Dr Satan - [Pulp Classics 6] Read online

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  DR. SATAN

  [PULP CLASSICS 6]

  Edited Robert Weinberg

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

  DR. SATAN by Paul Ernst, copyright 1935 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for WEIRD TALES, August 1935. No record of copyright renewal.

  THE CONSUMING FLAME by Paul Ernst, copyright 1935 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for WEIRD TALES, November 1935. No record of copyright renewal.

  BEYOND DEATH’S GATEWAY by Paul Ernst, copyright 1936 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for WEIRD TALES, March 1936. No record of copyright renewal.

  THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE by Paul Ernst, copyright 1936 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for WEIRD TALES, May 1936. No record of copyright renewal.

  MASK OF DEATH by Paul Ernst, copyright 1936 by Popular Fiction Publishing Company for WEIRD TALES, August-September 1936. No record of copyright renewal.

  CRUSADER by Basil Well, copyright 1949 by Fantasy Publishing Company Inc. for FANTASY BOOK, # 5, (under the pen-name of Gene Ellerman). Reprinted by permission of Basil Wells.

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION by Robert Weinberg

  DOCTOR SATAN by Paul Ernst

  THE CONSUMING FLAME by Paul Ernst

  THE DEVIL’S DOUBLE by Paul Ernst

  BEYOND DEATH’S GATEWAY by Paul Ernst

  MASK OF DEATH by Paul Ernst

  CRUSADER by Basil Wells

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  INTRODUCTION

  By ROBERT WEINBERG

  Early in 1935, Farnsworth Wright, editor of WEIRD TALES, was facing his first real challenge from competition. There had been earlier magazines in the mold of WEIRD TALES — in 1928 TALES OF MAGIC AND MYSTERY, and in 1931, STRANGE TALES. However, neither magazine hurt WEIRD TALES very much. The first because of its poor quality of material, while the second was a casualty of the collapse of the Clayton Magazine chain in early 1933.

  However, the challenge now was of a different type. The two earlier magazines had been in the weird fantasy field and while readers of WEIRD TALES might purchase the competition, they also bought WEIRD TALES. Not so with the problem created by the Popular Publications magazines that were beginning to siphon off a small part of the following of “the Unique Magazine.”

  Popular Publications had entered the weird mystery field with a mystery magazine that was switched into the horror field in 1933. This pioneering magazine was DIME MYSTERY MAGAZINE. It was so successful with its formula stories of weird horror and detective stories that it fostered two other sister magazines, TERROR TALES in September 1934 and HORROR STORIES in January 1935. Standard Publications, followed the lead and brought out THRILLING MYSTERY. Several other horror-mystery magazines from smaller publishers followed. A new field was born, one that offered a different sort of competition.

  The Weird-Horror pulps did not feature straight weird or fantastic fiction. Most of the stories were straight formula material. A weird and horrible crime was committed, oftentimes seeming to be of supernatural nature. A detective-hero would investigate and solve the crime Just in time to save the beautiful heroine. The stories featured a goodly amount of sadism, some minor sex and lust, and a lot of fast action. Many of the top pulp fiction writers of the time contributed to the horror pulps Including Norvell Page, Hugh Cave and Arthur Leo Zagat. The magazines did extremely well and lured a certain proportion of readers from WEIRD TALES. In an era when money for entertainment was hard to get and WEIRD TALES was the most expensive pulp offered at 25¢, the loss of readers attracted by the lurid covers (making the Margaret Brundage nudes on WEIRD TALES seem tame in comparison) and wild adventures of the horror magazines was a major problem faced by editor Wright. Drastic action was called for.

  Wright took such action beginning with the May 1935 WEIRD TALES. The cover was a terrible one but featured a detective staring at a gravestone while a lurker in darkness threatened with a stone. The story was “The Death Cry” by famous pulpster, Arthur Reeves. “The Death Cry” was a Craig Kennedy adventure and featured the famous detective character in a weird mystery story, somewhat in the style of the Popular Publications style. Wright had decided to fight fire with fire by featuring a weird-detective story in each issue. Other stories — “The Blue Woman,” “The Man with the Blue Beard”, and “Coils of the Silver Serpent” were to follow. None were of particular note and all were panned by the vast readership of the magazine.

  The most ambitious of Wright’s efforts was the Dr. Satan series written by Paul Ernst, a weird fiction pulp veteran of some years. The Dr. Satan stories were out-and-out weird fantasies, with both villain and hero being both masters of super science and black magic. Wright had high hopes for the series as he expressed In The Eyrie for August 1936:

  We await with eager interest your verdict on the stories about Dr. Satan, the first of which is published in this issue.... To those of you who are afraid that WEIRD TALES will degenerate into Just another detective magazine, we definitely promise that it will not do so...If the stories about Dr. Satan and Ascott Keane – the world’s strangest criminal and strangest criminologist – are ordinary detective stories, then we do not know a weird story when we see one.

  Wright was correct in stating that the Dr. Satan stories were weird. Ernst filled them with one supernatural event after another, even having his characters fighting in the after-life. However, while the series did have its admirers, it was not popular enough with the readership to continue it after eight stories appeared. The series had no resolution. Dr. Satan was never caught.

  Several points should be made. Ernst obviously wrote the stories on commission from Wright and did not pay the attention to details that he should have. In one story a minor sub-villain is killed, but in the next, that villain is back with no mention of his death, (that error has been corrected with a few well chosen revisions here). In several of the stories, Ascott Keane’s name is spelled with one t and then later, with two. In the earlier stories, some mystery is made of Dr. Satan’s true identity. Keane never learns of the identity (this is fairly evident from a reading of “Beyond Death’s Gateway”) but in the latter stories, the mystery of Satan’s identity is conveniently forgotten.

  The blurbs for the stories, as written by Farnsworth Wright, often were unintentionally hilarious. In the Introduction for the story “Hollywood Horror”, Wright stated:

  Here is another fascinating tale about that weird genius of crime who calls himself Dr. Satan. He is no madman, but as sane as you or I. An immensely rich man, he has turned to crime for the thrill of it, and strikes down those in his path ruthlessly, heartlessly and thoroughly.

  If Dr. Satan was “as sane as you or I” one would have to wonder about what sanity actually means. Wright often got carried away with his blurbs and was not a particularly good writer of them.

  The reason for the failure of the Satan staples is that the readership Just did not want detective stories, no matter how weird they were. The following two letters in The Eyrie expressed the ideas of most:

  The point is when I want to read weird detective stories I’ll buy them but when I sit down to read your magazine, I don’t expect to find weird detective stories included therein.

  and

  Glad you left out Dr. Satan. We readers can struggle along very nicely without him. A super detective against a super crook has no place in a magazine devoted to Weird Tales.

  As Wright was a good editor, he was quick to see that instead of winning new readers, the Dr. Satan stories might lose him regular customers. So, the series was dropped.

  While strictly formula stories — the reader knows in advance that at the end of each story, Dr. S
atan’s schemes will have been thwarted but that both he and Ascott Keane will escape unharmed — the Dr. Satan stories are fine entertainment and a good example of a pulp style adventure that is still with us in paperback, though with different settings, today. The Ernst series is unique in that it is filled with a wild mixture of super-science and darkest magic. There is rarely an attempt for any rational explanation of the powers of either the hero or the villain. When the action starts, logic takes a walk out the door.

  A fine Margaret Brundage cover introduced Dr. Satan. For a rare change, it did not feature a nude girl — since there were none in the story. Since Wright almost always had his cover story the one which featured a nude girl, the cover was obviously painted to signify the major start of a new series. The one other cover that featured Dr. Satan, “The Devil’s Double,” enabled Mrs. Brundage to feature a girl in her nightgown.

  Vincent Napoli handled the interior illustration of the Dr. Satan series and did some very fine linework illustrations for the series. One of the best of these illustrations is reproduced in this booklet. Napoli was doing a good deal of work for WEIRD TALES during this period and he had the regular assignment of drawing the pictures for the Dr. Satan series. His concept of Dr. Satan was less dramatic than Mrs. Brundage but much more haughty and diabolical than the rather ridiculous looking figure in the Brundage paintings. Of course, neither of the artists could be faulted much as it was Ernst who had Satan dress in his ludicrous costume.

  In this booklet, we have reprinted five of the Dr. Satan stories. Two of these have appeared earlier as reprints in STARTLING MYSTERY STORIES, a hard-to-find reprint magazine edited by Robert Lowndes in the late 1960’s. The other three stories have never been reprinted since their initial publication in 1936. No particular order has been kept other than the printing of “Dr. Satan” first, as all of the other stories are independent of the other stories in the series.

  Also Included in this booklet is “Crusader” by Basil Wells. Mr. Wells is a veteran of the pulps of the forties and early 1950’s and is now making a belated comeback in the writing field. The story reprinted here is one of the editor’s favorites in the fantastic adventure field. It is a deft combination of the immortal soldier story and the swords-and-sorcery adventure. “Crusader” is a much better story than many of the stories being printed today in anthologies of fantastic adventure and we are pleased to reprint it here in its first appearance in many years.

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  Readers will notice that two types of type are used in the booklet. We have to apologize for this minor fault and promise that it will not occur again. We have finally been able to purchase an electric typewriter and all future booklets will be done using that machine. However, most of the manuscript had already been done on our old typewriter before that purchase and so, because of both economic and deadline factors, there is a difference in type between several of the stories.

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  This is the first of our PULP CLASSICS to reprint stories not directly from the character pulps. The editor is naturally interested in your reaction. Should we continue publishing stories only of the hero-pulp type or should we extend our series to include all type of material from the rare pulps of the twenties and thirties. There are many fine novels available that do not fit the standard character pulp formula. Several collections of little-known authors from weird fiction magazines including WEIRD TALES and STRANGE TALES could be done if readers liked. Please realize that we are in much the same position of Farnsworth Wright, editor of WEIRD TALES. We want to publish what the readers want. Won’t you please write and let us know.

  Robert Weinberg

  Editor and Publisher

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  DOCTOR SATAN

  Business was being done as usual in the big outer office of the Ryan Importing Company. Calls came over the switchboard for various department heads. Men and girls bent over desks, reading and checking order blanks, typewriting, performing the thousand and one duties of big business.

  Yet over the office hung a hush, more sensed than consciously felt. The typewriters seemed to make less than their normal chatter. Employees talked in low tones, when they had something to communicate to one another. The office boy showed a tendency to tiptoe when he carried a fresh batch of mail in from the anteroom.

  The girl at the switchboard pulled a plug as a call from the secretary of the big boss, Arthur B. Ryan, was concluded.

  The office boy looked inquiringly at her as he passed. “How’s the old man?”

  The girl shook her head a little. “I guess he’s worse. That last call was important, and he wouldn’t take it himself. He had Gladys take it for him.”

  “What’s the matter with him, anyhow?”

  “A headache,” said the girl.

  “Is that all? I thought from the way everybody was acting like this was a morgue, that he was dying or something.”

  “I guess this is something special in the way of headaches,” the switchboard girl retorted, smoothing down the blonde locks at the back of her head. “And it came up awful sudden. He walked past here at nine, two hours ago, and grinned at me like he felt great. Then at ten he phoned down to the building drugstore for some aspirin. Now he won’t take a call from the head of one of the biggest companies in the city! I guess he feels terrible.”

  “A headache!” snorted the office boy. “Well, why don’t he go see a doctor?”

  “I put through a call for Doctor Swanson on the top floor of the building, ten Minutes ago. He was busy with an appointment, but said he’d be down soon.”

  “A headache! And he can’t take it! Wonder what he’d do if he got something serious the matter with him.”

  He swaggered on, and the hush seemed to deepen over the office. A premonitory hush? Were all in the big room dimly conscious of the sequence of events about to be started there? Later, many claimed they had felt psychic warnings; but whether that is a fact or imagination will never be known.

  A hush, with a drone of voices and machines accentuating it in the outer office. A silence, in which the doors of the executives, in their cubicles along the east wall of the office space, remained closed. A quiet that seemed to emanate from the blank, shut door marked Arthur B. Ryan, President.

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  And then the hush was cracked. The silence was torn, like strong linen screaming apart as a great strain rips it from end to end.

  From behind the door marked President came a shriek of pain and horror that blanched the cheeks of the office workers; a yell that keened out over the hush and turned busy fingers to wood, and which stopped all words on the suddenly numbed lips that had been uttering them.

  Ryan’s secretary, pale, trembling, ran from her desk outside the office door and sped into Ryan’s office.

  “Oh, my God!” the shriek came more clearly to the general office the opened door. “My head . . . oh, my God!”

  And then the screams of the man were swelled suddenly by the high shriek of the secretary. “Look – look...”

  There was the thud of a body in Ryan’s office, telling the plain message that she had fainted; an instant later the agonized shrieks of the man in there were stilled.

  For a second all in the general office were gripped by silence, paralyzed, staring with wide eyes at the door to the private office. Then the sales manager stepped to the open door.

  He glanced into Ryan’s office, and those outside saw his face go the color of ashes. He tottered, caught at the door to keep from falling.

  Then, with the air of a man dazed by a physical blow, he closed the door and stumbled toward the switchboard.

  “Phone the police,” he said hoarsely to the girl. “My God 111 the police . . . though I don’t know what they can do. His Head ...”

  “What - what’s the matter with his head?” the girl faltered as her fingers stiffly manipulated the switchboard plugs.

  The sales manager stared at her without seeing
her, his eyes looking as if they probed through her and into unplumbed chasms or horror behind her.

  “A tree growing out of his head,” he gasped. “A tree . . . pushing out of his skull, like a plant cracking a flower-pot it outgrows, and sending roots and branches through the cracks.”

  He leaned against the switchboard.

  “A tree, killing him. Hurry! Get the ...”

  He lunged for her, but was too late; the switchboard girl had slid from her chair, unconscious. Blindly, with fingers that rattled against the switchboard, the man put through the call himself.

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  That was at eleven in the morning of July 12th, 193-, a day that made criminal history in New York.

  At eleven-ten, in a great Long Island home, the second chapter was being written.