The Spider: The Hangman From Hell - Will Murray

As I’ve mentioned before, I have vivid memories of how I discovered both The Spider and Operator 5: I bought the first two Berkley reprints of The Spider, THE SPIDER STRIKES! and THE WHEEL OF DEATH, both by R.T.M. Scott, when they were packaged together in a buy-one-get-one-free deal, off the paperback spinner rack at a drugstore in Stephenville, Texas, where we always stopped when my parents were going to visit relatives in Blanket, Zephyr, and Brownwood. I picked up the Corinth Regency paperback reprint of the Operator 5 novel LEGIONS OF THE DEATH MASTER (by Frederick C. Davis writing under the house name Curtis Steele) off the spinner rack in Trammell’s Pak-a-Bag Grocery in downtown Azle. (Several times a week, I drive by the building where Trammell’s used to be. It’s now a Mexican restaurant, and whenever I go in there, I can look over in the bar area and see the exact spot that spinner rack used to stand.)

But I digress, as the saying goes. You know you can’t get a straight review from me without a healthy dose of nostalgia accompanying it. So, to get to why we’re all here today . . . THE HANGMAN FROM HELL is the latest novel from Will Murray teaming up the iconic pulp heroes The Spider and Operator 5, and man, is it good! One of Richard Wentworth’s associates who keeps an eye on crime in Europe for him comes to New York with some important information. But when Wentworth meets the ship he’s traveling on, he finds that his informant has been murdered. Then Wentworth’s assistant Ram Singh is attacked and nearly killed by a giant attacker wielding a hangman’s noose attached to a razor-sharp sickle. Wentworth’s investigation reveals that this attacker, a deadly assassin known as The Hangman, works for the burgeoning political terror group known as the Purple Shirts, and he’s come to the United States for the specific purpose of killing Operator 5, America’s top secret intelligence ace.

Wentworth and Jimmy Christopher, Operator 5’s real name, have crossed paths before and an uneasy truce exists between them. They usually have the same goal but much different methods in achieving it. Operator 5, as a government agent, has to stay within the law (mostly) while Wentworth, as the vigilante known as The Spider, takes the law into his own hands and metes out what he considers justice without hesitation. It's an explosive relationship as both of them try to track down the Hangman and find out the details of the terrible scheme the Purple Shirts are planning to coincide with a big rally in Central Park.

There’s not quite as much breakneck action in this novel as there’s been in previous Spider novels by Murray, but the investigation by our two heroes plays out with compelling urgency, and when violence does erupt, it's packed with the apocalyptic excitement that’s a trademark of the Spider yarns going back to Norvell Page, the principal author of the series back in its pulp days. Page came up with some great murder methods for his villains to use, but Murray goes him one better in this novel: the attack on New York by the Purple Shirts is one of the most ghastly I’ve encountered in pulp adventure fiction. It’s truly creepy stuff, but it’s also very effective in raising the stakes and making the reader root for Wentworth and Jimmy Christopher even more.

I also like the way Murray ties this novel in with several of the original novels from both series. It fits perfectly and naturally and there’s never a sense of it being forced into canon. This is the way to write new novels based on classic pulp series, which, of course, is exactly what you’d expect from Will Murray.

I had a great time reading THE HANGMAN FROM HELL, as you’d expect since I’m a big fan of both The Spider and Operator 5. It’s one of the best books I’ve read so far this year and I give it a very high recommendation. And it’s put me in the mood to read some of the original pulp novels again. Whether I’ll get around to it, we’ll have to wait and see. But if I do, you’ll read the reviews here, as usual.

The Spider: Scourge of the Scorpion - Will Murray

Will Murray is back with his third novel featuring the iconic pulp hero character The Spider, following THE DOOM LEGION and FURY IN STEEL. As in those earlier novels, in SCOURGE OF THE SCORPION Murray brings in some heroes and villains used in other Popular Publications pulps, making it clear that all of Popular’s characters existed in the same universe. This time he teams up The Spider with one of most obscure pulp heroes, The Skull Killer. The Skull Killer is obscure for two reasons: he was never the star of his own pulp but rather functioned as the hero in a couple of pulps that spotlighted the villains, THE OCTOPUS and THE SCORPION. There was only one issue of each, and it’s a common belief in pulp fandom that the lead novel in THE SCORPION was a rewritten yarn that was intended for the second issue of THE OCTOPUS, except the first issue sold so badly that the publisher thought a title change might be helpful. In fact, that may well be what happened.

But regardless of that, Murray comes up with a very clever way to tie together the mystery of The Octopus and The Scorpion and make something totally new out of their history without retconning anything. It’s an audacious approach that succeeds extremely well. I know something about working with other people’s characters and trying to find ways to make sense out of apparent contradictions, and it’s not always an easy thing to do. Murray pulls it off and does a great job.

And of course, he also captures the characters of Richard Wentworth (The Spider), Nita Van Sloan, Ram Singh, and the rest of the supporting cast perfectly. As for the story itself, it races along at a breakneck pace as you’d expect. The Cult of the Purple Eyes, led previously by both The Octopus and The Scorpion, is back, with The Scorpion still in command, and once again he’s turning innocent people into his mindless minions by a method that causes their eyes to change color and become a bright purple. He’s also infecting hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent New Yorkers with a deadly combination of scorpion venom and tetanus that causes them to come down with lockjaw. Wentworth’s faithful assistants Ram Singh and Jackson fall victim to this plague, and Nita Van Sloan is converted into one of The Scorpion’s purple-eyed zombies. Wentworth is left alone to battle against this horrible menace . . .

Oh, wait, he’s not, because The Skull Killer, who defeated The Octopus and The Scorpion the first time, is still around and teams up with The Spider to save New York City. But just when you think they’ve succeeded . . . things get worse.

SCOURGE OF THE SCORPION is a great pulp adventure novel with a very nice blend of shuddery horror and over-the-top action. At one point The Spider, being pursued by bad guys, hides out in a morgue, climbs into an empty drawer, closes it behind him, rolls over, and calmly goes to sleep. You don’t get much more badass than that. As I said, Murray’s plotting is excellent, and everything comes to a very satisfactory conclusion. I had a wonderful time reading this book, and if you’re a pulp fan in general, or a fan of The Spider (I have been for close to sixty years now, since the first paperback reprints), I give it my highest recommendation.

The Wild Adventures of the Spider: Fury in Steel - Will Murray

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that my introduction to The Spider was in 1969, when Berkley Medallion reprinted the first two books in the series, THE SPIDER STRIKES and THE WHEEL OF DEATH, both by R.T.M. Scott. They released these in an odd, “buy one, get one free” scheme which saw the two paperbacks bound together with a paper band around them. I bought them off the spinner rack in a drugstore in Stephenville, Texas. My mother and I were on our way to my aunt’s house in Blanket, Texas, and I usually talked her into stopping at that store in Stephenville because they had good paperback and comic book spinners, as well as a big magazine rack where I saw some of the late issues of RANCH ROMANCES but didn’t buy any because I was spending my money on paperbacks like those two Spider novels.

Anyway, to get back to the subject at hand . . . Berkley reprinted a couple more Spider novels, these by Norvell Page writing under the house-name Grant Stockbridge. Page was far and away the most prolific Spider author and really defined the series’ tone with his wild, over-the-top plots and almost non-stop action. The problem is, I never saw those paperbacks. They just didn’t show up in any my usual book-buying haunts. It was more than a decade before I read any more of the Spider series, although by then I had read quite a bit about it. A few more reprints started trickling out in the early Eighties, a trio of trade paperbacks published by an outfit called Dimedia, and I found an issue of the actual pulp in a thrift store, and I picked up used copies of several novels published by Pocket Books that had been rewritten and “updated” but still retained some of the pulp feel. More actual reprints followed, some in mass market paperback, some in facsimile editions from small press publishers, and I read most of them. I’m not a Spider expert—I’ve read maybe half of the series in one format or another—but I always enjoy the character and his wild exploits.

Which brings us to The Wild Adventures of the Spider, a series of brand-new novels by pulp expert and fine writer Will Murray. The first one, THE DOOM LEGION, guest-starred two other characters from Popular Publications pulps, G-8 (the Flying Spy) and Operator 5, Jimmy Christopher his own self. I loved it. Murray’s latest Spider novel, the recently released FURY IN STEEL, also has some guest stars, in this case Emile C. Tepperman’s intrepid trio of fast-shooting FBI agents, the Suicide Squad: Johnny Kerrigan, Dan Murdoch, and Stephen Klaw. I’ve read half a dozen of Tepperman’s Suicide Squad stories, and they’re great. So seeing them in the same book with The Spider was a big draw for me. They don’t exactly team up—in fact, for most of the book the FBI agents are trying to arrest Richard Wentworth and in fact succeed in doing so at one point—but their efforts against an invasion of New York by giant killer robots makes for some great reading.

That’s right, giant killer robots that can bite off a man’s head, tear him limb from limb, and, like steel termites, gnaw away the foundations of skyscrapers to bring them crashing down. Another week, another apocalypse in the Big Apple, a crazed scheme by another villain to wreak havoc, panic the nation, and cause the deaths of thousands. And the only one who can stop it, of course, is The Spider.

FURY IN STEEL is just pure fun from start to finish. The plot is well-structured, flowing smoothly from great action scene to great action scene, Murray’s prose captures the frantic tone perfectly, and he has a keen sense of the absurd, pushing the boundaries but always stopping short of letting things get silly. I enjoyed this novel a great deal, and if you’re a fan of The Spider, or just a fan of wild pulp adventures in general, I give it my highest recommendation. 

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.

Forgotten Books: Empire of Doom - Grant Stockbridge (Norvell Page)

(This post originally appeared in slightly different form on June 26, 2005.)


Back in 1969, I picked up a couple of paperbacks in a drugstore in Stephenville, Texas, while I was on the way to Brownwood with my parents. They were wrapped together in plastic, in a "buy one, get the other free" ploy. Their titles? THE SPIDER STRIKES and THE WHEEL OF DEATH. They were reprints of the first two stories from the long-running pulp series about the crimefighter known as The Spider.

By this time I'd been reading the paperback reprints of Doc Savage and The Shadow for quite a while and was fairly familiar with pulp magazines. I hadn't heard of The Spider, but the books looked interesting and exciting, so I didn't hesitate to buy them. I read and enjoyed both of them and would have bought more books in the series, but I didn't run across them. Paperback distribution was much more haphazard in those days, when there were still hundreds of independent book distributors. It was several years later before I came across used copies of the other two Spider novels Berkley published. By that time I had learned that the first two books, the ones I'd read, were somewhat atypical of the series. They were also the only ones written by R.T.M. Scott. The others were by somebody named Grant Stockbridge. I read those two later paperbacks and was hooked on the crazily plotted, sometimes illogical, but always fast-paced and exciting adventures of The Spider. Naturally, the reprint series came to an end after four books, and I couldn't afford to buy original Spider pulps. They were already highly sought after and out of my price range.

Over the years, a few more reprints trickled out from various publishers, some of them small presses, others mass market paperbacks. I bought them all. I even came across one Spider pulp in an antique store and gladly paid the five bucks someone wanted for it. Then, a few years ago, the Spider novels began to be reprinted as handsome trade paperbacks under a variety of imprints. I've bought and read quite a few of these, and today, after many years, I finally read the fifth novel in the series, the one that was promised as a Berkley reprint but never appeared: EMPIRE OF DOOM.

Grant Stockbridge was a house name, and the author responsible for most of the Spider novels -- and the reputation the series has today -- was Norvell Page. EMPIRE OF DOOM is Page's third Spider novel. As an early effort, the plot hangs together better than some -- it was later in the series before Page's plots got really goofy. In this one, a gang calling itself the Green Hand gets hold of a terrible flesh-eating gas and threatens to turn it loose on various cities unless huge ransoms are paid. This extortion on a gigantic scale is a well-used plot -- think about Ian Fleming's James Bond novel THUNDERBALL, for instance -- but Page was one of the first to come up with it. There are a few minor twists to the plot, but mostly this novel is one nerve-wracking adventure after another as Richard Wentworth, the dashing, wealthy playboy who is really The Spider, tries to foil the schemes of the Green Hand and uncover the identity of the gang's leader. Only once that I noticed did Page lose control and throw in some developments that make no sense. That's pretty good for him.

The real appeal of the Spider series is the amount of punishment -- physical, mental, and emotional -- that Page puts Richard Wentworth through. Some pulp fans insist that Wentworth is almost as psychotic as the villains he fights. How could he not be, after all the punishment he takes? The reader is dragged along through all these ordeals, and reading a Spider novel can be exhausting, if rewarding. Many fans have advised me not to read too many of them too close together. That's good advice, I think. I love 'em, but it's better to space them out a little.