Tuned for Murder

 

cover art by H.W. Scott

Written by Paul Ernst (using the house name Kenneth Robeson), Tuned for Murder appeared in the May 1940 issue of The Avenger.

When, as a teenager, I first read the Avenger stories in paperback reprints, I liked them but didn't think them quite as good as the Shadow or Doc Savage. But each time I revisit them, I appreciate them a little bit more. Great mysteries, excellent use of the supporting cast, exciting action scenes, unexpected plot twists. Though all other pulp heroes bow before the pure awesomeness of the Shadow, the Avenger is definitely a top tier hero himself.

Tuned for Murder is set in Garfield City, NY, where bizarre things are happening. First, a famous inventor announces that he's invented the ultimate weapon. He won't share this invention with anyone, but promises to use it to make war impractical by giving it to any nation that is invaded by another. The inventor lives in a castle outside the city, guarded by an electric fence and armed guards.

But, about the same itme, several prominant citizens of the city begin to publically act in clearly insane ways, only to later regain their sanity with no memory of what they had done. This soon becomes dangerous, with one man committing a double murder and a woman committing suicide.

It's not much of a spoiler to say that hypnotic control is involved. That's pretty obvious from the get-go. But the exact nature of the control and the identity of the man behind it all are still mysteries.

Soon, Justice, Inc. becomes involved. The Avenger and his crew survive a mob ambush getting to Garfield City and split up along several routes of inquiry. This emphasizes one of the strengths of the Avenger series I mentioned earlier. Each member of Justice, Inc gets a moment to shine. 

The highlight of these highlights has to be when Nellie Gray and Rosebel Newton are kidnapped by mobsters. Using teamwork, intelligence and Nellie's martial arts expertise, the two ladies turn the tables on the thugs in a manner that can only be described as epic. 

Josh Newton's escape from an attempt to kill him is also pretty cool.

I enjoy the way that all the bizarre occurances and apparently random deaths are tied together in the end in a way that makes sense. Well, it makes sense according to the logic of a Pulp Magazine Universe, but that's more than good enough for me. The good guys all end up apparently helpless while held at gunpoint by mobsters. But they are rarely helpless. The climatic fight scene and exposure of the Big Boss is wonderfully constructed.

In my mind, the Shadow is the #1 Pulp Hero. But the Avenger vies for 2nd place with Doc Savage. Right behind them are G-8 and then the Spider. 

The Shadow Meets the Avenger

cover art by Michael Kaluta 

I really, really wish that, back in the heyday of the pulps, Street and Smith had made a point of having their various pulp heroes crossover with each other from time to time. Heck, as I've written before, the supporting characters alone could have had some awesome team-ups.

Fortunately, later comic books and novels (such as those currently being written by Will Murray) fill in this gap. One of the first examples of this, though, might be DC's The Shadow #11 (June-July 1975), the penultimate issue of that sadly short-lived classic series.

This was written by Michael Uslan, with some excellent, atmospheric art by E.R. Cruz and it was my personal introduction to the character of the Avenger. By that point in my life, I had listened to at least a few Shadow radio shows (having whined at my mother until she bought me an LP featuring two episodes that I had seen at a local store) and I had read some of the Pyramid/Jove paperbacks reprinting the original Shadow pulps. So I had a handle on both these versions of the Shadow.

But, though Avenger paperbacks reprinting his excellent pulp adventures were also in print at the time, I had not yet read any of them. I don't remember if I had any idea who Richard Benson was when I bought this issue, but the Mike Kaluta cover alone would have sold me on giving it a try.

The story itself initially pits the Shadow and his agents against Justice, Incorporated.. Someone is planning on launching an invasion of the U.S. using an underground army and stolen military weapons. The weapon thefts are also being used to generate suspicion between different countries, which in turn threatens the start of a world war. Which, by the way, is a good way to make an invasion by an underground army plausible--they can strike while the U.S. is forced to deploy its military abroad.

Both the Shadow and the Avenger are investigating. But the Shadow's headquarters is then attacked by armed men. The attackers are defeated and one of them is captured. This turns out to be Smitty--one of the Avenger's men. And he helpfully confesses that the Avenger ordered the attack.

The Avenger, meanwhile, is having troubles of his own, when Margo Lane tries to assassinate him. Upon her capture, she helpfully acknowledges that the hit was ordered by the Shadow.

It's obvious to the reader that both agents have been brainwashed or hypnotized. Considering the ease with which they give away their respective bosses, one can argue that both the Shadow and the Avenger should have suspected shenanigans of this sort. But neither had met the other yet and rumors of the Shadow's often violent war against the underworld would have left him open to suspicion by an outsider looking in.

The script is tightly written and accomplishes an impressive amount of clear, strong storytelling in just 18 pages. I admit I'm tempted to whine a little about how a two- or three- part story arc might have been better, giving us more details about the initial investigations into the case by the two groups. But what we have is done so well that a complaint about something that wasn't written would be unfair. It's a fun what-might-have-been thought, though. I wonder if this might have happened if the book wasn't heading towards cancellation.

Both sets of good guys end up at a remote lighthouse being used as a rendezvous by the real villain. They fight briefly, but then the Shadow recognizes the Avenger as crime-fighter Richard Benson and realizes they've all been duped. The real villain then turns up and we discover that this is the Shadow's arch enemy Shiwan Khan, who is once again trying for world domination.

The Shadow's agents and Justice Incorporated abruptly find themselves on the same side, locked in a desperate struggle against Shiwan Khan's forces. I only recently re-acquired this issue as an adult, but I always vividly remembered the panel showing Richard Benson taking out a bad guy atop the lighthouse by making an epic knife throw.

Khan's men are defeated, so the Shadow and the Avenger go their separate ways--though not without some residual mutual suspicions. It's a neat way of ending the story--setting it up so that future encounters between the two heroes can either be adversarial or be a reluctant alliance.

So that was my introduction to the Avenger. It was also nearly the end of DC's The Shadow. Gee whiz, all you comic book readers of the 1970s, why weren't you buying The Shadow? I was. But the rest of you fell down on the job, didn't you? An excellent comic book adaptation of the Shadow properly set in the 1930s and it only ran 12 issues. I'm annoyed with the lot of you.

Next week, we'll visit again with the Rat Patrol.

Murder by Mold

When I was a wee little one, Pyramid Books was publishing paperback reprints of the original Shadow novels. It was these novels that served as my introduction to the coolest of the cool pulp characters.

About the same time, The Warner Paperback Library was reprinting most of the original Avenger novels,

with author Ron Goulart then commissioned to continue the series. But I didn’t get around to reading these until a few years later, when I picked a few of them up at a used book store.

And I’m glad I did, because the Avenger stories nearly rival the Shadow’s adventures in pure Rule of Cool. I reviewed the December 1939 issue not long ago, in which Richard Benson and the rest of Justice Inc clean up a corrupt town. But Benson doesn’t just deal with common thugs and organized crime. Like the Shadow, he’ll have to deal with a more science-fictiony threat from time to time.

In the January 1940 issue, for instance, Benson took on “The Frosted Death.” This is a man-made plague, accidentally unleashed on New York City by an amoral scientist. The plague is actually a mold that is passed from person to person by touch. It then spreads across your entire skin, making it look like you are covered with a light snow, but eventually suffocating you.

It’s an unpleasant and scary way to die, giving the story a large dollop of suspense right from the first page. But the villain ups the ante when he frames his business partner for both murder and for releasing the plague, while he uses slave labor in a secret lab to produce enough of the deadly stuff to sell to a foreign power.

The foreign power, by the way, is unnamed, but is obviously meant to be Germany. This was actually very common in popular fiction in all media during the early years of World War II. Though America wasn’t in the fight yet, many writers recognized Nazi Germany to be pure evil.  But isolationist feelings ran deep in many Americans before Pearl Harbor. This made many publishers, editors and filmmakers nervous about directly using the Nazis as villains in fiction. So many writers used spies or invaders who were Nazis in all but name. Milt Caniff did this (with both the Japanese and the Germans) in the comic strip Terry and the Pirates, while faux-Germans turned up in several “Adventures of Superman” story arcs on radio. Paul Ernst (who wrote the Avenger stories under the house name Kenneth Robeson) pulls the same trick here.  

[There are, by the way, several examples of storytellers who did directly reference the Nazis as villains before we entered the war. The Three Stooges, Charlie Chaplin, a number of Warner Brothers films and Timely (later Marvel) Comics all took overt shots at Hitler’s thugs prior to Pearl Harbor.]

Anyway, back to “The Frosted Death.” It doesn’t take long for Benson to deduce who the real villain is, but the main problem is destroying the stockpile of the deadly mold before the Nazis get it AND finding a cure as the horrible stuff spreads across New York.

Well, one of Benson’s men—Fergus MacMurdie—is the world’s foremost chemist. He soon whips up a cure. But he and Josh Newton (another Justice Inc operative) are captured by the Nazis along with the only samples of the cure.

In the meantime, Benson uses his mastery of disguise to replace a Nazi thug and locate the secret lab. But he soon discovers that he’s going to have to multi-task. Not only does he need to destroy the mold, he also has to rescue Mac and Josh, recover the cure, scuttle a U-boat and somehow outwit or outfight a score of heavily-armed Nazis.

I already mentioned that the story’s basic premise generates a lot of suspense. This is amped up to Eleven in the climax. Paul Ernst was a skilled pulp writer, with a strong understanding of how to tell a story clearly while still injected one exciting action set piece after another. He plops Benson down into one seemingly hopeless situation after another, but the Avenger is always one step ahead of the bad guys.

In the end, I do think the Shadow edges out both the Avenger and Doc Savage in pure coolness, but it really is a close call. “The Frosted Death” is unquestionably in the top-tier of the many entertaining stories produced during the Golden Age of the pulps.

The Devil's Horns

During the 1920s and 1930s, corrupt towns run by dishonest politicians and mobsters were as much a problem in the pulp magazine universe as they were in real life. In fact, several of the best known heroes of the era each had the job of cleaning up such a town.

Dashiell Hammett’s unnamed operative from the Continental Detective Agency was one. In what is arguably the best crime novel of the 1920s (Red Harvest), the Continental Op cleans up a dirty town by turning the various mobs there against each other—feeding them partial information, various half-truths and outright lies until the bullets began to fly and the mobsters began to fall.

 If we jump ahead to 1934, we find Simon Templar (aka The Saint) being offered one million dollars to clean up the New York City mobs. Simon takes the job, then openly challenges the mobsters by assassinating one of them. He follows this up by stealing a small fortune in bribe money from a judge who’s on the take and continues to cause trouble in a number of other ways while dodging hitmen. He works his way up the mob’s chain of command, looking to identify their secret boss and bring the whole organization down. (The Saint in New York.)

In 1939, Richard Benson (aka the Avenger) takes on the job of cleaning up Ashton City. Interestingly, he’s brought to the city by Oliver Groman, the political boss who has been running the rackets in the town for decades. Groman is getting old and suffering from the effects of a stroke. He’s reformed because of this and wants to make up for his old sins.

And if you are going to call in someone to clean up a corrupt town, there are few choices better than the Avenger. Benson is a unique pulp hero even among the gazillion or so vigilantes who inhabited the pulp magazines. A brilliant inventor, scientist and explorer, he suffered an emotional shock when his wife and daughter were murdered. This shock turned his face and hair a deathly white, killing the nerves so that he is perpetually expressionless. But this also means that the skin of his face can be molded into different shapes. With the help of wigs and make-up, this makes Benson a master of disguise.

He uses his wealth to form Justice, Inc and builds up a small group of loyal followers (most of whom had also lost people to criminal violence). Smitty is a huge and incredibly strong man who doesn’t look very smart, but is in fact a brilliant electrical engineer. Mac is one of the world’s foremost chemists as well as a tenacious hand-to-hand fighter. Nellie Gray is small and petite, but also a judo expert. Josh and Rosabel Newton are articulate, intelligent and brave—but use the fact that they are black to play off the racism of the time and get the bad guys to consistently underestimate them.

The Avenger first appeared on the newsstands in 1939 and ran a couple of dozen issues before the magazine was cancelled.  The hero appeared in a few short stories as back-up features in other magazines for a short time after that. So Benson didn’t find the same commercial success as the Shadow or Doc Savage (though he was, in fact, a deliberate amalgam of those two characters), but his adventures were strongly plotted tales of action and mystery. They were written by pulp veteran Paul Ernst, using the pen name Kenneth Robeson--the same pen name used for the Doc Savage stories, leaving the false impression that the adventures of both heroes were recorded by the same guy.

In The Devil’s Horns (December 1939), Benson is called to Ashton City by Oliver Groman to clean up the town. Almost immediately, a trio of thugs try to gun him down. This does work out well for the thugs.

Benson begins to investigate. The agents of Justice, Inc are given various assignments to gather information. It’s soon learned that a group of five men are currently running the rackets. Four of them are at least tentatively identified, but the identity of the fifth—the boss of the group—is unknown.

In the meantime, Smitty is framed for murder, Nellie and Rosabel are kidnapped by mobsters and Mac is nearly offed by a mob gunman. But the agents stick tenaciously to their jobs and Benson begins to collate the various clues. These clues include the words “devil’s horns,” written in blood by a dying man. That strange phrase turns out to be the most vital clue of all.

The mini-adventures of Benson’s agents are, in fact, one of the strengths of the Avenger novels. Though Benson is the main protagonist, writer Paul Ernst never forgets that the other members of Justice, Inc. are pretty cool in their own rights. He presents them as capable, brave and intelligent—doing their share to bring the bad guys down.

The mystery elements of the story progress logically, leading up to a nifty twist at the end. And the action scenes—most notably a sequence in which Mac and Smitty rescue the two girls from a mob-controlled nightclub—are a lot of fun; especially when Smitty rips a reinforced door off its hinges and uses it as a shield against bullets. Eveything culminates in a deserted warehouse, where the bad guys have Benson, Smitty and Mac trapped in a room about to be pumped full of poison gas.  But Benson, as usually, is two or three steps ahead of the villains.

The Devil’s Horns is not the true classic that Red Harvest is; and The Saint in New York is a bit more fun; but it’s a solidly entertaining yarn nonetheless.

So if you ever need to clean up a corrupt town, see if you can’t hire the Continental Detective Agency and ask for… oh, heck, Hammett never does tell us his name, does he?  Well, then you can hire the Saint---if you have a spare million dollars lying around.

If that exceeds your town-cleaning budget, then give Richard Benson a call. He’ll do the job for free and, by golly, he’ll do it well. 

Why-oh-Why didn't Street & Smith do team ups?

There were a lot of hero pulps in the 1930s and 1940s--fiction magazines that recounted the adventures of a specific hero. The best of these is almost certainly The Shadow, but he had a lot of strong competition.

The Shadow was published by Street and Smith, one of the best publishing houses of the era in terms of quality. In fact, the hero pulps put out by S & S included Doc Savage, the Avenger and the Whisperer. All were really cool. All had cool agents or sidekicks. And all are currently being reprinted. Snatch 'em up if you can. There's some wonderful adventure storytelling behind those awesome covers.

I've always thought it was tragic that it apparently never occurred to the otherwise talented editors at Street and Smith to put out a special issue or two in which their heroes could team up with one another. Heck, most of them were based in New York. The Shadow and most of his agents hung out there. Doc Savage had a headquarters on the 86th floor of an unnamed skyscraper (generally considered to be the Empire State Building). The Avenger and his organization (Justice, Inc) were based there.

The Whisperer was based in an unnamed city, but all the other guys traveled quite a bit. So a team-up involving him would have been easily arranged.

But it never happened. The Shadow might be battling thugs on a tenement rooftop while Doc Savage was tracing kidnappers through the streets of New York and the Avenger was investigating a bombed out building, but none of them ever crossed paths.

It would have been too much fun for words. Even a minor team up between their various agents would have been cool. Heck, Smitty from Justice Inc and Long Tom from Doc Savage's team were both skilled electrical engineers. They could have met and worked together. Monk (Doc Savage) and Mac (Justice Inc) were both chemists. And agents of the Shadow such as Rutledge Mann and Clyde Burke had reason to come into contact with all sorts of people through their respective jobs as investment broker and newspaper reporter.

Doc Savage's pretty cousin Pat ran a high-priced beauty shop that probably was frequented by both Margo Lane (the Shadow's agent) and Nellie Grey (who worked for the Avenger), so the distaff trio could have easily teamed up for an adventure.

Now that I think of it, a back-up feature in one of the hero pulps featuring team-ups of the various agents would have been the most brilliant idea ever. I really need to invent a time machine, go back to the 1930s, and sell this concept.

In 1989, DC Comics finally managed to put the Shadow and Doc Savage together into the same adventure (and had some fun with the Shadow getting annoyed at the constant bickering between Doc's men Ham and Monk), but it never happened during the pulp era. I would have loved to see what Shadow writer Walter Gibson or Savage's scribe Lester Dent might have done with the idea.

But it was never to be. Oh, well. No world---not even the world of pulp fiction--is perfect.