Bryan Irvine

Bryan Irvine’s work appeared in pulp magazines for two decades, while his employment moved through several very different settings. A specialist biographical survey places his life from 1885 to 1945, records early newspaper work in Montana, and documents a period as a guard at the state prison in Deer Lodge. That prison experience is a striking part of the record for a writer whose first Weird Tales story was “The Ghost Guard,” set around a haunted prison tower.

Irvine’s stories appeared mostly in Detective Story Magazine and Western Story Magazine, alongside work for other popular periodicals. He published four stories in Weird Tales between 1923 and 1927. “The Ghost Guard,” in the March 1923 debut issue, was his first. He later wrote for the screen as a scenario reader and continued public-speaking work. These facts survive through magazine credits and research drawn from records such as draft and newspaper material; they do not make the fictional incidents of “The Ghost Guard” autobiographical. The byline offers the best starting point for reading a career otherwise scattered across many short-lived magazines.