While browsing the Fictionmags Index, I came across this
great, slightly goofy cover by H.W. Wessolowski (also known simply as Wesso) on
an early issue of ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE, while it was still being edited by Harry Bates. I was so taken by the cover
that I immediately wanted to use it for a Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp post, but I
also found myself wanting to read the featured story, “The Ape-Men of Xlotli”,
by an author I’d never heard of, David R. Sparks. So I checked and, what do you
know, the entire issue is available on the Internet Archive. I decided to hold
off on posting about it until I had a chance to read the stories, so now that I
have, here are my comments on them.
Sophie Wenzel Ellis is a name that’s only vaguely familiar to me. I looked her
up and found that she published only 20 stories in a career that lasted from 1919
until the late Forties, in pulps as wide-ranging as WEIRD TALES and RANGELAND
ROMANCES. “Slaves of the Dust” in this issue appears to have been one of only
three science fiction stories by her. In this one, young scientist Hale Oakham
penetrates deep into the jungles of Brazil to find the hidden laboratory of an
eccentric genius who is believed to have made some groundbreaking discoveries.
And indeed he has. In fact, he’s discovered the secret of creating life out of
inert matter, reducing various species to their component elements and then
combining them in bizarre ways and bringing them back to life. What could
possibly go wrong? I’d guess that this story was pretty heavily influenced by
THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ THE MONSTER MEN. It’s
pretty entertaining and moves right along.
Next up is an installment of a serial, “The Pirate Planet”, by Charles W.
Diffin. I didn’t read this one now, but there’s a cheap e-book edition of the
whole serial on Amazon, so I’ll probably read it that way. Diffin was a popular
SF author at the time and quite a bit of his work is available again in e-book
editions. If I like this one, I’ll probably read more by him.
Captain S.P. Meek I’ve not only heard of, I think I’ve read stories by him
before. “The Sea Terror”, in this issue, is part of his series featuring
two-fisted scientist Dr. Bird and Secret Service Operative Carnes. It finds
them investigating the mysterious sinking of a ship carrying four million
dollars in gold bars by a gigantic sea creature. Pretty predictable in most
ways, but well-written and moves along with plenty of action. Even though the
two protagonists are never developed much, I still found them likable and wouldn’t
mind reading more of the series.
Harl Vincent is another familiar name from the early days of science fiction. “Gray
Denim” starts out as a fairly standard dystopian yarn, the old plot about how
the cities have turned into towering monstrosities where the elite live in the
clouds with their robot servants, while the poor toil far below, keeping everything
running without ever seeing the sun. But then suddenly Vincent switches gears
and hands us a wild Graustarkian yarn about how an evil scientist conquers half
of Earth with the help of aliens from the other side of the Moon, and then his
son disappears, and then one of the drudges from the lower levels of New York
turns out to be lost royalty, and then everybody is zipping around in flying
machines and firing heat rays and disintegration beams at each other, and then
. . . You get the idea. Vincent packs a lot into this story, and not all of it
has aged very well. This is the weakest story in the issue, and while it's not
going to make me run out and look for more stuff by Harl Vincent, it wasn’t
terrible, just too busy and not particularly well written.
Finally we come to the story that brought us here in the first place, “The
Ape-Men of Xlotli” by David R. Sparks. It starts out great:
Kirby did not know what mountains they
were. He did know that the Mannlicher bullets of eleven bad Mexicans were
whining over his head and whizzing past the hoofs of his galloping, stolen
horse. The shots were mingled with yelps which pretty well curdled his spine.
In the circumstances, the unknown range of snowy mountains towering blue and
white above the arid, windy plateau, offering he could not tell what dangers,
seemed a paradise. Looking at them, Kirby laughed harshly to himself.
Well, that certainly got me hooked,
anyway. Kirby turns out to be Freddie Kirby, a two-fisted American aviator/adventurer
who is in Mexico training pilots for the Mexican army. When a broken fuel line
forces him to crash-land his plane in the wild northern reaches of the country,
he’s jumped by bandits, escapes, and flees into those snow-capped mountains,
where he discovers the entrance to a lost underground world populated not only
by a race of humans but also by a group of savage ape-men. Naturally, there’s a
beautiful girl Kirby falls for, and vice versa, an evil high priest, some
plotting and double-crossing, a little pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, dead but
perfectly preserved Conquistadores, and several brutal, well-written battles
against the ape-men, who are really only supporting characters in this tale,
despite its title. In other words, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before
in dozens, if not scores, of lost world/lost race yarns.
But boy, did I have a good time reading it. I couldn’t turn the digital pages
fast enough to find out what was going to happen. This story slows down now and
then, but mostly it races along at breakneck speed. The cover refers to it as a
novelette, but I think it’s at least 30,000 words long. It’s certainly long
enough to have been reprinted as half of an Ace Double in the Fifties or
Sixties, and I’m a little surprised that it wasn’t. Maybe Donald A. Wollheim
just never came across it.
As far as I can tell, this was the first story by David R. Sparks, and he
published only one other, a space opera called “The Winged Men of Orcon” in the
January 1932 issue of ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE. You can actually buy
that one as an e-book on Amazon, which I did as soon as I finished reading “The
Ape-Men of Zlotli”. Sparks himself is a mystery. I couldn’t find anything
on-line about him. But based on this story, he was a fairly talented writer and
I’m sorry there’s not more by him available.
This issue wraps up with a number of letters from readers, including one from
Forrest J Ackerman, mostly praising the stories from previous issues but
complaining about a few things, too. Letters columns in SF magazines don’t seem
to have changed much in the intervening 90+ years.
ASTOUNDING STORIES OF SUPER-SCIENCE eventually became ASTOUNDING SCIENCE
FICTION when it was sold to Street & Smith and later on evolved into the
digest magazine ANALOG, which is still around today, of course . . . although
it certainly doesn’t publish stories like “The Ape-Men of Zlotli” anymore.
Whether or not that’s a good thing is up to the individual reader. As for me,
I’ll take the old stuff that transports me back to those days of reading
voraciously on my parents’ front porch. I may have downloaded this one from the
Internet, but I could almost smell the yellowing pages of an old paperback
while I was reading it. I enjoyed it, and I was content.
As usual with one of his stories, the plot is traditional: The railroad has
come to a valley that’s shared uneasily by cattlemen and homesteaders, and when
the evil railroad manager tries to swindle the settlers out of their land, it
sets up a clash between different factions of cattlemen, one led by Henry
Marsten, who hates the homesteaders and wants them out of the valley, even if
means siding with the shady railroad deal, and our Stalwart Hero Vike Gunnison,
to whom fair play is more important than whether you raise cows or crops. So we
have cattlemen vs. homesteaders, cattlemen vs. cattlemen, and an evil railroad
boss trying to take advantage of the situation who brings in a hired gunman and
his gang of killers. Shootouts, raids, and the sort of brutal fistfight
that turns up in a lot of Holmes’ yarns ensue. Oh, and two beautiful young women for
Gunnison to choose between. There’s a late twist that’s not really unexpected,
but it works very well.
I had a wonderful time reading this one. Holmes may not have pushed the
boundaries of the genre, but he did a great job of working within them. WOLF
BRAND is packed with incident and well-developed characters. Vike Gunnison is a likable but pretty standard hero, but the women in his life are complex enough that
the romantic triangle aspect of this book is particularly effective. Not all
the characters turn out to be as good or bad as you might expect, either. And
the action scenes are great, including that fistfight and some epic gun
battles.
If you’re a fan of traditional Westerns, I can’t recommend the work of L.P.
Holmes highly enough. WOLF BRAND is a top-notch yarn, one of the best I’ve read
by him so far.
The Tragon stories are straight-up sword-and-sorcery, the classic stuff that
I’ve loved for more than fifty years now. Tragon has a mortal enemy, the evil
wizard Caldec, who has taken over his homeland of Ramura. Tragon would like to
overthrow him, which in the title novella leads him to explore the far northern
reaches of his world in search of the legendary Scorpion Woman, a Medusa-like
being with scorpions for hair instead of snakes whose gaze can turn a man into
salt. Whalen throws an unexpected twist in the plot, as he does in nearly all
of these stories. Just because they’re in the classic sword-and-sorcery style
doesn’t mean they’re predictable. Whalen is a skilled author with plenty of
tricks up his sleeve.
In the other stories, Tragon and Yusef encounter political intrigue, giant
flying monsters, undead warriors, a beautiful but evil sorceress, and lots and
lots of action. It’s highly entertaining, with echoes of Robert E. Howard,
Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Jakes, and Lin Carter (especially his Thongor
series). But Whalen has his own voice and his own spin on things, and I can
definitely see myself reading these stories while sitting on my parents’ front
porch on a summer morning with Top 40 rock playing on the transistor radio I
set on the porch beside me. That’s right, TRAGON AND THE SCORPION WOMAN is a
Front Porch Book, without a doubt.
But in addition to classic sword-and-sorcery, you also get a tale of ancient
Atlantis with some excellent worldbuilding. I’d love to see more in this
setting, but the ending of “Bride of the Sea” kind of precludes that, as you
might guess. Of course, Whalen could always write some stories set before this
one . . .
“Where There Be No Dragons”, a story about a hunter’s quest to kill the dragon
that destroyed his village, is another tale in which you think you know where
the story is going, but there’s a surprise waiting. The collection wraps up
with “The Hostage of Maldon”, a straight historical adventure yarn about one of
the many Viking invasions of England. There are no supernatural elements in
this one, but it’s packed with almost non-stop action, and the battle scenes
are magnificent. I was reminded of REH’s historical adventure stories while
reading this one.
Overall, TRAGON AND THE SCORPION WOMAN . . . AND OTHER TALES is a top-notch
collection, and I had a great time reading it. It’s available in both paperback
and e-book editions, and I give it a high recommendation, especially if you’re
a sword-and-sorcery fan.
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It starts off with a nude, beautiful young woman who finds herself on a beach
with amnesia. She has no idea who she is or what she’s doing there. All she
knows is that she’s mortally terrified of something and has to get away. As
luck would have it, a traveling carnival is stopped on a road nearby because
one of the trucks has a flat tire, so, since it’s the middle of the night, our
heroine is able to sneak onto the merry-go-round and hide. Of course, she’s
discovered in the morning and winds up joining the carnival, working as a shill
for some of the games and in the girlie show. She also falls for the handsome
but down on his luck owner of the carnival and battles against an inexplicable
(amnesia, remember?) nymphomania that makes her go to bed with most of the men
she encounters. Eventually she comes to be haunted by the mystery of her past,
especially when she finds out the authorities are looking for a girl who
matches her description. And then a hurricane blows in on the Gulf Coast where
the carnival is set up . . .
Like most of these books, CARNY GIRL reads quickly and is entertaining. I like
carny novels in general, and this one focuses quite a bit on that colorful
background, although the nymphomania is the main plot element, of course. But
it’s also frustrating (also common for these books) because with that set-up
and if the sex had been toned down some, this could have been an excellent
hardboiled novel published by Gold Medal or as half of an Ace Double. Whoever
this John Dexter was, his prose is pretty smooth and there’s some good
dialogue.
But there’s no point in lamenting what might have been, and anyway, who am I to
judge? The author got paid a quick thousand or twelve hundred bucks
(significant money in 1964), did his job in a professional manner, and I assume
was happy to cash the check. I’m sure the thought that somebody would be
reviewing this novel nearly 60 years later never crossed his mind. CARNY GIRL
is no lost classic, but I enjoyed reading it and for me, that counts more than
anything else.
