Carl Richard Jacobi (July 10, 1908 – August 25, 1997) was an American journalist and writer. He wrote short stories in the horror and fantasy genres for the pulp magazine market, appearing in such pulps of the bizarre and uncanny as Weird Tales, Ghost Stories, Startling Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories and Strange Stories. He also wrote stories of crime and adventure which appeared in such pulps as Thrilling Adventures, Complete Stories, Top-Notch, Short Stories, The Skipper, Doc Savage and Dime Adventures Magazine. Jacobi also produced some science fiction, mainly space opera, published in such magazines as Planet Stories. He was one of the last surviving pulp-fictioneers to have contributed to the legendary American horror magazine Weird Tales during its "glory days" (the 1920s and 1930s). His stories have been translated into French, Swedish, Danish, Russian and Dutch.
Biography
Early life and education
Jacobi was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1908 and lived there throughout his life. He was a lifelong bachelor. He was a voracious reader at an early age, reading Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe, H. G. Wells as well as the Frank Merriwell and Tom Swift boys' adventure yarns. Jacobi was always a writer; at his junior high school he earned good pocket-money concocting his own 'dime novels' (short story booklets) and selling them to fellow students as 10 cents-a-piece.
Jacobi attended the University of Minnesota from 1927 to 1930, majoring in English Literature, where he began his writing career in campus magazines and was an undergraduate classmate of Donald Wandrei. He wrote of this period on Thrilling Wonder Stories (June 1939) that "I tried to divide my time between rhetoric courses and the geology lab. As an underclassman I was somewhat undecided whether future life would find me studying rocks and fossils or simply pounding a typewriter. The typewriter won." Jacobi's first stories were published while he was at the university. Long before graduation he made his first professional sale, a short detective tale, "Rumbling Cannon", to Secret Service Stories. This ought to have paid around fifty dollars but Jacobi received nothing since the pulp folded soon after the story was published. The last of the stories he published while at university, "Moss Island", was a graduate's contribution to The Quest of Central High School, and "Mive" (which won a college-wide contest judged by Margaret Culkin Banning), published in the University of Minnesota's The Minnesota Quarterly. Both stories were later sold to Amazing Stories (Winter 1932) and Weird Tales respectively and marked his debut in professional magazines. "Mive" (Weird Tales, 1932) brought him payment of 25 dollars. "Mive" was praised by H. P. Lovecraft in his letter to Jacobi of February 27, 1932: "Mive please me immensely, and I told Wright that I was glad to see at least one story whose weirdness of incident was made convincing by adequate emotional preparation and suitably developed atmosphere." Lovecraft commended Jacobi's work to Derleth and thereby helped set up the long-term relationship Arkham House would have with Jacobi.
Beginning in 1928, Jacobi corresponded with adventure-pulp veteran Arthur O. Friel.
Jacobi's early story "The Monument" (1932) was submitted only once—to Farnsworth Wright of Weird Tales. It was not submitted subsequently but was discovered in a filing cabinet when R. Dixon Smith was researching his biography Lost in the Rentharpian Hills: Spanning the Decades with Carl Jacobi (1985) and finally saw print when included by Smith in Smoke of the Snake (1994).
Jack Adrian writes:
<blockquote>In the depression years of the early 1930s, the pulp-writer needed as formidable a creative armoury as possible, along with a certain amount of luck, and cunning, to crack even the lowest paying markets. Jacobi had a useful knack for dreaming up memorable milieu against which to set his tales, and bizarre situations that stayed in the mind long after the magazine the story itself was in had been finished and tossed away. He may have been the only writer ever to have a story firmly rejected by the redoubtable Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, only to have Wright, weeks later, begging for the story back, because an incident in it had stuck in his mind. This was "Revelations in Black", a chilling, and much-reprinted, vampire tale set in an old stone farmhouse outside of Minneapolis Jacobi had driven past one night (the house's eerie statue-lined garden, as seen by brilliant moonlight, had caught his eye and his imagination.
Already by 1935, Jacobi was seeing a greater percentage of rejected stories. Pressed by financial problems and the need to help his parents survive the Depression, he took a $50 a week job as a continuity writer for the local radio station where he stayed until 1940.
Jacobi was fascinated by adventure tales with a Southeast Asia setting, particularly in regard to Dutch central Borneo and the Maritime Southeast Asia. Jacobi wrote to officials working in Southeast Asia to obtain details for his stories,
In 1939, Jacobi met writer Clifford D. Simak when Simak moved to Minneapolis to take a job with the Minneapolis Star; they became friends. At this time, Jacobi listed his hobbies as "studying the night sky with a 60 power glass; continuing contacts with friends now located in jumping off spots of the South Seas and Malaysia; and collecting old tobacco tins."
1940s and 1950s
In 1940–41, Jacobi served as editor of Midwest Media, an advertising and radio trade journal. He then spent some years as a reporter, and reviewer of books and plays, for the Minneapolis Star. He worked for them for many years, writing fiction on the side. Following this, he "travelled a spell; fooled about with telegraphy, both wireless and Morse for another spell; then turned to writing fiction full-time."
At the time of the compilation of Revelations in Black (1947), Jacobi's first collection, Jacobi was at work on a novel, but it is unknown whether this was completed.
Jacobi continued to sell stories to Weird Tales up through the 1950s, with that market taking eighteen of his stories in all.
When the pulp markets collapsed, Jacobi took regular employment with one of the Honeywell defense plants as an electronics inspector, a job he had through WWII and beyond, while writing part-time. He worked the night shift at Honeywell seven days a week, which had a severe effect on both his writing schedule and his health, leading to heart problems.
1960s
1964 saw the publication of Jacobi's second collection of weird fiction, Portraits in Moonlight, and several short stories published in magazines.
1970s and 1980s
In 1972, Arkham House published Jacobi's third collection of weird fiction, Disclosures in Scarlet. Don Herron, writing in Jack Sullivan's Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, calls Jacobi's 1972 story "The Unpleasantness at Carver House" his masterpiece – "a ghoulish tale of horror and madness that may rank with the best work of Robert Aickman and Walter de la Mare in its brilliant use of suggestion. A feeling of unease pervades the story, and its many macabre implications prey on the imagination long after the last sentence is read."
In 1973, Jacobi attended the science-fiction convention Torcon II 31st World Science Fiction Convention, held in Canada, having been persuaded to attend by literary agent Kirby McCauley. There he met such figures as J. Vernon Shea and Robert Bloch. In the same year, Etchings and Odysseys magazine was launched in Minneapolis by Kirby McCauley, John Koblas, Eric Carlson, Joe West and others. Jacobi attended the launch, along with Mary Elizabeth Counselman, who had frequently appeared in the pages of the same magazines as Jacobi. Jacobi also met E. Hoffmann Price (visiting from the West) at both Donald Wandrei's home and at Etchings and Odysseys 'headquarters'. Koblas had come to know Jacobi much earlier, and received encouraging criticism from Jacobi on his manuscripts. Jacobi also came much in contact with poet and novelist Richard L. Tierney, a Twin Cities resident for nine years during the 1970s. During this period, however, Jacobi had suffered a stroke which left one side of his body paralysed and gave him a speech impediment.
1980 saw a collection of Jacobi's stories published in French, under the title Les ecarlates. In 1989 appeared a collection of all-reprint adventure stories from the pulps, East of Samarinda. In the late 1980s, Robert M. Price's Cryptic Publications published a number of obscure Jacobi stories in such magazines as Astro-Adventures, Pulp Stories, Pulse-Pounding Adventure Stories and Shudder Stories.
Jacobi continued to write macabre stories in the 1970s and 1980s. Many are collected in his final volume, The Smoke of the Snake (1994). His last published story, "A Quire of Foolscap" (Whispers, Oct 1987) contains an in-joke: an unfaithful wife and her lover check into a motel "out on Carcosa", an obvious reference to both Ambrose Bierce's "An Inhabitant of Carcosa" and Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow, as well as affectionate praise for Karl Edward Wagner's newly established publishing firm (see Carcosa).
Writer Don Herron has stated "Jacobi has a genuine bent for original, gruesome invention equal to the best writers who emerged from Weird Tales." Herron also said "Jacobi's finest stories have an exquisitely creepy quality from first paragraph to last" and described the story "The Unpleasantness at Carver House" as "Jacobi's masterpiece".