If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by Strange Detectives, an occult detective collection by G. W. Thomas. When the ghostbreakers get going there is usually a mad scientist or a crazed cultist behind things. This book features Victorian, Edwardian and 1920s detectives facing off against strange mysteries in old manor houses to the deep woods of Michigan. The Athenodorians are a group dedicated to solving all things outre. They appear in the companion volume, Strange Adventures, as well.
Mad scientists appear first as sorcerers and magicians like Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610). They transition along with scientific knowledge into the “Scientist” with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). Victor Frankenstein is a man obsessed with creating life from death. That’s the mad part. If you met Vic he wouldn’t want to harm you but he might bore you death with talk of chemicals for regeneration. He suffers from hubris, daring “to know that which Man was not meant to know” but he won’t hurt a fly otherwise. That will change with time.
The next most famous scientist after Franky is debatable. Dr. Raymond in the prologue to Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” is a candidate, willing to operate on a young girl’s brain so that she can see the true nature of the world. Other mad scientist classics include “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” by Edgar Allan Poe, “Moxon’s Master” by Ambrose Bierce, “The Monster Maker” by W. C. Morrow and others. Peter Haining collected these in The Monster Makers (1974). But I think Dr. Moreau is more famous, with his island full of ‘manimals’. Here’s a guy who wouldn’t stop for a second to kill you to protect his work. Hugo Gernsback must have thought the same way, for he reprinted the novel in Amazing Stories, October November 1926, with illustrations by Frank R. Paul. This wasn’t the first mad scientist to appear in a Pulp, but Wells’s novel is central to the many crazy doctors to follow.
There were a few loonies running around in the Soft Weeklies that preceded the Pulps with stories like “The Soul Trap” by Charles B. Stilson or Philip M. Fisher’s “The Master of Black”. As with other Pulp publishers, Argosy would offer up more mad scientists as it moved into its Pulp era with similar tales by Murray Leinster. There was also obscene amateur journals like H. P. Lovecraft’s original publication of Herbert West, Reanimator in Home Brew, March 1922, but this will get a reprint in Weird Tales in the 1940s. We will deal with it there.
The first real Pulp for mad scientists was, of course, Weird Tales. Right from its very first issue in March 1923, the crazy inventors and foolish experimenters get started. And like the line that begins at Frankenstein onward, mad scientist stories can be either Science Fiction or Horror or both. Mary Shelley’s Gothic tale lends itself to terror in the reader as it also offers a scientific background to the tale rather than a supernatural one. The stories in between 1923 to 1928 will cross and recross this line many times.
“Ooze” (Weird Tales, March 1923) by Anthony M. Rud gives us scientist John Corliss Cranmer working in the swamp on his biological experiments. These create a giant, killer amoeba that eats his family and him. The narrator is left to clean up the mess. Cranmer doesn’t seem particularly mad until certain family members disappear but he doesn’t stop.
“The Body Master” (Weird Tales, April 1923) by Harold Ward gives us Dr. Lessman, the Bodymaster! He can switch personalities from one body to another, and can control others to do his bidding. When the controlled are free to wander as wraiths, the doctor better watch out! The supernatural element in this tale makes it a Weird Tales piece rather than a Sci-Fi one. Mind you, in 1923, there were no SF mags yet.
“Ashes” (Weird Tales, March 1924) by C. M. Eddy and H. P. Lovecraft has perhaps the first love triangle in a laboratory with Professor Van Allister inventing a chemical that reduces living flesh into ash. Jealousy will drive our scientist mad and it won’t be pretty. One of HPL’s revision jobs with much of the ideas coming from his partner, Eddy.
“The House of Horror” (Weird Tales, July 1926) by Seabury Quinn is a Jules de Grandin tale. De Grandin will face off against a few madmen in his ninety-three adventures but none quite so terrifying as the unnamed surgeon who cuts up beauties to make circus freaks. For more on this story, go here.
“The Talking Brain” (Amazing Stories, August 1926) by M. H. Hasta features the scientist Murtha who has kept the brain of a mortally injured student alive. The brain can communicate through Morse Code. It demands to die. Murtha destroys the brain then commits suicide. As mad scientists go, Murtha is pretty light-weight.
“The Black Spider” (Ghost Stories, January 1927) by Edmund Snell was a detective writer for the UK magazines like The Thriller. This tale features the Japanese scientist Kamaga, who works to grow arachnids of huge size. He dies when the giant creature falls on him. Snell’s work is very dated, very racist. The fact that he is largely forgotten does not make me sad.
The Mastermind of Mars (Amazing Stories Annual, March 1927) by Edgar Rice Burroughs features the Barsoomian scientist Ras Thavos, who has created a method for transferring brains between bodies. He sells this discovery to the rich without much moral questioning. Using this method, Thavos creates a Barsoomian ape with the mind of a man, creating a powerful sidekick for the hero, Paxton of Earth. Ras Thavos will be back for Synthetic Men of Mars in 1939.
“The Nth Man” (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Spring 1928) by Homer Eon Flint is a story written in 1920 and sold to Munsey’s. It didn’t appear until 1928 after Hugo Gernsback bought it. The author died in 1924 under suspicious circumstances. The scientist in this tale is the father of the giant who goes on a rampage against corrupt rich men and government. Pendleton uses sea turtle glands to grow his son into a titanic avenger. Is he mad? Well, it works, with the giant returning to the sea after the millionaire Fosburgh is punished.
“The Plague of the Living Dead” (Amazing Stories, April 1927) by A. Hyatt Verrill has Old Doctor Farnham, a chemical researcher on the island of Abilone. Here he develops an immortality drug, then improves it to be an invulnerability drug as well. Which works fine for his animal test subject but when the local volcano starts killing people he injects all the injured victims. The drug has an unknown side effect for humans: it makes them completely insane. Farnham has made the island’s population insane and unkillable! The solution: fire them off into space.
“The Stone Cat” (Amazing Stories, September 1927) by Miles J. Breuer features Dr. Fleckinger who creates a method to turn people into stone. No surprise, he ends up one of the statues. I don’t think this was what Dylan meant when he said “Everybody must get stoned.”
“Cool Air” (Tales of Magic and Mystery, March 1928) by H. P. Lovecraft reprinted in Weird Tales, September 1939 is Lovecraft’s pastiche of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (The American Review, December 1845). Dr. Munoz is a scientist who must keep himself refrigerated or he will melt. The story may have been partly influenced by Arthur Machen’s “The Novel of the White Powder” (The Three Imposters, 1895) too.
“When the World Went Mad” (Amazing Stories Quarterly, Fall 1928) by Ronald M. Sherin has a Russian named Professor Ivan Teranhoff. Finally a baddie worthy of the name “mad scientist”! Teranhoff wants to get into space and he is willing to ruin the Earth to do it. He has control of subatomic energy which will propel him spaceward but will also screw up the magnetic fields and gravity at the equator. It is up to Professot Joplin (a non-mad scientist) to turn off Teranhoff’s machine.
“The Incubator Man” (Weird Tales, October 1928) by Wallace West features Dr. Philip Norton, the inventor of “The Incubator Man”. His creation tells the story of how Norton created a living being and encased him in a test tube for one hundred and fifty years. The Incubator Man may be immortal. He knows he will free himself and go in search of a female specimen like himself. Shades of Adam and — Lilith.
“The Last Test” (Weird Tales, November 1928) by Adolphe de Castro and H. P. Lovecraft has Dr. Alfred Schuyler Clarendon who is not quite the typical mad scientist. He suffers from the influence of his supposed assistant, Surama, who is actually an Atlantean priest released from suspended animation. Perhaps Surama could be considered the mad one, wanting to spread the “black fever” Clarendon is charged to cure.
Conclusion
The door is now wide open for mad scientists everywhere to get to their wicked work in Pulp stories. Weird Tales and Gernsback’s Amazing Stories dominated so far but others magazines are just waiting to follow suite. Whether Lovecraftian pseudoscience or more accurate scientifically inspired, the men in the white coats with a lunatic gleam in their eye are ready to fill your reading time with two-headed monsters, animals that talk, killer robots, fifty foot women and all the other wonderful monsters that both thrill you with horror and fascinate you with science. The Age of Mad Scientist has begun!
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