Vintage Pop Fictions

Murder on the Way! is a 1935 novel by Theodore Roscoe. It was originally published in the pulp magazine Argosy under the title A Grave Must Be Deep. I can’t tell you which genre it belongs to because I have no idea. And I don’t care. All I know is that it’s insane amounts of fun.

Theodore Roscoe (1906-1992) was one of the grandmasters of pulp fiction and writer some of the finest stories ever written about adventure in exotic settings. He spent some time in Haiti in the early 1930s which gives this novel an air of authenticity.

Patricia Dale (known to her friends as Pete) is more or less engaged to a more or less penniless artist in New York. An artist by the name of Cartershall. Pete always refers to him as Cart. Then a strange little Haitian lawyer shows up. He announces that he is Maître Pierre Valentin Bonjean Tousellines, Comte de Limonade. Pete is in line for an inheritance from her Uncle Eli. He has left a huge fortune and a vast estate in Haiti. All Pete has to do is go to Haiti. So she and Cart fly to Haiti.

It’s all a bit of a culture shock but the reading of the will is a bigger shock. The will is eccentric to say the least (and the method of burial prescribed for Uncle Eli is very bizarre). The seven heirs have been assembled and they’re the most disreputable bunch of cut-throats one could imagine. Several of them are murderers. The entire estate goes to one of them but he must remain at the estate for 24 hours after the reading of the will. If he fails to do that the inheritance passes to the next in line, with the same condition attached. Pete is the last in line. Given that the other six are villainous scoundrels there’s obviously the potential here for murder. Multiple murder.

It’s the kind of setup you might find in an English country house murder mystery and such books were hugely popular in 1935. The seven heirs plus Uncle Eli’s doctor and Tousellines are completely cut off at the estate. The weather has made the roads impassable. Someone has cut the telephone wires. This is the kind of setup you’d find in an Old Dark House movie, and these popular at the time as well.

For most of the book it seems like it’s going to be a story along such lines, albeit in a very exotic setting. And written in a flamboyant outrageous pulpy style and with rollercoaster pacing.

The locals follow the Voodoo religion. Roscoe isn’t making any of this stuff up. Voodoo was arguably the dominant religion in Haiti at the time.

There are a couple of extra complications. Uncle Eli may have been murdered. His doctor thinks he may have been murdered by a zombie. And there is a bandit uprising which could spread to the whole country and the rebels claim to be led by the King of the Zombies. The King of the Zombies being - Uncle Eli!

The expected mayhem occurs. There are lots of murders. All the murders take place in bizarre circumstances.

The local police chief, Lieutenant Narcisse, is perplexed. He suspects everybody. Which is not entirely unreasonable.

Cart and Pete will meet the King of the Zombies. This is one of those tales in which you cannot be quite sure if there’s something supernatural going on or not. Whether that really is the case is obviously something I’m not going to tell you.

This is a murder mystery and a suspense thriller and a horror story and an occult thriller. There’s lots of craziness. There are secret passageways and all the fun things you get in Old Dark House stories.

Murder on the Way! is just wildly entertaining. Highly recommended. And it's in print!

Roscoe revisited some of these themes a couple of years later in the equally superb Z Is For Zombie, also set in Haiti. And if you enjoy jungle adventure tales check out Blood Ritual.

Dr Death: The Gray Creatures is a 1935 crime/supernatural horror pulp novel written by Harold Ward under the pseudonym Zorro.

Dr Death had made his first appearance a year earlier in the pulp magazine All Detective Magazine. He figured in four stories in that magazine. In 1935 All Detective Magazine was renamed Dr Death. Each issue would feature a Dr Death novel. The Gray Creatures was the second such novel, appearing in the March 1935 issue. In the event only three issues of the Doctor Death magazine were published although two further novels were written.

Dr Death is actually a brilliant but insane scientist, Rance Mandarin. He believes he has been chosen by the Almighty to restore the world to its proper order. This will require the destruction of modern civilisation. Dr Death’s first step was to be the assassination of the world’s top scientists. To Dr Death science is an evil that must be eradicated.

Jimmy Holm is the one man who may be able to stop Dr Death. Jimmy is a millionaire criminologist and a police detective whose speciality is cases involving the occult.

Dr Death’s chief assistant has been a beautiful young woman, Nina Ferrera. Nina turned against Dr Death and joined forces with Jimmy Holm. In fact they were to be married. Now Dr Death wants Nina back.

The most terrifying weapon in Dr Death’s arsenal is his ability to create zombies, or at least dead men brought back to life in a way that resembles zombies.

Dr Death’s latest target is a mysterious Egyptian named Harmachis. It appears that Dr Death thinks that Harmachis has access to the occult knowledge of Ancient Egypt.

Dr Death is now headed for Egypt to find a hidden tomb and Jimmy has to find a way to follow him without his presence being suspected. He also has to rescue Nina. Dr Death would never physically harm Nina. The worry is that he will manipulate her into serving evil purposes.

The voyage to that tomb in Egypt is by air, by yacht, by submarine and by truck. With lots of explosions and mayhem on the way.

There will be epic battles against supernatural forces.

There are monsters of various kinds. The monsters are genuinely weird and scary. There’s plenty of out-and-horror in this tale and it gets very creepy and grisly at times.

Of course there has to be a beautiful queen in such a story, and there is.

The action is relentless, the hazards are many and the body count is high. You are very unlikely to be bored by this novel.

Dr Death is an evil mad scientist rather than a sorcerer so while he appears to command supernatural forces some of those forces might in fact be scientifically created. There are however quite a few elements in the story that are difficult to explain away as anything other than supernatural.

The lines between the supernatural, the paranormal and the scientific are constantly blurred in this story which gives it a rather interesting flavour.

It’s also a story in which the evil genius has something more interesting in mind than a straightforward plan for world domination.

It’s all very pulpy and very exciting. This is great stuff and it’s a mystery to me that the Doctor Death magazine wasn’t a success. Dr Death: The Gray Creatures is highly recommended.

Detective stories were one of the staples of the pulps, as they had been one of the staples of the earlier dime novels. In the early 1930s an odd sub-genre of the detective story briefly flourished: the weird detective story. Off-Trail Publications’ volume Cult of the Corpses includes two novellas of this type by Maxwell Hawkins.

The weird detective story needs to be distinguished from the occult detective story. The occult detective story became very popular at the beginning of the 20th century and survived for nearly half a century. It was to some extent inspired by the enormous success of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories but the occult detective story was in reality more of a sub-genre of the gothic horror tale. It was an attempt to add new interest to the classic ghost story. It was primarily, although not entirely, a British phenomenon. These stories were very popular but most of them had at least a veneer of literary polish.

The weird detective story on the other hand was an off-shoot of the American hardboiled crime story. Supernatural, science fictional or other bizarre elements are tacked on to the basic hardboiled crime story in order to increase the sensational content. The weird detective story was emphatically American. Literary polish was not very much in evidence.

Pulp magazines had from time to time published crime stories with weird elements in the 20s but for a short time in the 30s it became a moderately thriving genre.

The two stories in this collection, Cult of the Corpses and Dealers in Death, were both published in Detective Dragnet magazine in 1931.

Cult of the Corpses sees Assistant District Attorney Benton McCray plunged into a bizarre world of voodoo in New York, and his girlfriend Nan Collette is in line to be the next victim of the murderous voodoo cult. McCray is not easily intimidated by the usual dangers that are part of the job when you’re fighting crime in a big city but this cult poses very different kinds of dangers. While gangsters might not think twice about mowing down their enemies with sub-machine guns the voodoo cult threatens its enemies with a fate worse than death - being transformed into zombies! And this story offers both zombies and machine gun-toting mobsters.

With these ingredients it would be difficult not to come up with a fairly exciting story and Cult of the Corpses is fine pulpy fun. There are all the usual fun elements you expect from a pulp story - narrow escapes, plenty of action, hardboiled dialogue - and it all holds together quite well. Hawkins appears to have done some research on the subject of voodoo in Haiti. Transplanting the voodoo cult to New York City was an obvious move and it works.

Dealers in Death is slightly different. It lacks any supernatural elements but compensates for this by giving us a sinister villain with bizarre methods. Letherius claims to have invented literally hundreds of methods of committing murder that are absolutely guaranteed to be undetectable and he’s turned his obsession into a thriving murder-for-money business. Villains in pulp stories have a tendency to overshadow the heroes and that’s certainly the case here. Fortunately Letherius is sufficiently interesting and sufficiently menacing to keep the reader’s attention riveted.

Maxwell Hawkins (1895-1962) was a newspaperman who had a fairly brief career as a pulp writer in the 1930s. After marrying in 1937 he seems to have largely abandoned his efforts in this arena to concentrate on the more certain rewards of his newspaper career.

Cult of the Corpses and Dealers in Death are both highly entertaining slightly off-beat stories that should delight pulp fans. This volume can certainly be recommended.

The stories collected in The People of the Pit (edited by Gene Christie) were all published in the Munsey pulp magazines between 1903 and 1922. They are all, in their various ways, tales of horror.

The collection kicks off with Abraham Merritt’s The People of the Pit. Merritt wrote many lost world tales, all of them supremely imaginative and decidedly weird. The People of the Pit was an early effort but it’s typical of his work. Two explorers in Alaska encounter a wreck of man who tells a bizarre story of a strange lost valley containing the remnants of an ancient and very evil civilisation.

Francis Stevens’ Behind the Curtain is a disappointing story involving Egyptian mummies.

John Blunt’s The Orchid Horror is a story of obsessive orchid collecting and of an orchid whose scent is more addictive and more dangerous than opium. Even to seek this plant is to court death. So why would a man journey to Venezuela in search of such a deadly plant? The answer of course is a woman. To win this woman he must find the deadly orchid. A strange but very impressive tale and one of the highlights of this anthology.

In George Allan England’s The Tenth Question a madman is kidnapping doctors. Years earlier a doctor had bungled his case and now he has decided to rid the world of incompetent medical practitioners. So he may be a lunatic but at least he’s doing something socially useful. Each doctor is subjected to a test of his mental acuity. If he passes the test he may go free; if he fails he is painlessly destroyed. So far no doctor has passed the test. It’s like a game of Twenty Questions but you only get ten questions in this case. If the medical man fails to determine the correct answer his doom is sealed. In fact the answer is not difficult to guess but it’s still a very fine story.

Achmed Abdullah’s Disappointment is about a Russian nobleman with a morbid fear of dying. Not of death, but of dying. Atmospheric but not terribly interesting.

Owen Oliver’s The Pretty Woman is a reasonably intriguing tale of flirtation, madness and murder.

Tod Robbins is best-known as the author of the story on which Tod Browning’s notorious movie Freaks was based. His contribution, The Living Portrait, deals with a scientist who has his portrait painted and the portrait then takes on a life of is own and proves to have a stronger will than the luckless scientist.  Not a great story, but not without interest.

Talbot Mundy’s An Offer of Two to One proves that auto-suggestion really can kill. Damon Runyon’s Fear is similar in theme, dealing with the idea of fear as something deadly to the mind as well as the body. Both stories are effective offerings.

J. U. Giesy’s Beyond the Violet is another very strong story. A man is wounded in the war and his sight is affected. He cannot see most of the visible light spectrum but he can see beyond the range that the rest of us can see, with the result that he can now see ghosts. It’s actually an offbeat love story.

In C. Langton Clarke’s The Elixir of Life a mad scientist has discovered a means of draining away other men’s vital energy, giving him an enormously extended lifespan. If only it hadn’t been for that tin of gunpowder.

In Perley Poore Sheehan’s Monsieur de Guise the past lives on in a ghostly house deep in the Cedar Swamps. The mood is more one of gentle melancholy that stark terror but it works well enough.

Philip M. Fisher Jr’s The Ship of Silent Men is very creepy indeed, a tale of a ghost ship but it’s not a supernatural tale. It almost qualifies as a zombie story, and a rather horrifying and ingenious one.

All in all a strong anthology with only a couple of dud stories and some very strong ones. There’s no particular unifying theme except that all these tales deal with terror in some form. Some are more pulpy in style than others but are none the worse for that. A fine example of the quality of fiction to be found in the old pulp magazines and there are some writers here whose work I am keen to sample more of.