MANY STRUGGLING PULP WRITERS went on to fame and fortune and became household names (assuming the household is literate). The novels and stories of Erle Stanley Gardner, Robert E. Howard, Dashiell Hammett, Louis L’Amour, Raymond Chandler, and others still resonate, long after they, and the magazines for which they wrote, expired.
Others, and one might say the vast majority of others, remained mired in obscurity, frequently because they were not very talented, turning out hack work for a penny a word or less, and sometimes because they did not write very much.
One of the latter appears to have been (H)enry (F)erris Arnold (1901/1902–1963), who, as nearly as can be ascertained, as so little is known of him (including whether this is really his name), wrote only three stories in his career. Probably born and raised in Illinois, he moved to Hollywood to become a press agent in the 1920s and 1930s, and he was almost certainly a newspaperman, as the tone and minor details of the present story will attest. “The Night Wire” was his first story and was a great favorite of H. P. Lovecraft’s, who called it one of the six best stories ever to appear in Weird Tales, an opinion shared by fans of the magazine, acclaiming it as possibly the most popular story ever to appear in its pages. He also wrote a two-part serial, “The City of Iron Cubes” for the Weird Tales issues of March and April 1929.
“The Night Wire” was first published in the September 1926 issue of Weird Tales.