Carl Jacobi is best remembered as an author of weird fiction, of course, but he also wrote a lot of straight adventure yarns for the pulps. HELL ON THE BOTTOM is a 2001 chapbook from Black Dog Books that reprints two of those adventure stories and features the first-ever publication of another one that went unsold when Jacobi wrote it in the late Thirties.
The first of these, a novelette called “Captain Jinx”, appeared in the August 1940 issue of RED STAR ADVENTURES. It was bought by the Frank Munsey Company for ARGOSY but wound up in another Munsey pulp, as sometimes happens. The protagonist is a down-on-his-luck sea captain (the South Seas and the Far East were just full of down-on-their-luck sea captains during the pulp era) who is hired to take command of a ship owned by a rather disreputable line, and in addition to the regular cargo, he's supposed to deliver six bottles of heliotrope perfume to a certain lady. (Jacobi’s original title for the story was “Heliotrope Cruise”.) Could there possibly be something shady about this deal? Our hero thinks so, especially when somebody tries to kill him and a beautiful blonde shows up on a Chinese junk . . . and she wants the perfume, even though she’s not the lady for which it was intended. This is a well-written, really enjoyable story. The plot twists are pretty predictable, but that doesn’t take away from its entertainment value.
“The Caves of Malo-Oa” is the never-before-published story, sent by Jacobi’s agent Lurton Blassingame to the pulp SOUTH SEAS STORIES, which promptly lost it for several months before finding the manuscript, only to reject it. A great treasure is hidden on an uncharted island in the caves of the title, and after it are a beautiful girl, a ship’s captain who can’t be trusted, and a down-on-his-luck wireless operator (this during a time when being a ship’s wireless operator was still a romantic, two-fisted occupation). Honestly, I don’t know why this story didn’t sell to some adventure pulp. It’s well-written, moves right along, has interesting characters, and I had a good time reading it.
The third story, “Hell on the Bottom”, appeared originally as “Drowned Destiny” in the May 1939 issue of the Ace pulp 12 ADVENTURE STORIES. This is a deep sea diving yarn set in the Caribbean, as the protagonist attempts to recover from a sunken ship half a million dollars in gold that was intended to finance a Central American revolution. But since Jacobi wrote this intending to sell it to THRILLING MYSTERY, it’s actually a Weird Menace story and the treasure is supposed to be protected by monsters and evil spirits. The explanation for all the apparently supernatural menaces is rushed and pretty lame (as often happened in Weird Menace stories), which may explain why Margulies rejected it and it wound up over at Ace. But the actual deep sea diving scenes are excellent and the story is still fun.
I don’t know how many of these Black Dog Books chapbooks there were, but I bought most of them directly from the publisher, Tom Roberts, and really enjoyed them. Tom went on to do many beautiful trade paperback pulp collections under the Black Dog Books imprint, but I have a special fondness for these early chapbooks. They have a lot of charm and reprinted some great material. I’m glad I've finally gotten around to reading this one. I have EAST OF SAMARINDA, the other collection of Jacobi’s pulp adventure stories, and plan to get around to it fairly soon. It would be all right with me if someone reprinted even more of them.
1 comment:
I have some of those Black Dog chapbooks too, and the publisher put out a bunch of excellent collections when they switched over to trade paperbacks too. They had announced a handful of upcoming titles (including a re-issue of Robert Sampson’s THE NIGHT MASTER) that never happened, alas.
b.t.
Post a Comment