"The Master Magician" -- Loring Brent (ARGOSY, February 25, 1933), PART 1

Here we are again, with another story - another that will be covered in installments here at BPaLGM - from The Big Book of Adventure Stories.  We've entered the section entitled "Megalomania Rules," and with it a world of madmen, masterminds and maniacs bent on proving their own superiority and lording it over the common man.  Such figures were a common trope of the pulps, including such noteworthy villains as Fu Manchu, Shiwan Khan, John Sunlight and many others.  This first story, "The Master Magician," is from author Loring Brent (real name: George F. Worts), and forms part of a series detailing the ongoing adventures of a man named Peter Moore, aka "Peter the Brazen," a wireless radio operator working the various freighters and cruisers around Chinese and South-East Asian waters, who finds himself again and again drawn into conflicts well above his pay-grade.

"The Master Magician" finds Moore lying low in Hong Kong, hoping to escape some heat from certain unsavory figures who'd like to see him floating face down in the harbor.  Unfortunately, stepping out for a breath of fresh air, Moore runs into trouble, when a figure in the dark hands him a tiny, tightly-folded piece of red rice paper.  Moore needs only glance at the writing on it - pictographs, really, five tiny stick figures, the three leftmost checked off - to know exactly what it means.

Bringing along his thrill-seeking socialite companion Susan O'Gilvie, Moore finds his way to the yacht of his old friend, Roger Pennekamp, who has, it turns out, come to Hong Kong in search of Moore -- Pennekamp had received a square of red rice paper marked with five stick figures as well, and has experienced three failed attempts on his life in recent months.

Putting their heads together, Pennekamp and Moore quickly figure out exactly who's gunning for them: Zarlo, a persuasive and sinister figure who'd set himself up as the power behind the throne in the Sultanate of Tuzpan in the Philippines years earlier, only to be swiftly deposed by Moore, Pennekamp, and three other men.

Though they'd only intended to throw him out of Tuzpan, the intervention of Moore and Co. earned Zarlo a savage beating from the locals, leaving the con-man near death and swearing revenge.  Moore realizes Zarlo's revenge is at hand -- the three other men who'd gone with him and Pennekamp to depose Zarlo having already been killed, and Pennekamp clearly the next target.

That night, Susan O'Gilvie is kidnapped out from under Moore and Pennekamp's noses by a group of Chinese sailors on an unmarked gray launch, slipping away with the wealthy heiress under cover of darkness.  Pennekamp, a strong believer in the occult, suggests an unusual means of finding where she's being taken; consulting a crystal ball he keeps with him.

Moore forces his misgivings about the crystal aside and the two men, plus Jason Whitelaw, a sadsack suitor of Susan's, turn down the lights, sit around a table and focus on the crystal -- and see a vision! The crystal reveals an island whose headland resembles a fleshless human skull, and from the vision Moore is able to identify the island -- Soononga, south of Borneo, more commonly known to mariners as "Skull Island."

So far, I'm enjoying "The Master Magician."  I feel like the story began right on the cusp between "before the action" and "in media res," balancing on a razor's edge of tension between "nothing has happened yet" and "everything is happening."  I also like that we have Moore acting on information that the reader is not privy to until it's explained to O'Gilvie, who for a span takes on the role of audience surrogate; sort of a Dr. Watson character, she's there in the meeting between Moore and Pennekamp to give them a reason to explain who Zarlo is and why he's trying to kill them.  Now that she's been kidnapped and Jason Whitelaw has joined Moore and Pennekamp to effect her rescue, I imagine he'll be taking her place for any such similar scenes of exposition later in the story.

The thing that really took me by surprise, at least briefly, was the locale of "Skull Island."  The issue of Argosy containing "The Master Magician" hit newsstands just five days before KING KONG had it's initial premiere (at RKO Musical Hall in New York City).  It would seem like just one of those bizarre coincidences that sometimes occurs, though islands with skull-shaped mountains on them do have something of a history in adventure stories, dating back (at the very least) to 1881 with Stevenson's Treasure Island.

This post covers the first four chapters of the story, and I'm looking forward to getting some more reading in tonight.