The Whispering Swarm Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t pay enough, even to the top professionals. From Gateshead-on-Tyne, Jim Cawthorn started to send me stencilled illustrations of extraordinary quality. From Brixton, Arthur Thomson, who already illustrated the professional SF mags, drew me cartoons and headings. Professional writers who had sold stories to Nebula and Authentic wrote features as I expanded my fanzine’s parameters to include writers such as T.H. White and Mervyn Peake. Thanks to my new contributors I had begun to look pretty professional. I tried to get interviews with more fantasts and ran articles on people like Ray Bradbury, Talbot Mundy and M.R. James. When I told them how close to the Globe the weekly Tarzan Adventures magazine was, my fellow fans suggested I interview the editor whose offices were below the rooms where Chatterton died, between Leather Lane and Grays Inn Road, in Brook Street, Holborn. It seemed as if I could live my entire life in a bubble less than half a mile across and find everyone I wanted to meet, everything I wanted to do!
    Tarzan Adventures was a bit of a crossover between a weekly comic book and a text magazine primarily for boys. I enjoyed it better than most but I didn’t like every artist who drew the strip and I thought the features and short stories were pretty pathetic. Still, it seemed a good moment to ask the editor, Bob Greenway, for an interview. He was a bit lordly about it but permission was granted and I went to see him in his old-fashioned editorial study at Westworld Publications. Plump, boozy, aggressive, he knew nothing about Burroughs and of course my piece on him in Burroughsania reflected this appalling ignorance.
    Mr Greenway didn’t bother to send back my next submissions. But then, about the middle of 1956, I received a phone call from his young assistant editor, Alistair Graham. Bob had got a new job on Gardening Weekly . A tall, gaunt, cheerful, bearded Scot, Alistair had loved my piece. Everyone there had hated Bob. Now the editor, Alistair liked the idea of carrying some features on ERB characters, then perhaps something more substantial later. He was only a couple of years older than me. Soon I was writing short features on John Carter of Mars, Carson of Venus, Tanar of Pellucidar. Alistair was delighted. The readers loved them. Next I was asked to write a Burroughs-style serial. Could, I wondered, another fanzine contributor perhaps illustrate a story? Agreed. Jim Cawthorn, later to sketch out illustrations for Elric, illustrated Sojan the Swordsman . I got a guinea and a half an episode for them! I wrote thousand-word features for the same money. At sixteen I was on my way to becoming a full-time professional. I discovered that Alistair played banjo. We formed a skiffle group with his friends from Notting Hill and rehearsed at the office in the evenings. Then one lunchtime Alistair asked me to come and work at Westworld as an assistant editor. Surprised, I wasn’t sure. I enjoyed freelancing. I still worked part-time at The Gallery and did temp typing work when I needed to, but my freelance earnings were improving. He murmured that it might be a good idea to accept. When in a few weeks he left to hitchhike round the world with the rest of the skiffle group, I could take over from him. I would be editor. But, I thought, I was only sixteen!
    Uncle Fred saw sense in accepting the job, a great start to a career. ‘You’ll be editor of the Daily Herald at this rate.’ He stretched an arthritic hand towards the teapot. After all, he told my uncertain mum, editing was like show business. ‘Still selling illusions,’ he said.
    So, when a few weeks later Alistair left to travel around the world, busk with his friends and write mysteries, sure enough I was the editor! I must admit I wasn’t especially flattered by the wage offer. I was to get six pounds a week. His face scarred by fire from the downed Hurricane he had flown in the war, Donald F. Peters was