Doctor Satan: Weird Tales Shudder Pulp

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Doctor Satan made a spectacular debut in Weird Tales in August 1935. His strange, masked face was prominently placed on the cover. The creation of the character was in response to competition to “The Unique Magazine”. And it wasn’t the first time. In 1931, the Clayton chain had launched Strange Tales, drawing away WT’s top talent with two cents on acceptance. The chain went bankrupt and Weird Tales carried on.

But in October 1933, Rogers Terrill turned a failing Mystery Pulp, Dime Mystery Magazine, into the first of a series of “Shudder Pulps”, Weird Menace magazines that indirectly competed with Weird Tales. For in WT, a vampire is a vampire. In Dime Mystery (and later in Terror Tales, Horror Stories and Thrilling Mystery) a vampire is not an undead fiend, but a fiend of another kind. A dwarfish, hate-filled fraud posing as a vampire. For the Weird Menace Pulps were not true Horror stories. The dressing is all terror and rape and murder, but an explanation, no matter how Ann Radcliffe, was always given at the end.

These new magazines paid well and again Weird Tales lost some of its authors’ attention such as Paul Ernst, Henry Kuttner, Robert Bloch, Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton. So Farnsworth Wright thought the best way to fight fire was with fire. He hired Paul Ernst back to create Doctor Satan, a terrible fiend in his own right.

“Doctor Satan” debuted in the August 1935 issue. The story begins suddenly. A rich businessman dies horribly when a plant grows out of his head! Two more men fall to this strange form of death. The third man, when he receives his ransom note for a million dollars (yes, say it like Dr. Evil!), he goes to the only man who can save him: Ascot Keane.

He was a big man, but supple and quick-moving. His eyes, under coal-black eyebrows, were light gray; they looked calm as ice, as if no emergency could disturb their steely depths. He had a high-bridged, patrician nose, a long chin that was the embodiment of strength, and a firm, large mouth.

This private agent knows almost immediately that the man is all ready dead. What he doesn’t see coming is an attempt on his own life. A sudden burst of energy burns up the chair he had only seconds before been sitting in. The terrible fiend behind the extortion knows of Keane’s existence and his intention to find him.

Keane’s plan to capture the evil one is not complicated. He goes to the money drop for Walstead disguised as the dead man. Being an amazing make-up artist, he looks like the actual Walstead. Keane chooses to be captured and shortly is. When he wakes up he sees who is set against him:

The figure looked like one robed for a costume ball, save that in every line of it was a deadliness that robbed it of all suggestions of anything humorous or social.

Tall and sparse, it was covered in a blood-red robe. Red rubber gloves swathed the hands. The face was concealed behind a red mask that curtained it from forehead to chin with only two black eyes, like live coals, showing through eyeholes!

Keane also meets Satan’s two deformed assistants, the stub-legged brute Bostiff, and the scrawny weasel, Girse. Like all Shudder Pulp baddies, Satan surrounds himself with the deformed, the deranged and the depraved. (All card-carrying members of the Igor fan club.)

Doctor Satan demonstrates his lethal power on an associate who has betrayed him. Placing the man’s hair in a yellow powder and burning it, renders the man to dust. When he tries the same thing on Keane, it fails. Keane is also familiar with the ancient Egyptian sorcery that fuels the magic powder. He has covered his body in a green paste used by the Egyptian sorcerers.

Now it is Keane’s turn. He uses a powder of his own but Satan only laughs. He, too, has taken precautions. The two men struggle but ultimately Keane is knocked down and the villain escapes. Until the next time… By the end of the story, any idea that supernatural forces are being used, rather than obscure ancient Egyptian chemistry, is gone. Like all true Shudder Pulps, there is no actual metaphysical agency, only twisted use of understandable knowledge.

In “The Eyrie” letters of comment (appearing in October 1935) was one thumbs up for Doctor Satan though it came with a warning. Donald Allgeier of Leavenworth, Kansas wrote:

…The new Doctor Satan series starts out to be very good, but the temptation to become tritely sensational with such material is sure to be strong. However I have faith in Ernst and I believe he will make it a real weird series.

The best story of the issue kudos by an over-whelming majority was “Once in a Thousand Years” by Frances Bragg Middleton who’s previous credit included Terror Tales and Horror Stories. Perhaps Wright felt a little pleasure in drawing this author away from his competitors for one story anyway. He never wrote for Weird Tales again. Despite all this, it was a lackluster beginning for a character who would appear eight times.

Vincent Napoli’s illustrations are more interesting than the Margaret Brundage color cover. Napoli draws Satan’s mask in a way that would DC’s Dr. Fate, the supernatural superhero. Gardner F. Fox, another Weird Tales writer, would create that character in More Fun Comics #55 (May 1940), five years later. Fox based the idea for Fate on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, which also appeared in Weird Tales.

“The Man Who Chained the Lightning” (September 1935) has a new scheme to get large amounts of money from rich men. A valet is killed with a poisonous insect, saying mysteriously “master…millions…shaving…” before he died. Doctor Satan again is up to his old tricks (Dr. Fu Manchu really should have written in and complained. People using his tricks!) He attempts to kill Ascot Keane over long distances by send lightning through the phone. Keane is aware that rich men have been going to one particular bank, United Continental, with very large checks. When he visits the president of the bank, he learns that the men seemed unflustered and calm but somehow creepy. Keane notices that the president’s desk has a large onyx clock on it.

One other feature of these four men who have cashed checks is that their families are all away on holidays. When Corey Magnus’s family plans a trip without him, Keane knows what to do. Posing as the millionaire, he is kidnapped in Magnus’s place and ends up in Doctor Satan’s lair under the local cemetery. He discovers that Satan has corpses of the victims from which he can make perfect copies. Resurrecting the bodies as zombie servants, the fake millionaires have been signing the checks. They have all gone to United Continental because the zombies could pretend to write their pre-signed checks with the clock blocking the president’s view.

Doctor Satan has Keane tied up and places the lightning device on him. No matter where in the world, if lightning strikes the Earth, the victim will be vaporized. Only it doesn’t work. Keane has crystalline armor under his disguise of pseudo-flesh. He zaps Satan and his cronies. The chamber they are in begins to collapse because of the lightning, so Keane grabs the three remaining prisoners and flees. The escapees think the villain dead, but Keane knows better. Doctor Satan, too, was wearing crystalline armor. The valet had been killed because he realized the zombie impersonator did not need shaving because he was a dead man.

Earlier in the story, Ernst introduces a new secretary to Ascot Keane, the beautiful, Beatrice Dale “…Standing beside this was a girl, lovely, tall, lithe, with dark blue eyes and hair more red than brown.” Sadly, she has no real part in this tale, which feels like a repeat of the last one.

Henry Kuttner wrote from California to say: “Doctor Satan, too, was engaging. I hope the series will continue. The worthy Doctor, I was glad to see, doesn’t go in for turgid melodrama and juvenile Fu Manchu stuff; moreover, Keane is as interesting as his antagonist, and not the usual damn fool detective.

The complaints against the new series began with the second story. Where the first one did not gain praise, the second received out-right dislike:

Carl E. Woolard of Flint, Michigan wrote: “…Probably by now you are receiving many a protest about Doctor Satan, and hereby add mine. Now I’m not objecting to it because it is a detective story, although many will, but because it is punk. Any series of stories in which a master crook and a master detective match wits is bound to be poor. No matter what happens, the readers always know that in the next story the crook (or the detective) will have escaped. When one finishes reading such a story, he merely says to himself, ‘So what?’ I think you will soon realize your mistake in inaugurating this series of stories…”

The story tied for first place with Robert Bloch’s “Shambler From the Stars”, a Mythos classic and Clark Ashton Smith’s “Vulthoom”, one of his Martian tales. Six more stories followed but none broke the set pattern. Doctor Satan does evil and Keane thwarts him.

“Hollywood Horror” (Weird Tales, October 1935)

“The Consuming Flame” (Weird Tales, November 1935)

“Horror Insured” (Weird Tales, January 1936)

“Beyond Death’s Gateway” (Weird Tales, March 1936)

“The Devil’s Double” (Weird Tales, May 1936)

“Mask of Death” (Weird Tales, September 1936)

It took over a year but ultimately Farnsworth Wright listened to the letter writers in “The Eyrie”. It seemed that those who purchased Shudder Pulps weren’t necessarily the same folks who bought Weird Tales. WT buyers expected real horrors and more variety. The series was dropped without a concluding episode, which is too bad. It might have been nice to kill off Doctor Satan in a big, splashy finale. (You can always dig him up again if the sales warranted it. The comic books and the movie serials didn’t invent that one.) The stories would get a second life as reprinted in the Robert A. W. Lowndes magazines like Startling Mystery Stories in the 1960s.

Conclusion

The entire Doctor Satan experience for Paul Ernst was not a waste of time. He continued to write for Weird Tales and the weird menace magazines, but in 1939 he got the chance to try another hero Pulp. Street & Smith and John Nanovic, the publishers of Doc Savage wanted to start another pulp based on a heroic figure.

Taking advice from The Shadow‘s Water Gibson and Doc Savage‘s Lester Dent, The Avenger was created. Writing under the house name “Kenneth Robeson”, Paul Ernst was hired to write the monthly novels. Like Ascot Keane, Richard Benson is a master of disguise. Benson has a face like putty, allowing him to imitate anyone. Ernst wrote 24 of them, into 1942, before the series became a set of short stories written by Emile C. Tepperman. Ron Goulart added to the novels in the 1970s.

For more unusual detectives…