Forgotten Books: MACHINE GUNS OVER THE WHITE HOUSE by Norvell Page (1937)

To celebrate the publication of Will Murray's all-new Spider novel, The Doom Legion (review coming soon), I figured it time to reacquaint myself with the original. I've read a whole lot of Spider reprints over the years, in a lot of different formats, but it's been a while.

If you're a Spider fan, you know he gets into a lot of bizarre scrapes - battling such crazy villains as the Tarantula, The Fly, The Pharoah, The Red Mandarin, The Death Fiddler, The Cholera King and The Lion Man from Mars, while fighting off such minions as beast men, skeletons and vampire bats.

Machine Guns Over the White House, though, is something different. In this one, Norvell Page (the Spider's busiest racontuer) steps over the line into Operator #5 territory. Instead of the usual wacky weird menace, he pits our hero against a villain attempting a complete political takeover of the USA. (Well, there is a wacky weird menace on hand, too, but he's completely unecessary to the story, and seems to be there only for cover appeal.)

Here's some of the stuff that happens in this novel:
A U.S. Senator blows his brains out on the Senate floor. (And having been there a couple of months ago, it was pretty cool to visualize.) Fifteen movers and shakers of the government are killed, some by lynching and some burned alive. A Supreme Court Justice is trapped by a giant six-armed idol of Siva (see illo) and stretched until his head pops off. A Nazi-like militia takes control of the entire country. The Spider kidnaps 35 Senators and spirits them away. The President is holed up in the White House while the bad guys try to assassinate him.

Lucky for us, the Spider charges into the White House, and with the help of a few loyal Marines, crashes out through the gates with the Prez in a sedan armed with machine guns. The Marines, while they last, sing "From the Halls of Monezuma" as their machine guns chatter away. Meanwhile, the militia blast away at them with machine guns of their own. Eventually only the Spider and the President are left to man the guns. Will they make it? I'll leave you chewing your nails in suspense.

The weird menace stuff is almost an afterthought. For reasons not reasonably explained, there a bunch of crazy Hindus running around under the direction of a guy calling himself the Cobra, and they seem to be in league with the almost Nazis.

What is NOT unusual for Spider story is that the frantic action is dang near non-stop. It was sort of a relief to hit the rare patches between the fighting.

This particular reprint is one of nine done in a larger-than-usual 8 1/2 x 11 format by Pulp Adventures in the late '90s. It features all the orignal illos with reset type. It's all very nicely done, but ithe type is a bit too big. I had to hold the book at nearly arm's length to read comfortably.

Meanwhile, Will Murray's The Doom Legion, in which the Spider teams up with both Operator #5 and G-8 The Flying Spy, has just arrived in mail. It's available HERE from Altus Press.