I could never attempt a "1001 myths" project with prose pulp magazines and their kindred, even though in many ways those periodicals primed the pump for superhero comics. In the time it takes me to read one book-length pulp novel, I can read (say) ten horror stories in search of the mythopoeic. In prose pulps, I can find particular authors who were great at bringing the touch of the mythic to their stories, such as Rohmer, Burroughs and Howard. But it takes too damn long to search for myths in the hero pulps. Still, I did locate one by sheer chance-- even though both its title and its cover illustration have nothing to do with the story inside.
Norvell Page wrote the vast majority of SPIDER adventures credited to house-name "Grant Stockbridge," and ever since I first encountered pulp heroes in comics and paperback reprints, I've always favored Page's frenetic SPIDER over the faux-cerebral SHADOW. The SPIDER stories are justly mocked for being wildly over the top in terms of all the chaos and destruction the villains would unleash upon New York City, and all the violence the city's arachnid defender would commit to bring down said villains. But MANAGER shows Norvell Page being a bit more-- dare I say it-- "cerebral" in terms of bringing his myth-materials into a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
This time the Spider's other self, heroic Richard Wentworth (as well as his aides, principally his valiant girlfriend Nita Van Sloan) encounter menaces on two fronts. On the mundane front, Wentworth's police commissioner buddy Kirkpatrick has been assigned to help a deputy from the French Surete, Raoul Chartres, who's been instructed to bring down The Spider. Of course, this late in the game-- MANAGER was the seventy-seventh novel in the series-- Kirkpatrick had frequently suspected Wentworth's double identity but has arguably let his long friendship with Wentworth cloud his judgment, even though he firmly believes that the Spider should be jailed for his reckless vigilantism. Page may have brought Chartres in to freshen up the old formula with a new face. In addition, though the United States would not enter World War II for two more years, the spread of fascism on the European continent would have a French copper like Chartres sympathetic by reason of his allegiance to his embattled country-- even though the events of the war are only briefly touched upon in MANAGER.
In any case, Chartres is given a feisty, demanding character, and he has no doubt from his studies of the case that Wentworth is the Spider. There are a lot of good tense scenes between Chartres and Wentworth, and even between supposed allies Chartres and Kirkpatrick. But the primary menace is yet another dire super-villain determined to wreak chaos on New York for the sake of profit. I'm not entirely sure why Page named this fiend "The Brand." At first I thought it was because the red-clad evildoer initially bites the Spider's style by leaving sigils of his deeds on the bodies of his victims, the same way the Spider does to conquered criminals. But this brand-motif is quickly dropped. Once or twice the Spider thinks of his foe as a "firebrand" he means to extinguish, and I guess that's the most likely association, since the Brand's distinguishing gimmick is a special weapon, "the Bolt," that can spew forth lightning-like effects. But this power doesn't operate like conventional lightning, but has more the effect of a super-hurricane, inducing "implosions" that can devastate physical objects and kill people by exploding their heads. The descriptions of the weapon's devastation are much better than Page's logic as to how the Brand got hold of such a device. As pulp-scholar Will Murray has warned, no one should expect an ingenious surprise at the revelation of any SPIDER master villain's true ID.
The super-science of the Bolt doesn't resemble anything in real science, but Page's imaginative extrapolation of the way implosions work in his world endow MANAGER with its most potent mythicity. It's also of interest that the Spider also tries to bite the Brand's style by joining his gang under his underworld alias of "Blinky McQuade, safecracker." This leads to a scene in which "McQuade," along with several thugs, must don imitation Brand robes to join his gang, and this leads to a tense scene when the Brand detects the Spider among his auditioning minions. Eventually, the Brand imprisons Wentworth and sends out thugs dressed as the Spider, so that the hero will die with the reputation of being a cop-killing crook like those on whom the hero preyed. So I assign some mythicity to the trope of hero and villain assuming one another's guises for this or that advantage.
Girlfriend Nita acquits herself well here, dressing up as the Spider when he's caught, and shooting it out with the phony Spiders, even though Page is careful to note that this level of violence does not come naturally to the heroine. I also give Page props for some very cinematic writing that goes a little beyond simple purple prose. Here's a scene told from Nita's POV, one that explains much of the perennial appeal of the superhero:
"Wentworth looked so small against the bulk of the building-- small, yet the dance of his shadow stretched out hugely across the barren field. It was enormous, dominant, a black silhouette of unconquerable power-- the will of The Spider!"
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