If you missed the last one…
This post is brought to you by The Book of the Black Sun, a classic Mythos collection by G. W. Thomas. Originally published in 2002, it is the oldest tome we have at RAGE m a c h i n e Books, and it still sells well. Of course, it sports a different cover these days with its second edition thanks to the talented M. D. Jackson. This gathering of short-short, short and novella length tales is a kind of self-referring mandela of Lovecraftian weirdness. A sequel of sorts appeared later with The Book of the Black Sun II: The Book Collector. A third volume, The Book of the Black Sun: Black Millennium will happen some day…
1934 saw the first of many stories Jacobi would write about the Dutch territories of Borneo (as his pal Hugh B. Cave had staked out the British side of the island in fiction). Carl never left Minnesota to travel in South East Asia or anywhere exotic. All of his accurate detail, geographic info, locale customs and beliefs, came from correspondence with officers living in places like Borneo. This side-line in adventure fiction will grow to become his main type of story in 1934-1944, with Weird Tales only getting an odd tale now and then. But thankfully for Horror fans this period was short lived in his over-all career.
Unfortunately, some Jacobi tales lurk in very obscure Pulps and aren’t available. I will replace the short summaries with proper ones when I can find these “lost tales”.
1934
“Smoke of the Snake” (Top-Notch, January 1934) follows opium addict, Herrick, to the den of the Chinese, Liang Po. The opium dealer offers the white man a new drug, one made from the poison of the hamadyrad, or king cobra, promising it will cure his opium cravings. Herrick experiences strange visions involving snakes as well as his past crimes. Coming out of the drug, he realizes that he has been lied to. His craving for opium is slight compared to the desire for the new drug. Liang Po refuses to give him anymore unless he murders the man who took and killed his daughter, Wu. The victim is a terrible sea captain named Sledge Carper. Herrick knows Sledge, having worked for him and even helped him kidnap Wu. Herrick stabs Carper in ambush and gets more of the drug. Liang Po warns “you must never smoke all five pellets”. This time Herrick experiences the presence of a hamadryad. It slithers into his room and comes for his face. He tries to drive it back with smoke from his pipe. Liang Po finds Herrrick dead, seeing he has smoked the fifth pellet.
A predictable tale but filled with plenty of local color and detail. Herrick is not a likeable character and you don’t feel bad he dies. Liang Po is the classic inscrutable Chinese, but he does destroy the two men who killed his daughter.
“The Bantam Ben Hur” (Wild West Stories and Complete Novel Magazine #105, March 1934) is Carl’s one published Western tale. He wrote plenty of adventure fiction but usually chose the jungle as his locale.
“The Cane” (Weird Tales, April 1934) is a tale set in London. James Grenning is a man fond of walking and canes. While on a stroll, he comes across a funeral. The cane he bought at auction for eight shillings sends a bolt of lightning through him before it takes over his body and sends him to attack one of the pollbearers. He escapes the scene and goes to his friend, Sir Hugh Stanway, who hides him while Hugh goes in search of cues. The cane takes control of Grenning again and takes him inside the home of the dead man, to attack his sleeping widow. Sir Hugh corrals the facts: the dead man was Stephen Wells, the pollbearer is his wife’s lover. Grenning has a dream in which a white-skinned man and a native in primitive costume come to the door to ask for the cane. Stanway goes to check and the cane is gone. They rush to the Wells’ house to find the lover and wife clubbed to death by a cane wielded by an invisible assailant.
Another traditional haunted/ghost story. The English setting is unusual though “The Satanic Piano” (also from 1934) will use London as well. I suspect the influence of August Derleth here, for he set many of his ghost stories for Weird Tales in England.
“Crocodile” (Street & Smith’s Complete Stories, April 30, 1934) has live animal collector, Steve Gaynor, come to the camp of McNair, an engineer building a railroad for the Dutch. Gaynor gets drunk and confesses to killing a young man whose first name was Fielding. He doesn’t bother to find out his last name but accepts a handful of bills to take the lad on. They go to a Borneo village that has been victim to a tiger. The two agree to a challenge to see who can catch the tiger. Gaynor loses, with Fielding winning the contest and a fist-sized emerald from the village’s chief. Gaynor then demands half of the jewel’s worth but Fielding refuses. The animal hunter plans a way of killing Fielding without getting branded a murderer. He places bait and a rope at the crocodile infested shore of the river. Placing salt on Fielding’s hat brim, he knows he will want to wash the next morning. Fielding trips on the rope and gets eaten by a crocodile. The dyaks have a custom of killing all the crocodiles in the area until the man-eater is found. The tenth crocodile produces Fielding’s body and the emerald. Gaynor misjudges his dyaks, who want the emerald too. The white man kills many then flees down the river, taking all the canoes. Now he is in McNair’s camp. The engineer lays his own trap, telling Gaynor he has found gold in the river nearby. He proposes a partnership. Gaynor agrees, thinking he will get rid of McNair soon enough. McNair leads him to a rope that trips him into crocodile-infested waters. Fielding’s last name was McNair, the engineer’s son. A classic adventure tale with a sting in its tale.
“The Satanic Piano” (Weird Tales, May 1934) is probably Jacobi’s most interesting tale since “Moss Island”, not just a ghost story potboiler. It is a strange hybrid of Horror and Science Fiction with a sorcerer/mad scientist as villain. (H. R. Hammond, who is usually a terrible artist, actual captures this in the illustration.) The composer, Bancroft, gets a strange invitation late at night. It is from Wilson Farber, psychic and shop owner. Bancroft decides to go to the store on Milford Lane to see what Farber has to offer. (The composer has purchased rare musical scores from the man in the past.) Farber shows his guest his new invention, what looks like a miniature red piano. When Bancroft takes it house and concentrates on it, the device records perfectly the score from his imagination. Bancroft wants to buy the piano from Farber but the inventor has more adaptations to make.
Bancroft forgets about Farber and his piano when Martha, Bancroft’s fiancee, and her voodoo-worshipping maid disappear. The composer goes back to Farber when the trail leads him to Milford Lane. The inventor shows him the new-and-improved piano, which plays one of Bancroft’s new compositions but in a dark and evil way. Farber tells his guest that the soul of the maid, Kari, had been placed inside the musical device, making the score sound evil. He plans to do the same with Martha. Farber knocks Bancroft out, ties him up before getting ready to cut into Martha’s naked body. Bancroft is powerless, unless he can connect with the piano again, across the room. He does this, causing the screaming instrument to fall on its owner. Martha wakes up from the anesthetic and frees Bancroft. The satanic piano was destroyed in the fall.
Wow! What a hodge-podge of ideas worthy of the Shudder Pulps (which Jacobi would write for soon enough.) The mad scientist angle is quite familiar from stories like “Men of Steel” (Weird Tales, December 1930) by Desmond W. Hall, where robots will only work if implanted with human souls. That being said, the story was more fun than “The Cane”.
“Phantom Brass” (Railroad Stories, August 1934) was reprinted in Railroad Magazine December 1961. This is another Renparthian Hills tale. McFee is the station agent at River Rock. A forest fire threatens the town of Flume nearby. McFee is in contact with Henderson, a Canadian lad from Quebec who believes in Spiritualism. He send some weird mumbo-jumbo about death. McFee tells him to knock it off. The agent gets reports as the fire draws closer. Before the Pacific Mail No. 12 can pass, Henderson warns McFee that the bridge has burned down. McFee, with only a minute to spare saves the train. Later, when the boss congratulates him on his foresight, McFee tells him Henderson sent a message at 12:25. The boss informs him that the station at Flume burned and Henderson died at 12:15.
This tale is not something new. It is no real improvement on Charles Dickens’ “The Signal-Man” from 1866’s Mugby Junction. Railroad Stories was a fairly conservative Pulp, so a traditional train-ghost is not much of a stretch.
“Jungle Wires” (Street & Smith’s Complete Stories, September 24, 1934) begins when Bancroft (a different one!) gets a mysterious wire message from Dutch East Borneo Station No. 5. He goes there and meets the two agents who work there, Stockbridge, a grizzled veteran, and a younger man, De Horn. The agents send and receive messages as well as protect the lines from the local dyaks. A year ago, when Stockridge worked the station alone, he had had to machine gun down an uprising. The two men say everything is peaceful and the message De Horn sent out had been a mistake made when he was drunk. Bancroft is suspicious and sneaks out and uses a sender to tap the wire. He gets partial messages about a secret delivery. He makes a tour of the local village out of routine but spies a shack at the largest and most remote. The chief, Kota Noh, had lead the uprising a year before. The agent sneaks through the jungle to the shack and finds rifles. One of the men is attempting to bring a large packet of weapons into the area. With these, the Dutch will not be able to stop further violence. Bancroft secretly sends a message out but Stockridge catches him. The agent admits he is involved in the weapons deal before attacking Bancroft. When he pulls a large knife De Horn kills him with an automatic. Bancroft figures out that De Horn wanted to tell the authorities but couldn’t openly do so. When he had first come to the station, Stockridge had saved his life from a thirty-foot python. He felt an obligation. Bancroft admits he would have too.
A competent adventure, but I have to wonder about a character named De Horn. Roy De S. Horn was the top editor at Argosy, a possible market for such a tale.
“Letter of Dismissal” (Top-Notch, October 1934) is set in Borneo, where an officer is about to be dismissed for insubordination when he prevents an uprising and the robbery of a mine.
“Satan’s Roadhouse” (Terror Tales, October 1934) was Carl’s first Shudder Pulp. He would only write a few of these quasi-Horror tales where everything is explained by the end. These magazines, like Terror Tales, Horror Stories and Thrilling Mystery, paid better than most Pulps. The editor that brought Carl to the Weird Menace magazines was Leo Marguiles, who also published Thrilling Wonder Stories and other SF magazines that would also get some Jacobi fiction. With the Great Depression holding America in its grip, an avid publisher was a godsend for writers like Carl Jacobi. But it meant changing what he wrote.
Stephen Benedict is back! Thd etective from carl’s first story has returned. He and his sidekick, Hugh Milden, have been hired to find singer, Ann Clermont. The trail leads them to a roadhouse outside New Orleans. Ann had been attracted to Blues music. When they draw near the roadhouse called Club Satan they find a dead black man in the road. His body has been crushed and he has a strange box in his pocket. The box contains an acorn with two feathers forming a cross inside.
Inside the club, they watch a stage show with hovering heads and a semi-nude woman thrashing herself with castanets. They also encounter newspaperman, Jimmy Lodge, who points out the club owner, the mulatto, Fabre Leveau. Jimmy was in New Orleans on holiday when he caught scent of the happenings at the club. After the stage show, Jimmy is found dead with a dagger in his throat. Leveau is not worried about the police, as he has a good relationship with them. Benedict insists on searching the place but finds nothing except a handkerchief with the letter ‘A’ embroidered on it.
Next, the private detective goes to Jimmy Lodge’s apartment, and finds some clues in the form of a notebook but is attacked by a slavering freakshow of a monster. A smoking rag is thrown into the room, choking Benedict. He fights through the drugged smoke to stop the knife-wielding freak from killing him.
While Benedict chases down a lead, (wanting to hear Ann Clermont’s voice, he hires a Radio station to play her singing at an arranged time), Milden goes off on his own to Club Satan. From the bushes, he watches four black men bury the body of a dead woman. Leaving them, he hears a woman scream inside the club and goes in to help. Not surprising, he gets a blackjack to the skull.
After listening to the Radio broadcast, Leveau phones Benedict, telling him to get on the train for New York and walk away. If he doesn’t, he will never see Milden again. The detective goes to the station, buys a ticket but then gets lost in a crowd. He gets a cab and heads for Club Satan. The detective slips onto a wagon that is going to the club. In the back, he finds a large crate from Africa, with breathing holes that smells terrible. He slips off the wagon then breaks in, finding a secret room where a vast voodoo rite is being held. There are ten dead women on a wire. There are also live rattlesnakes on another wire. Fifty white people, mostly women, are taking part in the rite, with four large semi-naked blacks serving blood to them in drinking jars. Milden is brought forth in chains.
The box from the wagon shows up. It is opened to reveal a giant python, the second such reptile. The other serpent had crushed victims like the dead black man. The new snake is offered a certain white girl for a sacrifice. (Amos Sewell chose that scene for the illustration.) Benedict opens fire on the snake, then goes for Leveau. Driving the owner back, the detective gives his friend a revolver, and the two men shoot the snake and attacking swordsmen. Benedict dispersed the white worshipers. The duo grab the white girl and flee. They stop only long enough to see Leveau has been crushed to death by the dying python.
On the train the next day we learn the white girl is, of course, Ann Clermont, and they are headed back to New York. Benedict, in Jules de Grandin style, explains everything. Once he heard Ann sing, he knew that the girl was at the club but disguised. He gives Leveau’s long history from African witch-doctor to resurrecting Voodoo in Louisiana.
Some character details, Jacobi uses for his detective includes Benedict smoking Rosa Trofero cigars. Milden is an out-work lawyer, who Benedict drags into adventures. These two appeared in a number of tales but only “Rumbling Cannon” (Secret Service Stories, September 1928) and this one made it into the Pulps so far. The racism of this story is unusual for Jacobi, but not the Shudder Pulps.
Conclusion
In 1989, Jacobi’s adventure fiction finally got a collection, East of Samarinda. It was the only collection Carl got that wasn’t from Arkham House (or in the same vein). East of Samarinda collects twenty-one of his jungle tales as well as other adventure fiction from 1934 to 1944. The decade where Jacobi wrote of Borneo (and other places he never visited) is an under-appreciated facet of his ouvre. Sometimes these tales include a supernatural element, like “Smoke of the Snake” (which appeared in a horror collection in 1994 from Fedogan and Bremer) but most often did not. Working only from research, Jacobi won the respect of writers who had been to such far places, friends like E. Hoffman Price. Some writers, such as Arthur J. Burks, who had been to Borneo as a soldier, wrote with less conviction than Jacobi, who had never been.
Check out the Wild Inc. Super-saga…
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