Tonight we pay tribute to Arthur D. Howden Smith.* Once one of the star authors for Adventure Magazine alongside Harold Lamb and Talbot Mundy, Smith died in near obscurity on December 18, 1945. He deserved better than that.

Arthur D. Howden Smith was born in New York City to a family of old New England stock. By the age of seventeen, he was an aspiring journalist at the venerable New York Evening Post. Apparently, he decided to go big, catching a ship for Europe bound for the Balkans. There, he joined the freedom fighters seeking to oust the imperialist Ottoman Turks from Eastern Europe. This organization of guerilla fighters, known as the Cheta--whose members were called "chetniks"--tried to talk young ADHS out of joining their merry band. Here is how Smith described it later:

"You are a small man," said Dr. Tartartcheff [one of the Cheta leaders]. "Do you think you could stand the work? It is very difficult. You cannot rest. The askares (Ottoman soldiers) follow you, always. You wear sandals which do not protect your feet. Often, you must go without food. When you are tired to weariness, it is your bread that you throw away, that you may not have to sacrifice any of your ammunition. It is a hard life, sir, and a thankless one.

“You do not understand the kind of warfare the Turks wage. It is not such as Western Europe knows. There is no mercy shown. It would do you no good to be a non-combatant. You would be slain, just the same, if they caught you. The askares never take prisoners. You are young and you have life before you. Think about it. Is it worthwhile? Remember you are not one of us; we are not your people. Why should you risk your life in an alien cause? There can be no middle course for the man who goes into Macedonia. He either goes with the Turks, or he goes with the chetniks, and if he goes with the chetniks, he goes armed."

“I understand the risks," I said. "I know what they will be and I am willing to take them."

ADHS ended up spending about a year with the freedom fighters in the mountains of Macedonia. As what we would now call an “embedded journalist”, he was involved in many guerilla actions against the Ottoman Turks and almost died a couple of times. Like the Hospitallers who travelled thousands of miles to fight in the seemingly "unwinnable" Siege of Malta, Smith put his life on the line to help push the imperialist Turks out of Europe.

Upon his return to NYC in 1908, Arthur began writing the manuscript of what would become Fighting the Turk in the Balkans. George Haven Putnam, the publisher of G. P. Putnam's Sons--one of the top publishing houses of the day--saw the manuscript when it was only two-thirds complete. Putnam sat up half a night reading it and decided to publish it.

Fighting the Turk in the Balkans sold well and raised Smith’s literary profile tremendously. ADHS wrote for the New York Evening Post from 1908 to 1915 and for the New York Globe from 1918 to 1920. Sai Shankar believes that Smith was probably serving in the US military during the two or three year employment gap, though we have no solid documentation for it. Shankar's theory sounds right to me. The same man who volunteered to fight for men of another nation would certainly enlist in his own nation's military during a time of war.

Meanwhile, Arthur had been selling fiction and non-fiction to Adventure Magazine--considered by many to be the best of the pulps--since 1911. The editors at Adventure liked publishing work from authors who had “been there, done that” and Smith certainly qualified. One of his first major series characters was Harry Ormerod, an English outlaw who had escaped to the American colonies and fought on the frontier in short novels like The Doom Trail and Beyond the Sunset.

Harry's son, Robert Ormerod, was the protagonist of ADHS' most popular work, Porto Bello Gold. In it, Ormerod consorts with the likes of Billy Bones and Long John Silver. Yes, this is a prequel to Treasure Island. An authorized prequel.

Apparently, Robert Louis Stevenson's literary executor--also his stepson--thought highly of Smith as a writer and gave permission for ADHS to write the novel. Porto Bello Gold, which was first serialized in Adventure, has been published in at least twenty editions since then and retains a good reputation among Treasure Island fans. I have seen it rumored online that the 1934 film version of Treasure Island featured one character drawn from Porto Bello Gold, but I haven't been able to solidly confirm that. Pretty cool, if true.

More or less simultaneously with the "Ormerod" stories, Arthur D. Howden Smith was chronicling the exploits of Swain the Viking in Adventure as well. From 1923 to 1925, he cranked out over fifteen stories about Swain, a grim, ruthless warrior who fell on hard times and fought his bloody way back to almost royal heights. Smith would write more tales of Swain in the '30s and '40s for Adventure. To the best of my knowledge, the complete tales of Swain have never been collected in book form.

Smith's final major series did not feature a human or humans as its connecting narrative thread. The "Grey Maiden" series chronicles the wanderings of a cursed sword through time, from Ancient Egypt to Elizabethan England. The sword, Grey Maiden, thirsts for blood. It brings victory to its wielder--at a price. While a truncated collection of the Grey Maiden tales was published in 1929, it took decades for all of the GM stories to see print in one volume. In 2014, Altus Press/Steeger Books published the complete saga in both hardcover and softcover.

Like Gordon MacCreagh, Smith's career at Adventure would span almost the entire life of the magazine as an actual pulp, before it turned into a "slick" Men's Adventure magazine. He died of a heart condition on December 18, 1945. After becoming one of the most well-known popular authors of the early twentieth century, Arthur D. Howden Smith barely rated a few obituaries in various newspapers.

I, for one, raise a glass to the shade of a brave man and a good writer.

*Good biographical resources on ADHS are hard to find and the trail of his life grows dim after about 1940. Sai Shankar wrote a fine post on Smith in 2012, which I linked to earlier. Here is the link again. However, in 2014, a Brooklyn journalist dug up even more facts on ADHS, which articles can be found here and here. All it takes to access the site is your email. You can unsubscribe at any time. Finally, though I hate to admit it, Wikipedia’s wiki on Smith does actually provide some extra details with sources cited.