"The Python Pit" -- George F. Worts (ARGOSY, May 6, 13, and 20, 1933) PART 2

Picking up where we left off yesterday, we'll be serializing George F. Worts' "The Python Pit" -- an exciting tale in the saga of Samuel Larkin "Singapore Sammy" Shay as he pursues his villainous stepfather across the length and breadth of the known world to reclaim his stolen inheritance.  To summarize the events of last installment, in a bar in Singapore, Sammy picked up a tip - beat it out of a lowlife known to be working for his stepfather, Bill Shay - that daddy dearest was heading for the island of Konga, with its untapped pearl beds.  Sammy's friend Lucky doesn't like the sound of this, as Konga has an evil reputation, allegedly inhabited by brain-eating cannibals.  However, Lucky does a 180 upon meeting Dorothy Borden, a young woman needing a lift to Konga, who claims the stories of headhunters are all exaggeration.  The trip passes with only two hitches -- Lucky and a deckhand keep seeing ghosts, and Lucky falls in love with Dorothy.

A mile off Konga's shore, Dorothy fires off five shots -- a signal, she claims to let her father know she's returned, and five shots are fired off on the island in acknowledgement.  Sammy, Lucky and Dorothy set off for the island in a small rowboat, leaving the schooner anchored about a mile off-shore.  

Struggling through the jungle at night to reach Dorothy's father's house, Sammy catches sight of a towering shadow thrown against the moonlit cliffs, and realizes in a flash that he's been set up.  The bartender who pointed out Bill Shay's second in command.  The second in command, pleading for his life, bargaining for his safety with Bill Shay's whereabouts.  They'd been working for Bill Shay all along, to send Singapore Sammy running off to Konga, where his villainous stepfather was laying in wait to finish him off once and for all.  Kill him to square away ownership of the money rightfully Sammy's due, as well as Sammy's good luck charm -- the blue fire pearl of Malobar, easily worth $15,000 by itself.  

At that moment, Sammy and Lucky are beaten senseless and taken by Bill Shay's gang.  Reviving in his stepfather's presence, Sammy endures seemingly-endless taunting as his smug, smirking stepfather mocks him for a dimwit, a lamebrain, a sucker and a meathead, too eager to fight his way through life to think his way through it, and as such damned to spend the rest of his very, very, very short life being outwitted by Bill Shay.  Very, very, very short because Sammy's to die that very evening -- the full moon is rising, and every full moon the native Kongans go a little screwy and decide they need to eat someone's brain.  

Sammy better get thinking...

Bill Shay is my new favorite literary villain.  His boundless sarcasm, his casual dropping of pseudo-Confucian wisdom mid-conversation, how utterly full of himself he is and how endlessly selfish he is, quick with a double-cross, quicker with a triple-cross, and a pioneer of the quadruple-cross.  In my head he looks like David Carradine, and it's a heart-wrenching shame that David passed away without appearing as Bill Shay in a Singapore Sammy movie.

He's also, refreshingly, a villain with back-up plans.  Case in point, the titular Python Pit is one of several dug into the trails around the house -- about seven or eight feet deep, and well-stocked with starving pythons before being covered over in loose brush to disguise them.  Bill Shay had them placed on the off-chance Sammy fought his way free of the cannibals, he'd fall into the pits and become snake-chow; a fate that Sammy very nearly succumbed to.

Even better, in the finest of pulp traditions, he's a villain who makes sure he's made good his escape before tossing off a parting shot; better to live to scheme another day then risk it all on getting the last word in.

The Python Pit itself occupies a relatively small portion of the book, and at first I was slightly mystified at it being made the title of the story; but it really is one of the most thrill-charged passages in the entire story, Sammy struggling against the steely-strong coils of the python looping around him and drawing tighter and tighter, his bones threatening to crack under the pressure and his lungs screaming for air.  It's the kind of nightmare action sequence that Pulp was made for.

"The Python Pit" -- George F. Worts (ARGOSY, May 6, 13 and 20, 1933) PART 1

George F. Worts' name should ring a bell - he was previously featured, under the pen name Loring Brent, with the story "The Master Magician," earlier in the book.  Under his own name, Worts also penned a series of stories following the adventures of Samuel Larkin Shay, alias "Singapore Sammy," a young man out to right a serious wrong done against him - his stepfather, Bill Shay, not only skipped out on his mother with her life savings, but with the will that would allow Sammy to collect his inheritance from his grandfather.  Sammy has spent the years since then roaming the world, searching for his stepfather's trail in hopes of confronting him and reclaiming what is rightfully his.  This story, "The Python Pit," was initially serialized across three issues of Argosy magazine, and I'm probably going to do close to the same here, because my day job is in the middle of overwhelming me this weekend and I just don't have as much time to read right now as I'd like.

"The Python Pit" finds Sammy once more on his stepfather's trail, his hunt for a man reckoned as Bill Shay's second in command interrupted by a barroom brawl that turns real ugly once a squad of Japanese sailors arrive, "[turning] the Sailors Delight into another Manchuria." Sammy narrowly escapes, lugging the barely-conscious form of his friend Lucifer "Lucky" Jones under one arm and dragging the unconscious form of the Malay lowlife by the belt behind him.  With a little "persuasion," Sammy finds his stepfather boarded a ship bound for the island of Konga, east of Celebes, last night! With the little sloop owned by Sammy and Lucky, they might just chase him down!

Lucky Jones wants nothing to do with Konga, however, adamant that the island's infested with cannibals and no white man who's ever set foot on the island has lived to tell the tale.  He changes his mind, however, when the two are approached by a young woman, Dorothy Borden, who wants to charter their boat...to go to Konga! She explains that the stories of headhunters and cannibals are simply sailor's tales, and she and her father have lived alone on the island for close to a year.  A chance encounter with a tiger has left her father injured and ill, and she needs a ship to carry her and the medicine he needs to recover to Konga.

Sammy and Jones agree to take Dorothy to Konga, only for tragedy to strike: Lucky Jones, reckoned by Sammy to be the hardest of the hard, the toughest of the tough, the meanest, fightin'est sumbitch to ever crawl out of an Shanghai opium den, falls in love with her, and becomes a weak-stomached, starry-eyed sap for her.  He moons around the ship calling her "Booful," making Sammy sick to his stomach.

The trip to Konga is further interrupted by sightings of "ghosts," first by Lucky, who spots a greenish-glowing, disembodied face rising out of the sea, and then by the deckhand, who sees a skinny shadow slinking along the decks with no one visible to have cast it.

Worts' writing, I'm finding, has a special poetry to it, a poetry of raised fists and thrown weapons.  Sink your teeth into this: "His throat was as dry as gunsmoke.  His heart had become a throbbing ache.  His muscles were striking for a five-hour day.  He brought the club crunchingly down on an upturned ear above his left foot, and the teeth disengaged themselves from his calf."

Absolutely beautiful.

I also like the "Beauty and the Beast" vibe on display with Dorothy here; and I'm thinking this must have been a running theme in pulp fiction at the time, because the same premise - the toughest tough guy in the world goes soft after one look at a pretty face - is on display in KING KONG, released the same year; not just in the general idea of Kong being in some way "weakened" by his exposure to Ann Darrow; but in dialogue, as Denham warns Jack Driscoll of the consequences of falling for Ann, and of course who could forget the "Old Arabian Proverb" that opens the film? "And the Prophet said, 'And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead.'"

Or maybe Worts just had lady troubles.  I don't know.

"The Master Magician" -- Loring Brent (ARGOSY, February 25th, 1933) PART 2

I kind of feel like a chump now for splitting this story into two nights of reading and two blog-posts.  When I got into bed and started reading last night, I discovered that the remainder of "The Master Magician" took me no more than 20 minutes to devour.  I probably could have sat up and finished the story all in one go the night before if I'd but realized.  Oh well.

To recap where we left our hero Peter Moore last time, Moore and his friend Roger Pennekamp have realized that an old enemy, the magician and would-be dictator Zarlo, has returned to exact revenge on them for deposing him in the Philippines six years earlier.  With the three men who'd aided them already dead and several attempts made on Pennekamp's life, Moore and Pennekamp resolve to take the fight to Zarlo, wherever he may be holed up.  This resolve is strengthened when Moore's traveling companion, the thrill-seeking heiress Susan O'Gilvie, is kidnapped to lure Moore into Zarlo's clutches.  An impromptu seance, at Pennekamp's insistence, suggests the island of Soononga, more commonly known as Skull Island, is the site of Zarlo's hideout.

Traveling to Soononga, Pennekamp's ship is stormed by a boarding party of black pirates (my guess being that these aren't blacks of African descent, but rather dark-skinned Polynesians, given the location) and Moore is taken captive, along with sniveling American wimp Jason Whitelaw, who has come along in hopes of convincing Susan that he loves her and she'll hopefully love him back.

Brought before Zarlo, Moore is given a glimpse of the possible fates that await him -- the skulls of the three men who'd preceded him in dying at Zarlo's hand are on display with neatly-lettered placards describing who they were and how they died, and more ominously, Zarlo shows Moore "Ronga" -- a former American business man, regressed to a snarling, mindless beast by Zarlo's magic, more than eager to feast on raw human flesh.  Zarlo assures Moore that should Moore make any attempt to escape, Ronga will follow him like the best-trained of bloodhounds.

Before long, of course, Moore breaks free and, with Whitelaw showing what he's made of for a change, sets off to rescue Susan and give Zarlo a taste of his own mad medicine...

Wow, what a story! Action, adventure, romance, exotic locales, mysticism, monsters (one made from a human being, no less!), betrayal, and so much more crammed into so few pages, I can say in all honesty that "The Master Magician" is a story that grabs the reader by the lapels and doesn't let go until the ink's dry on the last punctuation mark.

The characters are rich and interesting, and nothing about them feels forced or unnatural.  From Susan's headstrong conviction that whichever possibility offers the most excitement must be the truth to Peter's horrified ruminations on what would happen if he, a man who just wants some peace and quiet, were to marry Susan, these all feel like real people.

I also liked Brent's committal to remaining non-committal on the subject of the occult, carefully presenting every seemingly-supernatural event as one that has a rational explanation...but maintaining an open-mindedness towards the notion that that explanation might not be the "correct" one.  Sure, it's likely that Zarlo kept Ronga an animal through keeping him drugged and under hypnotic suggestion...but maybe, just maybe, he did use his mystical powers to drive a man's soul out of his body, leaving only a brutal monster behind.

This story really slapped me upside the head and took me by surprise, and I'll say no more about it other than to advocate you really check it out.

"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.