Issue 03 # June 1950 by Fantasy; Science Fiction

Author:Fantasy; Science Fiction
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2012-05-16T05:42:50+00:00

from DEATH’S JEST-BOOK

To trust in story, In the old times Death was a feverish sleep, In which men walked. The other world was cold And thinly-peopled, so life’s emigrants Came back to mingle with the crowds of earth: But now great cities are transplanted thither, Memphis, and Babylon, and either Thebes, And Priam’s towery town with its one beech. The dead are most and merriest: so be sure There will be no more haunting, till their towns Are full to the garret; then they’ll shut their gates, To keep the living out, and perhaps leave A dead or two between both kingdoms.

Thomas Lovell Beddoes, 1850

The first half of The Case of Summerfield was published in the Sacramento (California) Union in May, 1871. It was presented as a straight news story with the by-line “Caxton.” Immediately, the whole northern part of the state, from the Golden Gate to the Mother Lode country, was in a state of excitement verging on terror. Some days later the second part of the story was published. Incipient panic forced the Union’s editor to reveal that Summerfield existed solely in the imagination of San Francisco’s Mr. W. H. Rhodes, an able, though reluctant lawyer, who did occasional pieces for the paper under the pseudonym of “Caxton.” The editor did not say, as we do now, that W. H. Rhodes was in this and other stories one of the great pioneers of modern science fiction, who, in this story intended as a pleasant hoax, even anticipates, if crudely, the concept of chain reaction. As we read his bare, direct style, combining as it does imaginative romancing with the reportorial factualness of Defoe, we realize indeed what a great pity it was that Mr. Rhodes could never quite bring himself to forsake the law completely for his writing.

The Case of Summerfield

by W. H. RHODES

The following manuscript was found among the effects of the late Leonidas Parker, in relation to one Gregory Summerfield, or, as he was called at the time those singular events first attracted public notice, “The Man with a Secret.” Parker was an eminent lawyer, a man of firm will, fond of dabbling in the occult sciences, but never allowing this tendency to interfere with the earnest practice of his profession. This astounding narrative is prefaced by the annexed clipping from the Auburn Messenger of November 1, 1870:

A few days since, we called public attention to the singular conduct of James G. Wilkins, justice of the peace for the “Cape Horn” district, in this county, in discharging without trial a man named Parker, who

was, as we still think, seriously implicated in the mysterious death of an old man named Summerfield, who, our readers will probably remember, met so tragical an end on the line of the Central Pacific Railroad, in the month of October last. We have now to record another bold outrage on public justice, in connection with the same affair. The grand jury of Placer County has just adjourned, without finding any bill against the person named above.

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