{"id":15532,"date":"2023-01-16T10:00:08","date_gmt":"2023-01-16T15:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/?p=15532"},"modified":"2022-12-18T15:37:03","modified_gmt":"2022-12-18T20:37:03","slug":"the-oriental-intrigue-tales-of-lemeul-de-bra","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/2023\/01\/16\/the-oriental-intrigue-tales-of-lemeul-de-bra\/","title":{"rendered":"The Oriental Intrigue tales of Lemuel de Bra"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the 2022 PulpFest, I came across one of Black Dog Books<\/a>\u2019 earlier chapbooks: Slaves of the Silver Serpent<\/em> (2002) by\u00a0Lemuel de Bra<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

\"Lemuel<\/a>
Lemuel de Bra<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The title and cover artwork really didn\u2019t grab me. In fact, my first thought is that it was another reprint of spicy pulp stories, which I don\u2019t care for. But I picked it up anyway and flipped through it. The titles of the stories didn\u2019t do much for me either. Then I noticed that they all came from Blue Book<\/em> in 1922. As a top-tier pulp, these were clearly not spicy stories. They were instead stories of Oriental intrigue by an author I had never heard of.<\/p>\n

In the back was a brief overview of the author, with only a little information on him, but I was impressed that he apparently wrote not only a lot for Blue Book<\/em>, but also for Short Stories<\/em> and Clues<\/em>, and also did Westerns and other mysteries for a variety of pulps, many of them the better ones like Argosy<\/em>, All-Story<\/em>, and Complete Stories<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Looking around, I found that Black Dog Books had done a second chapbook, Tribe of the Tiger<\/em> (2004), and ordered it. It had a single work, a novella from February 1934 (not 1940 as the chapbook claims). This is another Oriental intrigue story. And it included the same single page of info on the author. Other than a couple of books reprinted during the author\u2019s lifetime and a couple of short stories in recent years, I am not aware of any other of his works being reprinted.<\/p>\n

Who is Lemuel de Bra? Well, at first all I had to go by is what Tom Roberts<\/strong> found and wrote in the back of these two books. I did some searching online and at first, I didn\u2019t find much more than that. He was born in 1884 (in Iowa) and died in 1954 (in Pensacola, Fla.). I found his gravesite, and it showed his name as \u201cde Bra\u201d not<\/em> \u201cDe Bra,” and he was buried with his wife and his son Lemuel Warren de Bra<\/strong> (1915-63). I wanted to learn more because I was suspicious of his government service. While many pulp writers used their real-life experiences in writing their stories, for every one who does that, there are several who just made it all up, and often then claimed such experiences.<\/p>\n

Finally found an online copy of an article on him from the Oakland Tribune<\/em> (Sept. 23, 1923, p. 87), which indicated he had recently moved to Florida. He states that in 1907 he entered government service working for the IRS instead of going to college, and three years later left when his writing income matched his government one.<\/p>\n

If he was writing for the pulps, most likely this was under an unknown pseudonym, as his first pulp work was in 1919. Or he wrote other works.<\/p>\n

His next job was publicity for four-and-a-half years, during which he wrote five boy\u2019s adventure novels for Street & Smith as Edmond Lawrence<\/strong>. Next, he went back as a narcotics agent. Clearly this government work, mostly in California, where he was involved in opium and drug cases in Chinatown, gave him the knowledge for his stories.<\/p>\n

After that first pulp work in 1919, he took a year\u2019s leave to write more. And in 1922 left California (and government work?) and drove to Florida. He would later move to other states for a while before moving to Pensacola, where he would pass away, along with his wife and soon after his son and daughter-in-law.<\/p>\n

Thanks to info provided by James Keeline<\/a><\/strong>, I was able to fill in some holes in his life, but still had no idea of his writing career before the pulps.<\/p>\n

From checking the indexes at Galactic Central<\/a>, his pulp career started in 1919 in Blue Book<\/em>, where he wrote extensively for the next couple of years with a couple of works in The Popular Magazine<\/em>. As noted, most of his early works were Oriental intrigue, but he soon got into Western stories, and later detective stories.<\/p>\n

He wrote 77 stories in Blue Book<\/em>, 26 stories in Clues<\/em> (along with 26 articles in Clues<\/em>), and almost 20 stories in Short Stories<\/em>. And he often had two to three stories a month in different magazines, with maybe also an article in the ’20s, but started to slow down in the ’30s.<\/p>\n

He stopped writing for the pulps around 1941. I don\u2019t know if he had works in the slicks. I did discover an article in Scientific American<\/em> in 1918. He may have been writing non-fiction pieces as well. As noted, Galactic Central listed several articles in Clues<\/em>.<\/p>\n

He had two books published during his lifetime. Doubleday\u2019s Garden City Press reprinted one of his longer Western works from Aces-High<\/em> as #54 in their series of \u201cRed Disc\u201d reprints (so-called as they used the covers from Short Stories<\/em>, also owned by Doubleday, which always had a red disc on them): Bandit of Devil\u2019s Own<\/em> (1924). It\u2019s about a customs officer working at the US-Mexico border dealing with smugglers and outlaws.<\/p>\n

And the second was a collection of a dozen Chinatown mysteries from Short Stories<\/em> and Popular Magazine<\/em>: The Ways That Are Wary<\/em> (1925). In addition to the two Black Dog chapbooks, Wildside Press<\/a> has made available a couple of his stories in ebook format on Amazon and reprinted one of those in Adventure Tales<\/em> #7.<\/p>\n

\"Slaves<\/a>Let\u2019s take a look at the two Black Dog Books chapbooks. Both include the interior artwork that appeared with the stories. First up is Slaves of the Silver Serpent<\/em> (2002) that reprints four stories from Blue Book<\/em>:<\/p>\n