Spicy Stories by E. Hoffmann Price and Henry Kuttner

The wikipedia page on E. Hoffmann Price, which I looked at while writing a recent installment of MPorcius Fiction Log, brought to mind the pulp magazines Spicy Mystery Stories and Spicy-Adventure Stories.  So today I typed "spicy" into the internet archive to check out what stories by Price and other Weird Tales writers from these magazines might be available for free.  Now let's read three of them, two by Price and one by Henry Kuttner, a long time favorite of us here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"Tailor Made Mummy" by E. Hoffmann Price (1936)   

Back in 1976 Odyssey Publications reprinted the July 1936 issue of Spicy Mystery Stories, which included Price's "Tailor Made Mummy;" it is this reprint that is available at the internet archive.  The contents page of the issue, which has an awesome illustration depicting a cabal of skull-faced villains lowering a curvaceous babe into a pit where she will be devoured by some kind of ravenous goblin or gremlin, also has a funny typo, "Dummy" for "Mummy."  Oh, brother!

Merrill Kane is an unscrupulous chemist, living in Egypt with his wife, the beautiful blonde Ida.  Kane's rich uncle was an Egyptologist with a fringe theory about the whereabouts of some ancient queen's mummy; in an early example of cancel culture, when he couldn't substantiate his theory, this guy was disgraced before the Egyptologist community.  In his will this scholar  stipulated that his nephew Merrill could only inherit his worldly goods if Merrill first found the mummy of that queen and proved his theory.

As the story begins Kane has hired a down-and-out Egyptologist, Denis Foster, a man who has not been able to find work with his Egyptology degree and has been going hungry.  (Should have studied engineering or something like that, pal.)  Foster's first assignment is to mummify a beautiful brunette suicide whose fresh corpse Kane has acquired from the morgue!  At first, Foster refuses--he says he is against defiling the bodies of the dead.  But then Kane draws a gun, tells Foster that this estate is surrounded by electrified wires so he can't escape, and if he doesn't mummify this poor suicide at once he'll let one of his native thugs rape the corpse.  So Foster mummifies the 20th-century body using the methods employed in Egypt thousands of years ago.

At night Foster is locked up in a basement.  Ida comes to him--she hates her husband, who hasn't been paying attention to her, and she has sex with Foster.  The sex in this story is not explicit--the lovers are in each other's arms, and then there is an ellipsis, and the next para starts with some indication that time has passed, and we are left to assume what went on.  After their lovemaking is finished, Ida explains to Foster why Kane needs a counterfeit mummy to secure his inheritance. 

When he is not busy working on the mummy or the mummy case, Foster sneaks around the estate, trying to figure out a way to deactivate those electrified wires.  He discovers that his first go at mummifying a woman was just for practice--Kane and his Arab thugs have caught a girl alive whom they are going to slay and compel Foster to mummify.  The villains lock this girl in the wine cellar, which shares a wall with the basement.  

Foster finds some loose blocks in the wall, and makes himself a passage through which he joins the new captive.  He and this olive-skinned beauty, Nefeyda, while plotting a means of escaping, fall in love and have sex.  

Foster and Nefeyda's first escape attempt is a failure, and after a brutal fight with Kane's Arab goons, our heroes end up back in their makeshift cells; Foster again sneaks into the wine cellar.  

Ida comes to the basement looking for Foster, and then goes to the wine cellar when she finds he's not there.  Foster loosens the light bulb that illuminates the wine cellar, rendering the place pitch black, and directs Nefedya to hide in the corner.  Ida, thinking them alone, wants to have sex with Foster, and our hero, who doesn't want to cheat on Nefeyda while she is right there, silences the blonde her by knocking her cold with a single punch.  But too late--jealous Nefedya, sensing the intimacy between Foster and Kane's wife, has already sneaked out the open door.

In the climax to the story Kane the evil chemist has Foster at gunpoint in the operating room and sends one of his Arab brutes to bring Nefedya to be mummified.  The Arab strangles the girl he finds in the dark wine cellar and brings the pulchritudinous corpse to Kane and Foster--everybody is shocked to see the goon has murdered Ida!  Foster takes advantage of his tormentors' confusion to attack, and a bloody fight ensues.  Foster incapacitates Kane, but that huge Arab is about to kill our hero when Nefedya arrives and stabs the thug in the back, killing him.  Foster assures Nefedya that Ida meant nothing to him, and we are given to believe that Foster and Nefedya will live happily ever after. 

The plot of "Tailor Made Mummy" is contrived, convoluted and ridiculous, Price concocting unlikely circumstances and portraying people acting in unconvincing ways to provide himself opportunities to serve up hearty helpings of sex and violence, the descriptions of injuries and transgressions against the human body, designed to appeal to the prurient interests and particular fetishes of readers drawn in by the sexy and sadistic illustrations on the cover and contents page of the magazine.  And these passages are legion: women who have been rendered helpless by drugs, battery or death are manhandled and violated; Nefedya strips in front of Foster on the pretext that he needs her silk undergarments for use as insulation in his (ultimately abortive) scheme of cutting the live wires leading to the electrified fence; Nefedya bites and scratches men bloody in fights in which she is herself bruised and bloodied.  And then there are Price's invocations of necrophilia and voyeurism.

"Tailor Made Mummy" is a crazy piece of work on every level.  I can enjoy a story full of sex and violence, and I am not the kind of guy to condemn a work of art or fiction simply because it is sexist or racist (for example, I think the illustrations on Spicy Mystery's cover and contents page are great), but "Tailor Made Mummy" is poorly put together and I feel I have to give it the old thumbs down. 

"South Sea Justice" by E. Hoffmann Price (1941)

In 1974, Odyssey Publications published a reprint of the February 1941 issue of Spicy-Adventure Stories, which includes Price's story "South Sea Justice;" it is this reprint that I found at the internet archive. 

"South Sea Justice" takes place in French Polynesia, where "Red" Lawton has been running a coconut plantation for five years.  Over that time a young native girl, Vikahue, whose body is covered in tattoos, has blossomed into voluptuous womanhood, and she has a crush on Red!  Red's plantation was financed by his 50/50 partner Vince Durbin; Durbin has spent most of that time back home in America, but recently arrived on the island.  As our story begins, Durbin is missing and Vikahue interrupts Red's search for him to flirt and to tell him some unhappy truths about Durbin.  For one thing, Durbin has been frequenting taboo locations on the island, and Vikahue warns Red that her tribe's priests will kill Durbin if he doesn't quit it.  For another, Durbin has been making time with the white woman Red has been courting, Paris-educated Irinea Salazar, daughter of a neighboring planter.  

Red catches up with Durbin at Salazar's, where he learns Irinea and Durbin are practically engaged.  Irinea is gorgeous, and seeing her slip through his fingers--and hearing Durbin remind him that he would be nothing without his investment--enrages Red.  It doesn't help when Durbin scoffs at Red's warnings about the need to stay away from the natives' taboo spots--Durbin admits he's hoping to find the rumored treasure trove of pearls said to be hidden at one of the native temples.  In his rage Red makes a fool of himself in front of Irinea and it looks like his hopes of marrying her are dashed.

Red doesn't give up, though.  He lets Durbin take over management of the plantation, a task for which he is totally unprepared and to which he is temperamentally unsuited, hoping that the stress of the troubles that arise will convince him to leave the island, or that his demonstrated incompetence will discredit him with the Salazars--Irinea's father won't let her marry some goof who causes a native uprising or can't run the business profitably.  The scheming Vikahue plays her own game; she wants Red to be her man, and is very jealous of Irinea; for his part Red desires Vikahue's luscious brown body, finding those long legs with their blue tattoos particularly fascinating, but he knows bringing a nonwhite wife back to the U.S. will be trouble and so keeps rejecting Viki's advances.  For some reason Vikahue also torments Durbin, perhaps trying to make Red jealous, egging Durbin on and then spreading rumors he has been harassing her.

Eventually Durbin cracks under the pressure.  Seeing as he doesn't know how to make money with the plantation, one stormy night he steals off to loot some sacred pearls from a native temple--he'll use these to finance a return to America with Irinea.  But islanders find him desecrating their holy grounds and he murders one of them.  The natives rise up, demanding revenge.  Irinea rejects Durbin's scheme of fleeing with the pearls, appalled by his thievery and worried that the uprising he has triggered may lead to the islanders killing her father.  Miss Salazar now realizes she should marry Red instead of this jerk.  Durbin makes a break for it on his own, but he can't navigate in the storm and his boat capsizes-- he drowns as the natives who were chasing him watch from the safety of the beach.  Seeing the malefactor meet his just deserts at the hands of the gods, the natives feel justice has been done and the uprising is over.  We are lead to believe that Red and Irinea will marry and spend a happy life together on the island.

"South Sea Justice," on a technical level, is substantially better than "Tailor Made Mummy."  The character's personalities, motivations and actions all make sense, though I feel Price committed a misstep in leaving the Vikahue subplot essentially unresolved.  There probably should have been a scene in which the tattooed girl made her peace with Irinea or found some other guy or whatever and resolved to stop chasing Red; or maybe an unsettling ending in which Red worried that Vikahue would try to break up his marriage and ha to resolve to be strong in the face of Viki's temptation.

"South Sea Justice" is also less exploitative than Price's bonkers fake mummy tale--nobody has sex, the violence is considerably toned down in volume and in vividness--and far less crazy; in fact, nothing that happens is crazy at all--everything that happens is pretty believable.  I'm afraid this makes the story less fun and less memorable, and suspect it probably doesn't scratch the itch that led a person to purchase Spicy-Adventures Stories in the first place.

"Tropic Hell" by Henry Kuttner (1941)  

Henry Kuttner's cover story from the August 1941 Spicy-Adventure Stories is so brief and straightforward it feels more like an anecdote than a story, but it does offer the sex and bloodshed readers were presumably looking for.

Joe Dawson is the second mate of a tramp steamer sitting in the lagoon of the little South Pacific island of Marava.  A dude named Kent owns the plantation on Marava, and Kent's sister, beautiful college grad Loretta, just disembarked from the steamer Dawson's ship to join him.  During the voyage from San Francisco, Dawson and Loretta had a little fling, but he assumes that is all over now.

Two native girls, frantic, paddle up to the ship--they ask for the captain, but Dawson tells them the captain and first mate are asleep.  The islanders, one of them a princess of the local tribe, Utota, beg Dawson to set sail with them aboard, offering him a bunch of pearls as payment.  Then another boat arrives, and on it are a bunch of native police and the brutish overseer of the Kent plantation, Rudy Storm.  They accuse the girls of stealing the pearls and seize them and the women; the princess tries to kill Storm with a knife, but he overpowers her--in the fracas her clothes come off and she gets knocked out with a punch in the face.  Before they are dragged off, Utota's companion tells Dawson that Kent is dead, a claim Storm denies.

After all these squabbling characters have left the ship, Dawson decides to sneak ashore and investigate.  He learns that Storm killed Kent some time ago and is ruling the island like a tyrant.  He, somehow, has been forging all of Kent's correspondence, fooling even Loretta.  There is a series of fights, captures and escapes on the island, Dawson, Loretta and the princess Utota at various times grappling with Storm, having their clothes ripped off, getting tied up, etc.  At one point Dawson and Loretta are hiding under some bushes and they have a passionate make out session--Loretta was hysterical with fear and about to scream and expose their hiding place and the best way to silence her and take her mind off her fears was to kiss her!  Later, they are Storm's captives and the brutal overseer gropes poor Loretta with one hand while he drinks booze with the other--suddenly the princess attacks him with a dagger, only to have Storm seize the blade and bury it in her chest.  Loretta bolts, and while Storm is chasing her, the dying Utota crawls, naked, "blood trickling down her swaying breasts," to where Dawson lies tied up.  With the dagger Dawson is able to free himself and then defeat Storm in a vicious fight.  

At the end of the story it is clear Dawson and Loretta are an item, but I don't think there is any indication of what is going to happen to the Kent plantation--it seems like Dawson and Loretta aren't made of the same stuff as Red and Irinea and won't be living on the plantation, but moving to America.  Well, Loretta probably couldn't use her degree on that island anyway.     

Maybe we should see "Tropic Hell" as the most successful of today's three stories, as it has characters whose behavior makes sense as well as horrific violence against women and fetishistic sex elements.  What it lacks compared to Price's "Tailor Made Mummy" and "South Sea Justice" is any kind of science or exotic or weird component.  

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We'll continue exploring this disreputable facet of the careers of the members of the Weird Tales gang in our next episode.