Arthur J. Burks


Arthur Josephus Burks was an American Marine officer and fiction writer.

Life

Burks was born to a farming family in Waterville, Washington. He married Blanche Fidelia Lane on March 23, 1918, in Sacramento, California, and was the father of four children: Phillip Charles, Wasle Carmen, Arline Mary, and Gladys Lura. He served with the United States Marine Corps in World War I, and began writing in 1920. After being stationed in the Dominican Republic and inspired by the native voodoo rituals he'd learned about from Haitian prisoners in a military jail, Burks began to write stories of the supernatural that he sold to the magazine Weird Tales in 1924.
In late 1927, he resigned from the Marine Corps and began writing full-time. He became one of the "million-word-a-year" men in the pulp magazines by virtue of his tremendous output. He wrote approximately 800 stories for pulp magazines. He was known for being able to use any household object that someone would suggest to generate the plot of a story. His byline was commonplace on magazine covers. He wrote primarily in the genres of aviation, detective, adventure, science fiction, sports, and weird menace. Two genres he was not to be found in were love and westerns. He wrote several series, including the Kid Friel boxing stories for the magazine Gangster Stories, and the Dorus Noel undercover-detective stories for All Detective Magazine, set in Manhattan's Chinatown.
His productivity decreased during the late-1930s. He resumed active military duty as the U.S. joined World War II and eventually retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Burks relocated to Paradise in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, in 1948, where he continued to write until his death in 1974. Throughout the 1960s, he wrote many works on metaphysics and the paranormal. During his later years, he lectured on paranormal activities and gave psychic readings.

Selected short stories

Books

  • The Splendid Half-Caste
  • Walter Garvin in Mexico
  • Rivers Into Wilderness
  • Land of Checkerboard Families
  • Here Are My People
  • The Great Amen
  • Who Do You Think You Are?
  • Bells Above the Amazon, the Life of Hugo Mense Adventurer of the Spirit
  • The Great Mirror
  • Look Behind You
  • Sex the Divine Flame
  • Human Structural Dynamics
  • Black Medicine
  • En-Don: The Ageless Wisdom
  • The Crimson Blight Black Dog Books
  • Grottos of Chinatown: The Dorus Noel Stories
  • PULP TALES PRESENTS #14: THE CRIMSON BLIGHT and Other Stories Pulpville Press
  • The Osilians Pulpville Press
  • Earth, The Marauder Pulpville Press
  • Man-Ape: Two Tales from the Pulps Wildside Press
  • Cathedral of Horror and Other Stories: The Weird Tales of Arthur J. Burks: Volume #1
  • Masters of the Weird Tale: Arthur J. Burks
  • The Black Falcon Age of Aces
  • Masters of Horror, vol 4: Arthur J. Burks—Wizard of Weird Tales Armchair Fiction/Sinister Cinema.

Critical appraisal

E. F. Bleiler described Burks' novel The Great Mirror as "pretty bad". He stated of the collection Look Behind You, "In terms of content and format this is one of the low points in American fan publishing." Bleiler described Burks's collection Black Medicine as "a weak collection. The Caribbean stories show racial bias to the point of grotesqueness, and most of the other stories are routine pulp fiction. has points of interest, and is worth reading for a certain baroque, exuberant overkill of horror."