During his time as a comic book artist and editor, Harry Harrison wrote scripts for comics, short text pieces – fiction and non-fiction – that appeared in comic books, and also fake letters and responses to them for letters pages in comics. Harrison left the comics industry as the Golden Age was coming to an end and moved to writing text articles for magazines. He wrote mostly ‘men’s adventures’ but also a few pieces for True Confessions magazine.

When I researched my HH bibliography – published in 2002 – there wasn’t much information available for me to draw from. I had seven definite references plus a list of the titles of original Harrison manuscripts held in the Special Collection at the California State University, Fullerton. That list consisted of over 40 working titles, some of which included a pseudonym used.

Since 2002 I’ve returned to this subject at various points, trying to match up the list of working titles with actual published articles. I’ve also scoured listings of magazines on eBay, often squinting at photographs of contents pages to see if I can identify Harry Harrison pieces. Some of those old men’s adventure magazine have been scanned and placed online in various places and I’ve collected PDFs of relevant issues. And I’ve purchased a few of the original magazines online.

When Harry Harrison was planning to move house, in 2009 or thereabouts, I helped him sort out his files. Stashed in an old filing cabinet I found a folder with tear sheets of some of the magazine articles he had written. This helped me fill in some more gaps in the list. And there were a few bits of correspondence between him and his collaborator Hubert Pritchard.

I’ve also identified some articles that weren’t on my earlier lists, and the number of unidentified items from the Special Collection list is now down to about 30 or so working titles, some of which I have possible sightings of. I would need to see the magazines or scans of the articles to confirm these sightings. I’ll probably include the list of ‘missing’ items in a future post in the hope that other people might be able to locate the published versions.

I’m not sure that I will ever feel confident in saying that I have a complete list of Harry Harrison’s magazine articles, but I hope to get close.

Over the coming weeks I’ll post the text of a few of the more interesting articles, plus some of the artwork and photographs that accompanied them. I’m also going to write a piece on how one of these articles came to be written – Harry had kept all of the paperwork, including the drafts, correspondence, and the original item that inspired it.

In this first post on the topic, I thought I’d introduce some of the people involved in this part of Harry Harrison’s career.

Harry Harrison married Joan Merkler in 1954. Their son, Todd, was born about a year later. I shall write more about Joan at some point in this series. She was a beautiful, funny, and talented woman. And just a little bit scary.

The family found living in New York uncomfortable, particularly in summer, and a small apartment didn’t offer the kind of freedom that a young child would need. Harry and Joan decided to move to Mexico. This might sound like a random decision, but Harry had visited Mexico when he was in the army. And a number of writers and retired soldiers had made their homes there. It was also possible to live there relatively cheaply. Harry Harrison wrote about this decision and about the year they spent in Mexico in his memoir Harry Harrison! Harry Harrison! published in 2014. For the purposes of this post, the most significant thing that happened there was that he met the writer Jackson Burke.

Jackson Burke was writing articles for magazines including Bluebook, Real, Man’s Illustrated, and Male. In the June 1953 issue of Bluebook, a brief biography was included: “Jackson Burke, who wrote ‘Matadors Die Rich’ (pages 26-32), tried bullfighting after hearing that a good lad at this trade can pick up as much as $20,000 in an afternoon; and that was about the rate of pay Mr. Burke was seeking at the moment. As he tells in his story, he retired from the ring after discovering that matadors aren’t overpaid, after all.

“Born in 1915 on an island in San Francisco Bay (not Alcatraz), of theatrical parents, Burke grew up in a suitcase, earned an A.B. degree at the University of California, taught school, and eventually went to sea. He since has settled down to a writing career and, besides his story in this issue, has written four novels, one of which (The Arroyo) was grabbed by a publisher. You’ll read more of Mr. Burke’s efforts in upcoming issues of Bluebook.”

It’s possible that many of the details in this ‘about the author’ piece are as true as the ‘true adventures’ Burke was writing.

In his memoir, Harry Harrison revealed that he learned how to write men’s adventures from Burke:

“A very simple formula,” Burke explained. “You open with a cliff hanger. Maybe literally one such as a climber reached the top of a terrible climb.”

Below me was a thousand foot drop. To the left and right sheer ice without a handhold. I was stretching upwards to the limits of my strength, clutching the small projecting knob of rock.

And I could feel it crumbling…

“This is called the establisher. As soon as the hero is in extremis there is a the flashback:

How did I get into this terrible position…?

“Now the build which explains what happened, how through a series of circumstances the protagonist finally reaches the cliff where he is hanging on by one fingernail. Then the justifier gives him an unexpected chance at salvation – have him win by guts and ingenuity and he is off the cliff. All in 2,500 words. Type THE END, send it round the editors. Top markets like Argosy paid up to $500 for one of these. Salvage markets – the dregs who bought most anything – were $75.”

Harrison collaborated with Jackson Burke on an article titled ‘Were Carlson’s Raiders So Tough They Had to Die?’ published in the June 1957 issue of Real Action for Men. It’s possible that they wrote more than this one piece together, but this is the only one I have found. The tagline for this article is: ‘What can you do with trained, merciless killers when the time for killing is past?’

Harry Harrison had an agent in New York to help him sell his articles to the magazines. He may have found Sidney Porcelain through Burke or through one of his other writer friends.

Sidney Porcelain was a literary agent based in New York. I couldn’t find a single definitive source of information about Porcelain, but I found a few bits and pieces on various websites and I thought I ought to put them together.

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database records that Sidney Edgar Porcelain was born in Leominster, Massachusetts on 7th January 1911 and died 5th November 1997. Porcelain is also listed as having short stories in Science Fiction Digest and Tales of the Frightened magazines. I’ve also seen a listing for one of his short stories in the June 1962 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

Sidney E. Porcelain wrote two novels featuring detective Stephen Clay, The Purple Pony Murders (1945) and The Crimson Cat Murders (1946). The 1945 US edition of The Purple Pony Murders has the author as Sidney E. Porcelain on book jacket; the 1948 UK edition has Sidney A. Porcelain on the jacket. IMDb lists him as the writer of one episode, ‘Ninth Life,’ of the ABC radio series The Clock in 1950. He is also credited as one of three writers of the short film From Inner Space, based on the story ‘Or All the Seas with Oysters,’ by Avram Davidson. A 1969 short film, Hangup, is listed as being a remake of From Inner Space.

Sidney Porcelain (no initial) is the author on the cover of Office Tramp, published in paperback by Midwood Books in 1962. The cover says, ‘Her job was to keep the bosses happy, and it wasn’t by taking dictation.’ This should give you some idea of what kind of book it was.

On the website for Savant Garde Archives, there is a scan of a pamphlet titled How You Can Heal Yourself and Others by E. Sidney Porcelain – it is about ESP. The ‘About the Author’ on the back cover includes the following:

E. Sidney Porcelain has written several books, articles, and short stories. Some of his work is listed in The Best American Short Stories … He has had plays produced and a script on NBC-TV; a short film he wrote was shown at the film festival in Spoleto, Italy. He has acted and directed in several productions and has performed in cabaret theatre, singing his own novelty songs. He has also appeared on stage at the old Metropolitan Opera house in two operas.

I’m including the image below because the cover features a photograph of Porcelain, credited to Dave Ward. The original website address is https://savantgardearchives.tripod.com/E.SidneyPorcelain.html

A note on the webpage says that E. Sidney Porcelain is one of the original founders of The Savant Garde and that ‘the savant garde workshop’ will publish an e-edition of his Purple Pony Murders in 2011. The Savant Garde Institute is the ‘parent company’ of the workshop. I don’t know if the e-edition of the book was made available.

I think Sidney E. Porcelain was also the editor of a literary magazine, Unusual. Abebooks lists Volume 1, Number 1 and Volume 1, Number 3 with publication dates of 1955. The first published by Script Delivery Service, New York and the second by Sidney E. Porcelain, New York. Number 3 also lists ‘Harrison’ as a contributor, but I don’t know if that is our Harry Harrison.

Assuming that all of these details refer to the same man, and there are enough links to suggest they do, he seems to have been an interesting fellow.

Harry Harrison and Hubert Pritchard were friends in high school and they met up again in New York after the Second World War. Pritchard began training to be a doctor while Harrison was training to be a cartoonist and illustrator. As I understand it, ill-health prevented Pritchard completing his studies, but his medical knowledge was put to use when he and Harry Harrison began collaborating on ‘true’ stories for the adventure and confession magazines. Pritchard would look at medical journals, seeking interesting medical cases that could be turned into ‘true’ adventure stories. When Harrison moved to Europe, Pritchard would carry out research into other topics – including military history – for the articles they wrote together.

The medical stories that Harrison and Pritchard wrote were popular with magazine editor Noah Sarlat.

Magazine Management was a company founded in about 1947 by Martin Goodman, who had worked in the pulp magazine industry since the 1930s. The company published a number of magazines and was the parent company of Atlas Comics which later became Marvel Comics. Noah Sarlat was an editor for the company, editing magazines including Male, For Men Only, Men, Stag, Male, Man’s World, Challenge, and Man’s Magazine. Harry Harrison and Hubert Pritchard’s articles appeared in a number of these titles.

I know for sure that Harry Harrison’s articles began appearing in men’s adventure magazines at the beginning of 1956. The following all appeared in January of that year:

‘The Cave that Swallowed Me’ by Paul Barrell as told to Harry Harrison in For Men Only – ‘I swam until my fingers touched rock. Then I raised my face, but there was no air. I was in a water-filled tunnel of stone.’

‘The Day They Stole the U.S. Fleet’ by Harry Harrison in Brief (edited by Richard N. Bruce) – ‘It will never be confirmed. But the weirdest story of the war keeps cropping up with a strange persistence.’

‘I Went Down with My Ship’ by Captain M. Wilner as told to Harry Harrison in Men – ‘She was heading for the bottom and I couldn’t get out.’

The last of these is a title that Harry Harrison often mentioned when he spoke about his time writing these articles, along with ‘I Ate a Pigmy’ and ‘I Cut Off My Own Arm.’ You can read ‘I Ate a Pigmy’ by clicking on the link below.

I Ate a Pygmy

Sadly, I haven’t been able to locate ‘I Cut Off My Own Arm,’ but I will post ‘I Went Down with My Ship’ next time.

Harry Harrison didn’t write any men’s adventures with titles to challenge the classic ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh!’ The example below was in Harry’s folder of tear sheets, so I’m presuming it was one of his, and it’s the closest I could find.

Judging by the cover and artwork, I would say that this magazine was probably one of the lower paying markets. The photograph almost certainly came from an agency and looks like it may have originally been a picture of a guy playing with a tame lion. Back in those days, I guess lions did occasionally wear blackface. That wouldn’t be allowed today.

Next Time: I Went Down with My Ship!

Paul Tomlinson is the author of over a dozen novels and books about writing genre fiction. www.paultomlinson.org