Operator #5 20 Scourge of the Invisible Death

Scourge of the Invisible Death
Operator #5 20
by Frederick C. Davis as Curtis Steele

http://www.philsp.com/

The bad guys: An underground Loyalist secret society descended from British intelligence efforts during the Revolutionary War.

The weapon: The Death Star!  A different one.  Not really a specific star, more like cosmic rays.  The Loyalists can create temporary holes in the ozone layer that allow cosmic radiation to beam down in a death ray.

Hosts of the Flaming Death - Operator #5 17

Hosts of the Flaming Death
by Curtis Steele (Frederick C. Davis)
Operator #5 17 8/35

America faces a shortage of wartime materials and a gold-masked enemy threatens America's gold supply.  Operator #5, Jimmy Christopher, is taken off the case to deal with the Hidden Hundred, a vigilante army of men in skull mask and skeleton gloves.

Operator #5 06 - Master of Broken Men

Master of Broken Men
by Frederick C Davis
Operator #5 06

Our villain, the titular Master of Broken Men kidnaps the top men in various fields and breaks their wills through various tortures and psychological gambits.  In at least one scene he wears formal dress and a gas-mask.  He's been hired by the Utopists, some kind of revolutionary group who has been fomenting unrest across the nation.

The Master has various primitive natives working as henchmen, because he likes to break down the white man's sense of racial superiority by having them bested by savages.  We've got boomerang throwing aborigines and a group of leopard cultist "blacks".

That part kind of struck me.  I know the term "black" was previously used to describe Indians as well as Africans - Little Black Sambo was from India - no tigers in Africa.  The "blacks" here are a confused mess, variously described with a mix of African and Indian characteristics.

A good villain, but plotwise was kind of a mess.

Audiobook available from Audible.

Operator #5 005 - The Cavern of the Damned

The Cavern of the Damned
Operator #5 005
by Frederick C. Davis as Curtis Steele
August, 1934

pulpcovers.com

Operator #5 faces an insidious cult, whose tentacles reach into the Secret Service itself.  Worshippers of Zaava use the fumes of bhang (cannabis) to enslave victims to their will, including the head of the Secret Service itself.  Operator #5 is accused of treachery and runs fugitive from his own organization,

I've read references to Operator #5 picking up some Weird Menace traits, but this is the first time I've seen it.  Death traps involving freezing victims solid and hordes of killer ants, and the finale takes place in a hellish underground cavern.

A whole different vibe from the earlier issues - less military, more secret agent.  Fails to pick up a lot of the loose ends, like how or why the leaders face was projected into the sky, or what happened to an entire missing girl's college.

Operator #5

Operator #5
aka Secret Service Operator #5
written by Curtis Steele (Frederick C Davis 1-20, Emile C Tepperman 21-39, Wayne Rogers 40-8)
48 issues 1934-1939

Jimmy Christopher is Secret Service Operator #5, America's super spy facing a different foreign menace each issue.  While the Spider was on the run from authorities, Jimmy Christopher had the full cooperation of everyone up to and including the President.

At least the first few issues were very formulaic.  A fictional foreign country, typically a stand in for Germany or Japan, attacks America with a piece of advanced technology (sub-orbital airships, a ray gun that removes the oxygen from air, etc).  With the aid of young bootblack Tim Donovan, Christopher discovers the invader's plans and thwarts them with large scale military action.

After Tepperman took over writing, the series reportedly took a turn away from the more fantastic pulp hero type menaces and were more straight military adventures, starting with the Purple Invasion, a continuing story that went for thirteen issues.

The cover drawings have Jimmy Christopher as a generic fedora-ed G-Man, but I get a different image from the text.  Between him using a rapier as his main weapon and his ability to switch places with his twin sister Nan, I don't see him as the butchest of characters, a welcome change in a genre filled with Lunk Squarejaws.

He has a secret identity as society photographer Carleton Victor, though the only person he seems to interact with as this persona is his humorously clueless butler Crowe.  This leads to convoluted segments were Christopher goes through an elaborate series of hidden passages to get to his apartment, when the only person he's concealing his identity from is completely oblivious to the outside world.

Operator #5, at least under Frederick C. Davis, had some of the most exciting action set pieces set to paper.  The series also had a weird, clean cut, gee willikers vibe that set it apart from the grim worlds of other pulp heroes.  There were even essays in good citizenship after the stories.

Operator #5 08 - The Green Death Mists

The Green Death Mists
Operator #5 08
November 1934
Curtis Steele (Frederick C Davis)

"Tonight these Orientals are just so much yellow dynamite - ready to explode"

Oh boy, it's one of those.  The foreign menace of the month for this issue of Operator 5 is basically everyone even remotely Asian, even down to Mexicans due to ancestors coming across the Bering Strait.

The uprising is led by an descendant of Gengis Kahn, Jenghis Dhak.  The sci-fi weapon of the month is a ray that turns oxygen into ozone, suffocating US troops and causing their weapons to malfunction.

Alaska is invaded, and Operator 5 must develop a strategy that will drive them out without delivering America's arms to the enemy.

This one had a bit too much large scale military action, as opposed to the dramatic one-on-one action Operator 5 excels at.  There's at least a little biplane to zeppelin action - air combat was so much better before jet engines.

Interestingly, we have the cliche "Resistance is futile" decades before it appears in sci-fi.  Also ahead of the curve, the Red Finger backup story has Nazis as a villain years before World War II.  Arthur Leo Zagat was an author that knew he got paid by the word, and was obviously typing with his thesaurus open.