Openers: Business was being done as usual in the big outer office of the Ryan Importing Company. Calls came over the switchboard for various department heads. Men and girls bent over desks, reading and checking order blanks, typewriting, performing the thousand and one duties of big business.
Yet over the office hung a hush, more sensed than consciously felt. The typewriters seemed to make less than their normal chatter. Employees talked in low tones, when they had something to communicate to one another. The office boy showed a tendency to tiptoe when he carried a fresh batch of mail in from the anteroom.
The girl at the switchboard pulled a plug as a call from the secretary of the big boss, Arthur B. Ryan, was concluded.
The office boy looked inquiringly at her as he passed. "How's the old man?"
The girl shook her head a little. "I guess he's worse. That last call was important, but he wouldn't take it himself. He had Galdys take it for him."
Paul Ernst, "Doctor Satan" (Weird Tales, August 1935)
So what is bothering the Old Man? Was it something more than the pounding headache that had struck him only two hours before? Then, suddenly, a "shriek of pain and horror" comes from Arthur Ryan's office. Ruching in, his employees find their boss dead, with a tree growing out of his skull, "like a plant cracking a flower-pot it outgrows, and sending roots and branches through the cracks." It's definitely not a typical day at that office.
Ten minutes later, in his mansion on Long Island, the same fate came to Samuel Billingsley, a retired merchant. Threats had been made to Billingsley and, two days before, he had hired armed bodyguards. And yet he died...horribly.
Super-wealthy Ballard Walstead was the next to get a threatening letter. It demanded one million dollars or he would suffer the same fate. The letter was signed Doctor Satan. Walstead brought the letter to Ascott Keane, a rich dilletante who also happened to be the world's greatest criminal investigator. But Walstead was doomed; Doctor Satan had already infected him with this strange, unholy curse.
Ascott Kane takes on the challenge of the mysterious Doctor Satan in a battle of wits that lasted through eight stories in Weird Tales, from August 1935 to September 1936 -- making Doctor Satan the longest lasting pulp villain. The readership of Weird Tales did not take kindly to this villain, feeling that the stories did not fit well into the magazine. Doctor Satan was dropped.
[It should be noted that these stories were clearly of their time: viz., the reference to "men and girls," the spelling of "dilettante," and the numerous typos in the original Weird Tales editions (which I have cleaned up in the paragraphs cited above.]
The late Robert Weinberg issued five of the stories in his book Doctor Satan in 1974 as number 6 in his series of "Pulp Classics." The complete series was issued by Altus Press in 2013 as The Complete Tales of Doctor Satan; the series was repeated in The Complete Stories of Doctor Satan from Fiction House Press last year.
Paul Ernst (1899-1985; not to be confused with the writer of the same name, b. 1886, who wrote detective novels) produced over 400 stories, including the 24 original novels about Richard Benson, The Avenger, under the house name "Kenneth Robeson." Ernst's other series characters (Seekay, Constable Carey, Russ Tildon, Bill Risk, Philip King, and Tiger Teague) each appeared for a few stories only; Ernst (and, perhaps, his editors) seemed to be more comfortable writing stand-alone tales across the genres.
Two other posthumous collections of Ernst's stories have been published. The Red Hell of Jupiter and Other Tales from the Pulps (2010) contains five stories from Astounding Science Fiction (1930-1932) and one from Popular Detective (September 1936). Twelve Who Were Damned and Other Stories, published last year, has twelve stories, eleven from Dime Mystery Magazine (1935-1938) and one from Horror Stories (February 1935).
Several of Ernst's stories have been reprinted several times in science fiction anthologies: "The Microscopic Giants" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1936), " 'Nothing Happens on the Moon' " (Astounding Science Fiction, February 1939), and "The Thing in the Pond" (Astounding Science Fiction, June 1934).
Paul Ernst's prose may be clunky, but it is eminently readable. For a good taste of what the pulps were like in their glory, you can't go wrong.
Incoming:
- Lloyd Biggle, Jr., Monument. SF novel. "To the paradise world of Langri comes H. Harlow Wembling, a ruthless billionaire promoter. He looks at the sparkling seas, magnificent, beaches, and fascinating plant and animal life and envisions a world-wide vacation resort that will be the financial coup of his life. Langri's human population is no match for his deft manipulations, and the charter he obtains makes Langri virtually the private property of Wembling and Company." The natives of Langri follow a plan to oppose Wembling, a plan devised by Obrien, a long-dead prospector who had crashed on the planet and had grown to love it. Wll the planet become a monument for Webling, or Obrien? Biggle was a popular and readable author who was most active in the science fiction field in the 60s and 70s. Always competent but seldom outstanding, Biggle then moved on to mystery fiction. I've always liked his writing.
- Scott Ciencin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Sweet Sixteen. Television tie-in novel. one of a gazillion about Buffy and the gang. "Buffy's younger sister, Dawn, knows how it feels to be different. So when she overhears her classmates teasing a new girl, Arianna, she steps in, and the two become friends. But when Buffy comes home one afternoon to find her sister and Arianna hanging out, she's surprised -- she encountered Arianna one night on patrol. A demon had been attacking her, but Arianna fought back on her own. What's that about?" I still miss the television program.
- Ed Gorman, Martin H. Greenberg, and Larry Segriff. editors, Cat Crimes Through Time. Historical mystery anthology with 21 stories about cats. One of a series of Cat Crimes anthologies. Good reading with stories from Doug Allyn, Bill Crider, Tom Piccirilli, Jan Grape, Gary A. Braunbeck, Jon L. Breen, Elizabeth Foxwell, Carole Nelson Douglas, and others.
- Nora Kramer, editor, The Ghostly Hand and Other Haunting Stories. Juvenile ghost/horror anthology with 19 stories and poems. By coincidence, I pick this one up at a thrift store the same afternoon Todd Mason had mentioned this book on his blog. For grades three through five, I reckon.
- Otto Penzler, editor, The Mighty Johns. Football-themed mystery anthology with thirteen short stories, plus David Baldacci's title movella. Authors include Lawrence Block, James Crumley, Brendan DuBois, Dennis Lehane, Mike Lupica, Brad Meltzer, Carol O'Connor, Anne Perry, Gary Phillips, and Peter Robinson. There's enough good stories here to satisfy even a non-sports fan like me.
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields have been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
and her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree.
-- Louise Gluck
Have a good week, Jerry. Plenty of reading there.
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