"Bamboo Death" made its debut appearance in an issue of Thrilling Mystery that has a cover which is genuinely shocking, and which may remind you classical scholars out there of Marcus Tullius Cicero. In 1988 "Bamboo Death" was reprinted in a small press pamphlet called Kuttner Times Three along with two other Kuttner stories.
Like the cover of the magazine in which it appears, this story, as Miss Nagatoro might say, is gross. During his service in the Great War, wealthy Captain Wayne Masson's life was saved by a six-foot-tall muscleman, Quentin, and Masson took this brute under his wing. In the course of saving the Captain, an explosion tore off the lower part of Quentin's face, so only a hideous hole and mass of scar tissue remains below his eyes--this wound he covers with a mask. Quentin's brain was also injured, and he is a pretty crazy character, or, as perhaps you college professors might say, "neuro-atypical."
When Wayne Masson dies, his remote Everglades estate passes to his niece, Joan. Upon arrival at the estate, Joan and her new husband, Lee Dean, find not only the erratic and quick-tempered Quentin but also Joan's cousin Jeff Kenton.
The plot of the story largely concerns Dean and Joan in hand-to-hand combat with Quentin as they try to stop him from torturing all these animals. As you expect, Joan eventually finds herself "nearly naked" in a bamboo cage with needle-tipped bamboo shoots growing up into her flesh while husband Lee is tied up, watching her suffer this horrendous torture. But Quentin isn't the only menace faced by the newlyweds--Jeff Kenton doesn't know Lee and Joan are married, so he thinks if Joan should happen to get killed, he will inherit the estate. In the crazy twist ending Kenton disguises himself as Quentin so he can kill Joan and blame it on the deranged maniac. In the end, justice prevails.
The craziness of this story is entertaining, I cannot deny.
Fred Malone and his fiancé Janet Cooper are staying at the remote Sycamore Inn. Also at the Inn are two other guests, a film actress and a psychiatrist, and the inn owner, David Stephens, and his staff, a white maid and a black cook. As the story begins Fred and Janet are relaxing outside when that maid crawls up to them, naked, and keels over dead--some villain nailed horseshoes to her hands and feet and forced a bridle into her mouth and she has died of blood loss.
How does Kuttner come up with these things?
The head shrinker examines the body and reports somebody rode the poor innocent maid like a horse. Good grief! The maid's fiancé, a mechanic, and the village freak, a deformed dwarf everybody calls by the nickname "Satan," both make appearances, adding to our cast of characters and line up of suspects. The cops are hours away from this remote resort, so Fred follows the blood trail the maid left himself, but learns little.
The issue of Thrilling Mystery with "The Devil Rides" also includes stories by Jack Williamson and Ray Cummings. Williamson is more famous for writing space operas like the Legion of Space books and speculative stories about such serious topics as man's relationship to technology, work and government like the Humanoids stories, but he wrote his share of exploitative sex and violence tales--we read one, "Wizard's Isle," not too long ago. As for Cummings, he too penned sciency adventure stories like Brigands of the Moon (which, like Williamson's Legion of Space books, I read before this blog blasted off on its erratic course across the firmament) as well as exploitation material, some of which we read back in 2018. In my last blog post I plugged Fred Pohl's memoir The Way the Future Was, highlighting his description of H. L. Gold, and I will point out today that Pohl also has interesting things to say about Cummings.
This one is a first-person narrative. Our main character is Ralph, and he and his wife Barbara are driving through the Arizona desert from Flagstaff to Phoenix; their car breaks down in a remote area after they decide to try taking a shortcut. While trying to fix the car Ralph is menaced by a rattlesnake, and an old Indian rescues him by whistling at the snake--this old geezer can command snakes!
The Indian, Grey Hawk, is a Zuni shaman. He guides the couple to his decrepit little shack, where he lives with Joel, his grandson, a hideous man seven feet tall, with a hairy muscular body the narrator compares to that of an ape. Joel can fix their car, Gray Hawk assures them.
Near the shack is a little hut half dug into the earth, a Zuni temple. White men are forbidden to enter such a temple, but then a chicken plucks a buckle off Barbara's shoe and Ralph is duty bound as a loving husband to pursue this perfidious piece of pick-pocketing poultry wherever it may flee, including into the cramped little temple! Where Ralph accidentally breaks a stone carving of a snake just after Gray Hawk emerges from a secret passage!
Enraged, the Indians attack Ralph, but then a white man, prospector Jim Kramer, appears to break up the fracas. There follows a longish sequence at the Kramer place, where Kramer describes the Zuni religion. The men sleep on the floor of the main room, and Barbara in the bedroom, but in the middle of the night Ralph wakes up to find Kramer and his wife gone. He hears a sound outside and finds Kramer, lying wounded; Kramer says he is dying, but Ralph can probably save Barbara, who has been seized by the huge misshapen Joel, if he hurries.
There is a long pointless sequence in which Ralph searches a bunch of caves and is menaced by various species of venomous serpents, and I think he gets captured by Joel multiple times. The story was already pretty contrived and silly what with that whole chicken business, and it gets far worse: a guy in a concealing headdress who directs Joel to sacrifice the naked Barbara to snakes turns out not to be Gray Hawk but Kramer in disguise. Kramer faked his own death, gave Ralph a pistol full of blanks, and then tied him up poorly in hopes that Ralph would break free of his bonds and shoot at him (Kramer) with the harmless pistol, thinking he had shot down Gray Hawk, so that Kramer could murder Gray Hawk himself without risking prosecution. Kramer wants Gray Hawk dead because the cave full of snakes is also full of radium that Kramer wants to extract and sell. (The radium is the reason Joel is so big and hairy and ugly--he's a mutant!)
Joel, the victim of Kramer's manipulations, gets killed by snakes after falling in the snake pit he was lowering Barbara into, and Kramer gets killed when Gray Hawk summons a snake to bite him. The white couple and the Zuni shaman become friends, and when Gray Hawk dies a year later he wills his land to Ralph and Barbara and they become rich. Oh, brother!
I have to give this story a thumbs down. It is way too long with long filler sequences that add little or nothing to the story. ("Power of the Snake" is much longer than "Bamboo Death" or "The Devil Rides," but it has the same amount of plot.) The plot is way too full of wacky coincidences, unbelievable Rube Goldberg schemes, and hard to credit actions on the parts of the characters, and the violence elements are mundane compared to the extravagant and bizarre such components of "Bamboo Death" and "The Devil Rides." The first two stories we read today were entertaining, as Kuttner's structure and pacing were good and he had concocted some surprising exploitation scenes, but "Power of the Snake" is a disappointing slog.
The editors of these pulp magazines had trouble acquiring printable stories, and so it is common to find a copy of, say, Astounding, containing two stories by a competent and popular author like John W. Campbell or Robert Heinlein, one of them being printed under a pen name, and in this issue of Thrilling Mystery we find two stories by Kuttner, this one, printed under the name "C. K. M. Scanlon," as well as "Laughter of the Dead," which appeared under Kuttner's own name. According to the Crime, Mystery and Gangster Fiction Magazine Index at the Galactic Central website, "C. K. M. Scanlon" was a house pseudonym used by many authors; among those familiar to the staff of MPorcius Fiction Log are the aforementioned Ray Cummings and Manly Wade Wellman as well as our pal Hank.
Butcher Pender the famous serial killer has broken out of jail! In the process of escaping, he murdered the warden, whom he then chopped up into six pieces; then he delivered a piece to each of the six people he blames for his brother's execution and his own arrest: the Mayor, the Police Chief, the boss of the city's political machine, the Mayor's secretary, the political boss's secretary, and our hero, Phil Cardew, who witnessed one of Pender's murders. The Mayor's secretary, Kathryn Sand, is Cardew's girlfriend.
Earlier I expressed stunned admiration for Butcher Pender's ability to commit twelve home invasions in the space of 48 hours without getting caught. Well, it turns out it was only ten home invasions, because one of the alleged victims is actually working with Pender! We know it's not our hero Cardew, and we know it's not his girlfriend, and it can't be the political machine boss's secretary because she was immediately murdered, so it must be the Mayor, the police chief, or the machine boss. I guess out of any three politicians you are bound to find at least one who is in cahoots with criminals of some description.
There are some fight scenes and torture scenes in the mansion and in the end only Cardew and the future Mrs. Cardew have survived and we know the story behind who helped Pender and why.
Lackluster, with villains and deaths that are not as interesting as some of the other gross stories we are reading today.
"Laughter of the Dead"
Our narrator, Don Bernard, was raised by his uncle in a remote house in the mountains. Uncle Adam filled little Donnie's head with stories about their ancestor, Johann Bernhardt, a rich Satanist who fled justice in Europe to settle in America, where he lead a coven of witches and conducted Black Masses in the very house little Donnie was sleeping in every night! Johann was buried next to the house, and a tall metal stake is affixed in the center of the grave--Uncle Adam told little Donnie that if the stake was removed Johann would rise from the grave! Adam also told the narrator that Johann's restless soul was trying to take over his (Donnie's) body!
At age 14 Don fled this house of horrors, ending up in New York City and marrying a redhead, Isobel. And people think I'm joking when I say NYC is a paradise! But as the story begins, Don is driving up a treacherous mountain road to his uncle's house, having received a desperate telegram from Adam. When Don gets to the house he finds Johann Bernhardt's grave has been dug up, the stake gone! A skeletal figure in a black cloak climbs out of the grave, kisses a stupefied Don, and then flees. Don, Don, Don! I could have told you not to leave New York!
Seconds later another car arrives--Isobel has followed Don here, accompanied by a stranger who turns out to be Uncle Adam's lawyer, Leo Peck. Isobel pursued Don when she was told that Uncle Adam never sent that telegram! Peck adds that recently five girls have disappeared without a trace in the area. When nobody answers the door at Uncle Adam's house, the three try to leave, but an avalanche has blocked the road, so they have to return to the house, where they find a disheveled Adam Bernard, who says somebody tied him up and he just escaped!
Having read four of Kuttner's Thrilling Mystery stories already, I assumed that the monster from the grave was somebody in disguise, but who? Uncle Adam? Leo Peck? Some third person working for one or both of those guys? After several scenes in which people discover secret doors, explore subterranean passages, fight voracious rats, get knocked out and tied up, and our narrator Don, apparently possessed by the spirit of his Satan-worshipping ancestor Johann Bernhadt, comes close to sacrificing his naked wife on a black altar (he recovers his senses having only inflicted a flesh wound on wifey--close one!), everything becomes clear.
Adam Bernard was a skilled hypnotist and also an insane homicidal maniac. Two great tastes that taste great together He killed those five girls and then lured Don to the house with the telegram (which he later fallaciously denied having sent) in hopes of pinning the murders on his nephew, whom he had primed to be his hypnotic slave when he was a child. As part of his scheme, he rigged cave ins and avalanches and disguised himself as the living corpse of their diabolical ancestor. Appropriately, his climactic hand-to-hand fight with his nephew causes a cave-in that kills Adam Bernard.
Overly convoluted and with relatively tame atrocities and a low body count (you can't count the five girls, who are never onscreen, alive or dead,) this one gets a marginally negative vote.
**********
I should have limited myself to three of these stories instead of pushing to five, because they are so similar that after two or three fatigue sets in and it is hard to judge the later ones fairly. "The Devil Rides," as the most horrific, is probably the best, with "Bamboo Death" second--these both have murder methods that are shockingly novel and include a deformed character, making them striking and memorable. Because it is too long and full of filler "Power of the Snake" is the worst. "Coffins for Six" is barely acceptable, and "Laughter of the Dead" slips down into thumbs down territory.
Before reading any of them, I thought the stories in Thrilling Mystery would be much like those in Spicy Mystery, and the stories from both magazines do appeal to readers' interest in gore and sexualized violence. However, the stories we read by Howard Wandrei and E. Hoffman Price from Spicy Mystery Stories all had some science fiction or supernatural element, while today's Kuttner stories from Thrilling Mystery have only limited speculative elements. I actually like those sciency and fantasy elements, so the next time we read from Terror in the House we'll pick out stories by Kuttner that were first published in Spicy Mystery Stories and see if, like Wandrei and Price, Kuttner included witches or space aliens or voodoo or cursed pens or other such fun elements in them.
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