When I was in college I discovered The Shadow. The first of the reprints of his pulp exploits was The Living Shadow, which I probably read in the summer of 1970. It had a striking cover by an artist identified as Kossim, who I later learned was Sanford Kossim, and as my reading at the time was largely comic books and sf, it was a perfect fit for the time I was deciding whether or not I should return for my third year of college -- the student strike and my own lack of academic engagement had me pondering my future.The Shadow did not draw me back to university, but among other things it probably influenced my decision to concentrate on the subjects I felt I needed to study, one of which was American studies. In that class, for the exceptional professor Richard Slotkin, I wrote my final paper on The Shadow, some 55 pages, which among other things drew a comparison with Herman Meville's Confidence Man, illustrated by the cover of the Signet paperback, with a cover by Kossim.
Captivated by The Shadow as I was, I looked for other pulp heroes, and the most obvious place to start was with The Spider, the most successful, and obvious, of The Shadow copies. I didn't go very far with The Spider, although author Norvell Page (writing under the house name Grant Stockbridge) had a talent for keeping things moving. But the lockdown being what it was, I decided to give The Spider a second chance.Fifty years later, it was even harder to be impressed. I chose Dragon Lord Of The Underworld because I do have a fondness for the pulp versions of Chinatown, and Chinese super-villains, but Ssu Hsi Tze (Four Vermin, apparently a nom de guerre) was a disappointment. Page specialised in villains with outre weapons of mass destruction: in this case, literally, vermin, which of course in The Spider's, mind, refers to the rule of vermin, not just accomplished by vermin, including the dread Kara Khoum spiders from the Gobi desert. And, as he fears, "what the Chinese could accomplish here in America was fearful to contemplate. He would have the instant, unquestioning obedience of every Chinese, to the death." This is 1935, after all. Look at the cover: white woman in the clutches of the long-nailed Chinese villain and his henchmen. The Yellow Peril threat engulfing society's most cherished symbol!
The casual racism is typical, but Richard Wentworth, The Spider, is an enigma. He is part Superman and part louche, which fits the Shadow model, but he lacks the dark centre and fearsme intensity of Lamont Cranston. His Margo Lane is his faithful girlfriend Nita Van Sloan, and one of the most fascinating differences to The Shadow is the way Page does not hold back from suggesting the sexual relationship between the two, even if it's never actually shown. Though she does always call him 'Dick'. Oddly, Nita is described early on as one of the three 'servants' who knows his true identity, another being his servant Ram Singh, a Kato-type bodyguard and chaffeur. The others are not characters, simply off-stage presences who can explain The Spider's uncanny knowledge of events, but the odd thing is that, at least in this novel, the villain knows his identity, knows where he lives, knows where he can attack Nita, and this appears to be more general knowledge than the narrative would dictate.
In Spider novels the death toll mounts exponentially, this is another characteristic of many of the pulp hero novels, most notably Operator No5, who fights the 'Purple Invasion' in a series of novels whose body count far surpasses World War II, and stands as the apex of Yellow Peril fiction. But the resolution of The Spider's battle always boils down to the mano a mano battle, with imperiled frails, bizarre tortures and underground catacombs laden with traps in which to fall.
Of course Nita in peril is a given, but its the handling of two other female characters that is most interesting. One is Flo Delight, a 'dancer' who wants revenge on The Spider because she thinks he killer her gangster boyfriend Craven (though it was Ssu who killed him as part of his bid to take over crime in New York). The names are not subtle, in case you hadn't noticed. Flo pursues The Spider and finally is left in the hands of Nita, a study in white and somewhat stained gray. When finally Ssu brings her face to face with her nemesis, he makes the fatal villain mistake of not honoring his promise to let her kill him with her own hands. Tsk tsk. The other, more intriguing woman, is San-Guh Liang-Guh, Ssu's handmaiden. Oriental villains always seem to have beautiful women (Fu Manchu's daughter Fah Lo Suee being the prototype) with whom to tempt their white enemies, though in San-Liang's case the first thing Wentworth notices is that she is not a pure-blooded Manchu. Not that his fealty to Nita is ever in doubt.
This all may seem silly beyond words, but Page's real talent lies in the final showdown, which turns into a literal battle of wills between Ssu and The Spider, who is billed, on the pulp covers, as The Master Of Men, something to compete with The Shadow's ability to 'cloud men's minds'. With San-Liang holding a still vengeful Flo at knife point and the governor of New York a mindless prison about to unleash mass destruction on the city, there is no way The Spider could ever escape, much less save New York and America! Is there?
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