Victor Martin Summersby

An American pulp novelist and screenwriter.

Eric Husch considered him the likeliest canditate for the identipty of Straka, perhaps with Torsten Ekstrom.

Biography
Born in 1880 in the US, Summersby worked as insurance adjuster, milkman, boxer, piano tuner, and was studying as a seminarian in 1905, when he sold some of his stories to the horror magazine Vespertinium. He followed with dubious and commercially unsuccessful novels. He also wrote several notable screenplays, including adaptations of his own novels.

He wasn't part of the original S group as he doesn't appear in the 1910 photograph.

In WWI he was injured by shrapnel.

He was a prolific writer doing average a book every ten months or so for the rest of his life. His own output dipped slightly during the 1920s.

In October 1930 he wrote a letter to Ekstrom saying he was distressed about A.'s (A. Rabe?) lengthy stay in hospital and sent his wishes.

He tried to throw the new S off the trail of F. X. Caldeira and Signe Rabe and make them believe that everything about her was just rumor. He felt very lonely in his life as the only Straka. (417)

At some other point he sent a letter to Tiago García Ferrara saying that there couldn't be any traces of their friend or their project would fall apart. He was robably V. Finch.

Right before he died in 1951 he recorded a confession in his cabin on a liner crossing the Atlantic and said that he was V. M. Straka and that Torsten Ekstrom helped him with Miracle at Braxenholm. His last words are "try to keep my head above the waves" (a phrase also at the end of Ship of Theseus Chap. 2) and at the end there is a knock at the door. He died from falling overboard.

The daughter of his lawyer had the tape in her attic and Eric tracked it down. However it was stolen by his coed Ilsa Dirks, in order to support the study of their dissertation advisor, T. Wright Moody.

Character
Well-traveled and well-connected, if not formally well-educated. Summersby was a tale-spinner (and, some would say, a check-casher) above all else. None of his works show a particularly active or acute political consciousness. Summersby was rumored to have occult interests, like necromancy, although there is no evidence that he actually embraced these; those rumors could have been started and/or encouraged by himself to generate publicity and spur book sales.

He appears in a 1940s photograph; he had close-set teardrop eyes, with two wings of white hair from his bald head flaring out over his ears.

Works
Summersby wrote what we think of today as “genre” works. His books (which have vast stylistic differences with Straka's) are straightforward with linear plots and workmanlike language; despite this gap, he is a candidate for the Straka identity. As in many dime novels, he featured the cliche of physicians with bags containing a nefarious secret.

He wrote his first horror stories while still a seminarian, which he sold to the horror magazine Vespertinium in 1905. Within 2 years he wrote (mostly unsuccessful and dubious) five novels within two years, the best of which being My Four Lives (1907). He didn't write again until 1912, but remained a staggeringly productive writer, publishing one book about every 10 months for the rest of his life (although his output dipped slightly during the 1920s). He also wrote several screenplays of note, including the adaptations of his own novels Salome's Sister (1913), Blood Beryl (1925), Below the Ice (1928), The Stairs to Never (1933), Death in Chrome (1940), and Forty Fathoms (1944) which has striking similarities to Straka's Coriolis of the same year.

Despite his lack of political views and vastly different styles, he is one of the V. M. Straka candidates, possibly wanting to separate his entertainmental work from his "serious" one. One argument is their common initials. His Forty Fathoms has many similarities to Straka's Coriolis as if one writer telling a story in two different ways. (Some of those who support that the prolific Summersby could also write as Straka, interestingly dismiss Amarante Durand for being too productive in her own life as well.)