Roylston Markham

Roylston Miller “Roy” Markham’s surviving publication trail is small, but it reaches two pulp magazines. The April 1923 number of Weird Tales printed his name over “The Tortoise Shell Comb,” a short story framed as a first-person account. It begins with a patient describing a haunted French château and a tortoise-shell comb offered as evidence; the closing pages change how the account should be read. The magazine issue is a firm part of the record. A specialist reconstruction, drawing on Markham’s newspaper obituary, identifies him as born in Michigan in 1885, raised in South Dakota, employed as a newspaperman in Sioux Falls and Chicago, and living in Florida in his later years.

That same survey records another story under his name: “The Scar of the Gibbering Imp,” published in Black Mask in 1920. It finds no broader body of science-fiction, fantasy or weird fiction under Markham’s byline. His surviving record therefore joins a working newspaper career to two traces in popular magazines, with the Weird Tales story the one most closely tied to supernatural fiction. Markham died in 1950. The contrast between the ordinary bibliographic record and the elaborate haunting in his tale is visible in the pages themselves: a byline, a story, and only a handful of clues to the writer’s life.