The Master of Men: The Daring Exploits of The Spider
Arbo Files
There’s something strange afoot in the industrial city of Cologne, Ohio. A large, bearded, and drooling hulk of a man attacks the mansion belonging to Berthold Healy, owner of a major steel conglomerate. The crazed man’s motivations are unknown, but, when a glass of water is produced, the cause of his affliction is revealed — hydrophobia!
Following the attack in Cologne, other cities in the Midwest, including Gary, Indiana and Columbus, Ohio, are besieged by armies of wolves, dogs, cats, and bats afflicted with hydrophobia. The disease spreads to the human population. Murder, robbery, and riots proliferate. The Ohio National Guard is mobilized, and yet all their machine guns and airplanes cannot defeat the scourge of hydrophobia. Only one man has the smarts, the cunning, and the sheer masculine energy to save the Midwest.
That man is the Master of Men. His real name is Richard Wentworth, and he is a millionaire criminologist with an FBI badge. The underworld knows him best as The Spider—a frightening avenger who dons a black slouch hat, wig, and false fangs to combat criminals wherever he finds them.
The Spider’s fight against hydrophobia is the plot to the novella The Mad Horde, which was published in May 1934 in the character’s own magazine. By that point, The Spider was less than a year old. The character debuted in October 1933 with a novella entitled The Spider Strikes. In that novella, the audience is not only introduced to the daring criminologist Wentworth, but also to his faithful manservant, Ram Singh. Described as a “Hindu,” Singh has a Sikh surname and wears the traditional Sikh turban, while he also frequently praises Allah. Consistency was rarely a concern for the pulps. From October 1933 until 1943, Wentworth, Singh, and other fellow crimefighters (most notably the lovely Nita Van Sloan) would battle the criminal underworld together.
Wentworth has all the qualities of a pulp vigilante. He is independently wealthy, he served in the armed forces as an officer during the Great War, and he is Renaissance man with a genius-level intellect. Like Sherlock Holmes, Wentworth is a master of disguise and a peak physical specimen. Wentworth’s one unique trait is his explicit connection to the Justice Department. Wentworth (not The Spider) is a special agent for the FBI, albeit a special agent who is allowed to do his own thing at all times.
The Spider’s creation was born out of envy. Harry Steeger and the other editors at Popular Publications were miffed that Street & Smith, their chief rival in the world of pulp publishing, had hit the proverbial jackpot with The Shadow. The Shadow’s popularity, as well as the popularity of Doc Savage, another Street & Smith property, convinced Popular Publications to create their own hero pulp. Thus, The Spider was born.
The character did not catch on immediately. The first three Spider novellas were penned by author R.T.M. Scott. Born in a small town in Ontario, Canada, Scott served as a captain in the Canadian Army during World War I until a serious concussion took him out of action. Scott put down his rifle and picked up his pen after moving to the United States in 1920. As a pulp writer, Scott’s most notable creation was the American Secret Service agent Aurelius Smith and his trusty Hindu aid, Langa Doonh. The Smith stories, which appeared in the Adventure pulp magazine, proved popular enough with Popular Publications that Scott was tapped to write for The Spider magazine.
Unfortunately, the first three outings from Scott were considered too slow and unoriginal. However, despite these criticisms, the unique brilliance of the character showed through in Scott’s efforts. The Spider Strikes features gangsters using poison gas to rob Wall Street blind. The Wheel of Death (1933) touches on a blackmail plot involving murder and New York politicians. The final Scott novella, 1933’s Wings of the Black Death, includes a supervillain named The Black Death who attempts to destroy Manhattan by unleashing pigeons carrying a mutated strain of the bubonic plague. For all the knocks that Scott took from readers and editors alike, it was his novellas that created the formula for The Spider—an idiosyncratic and deeply pulp mixture of detective fiction and horror. This mixture was known as “shudder” or “weird menace” in the coinage of 1930s magazines like Dime Detective.
Scott’s removal from The Spider opened an opportunity for a 27-year-old pulp writer from Virginia named Norvell W. Page. A graduate of the prestigious College of William & Mary, Page came to the pulps after years in the trenches as a newspaper reporter. Under the house name of “Grant Stockbridge,” Page produced somewhere between 100,000 and 120,000 words a month, with 60,000 of those words dedicated solely to The Spider. Page’s prolific output earned him a steady income of between $600 and $700 for each Spider novella.
Page had a craftsman-like approach to writing. In a May 1934 article entitled “How I Write,” the hardboiled Page made it clear that writing was more occupation than art.
“People who talk of ‘art for art’s sake’ annoy me. I did it once myself, but I learned better. I write now for two reasons: because I like to, and because I earn a better living writing fiction for magazine editors than I did working for newspaper editors.”
Later on in the article, Page expanded upon his methodology. For him, writing a Spider novella or any yarn for the pulps began by first learning a pulp magazine’s “formula” (Page’s term for the style and typical substance of the publication). Next, Page would find a story idea, and then would create characters and motivations. Whenever he found himself stuck, Page would consult with his files, which included index cards describing random scenes of intrigue and horror. Using these methods, Page wrote the majority of The Spider novellas between 1934 and 1943.
The Page years proved to be the character’s golden age. Wielding two Colt .45s and utilizing a personalized laboratory of special devices and potions, The Spider fought and bested masked supervillains, billionaire gangsters, and, in a series of novellas in 1938, a far-right organization known as The Black Police. Abusers of the poor and operators of concentration camps in the Empire State, the Black Police novellas are obvious political allegories about the rise of National Socialism in Germany. They are great yarns too.
Under the hand of Page and other writers like Emile C. Tepperman and Wayne Rogers, The Spider became one of the most widely read pulps of the 1930s and 1940s. The stories race ahead at a break-neck pace. Action is also front and center. In The Mad Horde, for example, Wentworth fights the mad science behind the hydrophobia outbreak by slinging lead, flying multiple airplanes, and withstanding torture just to learn the mastermind’s hideout. Unlike other pulp heroes of the time, The Spider is not above an execution or two. After each killing, the masked vigilante burns a personalized mark on the bodies of his gangster adversaries. The red ink spider lets the bad guys know that The Spider was responsible for each dead body.
In comparing The Spider to The Shadow, it would appear that The Shadow still knows what’s best. Walter B. Gibson’s immortal character had a more popular radio show and far more movie serials than The Spider, the latter of whom only enjoyed poorly-made serials produced by Columbia Pictures in 1938 and 1941. However, The Spider’s influence is deceptively widespread. The character directly inspired Hellboy creator Mike Mignola to compose his own pulp vigilante named Lobster Johnson, a character who fights evil with .45 Colts, and who leaves behind a burning lobster claw on the foreheads of his enemies. An even more important superhero, Spider-Man, was directly inspired by the pulp avenger.
Speaking more broadly, The Spider’s incorporation of horror and Grand Guignol-style violence into otherwise two-fisted detective stories helped to spawn legions of imitators in other pulps and comic books. The fearsome vigilante remains one of the core pulp characters still widely appreciated today, as evidenced by the consistent reprinting of the original Spider novellas. New Spider material exists as well, with Moonstone Books keeping the character current for the twenty-first century.
A good hero is hard to find. The Spider is not only a good pulp hero, but he’s representative of a great American tradition born out of the heady world of working-class literature in the early twentieth century. To read his adventures is to experience the thrill of perpetual and very violent motion. That is the hallmark of great pulp writing, and few pulps delivered great writing and imaginative storytelling on a more consistent basis than The Spider.