The Spider 113: Secret City of Crime by Grant Stockbridge

The Spider 113
February 1943; v29 #1
Secret City of Crime
by Grant Stockbridge (Norvell Page)

The Spider infiltrates the underground city of Easy Street, run by Perfect Crimes, Inc, where hoods can learn new skills while they hide out on the lam. The mastermind, The Brain, stages disasters like train accidents to cover up for bloody bank robberies. Nita, Jackson, and Ram Singh are captured and held hostage.

At one point, The Spider instantly hypnotizes a hood to let him into a secure area, reveal secret information, and stand guard to shoot any other criminals who come in the room. Completely lets the air out of the rest of the story - why doesn't he just keep doing that through the whole story?

Ebook available from Radio Archives 

WWX Tag Title: Spicy Western Stories v02n03

Spicy Western Stories v02n03
July, 1937

v02n03

Sheep Hater by Clint Morgan

Dirtbag cowboy is in love with a woman who won't marry him because she's ashamed of her father. He bangs her, bangs her sister, gets caught, and is forced into marrying sis, who turns out to be a shrew. He becomes a drunkard, is framed for murder, cleared, the marriage is invalidated, and his first love evidently didn't have other options.

Rodeo Rats by Rex Norman

Contemporary crime story. A rodeo star bangs the suspect in his boss' murder, a bubble dancer used by the New York syndicates as bait in a gambling scam.

Hell in Hidden Valley by King Saxon

A wandering cowpoke stumbles across a rancher under attack.

Available from archive.org

Dusty Ayres: The Green Thunderbolt

Dusty Ayres: The Green Thunderbolt
November, 1934

Dusty Ayres is a future war pulp, combining air war with yellow peril. Asian warlord Fire Eyes leads the Black Invaders on a quest for world domination. Humble pilot Dusty uncovers an enemy base in Mexico that plans on launching a proto-atomic bomb guided missile. The series is running out of steam at this point - some good action, but mostly capture/escape cycles.

Dusty Ayres was unusual in having supporting short stories set in the same universe, but with none of the main characters, both involving a wrongfully accused pilot clearing his name.

Reprint from Amazon 

Street & Smith's Mystery Magazine Feb 1940

Street & Smith's Mystery Magazine
Feb 1940, vol 5 no 4

Street & Smith ran a bunch of series characters in Mystery Magazine - a full look here https://thepulp.net/pulpsuperfan/2017/04/24/a-look-at-street-smiths-crime-busters/

The Death Lady by William G. Bogart

Townspeople drop dead when the bell tower strikes 13 and the mysterious Miss Death appears. The Scooby-Doo conclusion involves by hypnosis and undetectable poison gas.

Jobs of Jeopardy by Frank Gruber

Jim Strong breaks up an employment agency racket. He gets knocked out twice, and is unconscious as the baddies are dispatched off page.

Double Trouble by Theodore Tinsley

A Carrie Cashin story - kind of a Remington Steele set up with Cashin running the PI business with a male front. Cashin runs across actor impersonators and leads to a dubious treasure in a mansion plot. Way too many exclamation points.

You Can't Figure Women by Ned O'Doherty

A customs agent finds a severed head in a case of scotch and uncovers a French dress smuggling ring.

Death on Silvery Wings by Norman A. Daniels

Neil Morrison of the New York Aerial Police busts up a gang using airplanes as getaway vehicles.

Murders Aren't Nice by W.T. Ballard

Red Drake is a wanted man who gets mixed up in a kidnapping.

Doc Savage: Czar of Fear by Lester Dent

Doc Savage
Czar of Fear
by Lester Dent
November 1933

Doc is accused of murder while facing the hooded Green Bell, who is destroying the industry of a small town. The kind of case Doc can face in his sleep, and the added element of him being a fugitive just meant he had to duck down in his car a couple times.

From Amazon https://amzn.to/3zEtb66

NRV: Tag Team Elimination Tournament Round One

No Redeeming Value

Tag Team Elimination Tournament

Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine (March 1983, v28n03)

The Beckoning Eye by Ron Butler

An American businessman on vacation in Japan with a local police inspector evade an assassination attempt by the Yakuza. Mild thriller, no suspense, and no twist.

Teen-Age Gangsters (1957)

What Makes a Teenage Gangster   

Not exactly a research article, but quotes some psychologists. Talks about outdated theories of juvenile crime, like comic books and lack of corporal punishment, and gets closer to modern thinking with lack of group acceptance and household trauma, but then slips back into girls getting hooked at marijuana parties. Manages to slip in some references to infanticide and explicit child torture, in case you were worried this wasn't exploitation.

Soldier of Fortune (March 1985, v10n03)

I Was There: Silhouette Shoot by Uzal W. Ent

One page quickie about calling in a mortar strike during the Korean War.

Grimdark Magazine Issue 3 (March 2015) - Available from Amazon

A Recipe for Corpse Oil by Siobhan Gallagher

A pickpocket is recruited by a potion seller to steal chins to make corpse oil. A light comedy, the grimmest and darkest of fantasies.

Street & Smith's Mystery Magazine (May 1940,v06n01)

The Crack of Doom by Norman A. Daniels

A cop responding to a suicide call finds a series of bodies, heads twisted around following an unholy screeching. Daniels is a master mechanic of action scenes so we get great fist fights, shootouts, and fiery escapes, but the reveal was a letdown.

Complete Man (February, 1967, v7n01)

Come-Across Swinger by Karl Kramer

Sleaze short in the paperback original tradition, in the sub-genre of Private Airport Noir, the only other example of which I can think of is Coleman Francis' Skydivers, though it looks like Kramer had at least a couple novels in the genre. A dirtbag airport owner cheats on his wife, rapes a widow, screws over his partner, beats up an employee, and lives happily ever after.

Savage Realms Monthly Volume 1 (January 2021) - Available from Amazon

God of the Mountain by Willard Black

Redgar the barbarian is hired to rescue a woman from a savage tribe under the shadow of an active volcano. There's a sweet spot for Sword and Sorcery, and this one falls on the short side - the descriptions and actions could use more detail. S&S, like Westerns, tend towards generic templates, and this felt more generic than most - if this is a series character, maybe future installments have more variety.

Startling Detective Adventures (December 1937, v19n113)

Fatal Masquerade of the Midget Gunman by John Shirley (presumable a different John Shirley)

The story goes for the "midget" angle even though the gunman was a full five feet tall. The local press focused on the blackface, calling him the "Mammy Bandit". Pretty standard robbery gang true crime stuff.

A Recipe for Corpse Oil may not have been representative of grimdark, but you can't expect fairness and justice to prevail in this dark and cynical world. Grimdark Magazine is eliminated.

Pulp Continuation: Silver Age

The 1960s and 70s saw several pulp hero titles being reissued in paperback.  Along with the reprints, new stories were commissioned, and unpublished stories by original pulp authors were unearthed.

Walter Gibson wrote Return of the Shadow for Belmont in 1963.  Dennis Lynds wrote eight new Shadow novels between 1964 and 1967.  The Shadow is unusual in that the new original stories came first, and the reprints sporadically afterwards.

Ron Goulart wrote twelve new Avenger novels for Warner in 1974 and 1975.

The Doc Savage story In Hell, Madonna was written by Lester Dent in 1948, but was published in 1979 by Bantam Books as Red Spider.

In 1943, Donald C. Cormack wrote an unpublished Spider novel, Slaughter Inc.  It was rewritten and released as Legend in Blue Steel in 1979.

The Spider 111: The Spider and the Flame King by Grant Stockwell

The Spider 111
The Spider and the Flame King
by Grant Stockwell (Norvell Page)
December, 1942

Oil wells are being exploded in a protection racket by the giant, masked Flame King.  Some diminishing returns on this series by the forties.  There's one good scene of Nita handcuffed behind the wheel of a runaway truck of nitroglycerin, heading towards town center during a demonstration.  She does the math and decides its better to run over scores of innocent people and drive the truck into the lake than to let the truck blow up in the center of town.

Also noticed Page used the term "oppressed minority" to describe Mexican migrant workers, certainly a step up in ethnic terminology for the pulps.

Available in ebook for Kindle from Amazon

Tie-Ins: Buck Rogers

Barely known today, and mostly for the annoying "beedie beedie beedie" robot, Buck Rogers began life as the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D.  in Amazing Stories, August 1928, followed by The Airlords of Han in the March 1929 issue.  Written by Philip Francis Nowlan, the original novellas were strictly earthbound, with Rogers waking to a world of future gang warfare after 492 years of suspended animation.

Buck Rogers mostly took off in comic strips in 1929, where the name became synonymous with science fiction.  He also appeared in comic books, movie serials, two television series, and RPGs.  The character has been slipping ever deeper into obscurity, with multiple failed revival attempts over the last couple decades.

1933: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century by Philip Nowlan - a retelling of Buck's origin story, issued as a breakfast cereal premium.

Two novelizations based on the of the TV series by Addison E. Steele (Richard A. Lupoff)
1978: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century - novelization of the pilot theatrical film
1979: That Man on Beta - based on an unproduced script for a sequel to the film

There were a series of authorized sequels based on an outline by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle:

1981
Mordred by John Eric Holmes
Warrior's Blood by Richard S. McEnroe
Warrior's World by Richard S. McEnroe

1982: Rogers' Rangers by John Silbersack

TSR released a board game in 1988 and an role-playing game in 1990, with a series of books covering both:

1989:
Arrival (anthology)
Rebellion 2456 by M.S. Murdock
Hammer of Mars by M.S. Murdock
Armageddon off Vesta by M.S. Murdock

1990
First Power Play by John Miller
Prime Squared by M.S. Murdock

1991: Matrix Cubed by Britton Bloom

1992
The Genesis Web by Ellen C. & Theodore M. Brennan
Nomads of the Sky by William H. Keith, Jr.

1993: Warlords of Jupiter by William H. Keith, Jr. (TSR, Feb 1993, ISBN 1-56076-576-3)

1995: Buck Rogers: A Life in the Future by Martin Caidin - produced by TSR, but may have a different back story than the above.  A reboot of sorts by the creator of the Six Million Dollar Man, with Buck being placed into suspended animation by Cyberdine Systems.

The Spider 15: Red Death Rain by Grant Stockbridge

The Spider 15
Red Death Rain
by Grant Stockbridge (Norvell Page)
December 1934

The Red Mandarin infects cities with a chemical that enhances other poisons, making tobacco, alcohol, and even coffee deadly.  The Spider runs around like Yul Brynner screaming "Don't smoke!" while Nina is threatened with orangutan rape.

Horror Stories, v2n3 September 1935

Horror Stories vol 2 no 3
September, 1935

Death Calls from the Madhouse by Hugh B. Cave: Women are committing suicide after changing their beneficiaries to madhouse inmates.

The Devil's Gift by Raymond Whetstone:  Remember the Monkey's Paw?  Well this is completely different.  It's a magic ring.  And also all a dream.

City of the Scarlet Plague by Nat Schachner: A town is overrun by grey-hooded dead men.  Ear pincer torture.

Mother of Monsters by Roger Howard Norton: A woman visiting her uncle ends up in a very wrong house.  The creepiest premise yet in weird menace - a circus performer is angry that his horse-riding wife is pregnant, so he forces her to wear a steel corset keep her figure.  The baby is born deformed and he sells it as a freak.  He makes so much money he continues the practice, force his wife to be a mutant baby farmer.

The Living Flame by Robert Sidney Bowen: Mad scientists and a killer in the house

The Bath of Blood by H. M. Appel: Cult cattle ranchers

Satan's Lash by Arthur J. Burks: Creepy uncle promises his niece to his creepy friend.  When she hooks up with her true love, they are whipped and she is sent to an asylum run by a creepy doctor.  A rarity - written from a female first-person perspective, which got awkward when she was describing her own boobs.

The Shadow 320 - Reign of Terror

The Shadow 320
Reign of Terror by Maxwell Grant (Bruce Elliott)
July 1948

I've read a few Shadow, each of them a little different vibe.  This is the first I've read which felt like one of the radio shows.  An extortion racket, led by an overweight gourmet, threatens a variety of citizens.  The Shadow tracks them to an underground lair and ends up trapped in a lion cage.  He escapes, in what I'm sure would have been an exciting sequence if it were on-page, and then talks everyone into killing each other.

Reprint from Amazon

Horror Stories by Francis James

Horror Stories by Francis James
Reprinted by Radioarchives

Music of the Damned
Seven fingered warriors with a triangle cut out over their lips guard an ancient Aztec treasure.  "A flood of crimson belched out of the ripped flesh."

Nursery of Horror
"Between the scrawny, withered breasts, the old crone had another mouth!"
This is the stuff right here.  With basically no set-up, deformed monsters attack a woman in her home.  Two heads, seven legs, all kinds of stuff.  No Scooby-Doo cop out here: a mad scientist creates a new race of humanity by interbreeding freaks created with prenatal x-ray exposure.  He kidnaps women and has them tortured with whips, the rack, and itching powder until they consent to marry the creatures and spawn their horrid offspring.

When Men Died Screaming
A mansion was built at the mouth of hell, raising the furor of legendary Rumptilkin.  A lengthy hillbilly-gang-rape-menacing scene takes up a big chunk of this one.

The Woman Who Killed For Satan
A ranting hobo inexplicably drives women to publicly strip naked for him, and the men who become aroused are engulfed in flame.  There's a War of the Worlds reference, as the hobo is able to take over the radio waves.

Valley of Corpses
We're getting past the prime of Weird Menace here in 1940.  Spooky ghosts and implied violence.

Scourge of the Faceless Man
Another 1940 tale.  The advantage of the Weird Menace pulps getting tamed down is that they also went off-formula.  A mutated form of leprosy takes over the town, and only magical mummy juice can grant immunity.

Terror Tales - James A. Goldthwaite

Terror Tales - James A. Goldthwaite
Radioarchives
James A Goldthwaite, sometimes writing as Francis James
The Laughing Corpse
A walking corpse attacks the crew of a steamliner, his victims die laughing with the faces ripped off their skulls.

The Unwelcomed Dead
A man takes his wife to a mad scientist in hopes of rousing her from her catatonic state.  The scientist can return life to the recently deceased, fugitives that he kills with his own gallows, but at the cost of their souls.  He ties the comatose woman's nude body in front of his legion of zombies as he whips them, hoping the stimulation of pain and fear will return their souls, while the husbands tries to kill his own wife before her soul is forfeit.

Monster's Death Song
Monster killings at an inn to cover up search for hidden treasure, Scooby Doo down to an Old Man Jenkins.

The City Ruled by Death
A convicted man raises the dead to wreak vengeance on the judge and jury.

Dance of the Bloodless Ones
Rich tenants of a Florida winter retreat have their faces ripped off after complaints of something crawling over them.

The Plague From Underground
Victims are singled out with a mark on the palm of their hands, before their body bloat up and sprout black flowers.  A mention of "addicts of the unspeakable Mexican peyote", before going a different direction.

Dance to Satan's Drums
An ancient rural cult menaces fancy city folk in town to survey a damn.

Where Goldthwaite would rip out throats in his Dime Mystery collection, for Terror Tales he ripped off faces.

"One side of his face seemed torn off by the roots, skin and flesh ripped down as one would shuck an ear of corn.  Behind the jets of spurting blood, the bones showed in grisly outline."

"Some one - something - had ribboned that face with stripping of giant claws, literally cleaned off the flesh as though raked by a monstrous currycomb."

Goldthwaite reused a lot of plot elements, the main one having victims being marked prior to their grisly deaths.  Old Man Jenkins aside, not too many Scooby Doo endings - the horrible thing that appeared to be happening actual happens, and the plot is often revealed early on.  One thing I noticed in this collection is that Goldthwaite seemed to be actually trying to be scary rather than just gory.  Early chapters regularly ended with the sound of someone trying to get in the house, or already creeping up the stairs.

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.

The Spider vs The Empire State

The Spider vs The Empire State
by Norvell Page as Grant Stockbridge
Originally from the Spider #60-62

The Spider 60, 9/1938
The City That Paid To Die

http://www.philsp.com/

The Party of Justice has been elected into power in New York State.  The Black Police, criminals released from prison, patrol the towns, demanding tribute to be paid on the spot.  The Spider, Richard Wentworth, rescues a store owner from extortion, which turns out to be the beginning of a revolution.

From here the story reminds me of both the video game Freedom Fighters and the TV series V.  Wentworth and his growing army attack targets of strategic importance, growing their numbers from freed prisoners.

The Spider 61, 10/1938
The Spider at Bay

http://www.philsp.com/

More of the same, but with the added peril of germ warfare.  Captured revolutionaries are given diseases to discourage aid from the frightened citizens.

The Spider 62, 11/1938
Scourge of the Black Legions

http://www.philsp.com/

Wentworth is shot in the lung.  He disperses his large army - I guess Page got tired of that gimmick.  He attempts to infiltrate the Party of Justice with a someon's twin and it just kind of fizzles out.

Available collected in paperback.

The Spider 23 - Master of the Death-Madness

Master of the Death-Madness
by Norvell W. Page as Grant Stockbridge
The Spider 23
August 1935

Mass suicides by members of an Anubis death cult, controlled by a drug similar to our own loco weed.  Pretty good scene of a wave of suicides jumping off a bridge, trying to take the Spider down with them.  Nita gets in on the action, donning the Spider's cape and killing a few folk.

Dime Mystery Magazine: James A Goldthwaite Book 1

Dime Mystery Magazine: James A Goldthwaite Book 1
Radioarchives
James A Goldthwaite, sometimes writing as Francis James

Some stock weird menace setups, but the execution felt a bit less formulaic than usual.  Lots of throats getting ripped out with bare hands - like snapping celery stalks!

Hands That Kill
A beastly strong womanizer was run out of a small Canadian town ten years ago.  His wife waits for him to return with the dog she's trained to kill him.  Now he's back, claiming to have learned mystical healing powers of the orient.  Someone with his immense strength is committing brutal crimes, starting with ripping the heads off rabbits and lining them up in teacups.  Now, the men that ran the mystic off ten years ago are dying one by one, their throats ripped out with bare hands, one left crucifed as a scarecrow, is face eaten away by birds.

The Devil's Highway
A lumbering, square headed brute is kidnapping people from a small town.  Weeks later they return, feeble minded and covered in whip lash scars.

Satan's Sisterhood
A series of suburban housewives start sleeping separately from their husbands before ending up dead in apparent suicides, their suicide notes forged by their husbands.  Is this connected to the fiend who tears apart neighborhood cats with his bare hands?

Mark of the Laughing Death
Hundreds of citizens find a brand tattooed on their chest before succumbing to Joker venom (four years before the Joker).

My Twin From Hell
A boy spends years in an asylum, driven mad by his father's brutal murder.  Now cured, he takes his girl to the worst resort possible.

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.

The Spider 21 - Hordes of the Red Butcher

Hordes of the Red Butcher
by Norvell Page as Grant Stockbridge
The Spider 021
June, 1935

A horde of neanderthals roam rural America, immune to bullets, slaughtering everyone before them with spears and hammers.  The first part has pretty strong action, and it's interesting to see the Spider in a rural setting.

Wentworth is framed for murder and arrested, leaving Nita and Ram Signh to prove his innocence.  Nita goes full Dexter and orders the torture murder of a hood to gain information.  When chauffeur Jackson calls her on it she says she'll murder twenty men, including him, to free her man.

This development turns out to be a cop out, as Ram Signh is ordered things like "Go to Europe, find the suspect, and bring him back to New York", which all occurs off page.

Commissioner Kirkpatrick is now governor but Wentworth refuses to ask for a pardon.  This leads to a lot of heated drama between Kirkpatrick and Nita about who loves Wentworth more.