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INTRODUCTION, by Philip Harbottle

Although English writer John Russell Fearn died in 1960, his work continues to be reprinted worldwide. In recent years, more than a hundred of his novels in all genres have been returned to print, ensuring that his stories will continue to appear through the twenty-first century in various forms. This has been achieved despite the carping and continued bafflement of some literary critics, who cannot recognize the secret of his enduring appeal. It is a secret shared by several prolific novelists, such as the legendary Edgar Wallace. Quite simply, Fearn was a storyteller.

As writer Michael Gilbert has pointed out, Wallace—like Fearn—“was a storyteller who had learned, or maybe he knew by instinct, the first secret of story-telling. Something must be happening all the time. Not occurring haphazard, but happening in a consecutive and comprehensible chain of causation, to the resourceful hero and the attractive heroine who have been the protagonists of all real stories since storytelling began.” Despite most of their stories having been written very swiftly, writers like Fearn and Wallace, as Gilbert observed, give the feeling that the author knew “that he had been seized of a good idea, exactly suited to his scope and talents, and that he was on the top of his form.”

In England, Fearn is known not just as a science fiction author, but as a writer of detective stories and westerns. However, in the USA until recently, Fearn was still best known as a pioneer writer of science fiction, mainly because he began his career in the well-remembered and collectable prewar American pulp sf magazines, such as Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories. Wildside Press has republished The Intelligence Gigantic and Liners of Time (his first two novels), whilst the cream of his early short stories can be found in the two-volume set, The Best of John Russell Fearn. More recently, however, the Borgo Press has launched an ambitious program of reprinting all of Fearn’s many detective novels (including new posthumous titles), together with new science fiction collections and novels.

This present novel, Voice of the Conqueror, was one of Fearn’s later sf novels, first published (as The Conqueror’s Voice) in 1954 in the prestigious Canadian magazine, the Toronto Star Weekly. It was then serialized as Voice of the Conqueror in the UK British Science Fiction Magazine, under Fearn’s Vargo Statten pseudonym. It is a story which he clearly enjoyed writing, being partly based on personal experience.

Before the war, whilst Fearn was a full-time writer, his main hobby was the cinema. He was the proud owner of a 9.5 film projector, and used to throw shows to his friends at his home. The films were usually early old silent science fiction classics, such as Metropolis, Caligari, and Girl in the Moon. Fearn was to put his cinematic hobby to practical use in 1941, when Britain was in the grip of war.

At the outbreak of the war two years earlier, as a full-time writer over thirty (journalism being classed as a “Reserved Occupation”), Fearn was at first exempt from military service. But as the war continued, even journalists over thirty were called upon, and Fearn voluntarily took the medical test. However, he was adjudged as medically unsuitable. He was still obliged to undertake “essential war work,” and so took a job in an aircraft factory. Fearn found the work arduous and crushing (“It damned near killed me,” he later recalled) but fate soon intervened. What happened next was recorded in a letter Fearn sent to his Canadian pen friend Les Croutch, who published in it his fanzine Light in December 1941.

The previous summer, in a “dashing moment,” Fearn had applied for a job as a cinema projectionist, but failed to get the job. “But my name was left on the books, and that was how my cinema manager friend (whom I’ve seen for years in the normal course of going to the movies) got onto it, him losing projectionists like wildfire where they are A1 medical (I’m C3, remember). I knew nothing about it beyond amateur work when I said I’d take it on, though I spun him a tale—but somehow I got through.… I got the breeze up the first time I opened out myself, but gradually I got a grip on things and now I feel quite at home.”

I am indebted to Blackpool film and amateur dramatics historian Stephen Nuttall for providing further previously unrecorded fascinating information on Fearn’s cinematic career. In 1998 Stephen published an interview he had conducted with Robert Simms, aged seventy-three, and living in retirement in a rural Fylde village, Little Eccleston.

In 1941, whilst Fearn was “winging” it as Chief Projectionist at Blackpool’s down-market Empire cinema, the sixteen-year-old Simms was appointed as a trainee projectionist, or third operator, at the much more upmarket South Shore cinema, the Tivoli. Steve Nuttall’s account continues:

“In 1943, Robert became a second operator and was then rapidly promoted again, within just one month, to the lofty position of chief operator. As he was little more than seventeen years old at the time, this made him not only the youngest chief in Lancashire, but also some months short of satisfying the legal minimum age requirement. To circumvent the law, the Tivoli employed Jack Russell Fearn, the locally-based science fiction writer, as projection room boss.”

Bob Simms recalled his memories of the period to me in 2001. The situation could have been extremely awkward. Fearn completely lacked the technical experience to be Chief Projectionist at a larger cinema, and the young Simms actually knew far more about the job than he did. There could have been friction between them. But Bob found Fearn to be utterly disarming. He freely confessed his lack of knowledge, and was happy for the youngster to actually be in charge “behind the scenes.” He was happy to assume the role of second projectionist. The two men became friends and got along “like a house on fire.” Steve Nuttall again:

“Despite the fact that the precocious Robert could ably teach him everything he supposedly needed to know, the eccentric author, who was also a member of the Magic Circle, stayed quite aloof from the technical side of the job, preferring instead to regularly entertain the staff with his astonishing feats of prestidigitation.”

Being an amateur magician was in fact another of Fearn’s hobbies, and Bob recalls that he was an extremely good at it. His skill and good humour kept the cinema staff entertained during the long hours of what was something of an arduous job. As Nuttall explains:

“A typical day would begin at ten in the morning and finish around midnight. Moreover, if an air raid was in progress, the staff could sometimes be forced to spend an entire night in the building.… Robert recalls seeing low flying German aircraft passing regularly along the Fylde Coast to bomb Liverpool. As incredible as it may seem, Blackpool Tower was the safest site in the area due to the fact that the Luftwaffe used the famous landmark to gauge the precise co-ordinates for their deadly aerial assaults on Lancashire’s principal seaport. From the vantage point of Fairhaven Lake, one could see the night sky all aglow as most of Merseyside tragically went up in flames. As one might expect, the task of fire watching was considered to be of primary importance; however, it does come as a surprise to learn that this was one of the duties that regularly befell Robert (as it did Fearn). Apparently, the job of cinema projectionist was deemed to be a “reserved occupation.” After all, the cinema was no longer simply a venue for entertainment, but had a crucial role to play in the dissemination of information, including the showing of numerous training films for armed forces personnel and what some observers would label as propaganda movies.”

Bob recalled to me that he discovered Fearn was a science fiction writer when he was briefly hospitalised. Fearn came to visit him, and loaned him a pile of his published stories in Amazing Stories and Astounding Stories, to help while away the hours. He quickly became a fan, and borrowed many more of Fearn’s stories when he returned to work. He was fascinated to see Fearn scribbling away on notepads whilst the film reels were turning. During his time off, Fearn would then type up his notes and throughout the war, he continued to sell stories to the American pulp magazines. He also began to write more serious works, and Bob recalls that he was constantly revising his ms. of Blackpool life, Little Winter, the mainstream novel with which he hoped to break into higher literary markets. (Unfortunately the book was never published, and the ms. appears to have been destroyed.)

Projectionists were also responsible for operating the background interval music, and Bob recalled to me that whenever Fearn was on duty and he spotted his beloved Mother in the audience, he would play her favourite piece of music, “Stardust” by Hoagy Carmichael. He remembers Fearn as an ingenious and fascinating character, and regretted losing contact when they went their separate ways.

In May 1945, following VE-Day, Fearn applied to the War Ministry for release from his job, in order to return to full-time writing. Permission was granted, and he gradually quit writing for the American pulp magazines as he became established in England as a novelist. Whereas his early magazine stories had been purely imaginative fiction, for his novels Fearn began to draw more upon his real-life experiences.

Fearn wrote several detective novels that centred around murders committed in a cinema, with the plots hinging on the technical side of film projection, and the cinema staff as leading characters (and murder suspects). They included One Remained Seated (1946) and an unpublished 1957 ms., Many a Slip. The latter novel was posthumously published as Pattern of Murder in 2005. Other “cinematic” sf novels included The Grand Illusion (1954) and Voice of the Conqueror (1954)

The name of the middle-aged “hero” of Voice of the Conqueror is ‘Albert Simpkins,’ known to his colleagues as “Old Simmy.” Obviously, the surname is derived from Fearn’s own work colleague Bob Simms, whom he knew as “Simmy.” His actual character, however, is modeled on Fearn himself. Albert’s fascination with science was clearly based on Fearn’s own predilections.

The novel’s extraordinary plot, telling how “old Simmy” actually succeeds in his idealistic dreams of reshaping the world, can be seen as amusing wish-fulfillment by the author. The scientific background to the novel is made up of several quite disparate elements. Some of them are extremely plausible and scientifically accurate (particularly on the cinematic side), and the concept of using an artificial satellite to broadcast worldwide radio messages is an inspired one. As everyone knows nowadays, the concept had, of course, first been visualized and invented by Arthur C. Clarke in his famous 1945 paper on “Extra-Terrestrial Relays.” It is virtually certain that Fearn never saw this, or even knew of Clarke’s idea, and if so he seems to have stumbled on the idea himself. Fearn’s novel may well be one of the very first sustained fictional uses of the idea of broadcasting via an artificial satellite. (It was, of course, written some years before Sputnik and the actual advent of space travel.) One important difference was that Clarke visualized the satellite as relaying messages, rather than originating them.

Conversely, however, as was often the case with Fearn, some of the scientific background was highly implausible, and requires a willing suspension of disbelief. One of the enduring myths about early pulp science fiction was that stories supposedly abounded wherein a scientist built a spaceship in his own backyard! In actual fact, very few, if any, such stories exist! I have read as much early sf as most people, and I cannot remember reading a single example of this—except for Fearn’s novel!

The author was of course well aware of the basic implausibility of this, and so, in the style of the skilled science fictionist, he tries to make it plausible. In my view, he succeeds in doing so by sheer storytelling skill, and in his sympathetic portrayal of the altruistic Albert Simpkins, he obviously wrote from his own personal beliefs. This gives the story a definite believability, and adds to its appeal.