Another Peter Haining Fraud

The prolific anthologist Peter Haining (1940-2007) is known not only to have cut corners in filling up his anthologies, but to have gone so far as to make up references and fabricate texts.  Both of these serious problems are especially visible in his collections of Bram Stoker materials, where he has given deliberately false citations as well as having significantly re-written some of the texts he has supposedly reproduced. I’ve written elsewhere of a few other instances of his outrageous frauds (for one, where he lifted one author’s story from an early Weird Tales and claimed it was by Dorothy Macardle and from an Irish magazine, see here).  

Now I’ve happened upon yet another example of Haining’s premeditated deceit. I’ve recently been looking closely into the writings of Guy Endore (1900-1970), author of The Werewolf of Paris (1933).  In Haining’s anthology Werewolf: Horror Stories of the Man-Beast (London: Severn House, 1987) there is a story “The Wolf Girl” bylined “Guy Endore”.  Haining notes:

“The werewolf theme had evidently fascinated Endore for some years for, when barely out of his teens, he wrote the story, “The Wolf Girl”, which is included in this book.  It was originally published in The Argosy magazine in December 1920 and, despite its stylistic failings, is interesting in that it is based on an Alaskan legend, as well as demonstrating an early stage of Endore’s exploration of the narrow dividing lines between horror and sexual attraction.”

All of which sounds well and good.  But it doesn’t bear scrutiny.  No story of such title appeared in any of the December 1920 issues of The Argosy (nor in any of the surrounding years), nor did Endore’s byline appear at all in The Argosy, as can be confirmed in Fred Cook’s The Argosy Index 1896-1943. In any case, Guy Endore’s earliest known works all appeared as by “S. Guy Endore”, the first initial standing for Samuel.  This byline appeared on several novels he translated—including Alraune (1929), by Hanns Heinz Ewers—beginning in 1928.  Endore’s first known short stories published in periodicals appeared in 1929. He stopped using the initial around 1930.

The story “The Wolf Girl” also poses questions. First, it reads nothing like Endore’s much more polished and literary style.  Second, it is basically a pulp-styled retelling of a portion of Clemence Housman’s “The Were-Wolf”, first published in 1890, with the setting superficially shifted to Alaska (though there is nothing about “The Wolf Girl” that makes it characteristically Alaskan). It is possible that Haining found "The Wolf Girl" in some obscure magazine, and thought no one would contest his claim of source and author. It is also possible that Haining himself adapted the Housman story into this inferior filler, which he then passed off as by Guy Endore (whose name might help to sell a few more copies of Haining’s anthology).  A few things are, I think, certain, and one is that the story did not appear where Haining said it did. Another is subjective but (I think) no less certain: Guy Endore didn’t write “The Wolf Girl”.  Finally, it has become increasingly apparent that you can’t trust Peter Haining on anything.