Pulp Review: The Eyes of the Shadow

Street & Smith had a hit on their hands with the Shadow, and the second issue of Shadow Magazine hit stands in July of 1931 featuring The Eyes of the Shadow.

The story concerns itself with Bruce Duncan, who's rich uncle Harvey recently passed, being awakened in the night from a foggy sleep to see an ape-like creature stealing something from a hidden safe in his bedroom.

Harvey Duncan had saved a Czarist general during the Russian Revolution. The general had hidden away a large fortune, and had promised it to seven men who had helped him greatly, and Harvey was entrusted with the secret messages that would summon the men to a meeting place when the time came to distribute the reward. That was what was stolen from Bruce's room that night.

Worried, Bruce seeks out an old acquaintance of his uncle's, Isaac Coffran, who might know about Harvey's situation.

Meanwhile, Harry Vincent, agent of the Shadow, has a chance encounter on a train with Steve Cronin, a gangster and hired killer from the The Living Shadow. Cronin doesn't recognize Vincent, so the agent follows Cronin to Harrisburg, PA and tries to worm his way into Cronin's current scheme. Cronin suspects something, and saps Vincent, leaving him to die at a railroad crossing, but fate delays the train, allowing Vincent to wake up in time to drive to safety.

Pieces of a puzzle begin forming. Several prominent men have disappeared over the course of several weeks, each secretly one of the heirs to the Russian general's fortune. Meanwhile, Bruce stumbles into a trap laid by the sinister Coffran...

Expanding on the first story, Harry Vincent remains the real protagonist, with fellow agent Claude Fellows and Bruce Duncan acting as secondary viewpoint characters. The beginning establishes that weird crimes are the domain of the Shadow, and a murderous ape-man is a solid way to set the tone.

Without delving into the juicy plot details, I can tell you that the story has several excellent set-pieces. Bruce Duncan being saved from a death trap house by his Hindu servant Abdul and Harry Vincent (and the Shadow) and a thrilling showdown in rural Pennsylvania that starts with an abandoned cemetery and ends with a watery grave.

The real showstopper segment is in the middle though, with the Shadow tailing Coffran's henchman into a criminal hangout and willingly walking into a trap where he brings a gun to a knife fight, and has to survive several dozen armed thugs. Its great.

It marks the first appearance of the Shadow as Lamont Cranston, wealthy young man about town. While Walter Gibson's pulp stories would eventually reveal that Cranston was not the real identity of the Shadow, the 1937 radio show would run with the idea. Another difference with the radio version, which depicted the Shadow as a bodiless voice, is how this story takes great care to emphasize the Shadow's eyes blazing with righteous indignation when he's on the prowl. It'll be interesting if this character trait continues or if Gibson later abandoned it in favor of something else.

Its probably purely coincidental that the first story where a dark avenger of justice is revealed to secretly be a wealthy playboy also features a rich young man named BRUCE. Pure coincidence. Surely. 

Is The Eyes of the Shadow good? Hell yes. Its a brisk, action packed thriller that ramps up the supernatural side elements of the Shadow while also making him more human, and placing much of the important action in small town Pennsylvania is a great change of pace from the concrete jungles of New York City. Totally recommended.

Pulp Review: The Planet of Peril

It is a weird coincidence that many of the stories I've read on my journey into pulp literature were published in the pages of Argosy. True, much of it comes from the fact that I've been reading a lot of Burroughs & Merritt over the last year (who are giants of the era), but when it comes to discussion of pulp magazines themselves, Argosy in the 10s and 20s doesn't get as much mention in my Pulp Revolution running crew as Weird Tales or Astounding, or even the later Analog and Planet Stories. I'd guess because it lacks a strong editorial personality like Farnsworth Wright, Hugo Gernsback or John W. Campbell. Just an observation.

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891-1946) was a pulp author closely associated with Weird Tales, with his first published story appearing in that magazine's first issue in 1923. An assistant editor and regular story contributor to Weird Tales, he would also find success with Argosy before becoming a literary agent. His most famous client? Robert E. Howard.

The Planet of Peril is the first of Kline's Venus stories, planetary romance swashbucklers in the same vein as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series. It was first serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly in 1929 and published as a novel that same year. Here, Robert Grandon is a WWI veteran who's bored with the modern world when he's approached by a Dr. Morgan who offers him a route to adventure and excitement. Grandon agrees and through a process of hypnosis Dr. Morgan sends Grandon's mind across space and time to Venus, where he mentally swaps places with the lost Prince of Uxpo. Awakening as a slave of the fearsome kingdom of Reabon, Grandon wastes no time in leading a prisoners' revolt and running into the deadly jungles of Zarovia (the locals' name for Venus).

Through various happenstances, he rescues Queen Vernia of Reabon, a commanding woman of action who was responsible for imprisoning Grandon's body before he arrived. Proud,haughty and beautiful, Grandon naturally falls in love with her, and the two travel across Venus to get her back to Reabon within a year or else her political rivals will usurp her throne because of byzantine Zarovian laws.

This is an obvious imitation of John Carter, aimed at fans of that series (which is probably why Argosy picked it up. Burroughs got his start in their pages with A Princess of Mars and Tarzan). The story moves at a fast clip. Perhaps too fast, at times. When Grandon rescues Vernia from a giant monster threatening to eat her, its built up as a great threat, and Grandon quickly dispatches it. This happens semi-regularly throughout the book. The sabit sequence is satisfying because it takes a little more time, starting with the horrors of people being forced into communal living conditions (even being unable to choose who they mate with) against their will and ending in a titanic battle where thousands of the giant ants are killed in the revolt.

Its got action, adventure, and romance aplenty, though the quality isn't as high as Burroughs. There's a few pieces of convenient deus ex machina plot resolutions here and there, but even so, its great fun when carnivorous bird-men are being gunned down from an airship over a lake made of lava. Vernia is an amazingly strong female character, just a few steps shy of Dejah Thoris. I do recommend it, though in a “If you enjoyed A Princess of Mars, then you'll enjoy this” sort of way.

Appendix N Review: The High Crusade

An English baron, Sir Roger de Tourneville, is mustering a force to aid King Edward III in his wars in France.

And then a Wersgor spaceship arrives over the small town in Lincolnshire where Roger is mustering. The little blue men inside the scoutship attack, the English storm the ship and kill all but one of the aliens, and Sir Roger gets a bright idea: force the surviving alien, Branithar, to fly the English force to France, and from there they can fly to the Holy Land. Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately for them, Branithar has other ideas, and plots a course for Tharixan, a Wersgor colony world, and thus, Poul Anderson's 1960 novel The High Crusade begins. Originally serialized in Astounding/Analog Science Fiction and Fact, it was published as a novel by Doubleday that same year.

Like Three Hearts and Three Lions, the story is told within a framing device. In in, an expedition from Earth comes across a curious historical record of how a bunch of Medieval Englishmen became the first humans to travel the spaceways. The main narrative is told by Brother Parvus, a scholar and clergyman accompanying Sir Roger's wild adventure.

The Englishmen, being medieval, are flabbergasted by the alien technology they encounter, but Roger counters with a deep cunning born in a feudal court system, and a tireless bravado that borders on recklessness. Outnumbered and outgunned by the hostile Wersgorix, his greatest advantage is his boldness in seizing the initiative and outmaneuvering the rigid “advancements” of the aliens. They are so used to impersonal, long-range warfare that when the English draw them into close quarters, the outcome is invariably the same.

The goal is to return home to Earth, but as the hope of that dwindles, Sir Roger's drive pushes him to conquer Tharixan, which strains his relationship with his wife, Catherine. She seeks succor in the company of the handsome young Sir Owain Montbelle, and you can guess that there are going to be problems.

The High Crusade is commonly billed as a satire, and in many ways it is. The idea that a bunch of Medieval Englishmen can be ripped away from Earth and go about conquering a mighty space empire seems silly. It is silly, when described that way.

And yet, the strength of the novel is that it plays everything completely straight. There is no single trace of irony, nor a smirk at the audience that this is as absurd as it sounds. It is committed to the kayfabe and that's how the story is able to work.

Because the story is told with a straight face, it absorbs the reader into it, and it transforms from a “ha ha, Deus Vult in space” concept into a swashbuckling adventure story about a nobleman forced to rise to the position of a conqueror. The climax of the story isn't the conquest of the Wersgorix Empire, but is rather about resolving the crumbling marriage of Roger and Catherine. With sword fighting.

I can't recommend The High Crusade enough. Its an absolute joy to read, both as an action-comedy and as well-done speculative fiction. Anderson wrote a sequel called Quest in 1983, and there was a movie adaptation in 1994 by Roland Emmerich, which is apparently terrible.

Pulp Review: The Skylark of Space

Star Wars casts a long shadow across science fiction and fantasy. For most people in living memory, it is THE example of the power of Space Opera on audiences. But George Lucas stands on the shoulders of another giant: Alex Raymond, the creator of Flash Gordon, and Raymond stands on the biggest shoulders in all of Space Opera, a humble food engineer specializing in donut mixes from Sheboygan, Michigan, named Edward Elmer “Doc” Smith (1890-1965).

Living in Washington DC after graduating college in 1914 with two chemical engineering degrees, he began writing what would become the very first Space Opera story in 1915, initially co-writing it with Lee Hawkins Garby, the wife of one of his college friends, who agreed to help write some of the romance plot. Working on-and-off on it while he pursued his doctorate, he would finish The Skylark of Space in 1920. After submitting it to various publications for eight years, editor Hugo Gernsback eventually bought the story and began serializing it in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories. It was a success, which would spawn three sequels and a hardcover edition (that was significantly edited from the serial) being published in1946.

The Skylark of Space begins innocently enough as an example of the older Victorian “Edisonade” story, where a brilliant and brave young inventor uses his discovery to save the day. Richard “Dick” Seaton is the heroic inventor in question, and on the very first page he discovers that a newly discovered metal (named X), when electrolyzed with copper, releases tremendous energy, which can either be explosive or propulsive. Seaton, along with his best friend Martin Crane (who is a less brilliant scientist, but has more money and business sense) and Seaton's fiance Dorothy Vaneman, experiment with what they can do with the metal, first building a flight harness, and then a spaceship.

Catching wind of them is Marc “Blackie” DuQuesne, a ruthless, but equally brilliant scientific mind in the employ of the sinister World Steel Corporation, a gigantic globalist company infamous for criminal activity that can never be proven in a court of law. DuQuesne steals a sample of X, which begins a quiet arms race that turns into a space race. DuQuesne ends up kidnapping Dorothy, and in the ensuing struggle, she kicks a lever and DuQuesne's prototype ship is launched into deep space.

Seaton and Crane immediately take off after in their own ship, the Skylark, and then it gets nuts.

Suffice it to say that there's another of DuQuesne's kidnapping victims, Margaret Spencer, that Crane gets to fall in love with, and a showdown on a Barsoom-like alien world where the Skylark is ramming through enemy airships like a giant pinball as the wild wonders of Space Opera take swashbuckling shape.

Solution X is pure bullshit, of course, but Smith's scientific background helps the verisimilitude immensely. The protagonists are all scientists or in relationships with scientists. They approach problems like scientists do, and conduct numerous trial-and-error experiments before finding solutions. It just so happens that sometimes the solution is gunning down a bunch of hostile aliens with a weird Darwinian religion that are trying to destroy your ship. Goes with the territory.

DuQuesne is a remarkable villain, and easily one of the best in the history of science fiction. Charismatic, darkly handsome, and brutally honest about his methods and aims, he is clearly a villain, but also a man of reason. He's the farthest thing from stupid, and completely willing to team up with his enemies in order to survive. Doctor Doom written at his best reflects more than a bit of Blackie DuQuesne.

Come to think of it, the “quartet of scientists exploring bizarre worlds” comes back in two major Jack Kirby co-creations, DC's The Challengers of the Unknown, and Marvel's The Fantastic Four. I have no idea what kind of influence Doc Smith might have had on Kirby, but the comics legend was around 11 years old when Skylark was first published, which puts him in the right era to be exposed to it. But that's just speculation.

Smith's real brilliance lies in escalation. The story consistently and satisfyingly ratchets up in tension and scale of conflict in a way where the characters are running for their lives from giant not-dinosaurs on a savage planet because they needed to dig up some X so they wouldn't run out of fuel, and it makes perfect sense why they're there.

“Escalation” is the word that applies to Doc Smith. The Skylark sequels grow in increasingly big directions. His other major series, Lensman, would go even bigger, to the point of weaponizing objects so large that Emperor Palpatine would blush.

But all of that would start here, in The Skylark of Space. Its important as an important work in the evolution of science fiction, but even more importantly, its damn good fun. 

Recommended.