In the mid to late 1930s the current site of the Hilton Garden Inn in Indianapolis Indiana was known as The Fletcher Trust Building. A stenographer and secretary who worked for the company was a young woman by the name of Catherine Lucille Moore. After two years of study at Indiana University during the Great Depression, she had to leave and return to work at Fletcher Trust. She published her first two works of fiction in the IU student literary journal.
In the coming decades CL Moore as her name appeared on the cover of her books became one of the pioneering female authors of Horror and Science Fiction starting less than a decade after the genre was even named by Hugo Gernsbeck. Her stories of vampires on Mars, pirates on Venus, and sword-wielding monster-fighting heroines appeared in the groundbreaking Weird Tales magazines along with famous authors like HP Lovecraft and Robert Bloch.
She also wrote stories and novels with her husband Henry Kuttner under the pen names Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell. Many of the stories became legendary films and TV episodes including classics of the Twilight Zone and The Last Mimzy.
As the legend goes Catherine often stayed late in the Fletcher Trust building to type stories on the company typewriters, dropping them in the mail slot on her way out. That mail slot still remains in the hotel lobby.
This letter is co-signed by a group of writers, academics, librarians, and more who call on the Hilton corporation to honor this spot with a plaque that explains the history and importance of CL Moore to the fabric of the arts in the Hoosier State and various genres that she is a legend in.
We are willing to raise the money and pay for it, but we need to work with Hilton to make sure we can do this.
If you agree, we will organize a Catherine-Con at the hotel to celebrate the installation and have speakers and workshops at the hotel. We see this is an excellent opportunity for PR for the hotel and will teach valuable history.
Signed,
David Agranoff (Author of The Last Night to Kill Nazis and co-host of Dickheads Philip K. Dick Podcast)
Laird Barron (Author of the Isiah Coleridge trilogy)
Rebecca Baumann (Head of Curatorial Services and Curator of Modern Books, The Lilly Library)
Joachim Boaz (SF critic and historian)
Maurice Broaddus (Author of The Sweep of Stars)
James Chambers (Author of On the Night Border)
Steve Davidson (Publisher of Amazing Stories)
Brian Keene (Author and World Horror Grandmaster)
Lisa Kroger (Author and co-host of Monster She Wrote Podcast)
Alec Nevala-Lee (Historian and author of Astounding)
Lisa Morton (Author and Halloween expert)
Mary Sangiovanni (author of Chills and many works of cosmic horror)
John Shirley (Screenwriter of The Crow, author and Cybperpunk legend)
F.Paul Wilson (bestselling author of the Repairman Jack series)
Lisa Yaszek (Editor of the Future is Female and Professor teaching Sci-fi at Georgia Tech)
More to come….
If you would like to co-sign this letter before it is sent to Hilton send an e-mail and the title you want to be credited with to CLMooreproject@gmail.com
David Agranoff Grew up in Bloomington, Indiana hanging in the park that inspired this novel. His future wife worked at the Spoon serving the real-life Electric Fred. They have two of his notebooks and a house full of rescued animals. David is a novelist, screenwriter and a Horror and Science Fiction critic. He is the Splatterpunk and Wonderland book award nominated author of 11 books including the novels the WW II Vampire novel – The Last Night to Kill Nazis, and the science fiction novel Goddamn Killing Machines from CLASH BOOKS, The Cli-fi novel Ring of Fire, Punk Rock Ghost Story He co-wrote a novel Nightmare City (with Anthony Trevino) that he likes to pitch as The Wire if Clive Barker and Philip K Dick were on the writing staff. As a critic he has written more than a thousand book reviews on his blog Postcards from a Dying World which has recently become a podcast, featuring interviews with award-winning and bestselling authors such Stephen Graham Jones, Paul Tremblay, Alma Katsu and Josh Malerman. For the last five years David has co-hosted the Dickheads podcast, a deep-dive into the work of Philip K. Dick reviewing his novels in publication order as well as the history of Science Fiction. David’s non-fiction essays have appeared on Tor.com, NeoText and Cemetery Dance. He just finished writing a book, Unfinished PKD on the unpublished fragments and outlines of Philip K. Dick. He lives in San Diego where you can find him hooping in pick-up games and taking too many threes.
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