Sunday, August 6, 2023

THE READING RHEUM: THE SPIDER VS THE EMPIRE STATE (1938)


 


I preface this review by stating that I'm far from an expert on the pulp character The Spider. Over the ten years in which the character appeared in his own magazine, a little over fifty novel-length stories appeared, of which I may have read a dozen or so in reprinted forms. Norvell Page wrote the vast majority of these novels, and it's probable that most of the works I've read, with their grotesquerie and blood-curdling ultraviolence, were stories by Page. What I value most in SPIDER stories is their apocalyptic delirium, in which the hero's domain of New York City is often razed to the ground in one narrative, only to appear in the next totally back to normal. So when I heard that Page had written a big story, "The Black Police Trilogy," which extended over three consecutive issues of the magazine, I ordered it.

The short verdict: delirium is hard to sustain over a long haul.

An excellent foreword by scholar Thomas Krabacher explains that Popular Publications, the house that issued the SPIDER adventures, also came out with a magazine with a similar apocalyptic feel. OPERATOR FIVE began in 1934, the year after the SPIDER began. Whereas the arachnid protagonist confined himself to menaces to New York, in OPERATOR FIVE hero Jimmy Christopher always dealt with huge invasions of the United States by predacious foreign armies. While many modern readers might deem this focus on foreign threats to have fascist overtones, Krabacher demonstrates that publisher Harry Steeger was a thoroughgoing liberal. His publications conjured up larger-than-life menaces so that heroes, whether empowered by the government or operating on their own, could vanquish them and return a devastated populace to normalcy. Krabacher asserts that Steeger may have been trying to cross-pollinate the approaches of the two magazines by having the Spider battle a more long-range threat. 

In EMPIRE-- a title apparently imposed on the trilogy by some modern editor-- a criminal schemer called "The Master" duplicates Hitler's 1933 feat: that of getting a repressive political party legally elected to supreme power, if only in the state of New York. (Very little is said in EMPIRE about how the other 48 states react to this state of affairs, much less the Federal government.) The Master immediately enacts through his proxies draconian laws, and liberates from the state's prisons a horde of ruthless criminals. These hardened crooks become the Black Police, who devote all their time to collecting illegal taxes and torturing citizens who don't pay. The Spider, a,k.a. millionaire Richard Wentworth, cannot counteract this peril with no more than his usual small band of helpers. Instead, the Spider must become a revolutionary figure, inspiring countless brave citizens to take up arms against the tyrants and their servitors.

Though Page's trilogy is never completely dull, its many scenes of inspiring derring-do and sacrifice become repetitive after a while. My overall impression is that, since Page could not concentrate his imaginative talents in a compact story of apocalyptic action, he resorted to repeating his revolution-themed scenarios as a strategy to simply extend the story artificially. A handful of new characters appear to assist the Spider's band, but none of the newbies are memorable. Nita Van Sloan, Wentworth's inamorata and the pulps' epitome of the courageous woman, gets some strong scenes but these too fall into something of a rut, while familiar aides like Ram Singh are often sidelined. The Black Police are one-note villains and the Master is just a standard mystery-fiend. (Given the evildoer's name, Page foregoes to use the hero's usual epithet, "the Master of Men.") The Master has a few gimmicks, like a virulent plague he uses to quell rebellion. But he has no personality and the Big Reveal of his identity carries no weight.

So THE SPIDER VS. THE EMPIRE STATE adds up to little more than a so-so pulp adventure with no real political connotations and excessively padded. It's surely one of the few times I found the foreword more entertaining than the novel proper.



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