Girasol Pulp Doubles Vol. 11: The Spider - Death and the Spider & Scourge Of The Yellow Fangs

Girasol Pulp Doubles featuring The Spider #11

by Norvell W. Page, E.C. Tepperman, Orginal Illustrations (House Name)

This volume contains:
The Spider #43 - April 1937: Scourge of the Yellow Fangs: First, they preyed upon the city's Chinatown. Then, a new menace spread, threatening to engulf Oriental and Caucasian alike! Only the Spider guessed that a hidden fiend lurked behind the atrocities committed on the nation's new citizens... and Richard Wentworth, in his Spider garb, was already marked for a ghastly death!
The Spider #100 - Janurary 1942: Death and the Spider: From Mar-lar-delan, ancient lama of Tibet, came the prophecy that when Death walked the Earth as a man, the Spider would die! Beseiged by terror and murder, the city struggles to survive as criminal forces rally to the man called... Death! Is this the last campaign for Richard Wentworth, alias the Spider?

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Norvell Wordsworth Page (1904–1961) was an American pulp fiction writer, journalist and editor who later became a government intelligence worker.

He was born in Virginia the son of Charles Wordsworth Page (1880 – 1947) and Estlie Isabelle Bethel Page (1880 – 1946). The name Norvell came from his maternal grandmother Elvira Russell Norvell Page.

He is best known as the author of the majority of the adventures of the ruthless vigilante hero The Spider, which he and a handful of other writers wrote under the house name of Grant Stockbridge. He also contributed to other pulp series, including The Shadow and The Phantom, and supplied scripts for the radio programs based on the characters he wrote, science fiction and two early sword and sorcery fantasy novels under forms of his real name, Norvel Page and Norvell W. Page. His 1940 Unknown novel, But Without Horns is considered an early classic explication of the superman theme. Under the pen name of N. Wooten Poge, Page wrote the adventures of Bill Carter for Spicy Detective Stories. His works only saw magazine publication during his lifetime, but his fantasies and some of the Spider novels were later reprinted as paperbacks.

The Spider was a crime-fighter in the tradition of The Shadow, wanted by the law for executing his criminal antagonists, and prefigured later comic book superheroes like Batman. Page's innovations to the series included a hideous disguise for the hero and a succession of super-scientific menaces for him to combat. One of these, involving an invasion of giant robots, was copied by an early Superman story and helped inspire the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

The setting of Page's sword and sorcery novels is central Asia in the first century A.D., when the legendary Prester John supposedly established a Christian kingdom there. In Page's conception, the man behind the legend was hard-bitten Mediterranean adventurer Hurricane John, or Wan Tengri, a hero in the mold of Robert E. Howard's Conan, though more humorous, verbose, and exaggeratedly omnicompetent as a warrior. He comes close to taking over two cities in the course of his travels, but the series concludes before he establishes his empire. He was featured two stories Flame Winds and Sons of the Bear God. The magic John encounters is unconvincingly rationalized

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book collects two Spider novels, Scourge of the Yellow Fangs from the April 1937 issue and Death and the Spider from January of 1942. The earlier story was written by Emile Tepperman under the Grant Stockbridge house pseudonym during a period of eight months when Norvell Page, the man who wrote the best and the majority of the Spider adventures, was ill and unable to write. As one can guess from the title, it's a pretty racist story. It has some fun and interesting bits, but it's a rather minor Spider novel. Death and the Spider was written by Page and happened to be the 100th adventure of Wentworth and his team. Pocket Books published a heavily edited version of it in 1975, supposedly updating it to a contemporary setting, but it was a terrible mess, a mistake that killed their reprint series; I had not read the original before, and though it isn't among Page's best, it's quite enjoyable in this original form. Nita, Ram Singh, Jackson, Jenkyns, and Kirkpatrick all participate to an extent, but it's primarily an examination of Wentworth's early life and his training and origin as the Spider. Page was a talented writer who never let common sense or plausibility get in the way of his breakneck pacing and action-packed prose, and his Spider is right up there with The Shadow and Doc Savage at the apex of pulp heroism.