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 

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 

The Shadow 2: Eyes of the Shadow by Grant Maxwell

The Shadow 2
Eyes of the Shadow
by Grant Maxwell
1931

Gangsters with a pet man-ape try to steal a hidden czarist treasure. Mostly it's Shadow operative Harry Vincent hanging around a cabin receiving orders over the radio. There's a squishing room death trap and an excellent shootout between the Shadow and a bar full of thugs shoehorned in to liven things up.

The first appearance of the Shadow as Lamont Cranston - I believe later it's revealed he took over the real Cranston's identity. His ability to melt into the shadows is unexplained, and he appears to have supernatural strength. He's not invulnerable - he takes a few bullets and is bed ridden for a couple scenes.

Check AbeBooks

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

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

TM Gallery: Pulp Hero

The Spider: Voyage of the Coffin Ship

Coffins and gold lay side by side in the strong-room of a liner that was sailing to its doom. Aboard as a guest is a disguised Richard Wentworth, who dons once more The SPIDER's dusty cloak and well-oiled guns for an epic battle at sea. Old Captain Homan won't tolerate any delays-the Treasury Department has sent orders not to delay the arrival of the gold bullion-but a merciless pirate, known only as 'The Baron', has a different agenda. The killing begins at dockside and doesn't cease until The SPIDER's confrontation with The Baron-a confrontation that could end with The SPIDER's burial at sea! 

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The Shadow: The Yellow Band

Reprints and back issue from AbeBooks

The Spider: The Spider and the Scarlet Surgeon

Paperback from AbeBooks

TM Gallery: Pulp Heroes

The Spider: The Devil’s Paymaster

An unseen weapon that drives men mad . . . A green gas which turns smiling faces into leering skulls . . . A master criminal who can assume at will any known identity . . . Add to these separate menaces three big-game hunters sworn to destroy the Spider -- and you have a situation in which the brilliance and courage of Dick Wentworth will thrill you as never before! At the merest whim of Crime's new overlord, citizens writhe in baffling, agonizing death! Wholesale threatened, officials threw up their hands in failure! Could the Spider, himself grievously wounded and trapped, remove the scarlet stigma attached to America's proud symbol of Freedom - The Statue of Liberty? 

Paperback reprint from Amazon

The Phantom Detective Winter 1953: The Staring Killer by Robert Wallace

Back issue from AbeBooks

The Shadow: The Chinese Disks

Reprints from AbeBooks

TM Gallery: Pulp

Double Detective, June 1940

Featuring The Green Lama: Babies for Sale, available in audiobook from Audible

Worlds Beyond, December 1950

Back issue from AbeBooks

Off Beat Detective Stories, November 1959

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Spider 014 - Death's Crimson Juggernaut

Death's Crimson Juggernaut
by Norvell Page as Grant Stockbridge
The Spider 014
November 1934

The Spider is framed in a series of crucifixion murders in a tenement block.  To add to his troubles, his apartment headquarters is compromised and he's been blinded.

The blinding starts off pretty good as a plot device.  This graduates into "you can use your sight, but if you overdo it you'll be blind forever" before it's forgotten about altogether.

Aside from the part where he's blind, a mostly meh entry in the series.  The villain's motivations are more incoherent than usual with random carnage being piled up arbitrarily until it completely loses affect.

Audiobook available on Audible.

G-8 and His Battle Aces - Squadron of Corpses

Squadron of Corpses
by Robert J. Hogan
G-8 and His Battle Aces 07
April 1934

www.philsp.com

Germans are using voodoo to resurrect their dead officers and American soldiers die in their place, ascending to the heavens rapture style.  And they would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for, etc.

I'm going to go ahead and spoil the heck out of this one, in case you care about such things.

Things I Didn't Finish - Kid Calvert

Kid Calvert
Originally from Western Aces 1934-5
Altus Press 2015

Been on a bit of a western kick lately.  I've read and enjoyed some western pulp, and got this volume on the strength of it being a "pulp hero" type volume (implied more in the Amazon blurb than the text itself).  There are western pulp heroes (Zorro, Lone Ranger, Masked Rider, etc), but this appears to be a regular western pulp, without the outre elements of a Secret Agent X or the Doc Savage.

I say appears because I couldn't get that far.  It might just be me, but the bizarre sentence structure and obscure slang made it come across like Yoda doing a Yosemite Sam impression.  I shouldn't have to read a sentence three times to figure out "The cowboys rode their horses up a hill".  I may be dumb and lazy, but this is an oater, not James Joyce.

The more literate among you are welcome to try yourselves.

Click here to read a sample.

Available for Kindle from Amazon.