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| Screen shot of the ePub format viewed through iBooks on an iPhone 4S |
As
I've probably mentioned, I returned early last year (2011) after many
years to a genre that I read fairly heavily in during my youth, which
corresponded with the waning years of its earlier revival during the
1960s and 1970s, that of the 1930s and '40s pulp heroes. One series
that I had only heard of, never read all those years ago, was The
Spider: Master of Men! The current pulp heroes' revival is
being greatly facilitated by the easy availability of ebook editions,
some authorized, some unauthorized. Distinguishing between
“authorized” and “unauthorized” can be rather dicey, I
gather, because a great deal of pulp fiction has lapsed into the
public domain. Such seems to be the case for the first five or so of
this series, because I found them readily available in multiple
locations around the Internet. I burned through them pretty quickly,
pretty much in order – not that it matters that much for The Spider because there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of carry-through
of plot elements. As far as I can tell, with only a few minor
characters or story elements coming or going into the series as
exceptions, an early Spider tale is much like a later one. So
when I found the next readily available source for the series to be
in the randomly published Pulp Doubles series from Girasol, I started
picking those up and reading them in a rather haphazard fashion, and
by no means continuously as I'd read the first through the fifth
stories.
Then,
earlier this year RadioArchives announced the appearance of its ebook
editions, complete with series introductions by one of the
pre-eminent historians of the pulp genre, Will Murray. I purchased
and read a couple, but still at first they were in random sequence.
And I have a fair amount of other things I'm also reading, as you
know. At some point, however, RA went back to the beginning of the
series and started publishing them in order, and filling in the gaps
around the ones they'd already released. Finally, in late August or
early September, I believe, they announced the “Total Pulp
Experience” upgrade to their “Will Murray's Pulp Classics”
line, whereby not just the lead novel from each magazine would be
included, but also the short stories that usually appeared as
back-of-the-book features, along with original editorials and letter
columns. All that are missing are the ads and the original interior
illustrations. And the process of getting the books onto an ereader
device has been streamlined so they are direct downloads from the RA
website rather than the previous, rather cumbersome, zip-files
containing the ePub, Mobi, and PDF formats together. They are also
available directly through the Kindle book store, the iBook store,
and the Barnes & Noble book store, in their respective formats.
RadioArchives
has been steadily churning “Will Murray's Pulp Classics” out for
the past several months, so that at this point virtually all of the
legendary Captain Future
series by Edmund Hamilton are available, as well as the first couple
dozen Operator #5
pulps, a smattering of offerings from other series, all in addition
to a couple dozen Spider
issues. This link [ here
] should take you to the current titles. All at a very affordable
price – about $4 apiece – considering what you would pay for any
of these original pulp magazines if you could even find them in
readable condition – or the hard copy reprints or facsimiles that
are still being published, which range from about $15 all the way up
to $35 or $40 apiece. Those are also available through RA, by the
way [ see here
]. But for my money, the ebooks are the way I'll be going in the
future as I slowly work my way through these great old stories.
Which
is a very long introduction to my review of RadioArchives' “Will
Murray's Pulp Classics” ebook edition of The Spider Magazine
for March 1934, containing the sixth recorded adventure of “The
Master of Men” (I still don't know exactly where that subtitle
comes from, but was on the covers from the beginning), entitled The
Citadel of Hell, written by Norvell Page under the series'
pen-name Grant Stockbridge, along with two short stories –
“Killer's Knout” by Anson Hatch and “The Standing Corpse” by
G. T. Fleming-Roberts. All things being equal, despite the relative
lack of any sequential continuity to the series, I would rather read
the stories in their original publication order, so the earliest in
sequence that I had not read last year seemed like a good place to
take the series back up again.
Each
issue is fronted with an essay by Will Murray, “Meet the Spider!,”
offering a brief introduction to the character, his place in the
history of pulp heroes, and his significance in a wider context,
including as part of Stan Lee's inspiration for the Amazing
Spider-Man. This essay is a series introduction, not an issue
introduction, being the same from issue to issue, but does make for a
good entry for someone picking up any of the stories at random for
their first exposure to the character.
The
Spider in The
Citadel of Hell, by “Grant
Stockbridge”
Fire
bombers target New York City's food supply, leading to famine and
starvation. To what end beyond creating chaos and a monopoly that
they control I'm not sure, but you don't necessarily read the
adventures of the Spider
for rational, well-thought-out villainous plans. You read them for
the driving, outrageous, over-the-top narrative that renders such
trivial details of little concern, only occurring to the reader
afterward. It makes for a typically frenetic tale that is quite hard
to put down, but even harder to abstract.
Here
is a very poor attempt. The Food Destroyers' foul plot progresses
far along as they proceed virtually unopposed when the Spider
is wounded and almost killed in a confrontation with law enforcement,
managing only with nail-biting difficulty to reach safe haven with
his scientific guru Dr Brownlee where he spends weeks convalescing.
That's something I've noticed in several of the stories I've read,
that the narrative seems to encompass well more than the month that
separated the publication of the pulp magazine issues. I suspect
that if you built a comprehensive time line based on the internal
evidence of the passage of time as given in the stories themselves
you would end up with the Spider's
career spanning quite a bit more than the ten or so years that the
magazine was in publication, from 1933 to 1943. But thinking too
hard about that is as unprofitable as considering how many scores,
hundreds, or even thousands of New Yorkers met their dooms in typical
issues, as well as the wholesale destruction of large parts of the
city including well-known landmarks, that frequently occurred. In
the end, all would apparently be well and – more importantly –
reset to the status quo ante for the next adventure to wreak similar havoc.
In
any case, Police Commissioner Stanley Kirkpatrick comes closer than
ever, here just half a dozen episodes into the hundred-plus
adventures, to proving that his good friend Richard Wentworth is
indeed the Spider
whom he is sworn to bring to justice. “Kirk” nevertheless (as
always) recognizes the nobility and good that the outlaw
accomplishes, and – not for the first nor the last time –
essentially lets him go in the end. In this story, however, the
Spider
is hounded by a new (I believe) antagonist among New York's law
enforcement officials, District Attorney Glastonbury, who keeps
Dick's fiancée and accomplice Nita Van Sloan off-stage for most of
this story, in jail and accused of being the Spider's
henchwoman. There is more of a sense than I've ever gotten from
earlier or later stories that Dick is a hunted fugitive, which
culminates in a preliminary hearing where he outwits the DA and would
seem to make a bitter enemy of him. Is Glastonbury a recurring
character? – I don't remember him from earlier adventures, but
it's been a year and a half or more since I read them, nor do I
recall him from the scattering of later stories that I've read.
An
unusual twist in the usually formulaic stories is that a girl who
comes into and out of the narrative, who believes that the Spider
murdered her boy friend at the beginning of the issue, does not as I
expected eventually realize the hero's innocence, become his ally,
and end up reunited with her miraculously still-living beau. No, the
boy friend is well and truly dead, and she is herself ultimately
killed in the final confrontation with the evil mastermind in the
story's climax, which sees the girl and the mastermind – who really
killed her lover, of course – plunging to their deaths together as
a fiery comet from the dirigible mast of the Empire State Building.
It's quite a memorable scene.
According
to the short summary of the tale given at The Spider Returns website, one notable aspect of this story is that this is the first
time that the Spider,
a master of disguise among his many other talents, uses the identity
of the old violinist Tito Caliepi to pass unrestricted here, there,
and yonder while the Spider
and his true identity of Dick Wentworth remain in hiding.
“Killer's
Knout” by Anson Hatch
Whether
the protagonists of this and the other short story are one-time
characters or part of back-up series of short stories that appeared
in multiple issues, I don't know at this time. All I know is that
they are all new to me. Frankly, there's not a whole lot to
recommend – or distinguish – either story. They seem to be
typical albeit very short examples of the same brand of bloody pulp
heroic adventure as marked the magazine's lead feature.
Basically,
in “Killer's Knout,” the hero, criminologist Oliver Hazard, and
his police ally Inspector Brunt, have been working to thwart an evil
figure known only as “Number One,” who has been mercilessly
working his way through wholesale torture and bloodshed to control of
the city. They are presented with a new clue – a ruined victim of
Number One's torture who is delivered to Brunt, along with the
message that Hazard and Brunt “shall be as he is.” When Brunt is
shortly thereafter kidnapped, Hazard desperately searches for him,
finding him just in time even as the police inspector is being
hideously tortured – by a “friend” of Hazard's whom the
criminologist had long suspected of being the true identity of
“Number One.” Part of his reasoning demonstrates a virulent
example of overt 1930s racism: “I suspect Number One [to be] of
Asiatic origins for several reasons. His insatiable thirst for
personal power, for one thing. And then, his methods of revenge are
carried out with refinements of cruelty of which an Occidental would
hardly dream.” The “friend” is indeed a mysterious “Mongoloid”
Russian, Basil Marakoff – as Hazard proclaims, “There are other
Oriental nations than the Chinese.” And the knout is a
Russian implement of torture, a form of whip that could inflict a
degree of flogging that could result in death, that Marakoff had been
so brazen as to boast of to Hazard. Of course, Hazard manages to
defeat Marakoff and save Brunt.
“The
Standing Corpse” by G. T. Fleming-Roberts
On the
verge of committing suicide by casting himself from a bridge, newly
flat broke millionnaire wastrel Nick Bower is interrupted in his
intention when he finds a corpse standing against the railing – a
corpse from which the brain has been removed. Through a series of
circumstances thereafter, Bower ends up confronting and thwarting the
Brain Thief – a stereotypical mad scientist who believes the
murders he is perpetrating are for the greater good of mankind. He
means to avert the human race going collectively insane by studying
the brains of healthy people – that he must harvest for himself:
“While other scientists seek to fathom the mystery of insanity by
examining the brains of ordinary cadavers, they forget that men who
insist on becoming cadavers are not men after which to pattern a
race. Only by studying the brains of the normal people can we hope
to breed a normal race! That is why I, the greatest brain specialist
in the world, shall continue my 'mad scheme' of obtaining perfect
specimens of the human brain!” You can't beat logic like that! In
any case, Bower prevents him from continuing his "mad scheme," and one senses that in so doing the destitute millionaire finds the will to live
despite the loss of his riches.
“The
Web – A Department”
The
issue closed with what seems to have been a place-holder for a letter
column, announcing that more and more letters are coming in praising
the series and its hero, but even moreso seems to have had as its
purpose flogging a new product being offered by Popular Publications,
a SPIDER ring “of non-tarnishable white metal, with an inlaid
spider of red enamel against a black enamel field,” purchase of
which gains membership in the SPIDER LEAGUE FOR CRIME PREVENTION,
an organization “devoted solely and exclusively to law-enforcement
and the suppression of crime.” Available by returning the
enrollment page printed in the original magazine along with a paltry
25 cents. Wow! I bet they cost more now! If
you can find them!
Cheers!
– and Thanks for reading!
