1935 H. P. LOVECRAFT | RAYMOND CHANDLER | WEIRD TALES. Original Unpublished "Cursed Mummy" Manuscript.

A superb, unpublished "Curse of the Pharoah" style novel written during the height of the craze of the 1930's and erupting from the then-burgeoning San Francisco pulp scene. Following on the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb in 1922, a wave of "all things mummy" and "cursed tomb" swept over the pulp world, including a significant increase of Egypt content in the classic spook and horror magazine, Weird Tales.

It seems nearly all the important pulp writers of the era were giving the new horror theme a go. H. P. Lovecraft, Harry Houdini, Bram Stoker and Sax Rohmer all gave the them ago. Add to their names:

Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, who published Eyes of the Mummy [Weird Tales, April 1938] and The Secret of Sebek [WT, November 1937].

Paul Ernest became popular for his The Thing in the Box series, and also authored The Mummy Maker and Bride for the Mummy, etc.

Robert Arthur published Footsteps Invisible in the mummy genre.

Seabury Quinn, one of Weird Tales' most prolific authors contributed significantly to the theme, with his The Jewel of Seven Stones [WT April 1928], The House of Golden Masks [WT June 1929], and The Dust of Egypt [WT, April 1930].

The binder suggests both a date and a location. Housed in a 1929 Yale catalogue binder originally owned by Marshall Newell Supply Company of San Francisco, this customized binder would have been a one off and certainly originates in the Bay area. The novel itself also, from both materials and content, is consistent with a 1930's dating. This would make sense. The Yale binder originally held a catalogue for Yale parts, which would have been updated on a regular basis. The binder was likely then repurposed by the author in the early to mid-1930's.

Writing in San Francisco at the time were Dashiell Hammett of Sam Spade and The Maltese Falcon fame, Raymond Chandler, and Allan R. Bosworth. It was also the period of the hard-boiled mystery and detective pulp, Black Mask, which was also being populated with tombs, mummies, curses, and all things Egypt.

A really wonderful find, and a classic Weird Tales style macabre story involving an Egyptology class meeting, as the opening paragraph notes, after the "country became roused by the discovery of the famous mummy of Tutankhamen." The college had the good fortune of having acquired its own mummy named, fictitiously, Ahnk Unk Aten. When our student obtains opportunity to go to Egypt to study the origins of the college's mummy, well, things go badly.

Our protagonist uncovers an Egyptian cult still worshipping the deceased Pharoah and the gods and goddesses of the underworld. While secretly observing a religious ceremony of the cult our character is caught into the literal underworld, battles the Egyptians gods, witnesses Egyptian magic, witches, the inter-relationships of the deities, etc., etc., and after falling in love with one of the underworldling, is ultimately sacrificed, in morbid detail, with the plunge of a dagger to the chest, etc., 

Worthy of preservation and publication. This does not seem to be our author's first attempt at writing and with some effort I'm optimistic they could be tracked down. 

Anonymous. Memoirs of a Pharaoh. Unpublished Typescript with MSs Revisions. 200pp.