HARRY DICKSON, THE AMERICAN SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE HEIR OF DRACULA: adapted in English by Randy & Jean-Marc Lofficier

Cast your mind back to Germany, 1907. As he is everywhere else, Sherlock Holmes is a remarkably popular fictional character so when you see for sale a new story magazine called Detective Sherlock Holmes und seine weltberühmten abenteuer (Sherlock Holmes' Most Famous Cases), you just have to take it home.

I suppose that unsophisticated readers believed they were buying a new collection by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—but unfortunately, Sir Arthur’s attorneys were not among that number and so, in order to avoid a lawsuit, the magazine changed its name after the 10^th issue to Aus dem Geheimakten des Weltdetektivs (The Secret Files of the King of Detectives).  The Great Detective was still named Sherlock Holmes, and his Watsonesque sidekick was named Harry Taxon.

Several of the original German series were translated into French, and by 1927 the stories were being translated into Dutch-Flemish and published as Harry Dickson de Amerikaansche Sherlock Holmes (Harry Dickson, the American Sherlock Holmes). The “American” part derived from the fact that Harry was born in New York.

In 1928, Belgian author Jean Ray (real name: Raymundus Joannes de Kremer), best known then and now for his horror stories, began translating the tales into French. When Ray grew tired of dealing with 2^nd-rate plots and prose, he began writing his own Harry Dickson yarns.

And that brings us, at last, to this Black Coat Press edition of four of Ray’s Dickson tales, three novelettes and one short story, translated by Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier. The yarns first saw print between 1933 and 1937, and you would be hard-pressed searching American pulps of that era to find more rip-snorting barn-burners than these.

Harry Dickson has at least as much in common with psychic detectives like Algernon Blackwood’s John Silence or William Hope Hodgson’s Karnacki as with the scientific detectives that followed in Conan Doyle’s wake. Robert Downey Jr’s recent outing as Holmes bears more resemblance to Dickson than he does to the traditional representations of the Sage of Baker Street.

In “The Heir of Dracula,” Harry and his assistant Tom Wills do battle with the Red Eyed Vampire in a haunted house near Hamburg. Harry is drawn into the case when a murderer named Ebenezer Grump is about to be guillotined and pleads with the Great Detective to complete the execution as quickly as possible because if he doesn’t die soon, something worse than death will overtake him.

In “The Iron Temple” Harry and Tom are back in London and have to deal with some monster that fell from the sky in what appears to be a spaceship. Its appearance is so terrible, it can kill with a glance—and then something else arrives that is so much worse, it can kill the monster.

The last novelette is “The Return of the Gorgon” in which a mad sculptor uses human beings as the building blocks of his art. The mad sculptor is Matthew Jarnes and here he has captured a journalist named Renders. He’s placed Renders’ into the body of a sculpted centaur, the man’s head protruding from the centaur’s neck.

“’Be careful!’ advised Jarnes. ‘That mixture of boiling plaster and melted wax must be delicately poured over the head of our Fallen Centaur. First, it must fill the hole around its neck, then slowly cover his head. We’ll keep the eyes for last in order to preserve their purity of expression of unimaginable fear. Yes, my friend,’ he added, speaking to Renders, “you’re going to die, horribly so! The expression of sheer terror that I see on your face will be preserved faithfully in stone for all posterity to marvel at!’”

Ah, but how does Jarnes fix that expression just the way he wants it? “’[I use] a mixture of talcum powder, camphor, plaster of Paris and soap powder. It immediately congeals inside your mouth, stops you from screaming, and freezes your face into an expression of unbearable agony—which, in your case, will not last long. I call in a pain fixer!’”

Paging Dr. Roth. Dr. Eli Roth.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t warn you that even the most supernatural of the tales could have a weird menace, Scooby-Doo ending. I’m not saying they all do, but if last page explanations that include that chance make you angry, well, prepare to lose a bit of your temper.

I think the stories are fun with an over-the-top, Saturday matinee serial, monster kid joie de vivre that some of us just can’t seem to outgrow. The tales clip along at a speedy pace, the plots are outrageous and the characterizations are pure pulp—and I mean that as a compliment.

I’ll read more Harry Dickson, if Black Coat Press decides to give me more, but I’d really like to see them publish some new translations of Jean Ray’s original horror stories.

Black Coat Press specializes in new translations, many by Brian Stableford, of 19^th and early 20^th century French pop literature. Sitting on my end table right now is Gustave Le Rouge’s Vampires of Mars.

I gotta go. See you later.

THE MAN FROM HELL by Arthur Leo Zagat writing as Morgan LaFay

This is a new collection of nine stories by one of those pulp writers who is known by every fan of the form but is completely unknown by everyone else. Which is a shame because at his best Zagat wrote well, at times even approaching a Bradburyesque poeticism. Seven of the stories in this volume were originally published in Spicy Mystery between 1936 and 1938, and the final two are from Thrilling Mystery in ’36 and ’39.

Spicy Mystery was a weird menace pulp plus sex. In weird menace stories the supernatural doings would be explained away at the end as the machinations of a villain out to get the money/girl/property/Macguffin for himself. Think of it as Scooby-Doo with Daphne and Velma flashing their boobs all the time. Mmm . . . Daphne and Velma flashing their boobs . . .

Sorry. I went away for a moment but I’m back now.

If that type of story doesn’t appeal to you but the horror element does, this may be the book for you as Zagat frequently pulls the rug out by not explaining that the spooky stuff has a natural cause. In the title story, for instance, a writer who is camping in a swamp to accumulate color for his new book is seduced by a woman who seems to have the ability to transform into a snake. Her presence is the result of human tampering, but maybe she’s for real.

In “By Subway to Hell” a young woman suddenly finds herself pursued by green, glowing men through subway tunnels. Zagat sends this tale out of the gate at full speed and it never slows down until we learn the truth about these subterranean monsters. Honestly, it doesn’t make much sense, but who cares? The yarn is an exercise in momentum and atmosphere.

“The Horror in the Crib” seems to start out as a psychological study of a young mother who is losing her mind. We see her in the beginning leaning over her baby’s crib with a pair of scissors in her hand, looking as if she intends to stab the child. Then we realize that this is no normal human infant.

“Her hands clutched the crib’s top bar and her eyes stared down into it. Her slim body was sheathed with ice and a scream ripped from her throat. Tiny reptilian eyes blinked up at her from the beribboned pillow, hooded eyes in a green, grotesque head that was long and flat and triangular, a head split by a fang-serried, malignant grin.”

A couple of other stories in the book also feature human children who are more bestial than your average rug rat. Or maybe that’s just what they are. Human rats. If Zagat had any kids of his own, I wonder what they thought of their old man’s visions of childhood.

I usually read one story a night when I’m working on a single author collection, but I ripped through this one in two evenings. Good stuff.

And don’t be misled by Zagat using a pen name for these stories, the witty Morgan LaFay. He wasn’t hiding his real name because he was writing for one of the Spicy titles. He was just so prolific he had to use several nom de pulps so readers would think they were getting stories by a variety of authors.

One writer, though, was afraid that he might miss sales to the higher paying slick magazines if their editors knew he contributed so much to the Spicy line, so Hugh B. Cave, just in case, signed his Spicy stories as by “Justin Case.” You gotta love it.

SPICY MYSTERY, February 1936

Pulp magazines now are enjoying their greatest flood of popularity since the rediscovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs kick-started the pulp boom of the 1960s. Falling between the pricey original magazines still in existence and the acceptably priced reprint editions are the exact replicas. These match the original mag’s dimensions and page count, and include everything that the first purchaser bought 55-85 years ago: all the ads, the letters to the editor, the not so-inspiring interior art and the hyperbole.

One of the leading producers of pulp replicas is Girasol Collectables, which puts out three replicas every month at a $25 or $35 per. Honestly, that’s a little steep for me, especially since other folks are doing it cheaper. Whining aside, I just finished reading Girasol’s replica of Feb. 1936 issue of Spicy Mystery. Look at the H.J. Ward cover painting of a terrified, gorgeous rehead in a sheer nightgown drawing away from a hanged corpse and tell me that you don’t want to read the stories that lurk behind that cover. It's supposed to illustrate a story called "Batman."  Go on, tell me – I dare you.

The cover story has nothing to do with any other Batmen with whom you may be familiar. In fact, the art has nothing to do with the story, but who the hell cares. The tale, from one of Spicy Mystery’s regular contributors, is about a man who thinks he’s a bat. Hey, you want your fiction to make sense, try something by Henry James.

This issue also contains stories by E. Hoffman Price and Robert Leslie Bellem. Price was a first rate pulp writer who continued publishing fantasy novels into the 1970s. Bellem’s story uses the theme of reincarnation. He is best remembered as the creator of Dan Turner, Hollywood Detective, from the pages of Spicy Detective magazine. Bellem also wrote for Spicy Western and Spicy Adventure. Perhaps you see a pattern.

Now, let’s approach that word “spicy.” The Spicys frequently were sold under the counter – one more glance at that cover art and you can see why – and went for the comparatively high sum of 25 cents. Every story contained several references to female breasts – the size, appearance and feel thereof – but it’s all PG-13 stuff that would make most kids today giggle. Spicy Mystery was a weird menace title and so its tales often would contain a blend of sex and violence that some readers might still feel is objectionable. But not you, you perv.  Weird menace is actually an inbred descendent of the English school of Gothicism

This issue contains no partial stories. Every tale is complete, and even the ones that don’t hold up too well are fun.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to spend some time ogling the hot blonde under attack by what looks like a gigantic grasshopper on the cover of the Feb. 1938 issue. It’s an assignment for my art appreciation class.

"Wolves of Darkness" by Jack Williamson (1932)

Most pulp fans agree that Weird Tales’ most significant rival in the realm of dark fantasy was the short-lived Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, which lasted only 10 issues from 1931 to 1933. Perhaps the strongest novelette published in Strange Tales was Jack Williamson’s always-fascinating “Wolves of Darkness” in the January 1932 issue.

Clovis McLauren has received a telegram from his father, Doc McLauren (one-time professor of astrophysics and currently an independent researcher), asking for help with an experiment. Clovis rushes to the small town of Hebron, Texas, and arrives on a snow-covered night and asks the station agent for help getting out to Dad’s ranch.

The agent does all he can to talk Clovis out of visiting the ranch, especially at night, but the younger man finally determines to find his own way. He hires farmer Sam Jenson to convey him to his father’s place. On the way, they are attacked by a pack of wolves. Jenson is killed and Clovis is horrified to see a beautiful young woman running with the pack. She is Stella Jetton, the daughter of his father’s assistant.

“Her head was bare,” Clovis tells us, “and her hair, seeming in the moonlight to be an odd, pale yellow, was short and tangled. Her smooth arms and small hands, her legs, and even her flashing feet, were bare. Her skin was white, with a cold, leprous, bloodless whiteness. Almost as white as the snow.

“And her eyes shone green.

“They were like the gray wolf’s eyes, blazing with a terrible emerald flame, with the fire of an alien, unearthly life. They were malevolent, merciless, hideous. They were cold as the cosmic wastes beyond the light of stars. They burned with an evil light, with a malicious intelligence, stronger and more fearful than that of any being on earth.

“Across her lips, and her cheeks of alabaster whiteness, was a darkly red and dripping smear, almost black by moonlight.”

Now, of course that’s overwritten in that grand, penny-a-word way of the pulps, but it also adds to the eerie suspense Williamson has been building from the beginning. Tod Browning’s film of Dracula had hit theaters about a year before this novelette was published, and the opening scenes reflect the movie quite closely: Innocent stranger arrives at country town and the locals tell him not to go to the castle — or, in this case, ranch. He goes anyway and is followed by wolves
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When he arrives, he is welcomed by Doc McLauren and Stella (think Dracula and his vampire bride) and given a meal in which they do not participate. And just as the film displays several telling details, Williamson give us this carefully placed observation: “Another fearful thing I noticed. My breath, as I said, condensed in white clouds of frozen crystals, in the frigid air. But no white mists came from Stella’s nostrils, or from my father’s.”

But you sense a shift from the supernatural to the science fictional as Clovis talks more and more of Doc and Stella acting and speaking like aliens. Williamson presents us with a grab bag of popular genres, from the supernatural and science fiction to the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft and the physical grotesqueness and pain of weird menace:

“Her teeth caught my trousers, tore them from my leg from the middle of the right thigh ownward,” Clovis tells us about the torture his father demands that Stella institues when his son refuses to help him. “Then they closed into my flesh, and I could feel her teeth gnawing … gnawing….

“She did not make a deep wound, though blood, black in the terrible red light, trickled from it down my leg toward the shoe — blood which, from time to time, she ceased the gnawing to lick up appreciatively. Occasionally she stopped the unendurable gnawing, to lick her lips with a dreadful satisfaction.”

And later, when Clovis escapes, he is pursued by the wolves and what appear to be zombies:

“Judson, the man who had brought me out from Hebron, was among them. His livid flesh hung in ribbons. One eye was gone, and a green fire seemed to sear the empty socket. His chest was fearfully lacerated. And the man was — eviscerated! Yet his hideous body leaped beside the wolves.”

More and more, we sense that these are not just ordinary wolves. We assume they are werewolves, but as the adventure progresses we begin to question that explanation. Will the final answer come from the horror genre or from science fiction?

“Wolves of Darkness” is one of Williamson’s most popular early novelettes and it has been reprinted many times. You can read it for free online. Enjoy.