"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 Golden Anaconda" -- Elmer Brown Mason (POPULAR MAGAZINE, February 20, 1916)

Largely forgotten by the passage of time, Elmer Brown Mason (1877-1955) deserves rediscovery.  While far from prolific and with no novels to his name, Mason's adventure stories ring with an air of authenticity lacking from many author's works.  Employed as a government entomologist, Mason traveled the globe, writing stories set in places he visited.  Several of these stories starred the recurring guide and adventurer Isaiah Ezekial "Wandering" Smith, a man whose sole profession was to help any "who wants to go after something unusual in a strange place." As such, Wandering Smith finds himself, over the course of several stories, in areas ranging from the Louisiana bayous to the heart of the Amazon.  Unfortunately, Mason's writing career was cut short after being gassed in WWI; while he survived, he was left debilitated to an unknown degree and his sense of adventure left him - and his stories.  Today's story from The Big Book of Adventure Stories finds Smith deep in the Amazon with a Scotsman and some big snakes...

Professor Ritchie "Reddy" McKee - a short-statured biologist whose flaming red hair and argumentative nature might as well be a neon billboard proclaiming "SCOTTISH!" over his head - has convinced Wandering to form an expedition into the depths of the Amazon with him in pursuit of anacondas for American zoos.  The two of them, along with Wandering's cook, Mose and four Mestizo guides, are having a fine time of it -- until "Hiram Jones" shows up.

Claiming to be an orchid hunter, "Jones" narrowly escapes a band of enraged headhunters by jumping on to Wandering's boat with a story that he upset the locals by grabbing an orchid growing in one of their graveyards.  Wandering can readily see through the fake name, and has his eye on "Jones," expecting a lot more trouble from him to come.

Things start looking up once Wandering and "Reddy" befriend a local tribe and enlist their aid in catching anacondas by the dozens.  When Reddy starts asking about other snake species, especially the venomous Fer-de-Lance, the natives shake their heads, explaining that all other snakes were captured and taken to the "land of the dead" long ago.

The road to Hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to the land of the dead is paved with megalithic stone blocks carved to resemble an anaconda twelve miles long, and at the end, Wandering and Reddy are flabbergasted to discover a white girl, nude except for a golden anaconda coiled around her body, being worshipped as a goddess.  And when "Jones" finds her cache of rubies, things become very dangerous for our snake-hunting friends...

"The Golden Anaconda" is a real winner, and I'm eager to acquaint myself with more of Elmer Brown Mason's stories.  The atmosphere of the tale is electric, and you can practically smell the jungle around the characters.  The characters are appropriately larger than life (especially the diminutive Reddy) but still find themselves in awe of what they encounter in the jungle, lending a mythic air to the place that just feels right.

The story is narrated by Smith as if he's telling it to us over drinks, and I really appreciated getting inside his head, seeing what he's thinking and his struggles regarding what is "right" to do about "Jones."

I have a soft spot for the Jungle Goddess archetype, from Ayesha in H. Rider Haggard's classic She to Marvel Comics' Shanna the She-Devil, and the nameless woman appearing in "The Golden Anaconda" represents an interesting break from the traditional formula.  Instead of a leopard-skin bikini, she's draped in the shimmering coils of a live, seemingly-tame (but woe betide he who lays a hand on her) anaconda; instead of speaking imperiously or grunting in broken "Me Tarzan, You Jane" English, she's mute; and instead of feral or domineering she's girlish and sweet.  It's an interesting change of pace, and I like it.