The Crawling Creature

With so many pulp magazines now available online, I've taken to occasionally pulling one up at random, then choosing a random story from within that particular issue.

In this case, I found the July 1932 issue of Thrilling Adventures and picked a story titled "The Crawling Creature," by Donald Bayne Hobart.

Hobart was a professional pulp writer--one of those who could regularly turn out an entertaining story in any one of several genres, including Westerns and mysteries.

In "The Crawling Creature," Hobart very effectively combines a jungle adventure with a mystery. Dix Ayers and Dan Buckly are travelling through the African jungle. Each of them carries a money belt containing a lot of cash--money they plan to use to buy interest in a diamond mine in South Africa.

But Ayers wakes up one morning to discover Dan has been murdered: "...his head smashed like an egg shell and those two ghastly red X's drawn across his cheeks with his own blood." Dan's money belt is gone.

The natives talk about a murderous entity known as the Crawling Creature. Ayers guesses that this is what killed his partner, but he also realizes that the Creature (despite the superstitious awe it generates) is human--the X's on Dan's cheek and the missing money pretty much prove that.

Ayers buries Dan and begins to hunt for the killer. He soon uncounters "Lucky" McNally, a man big enough to have smashed Dan's skull, but who soon saves Ayers' life from a booby trap. So McNally seems to be an ally and not an enemy.

Or is he? Ayers begins to suspect that all is not as it seems.

Hobert's prose is clear and fast-paced. He simply knew how to tell a good story. And here he gives us a tense hunt for a killer in a thick jungle combined with the uncertainty about who the killer actually is. It's a fairly short story, but it manages to build up a remarkable level of suspense before coming to a satisfying denoument.

You can read it for yourself HERE.

I knew Hobert's name but I don't think I've happened to have read any of his stuff before. That's one of the benefits of the Random Pulp Story Selection Method (patent pending). It will inevitably bring you to one of the many minor treasures buried with in the covers of the pulps.