That World of Creativity (1932-36)

From my post in Sac Prairie I fished in the wider stream that flowed past my private Walden and eddied outward to the stars. The mails brought in magazines, newspapers, letters which apprized me of what went on outside...

          -- Walden West

Derleth had continued to write whilst he was a student. He had continued to produce plenty of macabre fiction for Weird Tales.

Since childhood Derleth had also been a great fan of the Sherlock Holmes stories. When he was 19, Derleth wrote to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to ask if he was ever going to write any more Holmes adventures. When he received a non-committal reply, Derleth decided to have a go himself. Thus two of Derleth's longest-lasting and most engaging characters were born: the detective Solar Pons, and his faithful friend Dr Parker. From their base at 7 Praed Street, London, all sorts of crimes and mysteries were solved by Holmes and Watson's greatest rivals. The Solar Pons stories began to be published in 1929, and were still appearing some forty years later.

Another major contributor to Weird Tales was Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937). Derleth struck up a correspondence with Lovecraft, and soon regarded him with little less than hero-worship. Though I never met him in the near twelve years of our correspondence, I seldom knew a man so well. Once -- sometimes twice -- a week, letters came my way on every conceivable subject, ranging across all time and human experience... H P Lovecraft provided much-needed criticism, as well as further encouragement for the widening range of Derleth's writing -- especially his growing commitment to writing in depth about the Sac Prairie region and its people.

Derleth was eventually able to repay his literary debt to Lovecraft, and to change the face of the horror and macabre genre in ways that are still felt today.

After a brief spell as a magazine editor in Minneapolis, Derleth had returned to Sauk City in 1931, determined to survive as a professional writer.

Another long-staying Derleth character was born in the mid-1930's, as Derleth started to write books. This was Judge Ephraim Peabody Peck, an elderly and slightly eccentric inhabitant of Sac Prairie who solved murders in ten novels, beginning with Murder Stalks the Wakely Family (1934) and ending in 1953 with Fell Purpose.

Derleth was by now gaining a reputation as a fast and prolific writer, which was necessary for anyone who wished to make a living by writing. He boasted that the early Judge Peck novels were written at the rate of 10000 words a day. Derleth never tired of pointing out how prolific and versatile a writer he was. By the time he was 30, Derleth had published hundreds of short stories and poems, as well as sixteen books.

And he had begun to make his mark in the wider literary world with his historical novels.