If you pay much attention to the nonsense being passed around as truth in the fantasy and science fiction fields, you’ll quickly hear that women were shut out of the pulps/digests/paperbacks/takeyourpick until [insert arbitrary date here], when women suddenly started writing and publishing.
Most of you know that’s not really the way it happened. (If you don’t know that, start here, then come back. I’ll wait.) Around these here parts, we acknowledge the contributions of women to the fields of the fantastic, and we try to inform of others.
Case in point. The conventional narrative says women weren’t well represented in Weird Tales, with the possible exception of C. L. Moore. This is demonstrably not true. While women certainly weren’t the majority on the Unique Magazine‘s tables of contents, they were by no means absent.
We’ll take a look at one of those authors today, on the anniversary of her birth. Mary Elizabeth Counselman was born on this date, November 19, 1911. Ms. Counselman had in weird fiction a career that began in 1931 and, with interruptions, continued until 1994, the year before she died. She also wrote for the slicks, and later worked as a reporter and taught creative writing.
Counselman only published a handful of books in her lifetime, the final one a collection of poetry.
Some of her best early work is included in Half in Shadow. It contains her best known story, “The Three Marked Pennies”.
That’s not the story I want to look at, though. In observance of Ms. Counselman’s birthday, I read “The Monkey Spoons”. It’s also included in Half in Shadow as well as being available in ebook in the Weird Fiction Megapack, Fantastic Stories Presents the Weird Tales Superpack #2, and as a standalone.
The story concerns three young people who enter an antique store looking for something to signify their friendship. They are a young woman, her brother, and her fiance. They end up buying a set of monkey spoons.
I had never heard of monkey spoons before, but apparently they are a real thing. They were ornate spoons used by Dutch settlers in the New York area and were most frequently used to recognize a death, although they could also be used for births and marriages.
The monkey spoons the three young friends buy are said to be cursed. They were used at the wake of a notorious Dutch landowner in the 1600s who had been murdered by some friends and family members. He got his revenge on them from the monkey spoons. The old hunchbacked proprietor of the antique shop tries to discourage the friends from buying them, but they insist.
Of course all three come to grisly ends. That part is predictable. The nice twist is in the last sentence in which we learn exactly how the Dutch landowner died. It’s nice and grisly.
There hasn’t been a collection of Mary Elizabeth Counselman’s fiction in years, although a number of stories are available in the many omnibus anthologies currently for sale on Amazon. Virtually none of her later work has been reprinted. I think it’s time Wildside Press published a Mary Elizabeth Counselman Megapack. Until that happens, look her stuff up. She wasn’t a top tier author, but she was consistently entertaining. And remember, she wrote back when women allegedly didn’t publish in Weird Tales.
