Pulp Gallery: THE SPIDER 19 thru 24 (1935)

Pulp Gallery: THE SPIDER 13 thru 18 (1934-35)

Pulp Gallery: THE SPIDER 7 thru 12 (1934)

Pulp Gallery: THE SPIDER 1 thru 6 (1933-34)

Forgotten Books: FLAME WINDS by Norvell Page (1939/1969)

I first heard of Norvell Page in the mid-seventies, when I was into all things sword & sorcery. His two novels, Flame Winds and Sons of the Bear God, were widely recommended, so I picked them up, along with the several series by Michael Moorcock, Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser books, a couple by Poul Anderson, some Kothars by Gardner Fox, and even one featuring a forgettable character created by Lin Carter. (Bear in mind that used paperbacks were dirt cheap back then.) 

I read the Moorcocks, enjoying them all, and the Leibers, liking them even more, but never got around to the others (and when it comes to the Gardner Fox and Lin Carter stuff, I'm sure I never will).

But back to Norvell Page. Unbeknownst to me, I had already read and grokked on six of his Spider novels, beginning with Wings of the Black Death and City of Flaming Shadows, numbers 3 and 4 in the Berkley paperback reprint series that never went any farther. I then went on to read the four updated novels printed by Pocket Books in an attempt to cash in the Executioner craze. By ignoring the silly changes, I managed to enjoy them too. (I yapped about one of those HERE.) These days, Page is acknowledged as the best and busiest of the Spider scribes, but back then I was clueless. 

Now, having read many more of his Spider novels, a collection of weird detective stories (City of Corpses, HERE) a Spicy Western collection (Brand of the Cougar, HERE) and a few other shorts, I figured it was time to pluck Flame Winds off the shelf and give it a go. 

As you might expect, the book is sort of a cross between Conan and the Spider. Originally published in the Street & Smith pulp Unknown in 1939, it was written before the Spider was born. (Not so, Matt Clark has reminded me. The Spider's mag debuted in 1933.) But the manic driving force that makes Page's Spider so compelling is presaged here in Prester John--the hero of this novel and the follow-up, Sons of the Bear God. 

Like Page's version of the Spider/Richard Wentworth, Prester John is supremely confident and slightly crazy. He always seems to balancing on the edge, as if the next looming crisis might plunge him into stark raving madness. "Prester John was a man careless of death, but just now he thought it would be a good time to live," we are told.  "So, with a smile on his lips--and the blade of his sword between his teeth," he charges into danger.

Lest we be confused, the author's foreward explains that while this may well be the Prester John of legend, his story takes place a long time before the Crusades, way back in the First Century. A legend as large as his, Page reasons, would take that long to percolate. Except for a few instances, our hero is referred to as "Wan Tegri," which supposedly translates as "Hurricane John." This adventure is set in China--a China infested with sorcerors. 

As the paperback cover proclaims, there's plenty of Conan influence, including a giant serpent and a giant ape. The tale was even once adapted for a Conan comic book, which I'll have to dig out of a box for a second read. But there are differences. 

Instead of swishing about bragging about their powers, these sorcerors hide their identities, living among the populace as ordinary--and extraordinary citizens. They also have an ability I don't recall from the Hyborian Age, to "call back" anything stolen from them, making it vanish from the hands of the thief. That trick would have really pissed Conan off.

Like Conan, Wan Tegri is big, strong, comely and not-too-bright, but he differs in that he's able to hold more than one thought in his head at the same time. He's able to formulate both short term and long term goals, and pursue both at once. And unlike Conan, we're pretty much always privy to what he's thinking. He does a lot of scheming, proving himself occassionally clever, and laughs (a lot) at danger.

And Page does an adequate job with the style. As a sample, here's the passage on which the Unknown cover is based:

     Wan Tegri's brilliant gray eyes narrowed, and he scanned the tower with a soldier's mind, saw then the farther barrier he would need to pass. In the court beyond the heat of the flames, a great fountain threw up a spray like coruscating jewels, and ever in its jet there danced a great crystal ball, rising and falling, bouncing on the rising water as if it beat a deep rhythm for those dancing girls of flame. And around that fountain stood ranks of guards, seven ranks deep. Each row of them wore a different livery. Their tunics were crimson and blue and purple, cloth of gold and silver, and one was green, and the innermost rank faced outward, drawn swords in hand; but the other six ranks faced each other, two by two, and their naked swords rested each on the throat of the man who confronted him!

Will I be reading Sons of the Bear God? Yeah, I reckon so, and when I do you'll hear about it.

P.S. Some years back I posted a complete story from Spicy Detective, as by N. Wooten Page, which I invite you to squint at HERE.

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.

Spicy Western 3-pack from Black Dog: Robert Leslie Bellem, E. Hoffman Price and Norvell Page!

This Black Dog Holiday Sale Package brings you $37 worth of Spicy Western adventure for $27. And this is a great line-up. You know Robert Leslie Bellem from his Dan Turner - Hollywood Detective stories (or if you don't, you should get to know him pronto!). Norvell Page was the man behind the best of The Spider's wild pulp adventures. And E. Hoffman Price wrote his Simon Bolivar Grimes tales as a tribute to his pal Robert E. Howard. Yee-hah! Click HERE to order.

See the entire Black Dog line HERE.

Forgotten Books: Brand of the Cougar by Norvell Page

Before Black Dog Books publisher Tom Roberts began his current line of trade paperbacks, he published several dozen extremely fine little chapbooks of pulp material. Brand of the Cougar, from way back in the year 2000, is one of those.

The name Norvell Page is well known to fans of The Spider, Master of Men. Page wrote more Spider adventures than any other human, and most folks are glad he did. Page brought out the wild and crazy side of Richard Wentworth's character like no man before or since.

This volume collects two tales from Spicy Western, originally published under the pen name N. Wooten Poge, and one from Masked Rider Western. You also get some fine examples of that old spicy art.

The spicy stories have the usual allusions to sex. In the title story, our hero Cougar Charlie meets up with Nan, a babe from his past…

It was clear that she wore nothing except the sheer linen night-gown through which her flesh glowed pinkly. It was cut high at the throat, but her arms were bare, and the thin softness of the robe draped to every sweet line of her body. Her breasts lifted sharply against the caress. She shrank back and the soft linen molded to her extended thigh. Her eyes met Charlie’s and widened slowly. Her breath came quickly.

Cougar Charlie laughed. His hand leaped out and seized her wrist. With the same movement he jerked her into his arms, bound her helpless with them. The warmth of her burned through his clothing, the softness…

He could feel the quick surge of her breasts, hear the jerkiness of her breathing. He buried his face in the hollow of her throat. Nan shuddered and ran her fingers through his hair.

“Charlie,” she whispered. “Please, not now, Charlie!”

The stories also have bursts of violence worthy of The Spider. In "Hell's Backtrail," hero Slick Sherry is after a bad actor called Swede Anderson. When Swede draws on Slick . . .

The double blast of the heavy guns hammered the walls, seemed to split their fragile barriers apart. Deafened, Slick Sherry reeled aside, fanning the hammer with his thumb, driving more lead at the hulking bearded giant he had tracked down. The click of hammer on an empty cylinder he felt as an absence of sound.

He looked down at his gun, startled, darted an apprehensive glance toward the Swede. Not until then did he realize his lead had driven Anderson up against the wall and pinned him there while other bullets tore the heart out of him. His chest was a weltering mass. He fell forward with a jar that shook the building. 

Can't find a copy? Don't fret. Tom Roberts is planning a new trade paperback edition with a new cover and an additional story. Watch for it.

For more Norvell Page, I can heartily recommend the recent Black Dog volume City of Corpses, a collection of weird detective stories. I reviewed that HERE, and it's available on the Black Dog site HERE.

And some months back I posted a complete Page story from Spicy Detective called "Death Plays Knock-Knock." That's HERE. Check it out!

As usual, Patti Abbott serves up links to a lot more Forgotten Books over at pattinase.

Almost The Spider: CITY OF CORPSES by Norvell Page

I expected this collection from Black Dog Books to be good - I’ve yet to meet a Norvell Page story I didn’t like - but I didn’t expect these stories to be so Spider-like. Norvell Page, you see, was the chief driving force behind the pulp hero The Spider, penning over 80 Spider adventures between 1933 and 1943. 

Most of the stories in City of Corpses were written before Page took on his Spider duties, and offer a tantalizing glimpse of what’s to come. That’s what makes this book so interesting. While these stories are great reads on their own, they’re also fascinating on another level, as we see Page developing themes, props and character traits he would put to good use over the next eleven years.

It might even be fair to call Ken Carter, the hero of these stories, a sort of proto-Spider.

All but one of the stories in this collection appeared in Ten Detective Aces in 1933.  And all exhibit that Norvell Page trademark - frantic action from start to finish.

In the first tale, “Hell’s Music”, Carter is a relatively normal lone-wolf private detective. The only thing that makes him unusual is his background - he was once a  juggler in vaudeville. His case, though, is anything but normal. Passengers aboard an ocean liner hear an unearthly music and promptly fall dead.

In the second story, “City of Corpses”, Ken Carter faces the Blue Death. People on the streets of New York keel over with no apparent cause and turn a livid blue as they die. In this story we learn Carter has other operatives working for him, and that his vaudeville experience included work on the high wire.

In “Statues of Horror” innocent victims are being turned to stone. Ken Carter now has a corp of assistants at his command, plus a private plane - a low red-winged Lockheed Orion -  stocked with weapons for every emergency.

“Gallows Ghost” presents Carter in full almost-Spider mode. He now has a Daimler sedan (just like the Spider’s alter-ego Richard Wentworth) and a chauffeur. This time it’s the governor who needs Carter’s help, as dead people in noosed parachutes are floating down from the sky. In this one we meet seven of Carter’s operatives (“as queer a group as ever-assembled under one leadership”) likely inspired by the aides of Doc Savage.

And things just get stranger. “The Devil’s Hoof” finds Carter in New Orleans, where crushed bodies bear the imprint of an enormous hoof. Carter reveals yet another old vaudeville skill - knife-throwing.

There are still two more stories, as weird and thrill-packed as the others, but you get the idea. At this point, Ken Carter is operating very much like Richard Wentworth. In fact, if someone wanted to play L. Sprague de Camp to Page’s REH, he could expand these stories into full-blown Spider novels.

As a bonus, the book ends with an essay from the 1935 Writer’s Year Book called “How I Write.” This, too, is great stuff. Using one of his own stories as an example, Page walks us through his process, everything from getting and developing the idea to the painstaking revisions and final product. Page, we learn, was not one of those legendary fictioneers who mailed his stories off as fast as he could type them. He often wrote many thousands of unused words in search of just the right opening scene, and this attention to craft shows in his work. It’s a fascinating article, and a rare look inside his mind - much like the story collection itself.

For anyone interested in the Spider, or just thrill-a-minute pulp fiction, I recommend City of Corpses most highly. 

City of Corpses is available direct from Black Dog Books. Click HERE to buy. And check out the rest of their new website, where you'll find info on books by Lester Dent, Cornwell Woolrich, Robert Leslie Bellem, Roger Torrey, H. Bedford-Jones, Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb and Murray Leinster.

And there are more Norvell Page books on the way. Did you see “Death Plays Knock-Knock”, the Page story I posted yesterday? It featured a hero named Bill Carter. Well, I’ve just learned that Black Dog publisher Tom Roberts is now assembling a collection of the first ten Bill Carter adventures from Spicy Detective, and will follow up with a second collection of ten more. If those books are as good as City of Corpses, I’m going to be a very happy Page fan.

A Complete SPICY DETECTIVE Story by Norvell Page

Norvell Page is best known these days as man who wrote most of the classic pulp adventures of The Spider. His Spider prose has a fervor that grabs you by the throat and won't let go until the final page.

Tomorrow we'll take a look at the newest Norvell Page collection from Black Dog Books, a series of very Spideresque stories called City of Corpses. So as sort of a warm-up, just to get you in a Page frame of mind, here's a tale from the April 1937 issue of Spicy Detective. Page often used the monicker N. Wooten Poge when writing for the Spicy line. 

TOMORROW: CITY OF CORPSES!