In Volume 9 of Hippocampus Press' Letters of H. P. Lovecraft, we find HPL telling Duane W. Rimel that Otis Adelbert Kline is "probably the best agent in the business" (p. 305), "a wizard at placing things" (290) with lots of "influence" (306) who "regard[s] fiction writing as a business & not an art" (286). In our last blog post I was talking about how good some of Frank Belknap Long's early stories are, in contrast to his reprehensible later work, and in a September 8, 1934 letter to August Derleth*, Lovecraft blames Kline for Long's decline:
Belknap reports great successes in the pulp field. Under the tutelage of Otis Adelbert Kline he is getting to be a highly enterprising young business man---but the artist of yesteryear seems lost in the shuffle!
Indeed, in a March 25, 1933 letter to Robert E. Howard*, HPL admits "I simply can't read the crap Kline and [Hugh B.] Cave grind out...."
*See Essential Solitude: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and August Derleth: 1932-1937 and A Means to Freedom: The Letters of H. P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard: 1933-1936.
Well, today let's see if we can read some of that ground out "crap." Under Otis Adelbert Kline's entry, the indispensable isfdb lists three stories in a Dr. Dorp series and two stories in a Bart Leslie series. We've already read the first Dorp story, 1923's "The Phantom Wolfhound," and the second Leslie story, 1936's "The Cyclops of Xoatal," a collaboration with E. Hoffman Price. Let's finish up these two series today with "The Malignant Entity," "The Radio Ghost" and "The Demon of Tlaxpam"; I'll be reading these stories in scans of the magazines in which they first came under the eye of the pulp readers to whom Kline was, according to HPL at least, slavishly catering, and you can do the same by clicking the links in this sentence.
"The Malignant Entity" (1924)
First we're going back to the super-sized issue of
Weird Tales in which we read Lovecraft's famous collaborations with Harry Houdini--
"Imprisoned with the Pharaohs"-- and C. M. Eddy, Jr.'s--
"The Loved Dead." "The Malignant Entity" is the second Dr. Dorp story, and takes up like seven pages of the unique magazine.
Our narrator is a guy named Evans who is pals with Dr. Dorp; I guess their relationship is modelled on that of Watson and Holmes. These two nerds are talking about their mutual hobby, interest in psychic phenomena and the occult, when the police chief comes in and requests Dorp's aid. A scientist has turned up dead--he was healthy last night but this morning his daughter found him just a skeleton, still clad in his typical clothes and jewelry. Where did all his flesh and organs go?
The chief brings the narrator and the doctor to the house of death where they look at the skeleton of the scientist and at a vat of clear gelatinous liquid sitting there in the lab with the bones. Then, in other rooms, our heroes look for clues the way you'd expect people to in detective fiction--reading through files and questioning people. A cop is guarding the lab, and when his relief comes this second uniformed officer finds that his predecessor is dead, a skeleton still clad in his police uniform.
We get a lot of dialogue from Dr. Dorp about the debate over what constitutes life and whether the soul is real because the dead scientist was trying to create life synthetically. Dorp theorizes that the scientist created a monster that had no soul and so hated ensouled natural life and would set out to destroy natural life. In between such conversations, our guys notice that there is more liquid in the vat than before, and look at a drop of it in a microscope--the drop contains two forms of animated matter, the more numerous destroying the minority. Dorp then revises his theory--maybe an alien soul that lacked a body and was just floating around the universe, unable to interact with the material world, came upon this protoplasm created by the dead scientist--a body without a soul--and filled its soul-shaped vacancy. Once united with a body, the alien soul started devouring people to increase its new body's size. These theories are kind of interesting, but I don't feel like they are integrated with the rest of the narrative--they feel tacked on, parallel to the plot and the characters' actions.
The most exciting part of the story follows as our two heroes and the police strive to destroy the blob monster with various weapons and methods as it flees from them. Eventually they succeed. At the same time the hunt is on for the creature, the hunt for more documents that will reveal more about the synthetic creature continues, and this quest also succeeds. Unfortunately, these two quests operate in parallel instead of one somehow supporting the other.
"The Malignant Entity" has the makings of a good story, but the structure is a mess. For example, our heroes catch the monster and then find those additional documents that tell them more about the blob monster. Wouldn't it make more sense, story-wise, for the men to learn about the monster and then use their newfound knowledge to defeat it? As it is, the narrator catches the blob monster (which has been shrunken to the size of a golf ball after barely surviving a direct hit from acid poured on it by Evans and Dorp) in the totally mundane way I catch wasps up in the attic that is MPorcius HQ--by putting a glass jar over it--the new info doesn't really do anything for the plot. Similarly, it seems like Dorp figures out that the liquid in the vat is the monster, but instead of immediately telling everybody so they all can work together to destroy the menace, he takes his time, attending a meeting with government officials, before acting on his theory, even though the monster has already killed two upstanding productive citizens. Dorp doesn't even put a cover on the vat to confine the suspected killer while he hobnobs with the authorities!
I'm also a little curious why the blob monster, which we are told can only feed on living creatures, consumes the fur of animals and hair of humans but not the bones of man or beast or the clothes of people--aren't your bones alive, your hair dead, and people's clothes in 1924 made of organic materials? Another thing--the shock ending of the story is that the blob monster, as it dies while being heated in a furnace, takes the shape of the head of the scientist who created it, but while our heroes are chasing it around the house it never demonstrates any shape-shifting ability, never takes the form of a mouse or cat or dog or any of the other creatures the scientist fed it. Obviously Kline does what he does to create dramatic images, but all the science talk makes you expect the science to add up, and it is disappointing when it doesn't.
We're judging "The Malignant Entity" barely acceptable; I like blob monsters and the hunt for the creature is fun, so I'm not consigning this one to "bad" status. This second Dorp adventure was reprinted three times in Amazing Stories, first in June 1926, then in the 1934 Fall Quarterly, and finally in the February 1966 issue. It is interesting that it was Amazing and not Weird Tales that reprinted the story, and that Amazing's staff or owners kept going back to it--is this evidence of Kline's business acumen? Or just a testament to how much people love blob monsters?
"The Radio Ghost" (1927)
The third Dr. Dorp story, "The Radio Ghost," debuted in
Amazing but has never been reprinted anywhere. We will soon join the ranks of the few people alive today in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty-Six who have read this thing!
Our story begins as the narrator, Evans, and the good doctor are talking about ectoplasm (ectoplasm was a major element of the first Dr. Dorp story, "The Phantom Wolfhound," I'm sure you remember.) A pretty blonde calls on Dr. Dorp, interrupting the discussion, for which we have reason to thank her, as ectoplasm has nothing to do with this hard-science-based story. This young woman is the niece of yet another student of the occult with whom Dorp was on familiar terms, a man recently deceased, and she has come for advice in dealing with some bizarre and disturbing phenomena that have occurred to her as she has been fulfilling the obligations placed upon her by unc's will. You see, to keep her uncle's estate worth $600,000, she has to live for a year in his old house (this kind of thing happens all the time in fiction) because he plans on contacting her there from the other side! And, sure enough, since she moved in she has been hearing footsteps, smelling ugly odors, seeing doors opening and closing on their own, etc. Are these legitimate supernatural phenomena? Or are uncle's servants and/or the woman's cousin, who was estranged from the uncle because of their disagreement as to who deserved to prevail in the Great War, trying to drive away the blonde in hopes of getting their own mitts on the inheritance? Keep in mind this is Amazing, the pro-science magazine, and not Weird Tales, we are reading.
Evans and Dorp drive from downtown Chicago ("the loop") up to Highland Park where sits the haunted house. There they meet the creepy servants and witness a multitude of poltergeist-type phenomena-- flickering lights, inexplicably cold breezes, a luminous image of a man, etc. The blonde faints during one such incident, and Evans carries her outside so she can get some fresh air. Dr. Dorp remains inside the house still and ends up trapped in a closet that is so cold it threatens his life and Evans has to rush in and rescue the old geezer. Then the blonde's dog goes berserk and tries to kill Evans, and the blonde has to gun down her own pet.
By the next day Dr. Dorp has it all figured out, and enlists some technician/engineer types and police detectives to catch the overweight bespectacled German-sympathizer cousin, who has been using radio, television, remote-controlled electro magnets and refrigerators, etc., to cause all the strange events in the house from his lair eight miles away. As for the dog, the cousin simply injected it with rabies.
The "using technology to try to scare a woman out of money" theme is bland next to perennial fan favorite "a blob monster attacks!", but "The Radio Ghost" is better written and better structured than "The Malignant Entity." The characters' motivations all make sense, the science and technology makes sense and is fully integrated into the plot, the action scenes are good (and make sense--compare to the action scenes I'll be talking about below), and lectures on the paranormal virtually absent, while the narrative moves smoothly and logically from scene to scene. I can mildly recommend this one, even if it has been forgotten by history in favor of its inferior predecessor. The world is unjust!
"The Demon of Tlaxpam" (1929)
Here we have the first Bart Leslie story, which debuted in an issue of
Weird Tales alongside fiction by the aforementioned messrs. Lovecraft, Howard and Derleth. As far as I can tell, "The Demon of Tlaxpam," like "The Radio Ghost," hasn't been reprinted.
Two-Gun Bart is a US Secret Service agent working near the border with Mexico; recently, he dismantled a group of murderous Mexican bandits known as the Gila Men. Today he is invited to dinner at a "notorious cafe" with one of the former Gilas, now working for the Mexican government. (Sounds about right.) Having already gotten permission from Washington, the government of Mexico is asking Two-Gun Bart for aid in solving a problem they are having near the town of Tlaxpam. People riding along a trail are being mysteriously decapitated, and the local police have had no luck figuring out what is up or finding the lost heads. Some of the locals think the devil is to blame. If Bart can solve the problem, the Mexican authorities will reward him 20,000 pesos.
The former Gila Man accompanies Bart by train to Tlaxpam, where Bart outwits an assassin armed with a machete and then sets out on his mission, guided by a man who is three-quarter Aztec and backed up by a dozen brave Mexican fighting men. Why does the Mexican government need Bart when they have all these brave and apparently competent personnel who are already familiar with the area of operations? Anyway, this international task force gets to the narrow stretch of trail between a body of water and a towering cliff where these murders keep happening and spends some days investigating. They stay at the little home of a holy hermit who looks after a shrine to Saint Anthony and a pool said to have medicinal properties. Those dozen fighting men start getting killed one by one whenever one of them is dim enough to go some place alone, decapitated in an instant, their heads no where to be found. Leslie tries to lay a trap and catch the decapitator, but makes limited progress.
Finally, Leslie spots something odd about the hermit's domicile and discovers a secret door that leads underground to a room full of skulls--and the heads of his Mexican colleagues, cooking in a cauldron! He captures a man wearing a devil mask--of course behind the mask is the hermit. The hermit explains that he is a Yaqui, one of a tribe of Indians oppressed by the white man for centuries. The serial decapitator describes how all the members of his immediate family were abused by and died at the hands of the Mexican government and its supporters--raped, enslaved, killed for insubordination, etc. His family's sole survivor, he escaped slavery to embark on a campaign to collect 1000 Mexican heads--he chose decapitation as his method because his brother's head was cut off with a machete by a slave overseer.
Having some Spanish blood, and knowledgeable of priestly ways, he was able to pass as a devout Catholic Mexican and develop a good reputation as the keeper of the shrine. He invented a special device, a metal box with one open face and an internal spring-loaded blade. From the cliff above the trail to Tlaxpam, he can throw the box down over a man's shoulders, then pull the box back up with the severed head inside.
Just like you and me, Leslie is amazed that a dude can reliably throw a metal box with pinpoint accuracy, even able to make sure which of its six sides strikes the target. The Yaqui offers to demonstrate to Leslie his ability, and Leslie puts his revolvers back in their holsters so he can roll a target along the floor that the murderer can throw his box at. What? Of course, the killer throws the box over Leslie's cabeza, but Leslie is somehow able to interpose his hand between his shoulder and the trigger that activates the spring, so the blade does not sever his head. Then he outfights the Yaqui hand to hand.
The decapitating box is kind of silly, and Leslie letting the killer throw it at him is sillier still, and the fight between Bart and the killer, one trying to keep the spring from being tripped and the other trying to activate the spring, is hard to credit. The denouement is also silly. The Gila Man shows up minutes after Leslie has tied up the Yaqui and this former bandit, current government official, explains that he has also solved the mystery and is fully aware the holy hermit is the killer--he got impatient and tortured the assassin who tried to kill Leslie back in Tlaxpam to solve the mystery the easy way.
I think we are giving this one a grade of "barely acceptable." The action scenes are silly and hard to follow, and Leslie's detective work isn't satisfying because he discovers who the culprit is by luck and some other guy solves the mystery at the same time using (admittedly monstrous) logical methods. But Kline writes with enthusiasm and I was curious as to what the hell was going on, actually did care about how some bastard was decapitating all these people without leaving a trail or trace of himself, so I can't say reading "The Demon of Tlaxpam" was a bad experience. The noteworthy thing about "The Demon of Tlaxpam" is the story's portrayal of the government of Mexico as tyrannical and corrupt; maybe "The Demon of Tlaxpam" will be a useful text for those studying the depiction of Latinos and/or Native Americans in American genre fiction of the interwar period.
**********
Not a stellar performance, but no "F"s, either. "Crap" is, in my opinion, a little harsh. I'm not sure when we will read Kline again, but we may very well do so--if and when Kline come sup again here at MPorcius Fiction Log, I will likely focus on stories he had in Thrilling Wonder instead of his weird work.
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