"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.

"Shanghai Jim" -- Frank L. Packard (SHANGHAI JIM, 1928)

Perhaps best known for his novels following the adventures of Jimmie Dale, "The Gray Seal," a gentleman-thief who broke laws to enact a greater good, Frank L. Packard also wrote extensively about railroads, exotic South Seas adventure, and the seedy criminal underbelly of New York City.  Several of his stories have been filmed; most notably, his novel The Miracle Man was filmed to great effect as a silent in 1919 featuring the great Lon Chaney, Sr. as a "cripple" healed by the con artist healer to convince others of his power.  A remake was filmed in 1932 starring Silvia Sidney and Chester Morris.  Today's story eschews railroads and New York City dives in favor of the simmering heat of the South Pacific.  Originally published in magazine form in 1912, the story "Shanghai Jim" was first published in book form in 1928 in the collect of the same name.

Bob Kenyon has found three enormous, flawless pearls, and with them, he's told, trouble.  His partner in the pearling business, a lean, bearded New Zealander named Captain Watts is wary of the pearls, knowing that the nearest port, on the island of Illola, is a cess-pool of criminals and lowlifes who would cut his and Kenyon's throats in a heartbeat if they knew about the pearls.  Unfortunately, Illola is also home to the closest good, square dealer in and appraiser of pearls, a bearded man known as Old Isaacs.  

Once Old Isaacs gives his opinion that the pearls should be taken to New York at once to get their full value, Kenyon goes ashore on a different mission - he's looking for Shanghai Jim, the evil bastard who murdered his brother years earlier.  His hunt on land unsuccessful, Kenyon returns to the boat - and finds Shanghai Jim standing over Captain Watts' corpse, a bloody knife in his hands.  A struggle ensues, and when the authorities arrive, all they find is Bob Kenyon, bloody knife in his hand and the pearls in his pocket.  Now Bob Kenyon has to convince the authorities that he's innocent and that Shanghai Jim murdered Captain Watts -- when the authorities believe Shanghai Jim has been dead for years...

"Shanghai Jim" almost feels like two stories in one; Packard spends a lot of time building up and laying his cards on the table regarding the pearls and Watts' concerns and Old Isaacs' examination of them.  After this we get a short bridge with Kenyon wandering from dive bar to dive bar looking for Shanghai Jim, and then the second story picks up with Watts' murder and follows Kenyon's efforts to escape the frame-job Jim has pulled on him.  We also get something of a how-dunit, because there's some effort to understand how Shanghai Jim found out about the pearls.  Packard feeds us a whole catch of perfectly plausible red herrings to keep us on our toes, and he finally reveal is fantastic, albeit abrupt.  

If I had to find fault in "Shanghai Jim," it's the way the story just kind of throws things at us to see what sticks.  There's a romantic angle where the daughter of the British colonial administrator is Kenyon's ex-girlfriend, whom he lost over a tragic misunderstanding years earlier; they reconcile while sitting in the dark waiting for Shanghai Jim to show up, and this kind of had me rolling my eyes; the story just kind of bogs down in them telling each other what they perceived as having happened that fateful day, and what actually happened, and the tension that should be building as Kenyon waits for Jim, knowing that at any minute the police could burst in after him, just fizzles out entirely and never wholly returns.

"Off the Mangrove Coast" -- Louis L'Amour (OFF THE MANGROVE COAST, 2000)

Best known as a prolific author of western fiction (having produced eighty-nine novels and fourteen short story collections at the time of his death, with several further collections to be released posthumously, in one of which today's story was first published), Louis L'Amour wrote prolifically across a number of genres, right up to the end of his life - his final novel before his death, The Haunted Mesa, being science-fiction.  Today's story is not one of L'Amour's "frontier stories," nor something as far out as The Haunted Mesa; rather, a story of greed and betrayal, the lack of honor among thieves, set against the crystalline waters of the South China Sea.  One of his later stories, "Off the Mangrove Coast" was found several years after L'Amour's passing in a carbon paper box L'Amour had taken from an aluminum factory in Germany at the end of WWII.  It was initially published in 2000, having not sold to the magazines during his lifetime, in an anthology collection under the same title.

"Off the Mangrove Coast" finds our nameless narrator -- known simply as "Scholar," as he'd brought a few books with him on his journey -- on a stolen yacht in the South China Sea with three unsavory characters from across the globe; Limey Johnson from Liverpool, Smoke Bassett from Port-au-Prince, and Long Jack from Sydney.  They're sailing in search of a sunken freighter Limey Johnson claims knowledge of, drowned with $50,000 in the captain's safe.  Each man dreams of what he's going to do with his share, $12,500...or will it be larger? For as Scholar reflects, "who can say what can or cannot happen in the wash of a weedy sea off the mangrove coast?"

The sunken freighter located, it falls to the Scholar and Limey to dive down for it, they being the only two with experience in a diving suit.  Braving hungry sharks and the inherent dangers in diving in ten fathoms of water, Scholar finds the worst perils are awaiting him back on the ship as he learns who's looking to kill for his share of the treasure...and who will put their life on the line to protect him.

With incredibly taut pacing and a lean, pared-down style, L'Amour has hit this one out of the park.  Add in an exotic locale described evocatively without losing that lean style, a bloodthirsty shark, double-crosses and a ghoulish method of sending a man to his death involving aforementioned shark...this story was a real winner, one of my favorites of the book so far.

The biggest highlight of the story, for me at least, was the climactic fight between Scholar and one of the men (won't tell you who) looking to kill him for his share of the treasure.  Scholar has managed to arm himself with a harpoon, but is hampered by the fact he's still wearing a bulky rubberized diving suit with weighted boots, and his opponent is unhindered and armed with a boat-hook -- which has a much longer reach then the harpoon.  L'Amour gives us a detailed break-down of Scholar analyzing the situation and figuring out how to fight effectively in these conditions, without losing high-octane pace the fight requires to maintain the reader's sense of tension.  It's really a great piece of work.