Secret Agent "X": The Complete Series Volume 4
by
Paul Chadwick & Emile C. Tepperman
Introduction by
Will Murray
Altus Press • 2013
Copyright Information
© 2013 Altus Press
Publication History:
“Introduction” appears here for the first time. Copyright © 2013 Will Murray. All Rights Reserved.
“Devils of Darkness” originally appeared in the March 1935 issue of Secret Agent “X”.
“Talons of Terror” originally appeared in the April 1935 issue of Secret Agent “X”.
“The Corpse Cavalcade” originally appeared in the May 1935 issue of Secret Agent “X”.
“The Golden Ghoul” originally appeared in the July 1935 issue of Secret Agent “X”.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Designed by Matthew Moring/Altus Press
Special Thanks to BBrian Earl Brown, Will Murray, Ray Riethmeier & Bill Thom
Introduction by Will Murray
THIS fourth volume of the chronological adventures of Secret Agent “X” is a true cornucopia of pulpy action-horror.
Secret Agent “X” originator Paul Chadwick opens the grim proceedings with one of his most relentlessly intense efforts, “Devils of Darkness” from the March 1935 issue. The formula editor Rose Wyn devised for “X’s” exploits insisted on a suffocating dose of terror and horror infusing the requisite action-adventure plot. So it is not enough that the unknown “X” squares off against a band of the most diabolical bank robbers ever conceived. They happen to be whip-wielding torturers as well!
The superscientific premise of “Devils of Darkness” is not original with Chadwick. It’s lifted from Doc Savage creator Lester Dent’s 1932 Detective-Dragnet novelette, “The Sinister Ray,” which featured Dent’s first scientific detective, Lynn Lash. Detective-Dragnet was published by Magazine Publishers, Periodical House’s parent affiliate. So the story was in the family so to speak. However, the basic concept may go back to the Dean of Science Fiction, Murray Leinster, and his 1929 Argosy stories, “The Darkness on Fifth Avenue” and “The City of the Blind.”
Whether editor Wyn fed author Chadwick this plot germ, or Chadwick—a Detective-Dragnet contributor himself—simply borrowed it, is unknown. But it doesn’t matter, “Devils of Darkness” takes Dent’s idea to a far more horrific level than the creator of Doc Savage ever dreamed. It’s not beyond speculation that Dent himself might have offered Chadwick the idea. Lester was famous for helping other writers plot stories. He was forever trying to teach his secretaries to write. One of them was Dorothy Lester, Dent’s secretary in 1933-34. She subsequently married Chadwick. Of course, Dent knew Chadwick from the American Fiction Guild, to which both belonged.
“Talons of Terror” (April 1935) is the work of Emile C. Tepperman, who penned the occasional “X” adventure, while writing short stories in the back of the magazine under his own name and those of Anthony Clemens and Jordan Cole. This is a particularly good one, which evokes the classic vampire theme, and boasts a great villain in the devilish Doctor Blood.
Tepperman ghosted many pulp heroes in the years to come—among them Operator #5, Dan Fowler, the Spider, The Avenger and the Phantom Detective before moving over to radio in the 1940s, where he wrote for such major shows as Suspense, Inner Sanctum and Gang Busters. Here, he closes out his contributions to the ongoing adventures of the faceless “X” after only four fascinating change-of-pace novels.
After Secret Agent “X” once again mysteriously skipped an issue, a new author makes his debut with a clever concoction. (Did one of the star contributors blow a deadline?)
With “The Corpse Cavalcade” (June 1935), G. T. Fleming-Roberts assumes the mask of Brant House, and “X” has a new major scribe. Fleming-Roberts would also move on from this series to originate the Ghost, the Black Hood and Captain Zero. But Secret Agent “X” is where he learned to write series novels.
With its echoes of early Shadow novels like “The Silent Seven” and “Circle of Death,” “The Corpse Cavalcade” manages to continue the standards set by Paul Chadwick while injecting a strange new flavor to the series. Where Chadwick laid on a heavy oppressive atmosphere transplanted from his Wade Hammond series, Fleming-Roberts injected other elements—a stronger emphasis on clues and deduction, more imaginative plot twists, and a deeper view of characterization. A greater emphasis on some of the Agent’s operatives will also hallmark this new exciting phase of “X’s” career.
Fleming-Roberts’ “The Golden Ghoul” (July 1935) shifts the action to a classic Shadow staple locale—Chinatown. Here another creepy supervillain joins the long parade of arch-fiends the Man of a Thousand Faces went up against. And yet another weird “death”—the Amber Death—takes untold innocent lives. No pulp series ever pitted its indefatigable hero against so many bizarre and gruesome murder methods as did Secret Agent “X.” By pulp standards, the Amber Death is probably the most imaginative and realistic of them all.
After this pivotal sequence of stories, Emile Tepperman fades out of the series, while Paul Chadwick remained content with penning the odd novel. From here on out, Secret Agent “X” will be G. T. Fleming-Roberts’ domain.
Turn the page and watch it all unfold as the three primary ghostwriters behind the house name of Brant House strut their individual stuff as Secret Agent “X” careens from one figurative house of horror to another, with all the square-jawed determination and chameleon cunning that made him one of the most indefatigable pulp heroes of the 1930s.
Devils of Darkness
Chapter I
TERROR’S CALL
LIPS tightly compressed, eyes clouded with growing horror, a man in a black press coupé knifed into upper Broadway. His hands on the vibrating wheel before him had the steely tautness of curved talons. His foot fed gas recklessly to the roaring motor. And in his brain beat the mad words of an amazing message he had received a few moments before.
“Come, boss! Hurry! It’s getting dark—dark as night. Dark as hell itself. I can’t see the sun any more—because it’s gone out. And all over the block, people are screaming, fighting—looting! Come—for God’s sake!”
The words had been uttered with the frenzied hoarseness of one gripped by terror of the unknown. They had transmitted some of their horror to the nerves of the man in the careening press coupé. And, incredible as they seemed, he couldn’t ignore them. For that message had come straight from the lips of an operative trained and employed by one of the shrewdest criminal investigators in the world.
Others evidently had received word of this madness. On all sides of the rocketing press coupé was movement, turmoil, a frenzied medley of sound and action as the city stirred itself into unwonted activity.
Near by, an emergency squad truck, siren shrieking, hurtled forward like a berserk green monster trying to shake off the human leeches that clung to its swaying body. On an avenue running parallel, a clanging ambulance kept pace. Farther ahead, a regulation police prowl car added a persistent thinner note to the din.
Excitement was in the air. Excitement with an undercurrent of nameless fear, lashing the spinning wheels of a dozen vehicles to a more furious pace—as all raced forward toward the same objective.
But the man in the press coupé was making the best time of all. Hunched forward to the seat, tense in every muscle, he tore past intersections with the horn button
held down. He drove with death-defying abandon; swung by the ambulance, cut in ahead of it, ignoring a cop’s whistle that shrilled at him to stop.
He took a time-saving detour through a narrow side street. This got him ahead of the police cruiser. Another five blocks, and he trod abruptly on his brake pedal and brought the coupé to a slithering, screeching halt. This was as far as even he could go. The street was blocked by jammed traffic and crowds of frightened human beings, milling, shouting, jostling each other.
As he leaped out of his coupé he heard snatches of conversation from the bloodless lips about him:
“The dark!”
“The terrible twilight!”
“The world—coming to an end!”
“The devil—is on earth!”
Superstitious fear showed on the faces of some. A woman was weeping hysterically, fearfully, wringing her bony hands in a paroxysm of awed fright. An old colored man who looked like a preacher was down on his knees at the edge of the curb, praying, his body swaying, his eyes rolling toward the sky above, his deep-toned voice quavering in religious fervor.
“Oh, Lord, save us! Save thy chullen from the hands of Satan! Save the blessed earth from his wiles and wickedness!”
His words seemed an echo of the stark terror that was stamped on the features of everyone in sight—terror of the unknown.
The man from the press coupé strode ahead grimly, slipping unnoticed through the milling mob, moving on toward the spot from which the nameless horror seemed to have radiated. And then he glimpsed one face upon which no fear was registered. It was the face of a white-haired, shabbily dressed beggar standing in a doorway with a tray of chewing gum tied around his middle—a blind beggar whose sightless eyes had mercifully been spared the horror of the darkness which had cast its dread spell over every one else.
The blind man leaned forward abruptly, listening to the approaching footsteps.
Suddenly he called out: “Mr. Robbins! Mr. Robbins!”
Only for an instant did the driver of the press coupé pause. He laid a friendly hand on the blind man’s shoulder, uttered a name quickly: “Thaddeus Penny.” Then he plunged on through the crowd which at this point had begun to thin.
A hundred feet from the spot where he had been forced to park his coupé, he came upon ghastly evidence that the mysterious terror which all had mentioned wasn’t imaginary.
Two big delivery trucks, coming out of side streets, had met in a fearful, head-on collision. The motors and front wheels of both were telescoped into a tangled mass of shattered junk. Water from their cracked radiators had spilled into the street, running away in rusty rivulets.
THE driver of one truck was visible. Yet he was hardly recognizable as a man. An inert, flattened figure, he lay pinned under the side of the cab—beyond the aid of ambulance or interne.
The man from the press coupé stepped jerkily around the telescoped trucks and moved forward. But the accident of the crashing trucks was only the beginning. Twenty feet farther on he paused to stare with widening eyes into the gutter. Here, too, the Grim Reaper had struck.
The bodies of four people, three women and a man, lay in distorted postures, trampled to death by the onrush of many frenzied feet, their clothing torn and soiled. Bundles they had clutched before the fear-crazed mob had wrought its horrible havoc upon them, lay scattered and broken. Then the coupé’s driver came to the most gruesome tragedy of all—a thing so horrible that it made breath hiss between his clenched teeth.
For a school bus, filled with small children, had swerved and crashed into a lamp post. It had cracked open down its whole length, and turned on its side, spilling the crushed and mangled forms of its small occupants into the street. Tousled curly heads and tiny faces lay still under a mass of broken glass and debris. Three who had succeeded in dragging themselves from the wreck had fallen, pitiful victims to the frenzied mob’s feet. Only one, a little girl with chestnut hair, had managed somehow to reach a doorway on the street’s opposite side. Huddled in a corner, she sobbed in confused terror.
The man from the press coupé walked to her, bent down and whispered quiet words of reassurance until her crying ceased. He picked her up, comforted her still further, and gave her into the temporary care of an old lady who was peering fearfully from a first floor window.
Something else attracted his attention then. Faces stared out at him from the glass front of a big store, men and women with fear shadows in their eyes, gaping like frightened, wondering animals, too dazed to move.
He strode toward them, opened the store’s door, and when he entered they backed away. But he raised his voice harshly, authoritatively, and began quick questioning. As he did so he drew a press card from his pocket and held it up for all to see. This bore the name of A. J. Martin.
The store’s proprietor was the first to find his voice and answer the queries that were flung at him. Yet what the man said seemed hardly to make sense, any more than the statements of the milling people at the edge of the mob. For he was trembling, his hand waving toward the littered street, and his speech came haltingly.
“The dark!” he croaked. “The dark—out there! Even our lights were no good. The sun must have gone out. It was—an eclipse, I guess. But I don’t understand—about our lights not shining.”
A pause followed his startling words. Then a frightened woman spoke:
“No—you’re wrong. The sun didn’t go out. It was a fog—a black fog that filled the street. The people ran screaming. I saw them—and then—It was terrible—like a night when nothing can be seen.”
The man who held the press card nodded tensely. Fog, or an eclipse, or the falling of night—these people couldn’t explain the thing that had come to pass. Yet something infinitely strange had happened, something under the influence of which nightmare tragedies had occurred—cars smashed, men trampled, small children killed.
A moment of silence passed while his sharp eyes hovered over a dozen fear-strained faces. Then he said: “Thanks,” turned and hurried back into the street.
THOSE whom he had questioned weren’t aware that no syndicate or newspaper had sent him. They weren’t aware that his plainly cast features were part of a brilliantly clever disguise, natural as living flesh. They didn’t guess that behind it lay the face of a man whose identity was hidden from all the world—the identity of Secret Agent “X.”
Strange rumors had been built up about this Man of a Thousand Faces. His name had been spoken in awed whispers throughout the underworld. There he was feared as a swift, relentless human scourge who seemed to hear all and know all. Yet the police of many cities had been ordered to investigate his activities, trace him down, trap him. For the law regarded him as a desperate criminal. Only a few on earth knew that the direct opposite was true, that this man of strange destiny and mystery was one of the most daringly ingenious criminal investigators alive. For where crime appeared in its most threateningly hideous form—there, also, Agent “X” made a habit of appearing.
Yet his arrival now seemed oddly inconsistent. Darkness had fallen. Fearful accidents had occurred. People had been trampled, killed. But Nature, not man, seemed the guilty one.
The Secret Agent left the store, strode on down the block, and a figure suddenly stepped from a doorway and accosted him.
“Mr. Martin!”
The man was tall, redheaded. There was on his face a look of strain, as there had been on those others in the store. “Mr. Martin,” he said again. “Listen—the sun’s shining now. But it wasn’t a few minutes ago when I called you. It got dark, black as hell!”
The Secret Agent didn’t answer. There were lights of strange intensity in his eyes. Wild and fantastic had been the description of the people in the store, and the snatches of hysterical conversation in the street. Nightmarish they had seemed. But now the man before him, Jim Hobart, his own operative, whose powers of observation he trusted absolutely, was repeating the same thing. Darkness, as black as night, as black as hell, had fallen. And those fea
r-stricken people, those dead men and women and children, proved that under its cloak hellish things had happened.
“There was looting,” Hobart continued, “like I told you. I could hear windows smashing and people yelling. What a story it will make, chief! Better hurry before the other sheets get in on it.”
The Secret Agent made an angry, impatient gesture. Hobart hadn’t seen those children, those slain innocents back there. He didn’t know how horribly death had struck in this street of mystery.
“Wait!” he said harshly. “First I must see—” He left the sentence unfinished, gave no indication of what it was he hoped to find. But there was a bank building in the precise center of the block. The Agent hurried on toward this.
Dignified marble columns rose above the pavement. Granite steps led up to the bank’s facade where polished bronzed plates were set. It, too, had apparently come under the dread shadow of the terror fog, the darkness that none could explain. For when the Agent climbed the steps he stiffened abruptly.
The glass in the big front doors was broken, shattered. Behind them there were other signs of ruin. Windows along the tellers’ cages had been smashed. No employee of the bank was in sight. But at the far end of the main corridor, a crowd of depositors stood huddled, men and women who turned their fear-blanched faces at him, like dazed and frightened cattle herded into a pen.
The Agent strode swiftly toward them, and suddenly stopped in shocked amazement, clenching his hands at his sides. For these people had been treated like cattle. Searing welts showed on the features and hands of many. Plainly they were the marks of whips. Whips that had streaked out from behind that cloak of darkness. Whips with metal studded ends that left not merely welts, but jagged crimson cuts. And they had been plied ruthlessly.
A half-fainting girl cowered against a wall desk, her dress torn to ribbons where the sharp lashes had fallen, her white body was a crisscross of angry welts. She had been struck again and again as though some fiend had held the whip. One blow had landed on her cheek, laying it open, making a cruel wound that might disfigure her for life. She could only whimper now, and cower, dabbing a handkerchief to her crimson-stained face. But a man in the trembling terrified group addressed the Agent with hysterical shrillness.
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