Hoax” all over him. I’ll lay you a dollar to a doughnut that Beemis is a product of Goulart’s, shall we say, fecund imagination…a device for presenting an all-Goulart work as a tale of more profound provenance.
(Incidentally, over a year after you helped me out with the title of William O. Steele’s THE SPOOKY THING, I managed to find a copy online from a small used bookshop in Ohio. It arrived last week, I read it to the kids with REAL enjoyment all round…god, the use of the southern Appalachia dialect is superb…and I just wanted to thank you again on behalf of myself, little Pianola, and little Banjo.)
OK, I am blowing the tanks on this old thread. All indications are that Ukulele Ike was dead-on in his assessment. I happened to remember this thread today, and then as now, I can find no trace of the existence of any Arthur Wright Beemis, writer or otherwise. Goulart’s story “The Yes Men of Venus” was the story he “finished for Arthur Wright Beemis.” This link also contains some other novels Mr. Beemis “wrote,” all dead ends, as well as the publication " “Thursby’s All-Star Electrical Fiction” Link to the text if anyone’s interested.
Now, the crumbs at the bottom of the box. Ron Goulart’s The Yes Men of Venus is a parody of a certain famous pulpster, heavily disguised here as Arthur Wright Beemis, which seems both pitch-perfect and, therefore, almost superfluous. But it’s short enough to be amusing. Three stars for trivia well executed.
