I took the notes home and wrote a rough draft. Pratt then wrote the final draft, which I edited. In a few cases — our later stories of Gavagan’s Bar, for example — we reversed the procedure, Pratt doing the rough draft and I the second. This did not work out so well. In such collaborations, it is generally better for the junior member to do the rough draft, since the senior member, as a result of experience, is likely to have more skill at polishing and condensation.

A fan magazine once asserted that in the Harold Shea stories de Camp furnished the imaginative element and Pratt the controlling logic. Actually, it was the other way around. Pratt had a livelier and more creative imagination than I, but I had a keener sense of critical logic. In any case, I earned much of what I think I know about the writer’s craft in the course of these collaborations. Pratt’s influence on me in this matter was second only to Campbell’s.

In 1941, L. Ron Hubbard wrote one of his several hilarious fantasy novels for Unknown: The Case of the Friendly Corpse (August 1941). This tale had some of Hubbard’s funniest passages, but let the reader down badly at the end. The hero, Jules Riley, had swapped souls with an apprentice magician on another plane, who up to then has been a student at the College of the Unholy Names. Another student tells Jules (now on this other plane) that Harold Shea appeared before him, claiming to be a magician from another world. The student challenged Harold to a sporting contest: the student would turn his wand into a super-serpent, and Harold could summon up his own monster, and they would see which creature won. But. the snake just grew up and then grabbed him and ate him up before I could do anything about it.

Some fans were indignant at Hubbard’s so brusquely bumping off a colleague’s hero. Pratt and I thought of writing a story to rescue Harold from the serpent’s maw and turn the tables, but after some floundering we gave up. Another writer’s mise en scиne, we found, so severely cramps the imagination that fancy plods when it should soar. In the end, we ignored Hubbard and sent Harold on to other milieux.