No Retirement for the Spider

Poor Richard Wentworth. And poor Nita Van Sloan. Afte 39 issues of battling mass murderers, madmen and would-be world-rulers, the two of them just want to retire from crime-fighting, get married and enjoy a few years of peace and quiet. Even their friend, Police Commissioner Kirkpatrick (who suspects, but doesn't know for sure, that Wentworth is the masked vigilante known as the Spider) has retired.

Nita has even adopted a young girl orphaned in a previous adventure in anticipation of this.

This is the situation in the novel Dictator of the Damned," featurned in the January 1939 issue of The Spider. But I don't think a single reader expected this retirement to stick. In fact, it lasts less than two chapters, because someone has been knocking off new police commissioners as quickly as the mayor can appoint them. So the mayer turns to Kirkpatrick, asking him to return to his old job (and, if he can manage it, avoid being murdered). Wentworth realizes a new master criminal is running amuck, so, much to Nita's disappointment, backs away from his retirement plans as well.

Never date a masked vigilante, ladies. Aside from the rigid requirement to keep your hair perfectly coiffed when imprisoned in a sadistic death trap, you rarely get a Date Night that's not interrupted by gunfire and a room littered with corpses.

Anyway, Kirkpatrick does avoid getting shot in the assassination attempt that immediately follows his reappointment as commissioner. The mayor, though, isn't so lucky. He takes a volley of slugs in his chest.

A new mayor is appointed, but he's a puppet of the Dictator, the masked criminal who is planning on taking over the city. Kirkpatrick is soon railroaded into an insane asylum and a dirty cop is put in charge. Soon, police patrols are ordered out of specific areas, "coincidentally" just before a big robbery is committed in those areas.

I have always thought the Shadow novels were better written and better plotted than the Spider novels. The best of the Spiders, though, move along at such a lightning pace, jumping from one often exciting gun battle or chase scene to another, that they are impossible not to enjoy.

The plot of Dictator of the Damned is absurd, but it fits within the internal logic of the Spider's universe and it is a ton of fun. With the cops demoralized and being prevented from doing their job, the Spider must dive headfirst into a trap set for him by the Dictator, out-thinking and out-fighting an army of thugs until he learns that the Dictator is planning a massive robbery at Grand Central Station at midnight. The Spider will have to spring Kirkpatrick from an asylum run by a sadistic madman quickly enough to allow his friend to rally the honest cops in the department and launch a counterattack on the Dictator's forces.

In the meantime, though, Nita Van Sloan and her newly adopted daughter have been kidnapped. So, aside from helping to stop the Grand Central Station robbery, the Spider has to track down the Dictator's headquarters and rescue his girlfriend for the 40th time in forty issues.

Seriously, ladies, if a masked vigilante asks you out, it doesn't matter how rich and good-looking he might be when he's not wearing his mask. IT WON'T END WELL FOR YOU!

This is one of the few novels in which the main villian escapes at the end. Presumably, he was supposed to make a return appearance during the original run of the magazine. But it wasn't until Will Murray wrote The Doom Legion in 2018 (which features the Spider teaming up with Operator 5 and G-8) that the Dictator finally pops up again. I don't normally discuss recent stuff on my blog, but Murray's pulp-related works (including those featuring Doc Savage, the Shadow, and Tarzan) are filled with great prose and exciting action while remaining very faithful to the characters and style of the original pulp novels. I recommend them highly.