The Doom Legion - Will Murray

Back in 1969, there was a drugstore in Stephenville, Texas, where I always asked my parents to stop when we were traveling through there on our way to visit relatives in Brownwood and Blanket. I’ll bet some of you can guess why I wanted to stop. That’s right, the store had a paperback spinner rack, a comics spinner rack, and a magazine rack. That’s where I was one day, turning that paperback rack, when I spied an odd thing: two books with a paper band around them, advertising two for the price of one. They were the first couple of books in a series called THE SPIDER, by somebody I’d never heard of named R.T.M. Scott. I couldn’t look at them that well because of that paper band holding them together, but from what I could see of the first book, it looked pretty lurid, so I thought, sure, for 60 cents I’ll give this a try.

Well, I read both of those books—THE SPIDER STRIKES and THE WHEEL OF DEATH—pretty quickly, and I remember that I enjoyed them but couldn’t tell you anything else about them, and I’ve never reread them. By then I knew about pulps—I was a big fan of Doc Savage and The Shadow—and I realized these were reprints from a pulp magazine. Berkley Medallion published the paperbacks, and they did two more in the series, both under the name Grant Stockbridge. Paperback distribution being what it was in those days, though, I never came across those books, and I guess I must not have liked the first two well enough to try to hunt them down. And so I forgot about The Spider for a few years.

But then I began reading more about the character in various pulp fanzines, and more about “Grant Stockbridge”, who was usually a writer whose real name was Norvell Page, and then I picked up some reprints from an outfit called Dimedia, which also did a few Operator 5 reprints, and before you knew it, I was a fan. Over the years there have been lots of Spider reprints from various companies, and I’ve bought most of them. Wild plots, non-stop action, and a level of heroic angst not many pulp yarns ever matched. It’s great stuff.

Which brings us to THE DOOM LEGION, the latest novel from the modern-day King of the Pulps, Will Murray, which teams up The Spider with two more iconic pulp heroes, Operator 5 (mentioned above, and often in other posts on this blog) and G-8, the Flying Spy, who battled various bizarre enemies during World War I in the pages of his own long-running pulp written by Robert J. Hogan. Needless to say, with heroes like that, you need some good villains to oppose them, and Murray brings back two, one from G-8’s past (just look at that gorgeous cover by Joe DeVito, and if you ever read any of the G-8 series you can probably guess which) and one of The Spider’s old foes as well (one that I hadn’t encountered yet in the original pulp novels, many of which I still haven’t read—but I’m getting to them!).

THE DOOM LEGION begins with a Halloween party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. In attendance are socialite Richard Wentworth (long suspected of being the vigilante known as The Spider) and his girlfriend Nita van Sloan. A mysterious green meteorite crashes into nearby Central Park with tragic results that over the next 24 hours fills New York with death and destruction. I don’t really need to go too much into the plot, but it’s a whirlwind of action and danger that never lets up, and Murray captures Norvell Page’s breathless style very well.

If you’re a fan of The Spider, you really can’t afford to miss this one. I’ve said this before, but Will Murray is one of the few writers who can make me feel like I’m back in junior high or high school, eagerly devouring a paperback I bought off a spinner rack for 50 or 60 cents, and I tell you, with the world the way it is today . . . those respites, those visits to the past, are sweeter than ever. I had a great time reading THE DOOM LEGION. I was already reading or rereading Spider and Operator 5 novels fairly regularly, and dang it, now I want to read some G-8, too. Meanwhile, for pulp fans, THE DOOM LEGION gets my highest recommendation.