Refraction 003: Quest of the Spider

What is a Refraction in Bronze?

“That is exactly why I’m going to see Ham Brooks. Ham knows a person who is just what we need— a superman!”

The glints that caught my mind’s eye….

TaleType: Greedy plot to corner the market on lumber in the Southeastern US using terror, intimidation, and a creepy gray arachnid.

Savage Roll Call: Doc and all of the Amazing Five

La femme du jour:

• Edna Danielsen: daughter of lumber company owner ‘Big Eric’
• Description: tall, blond, blue-eyed… ‘a pippin’ ‘with an unreasonableness not uncommon to the fair sex.’ Oh, that ’30s style sexism.

Notable Nogoodniks (and their just deserts):

• The Gray Spider: mysterious mastermind behind a years-long effort to gain control of the Southeastern US lumber industry
• His deserved demise: When a grenade he throws at Doc and the lads is intercepted in mid-air by a machine-gun thrown by Doc, the explosion destroys a box of the Gray Spider’s own poison flies, which feast upon, and kill, the villain and his central cadre of cads: ‘…the screaming maniac behind them tripped on his own long robe, fell head-foremost on the floor. The bloodthirsty, poisonous flies swarmed about his distorted features, inflicting death with every thrust.’

• “Lefty” Shea & “Bugs” Ballard: The Gray Spider’s chief henchmen in New Orleans; burly ‘lumber detectives’ who sold out their employers in service to the Gray Spider
• Their Educational End: The become just two of the score of the Gray Spider’s thugs to become involuntary recruits in Doc’s Crime College.

• Buck Boontown: A Louisiana swamper, a bit larger and more intelligent than most of the rest of his kind. Buck serves the Gray Spider as one of the leaders of the swamper community. He changes his tune when he finds out that, instead of Doc being the fiend that the Gray Spider had told Buck he was, the bronze man had actually effected a surgical cure for the mental illness that had been plaguing Buck’s beloved son, Sill.
• His lamentable end: In remorse for setting a time-release trap of the poison flies to kill Doc and Co., Buck Boontown rushes to close the box, allowing the handful of escaped poison flies to bite him, instead, effectively saving Doc’s and his men’s lives

The Nefarious Plot:

• to corner the lucrative lumber market in the Southeastern United States through fear, intimidation, kidnapping, murder, and voodoo:
• ‘The Gray Spider’s campaign of wholesale looting of the great lumber companies of the South was no snap-of-the-finger scheme. It had been years in the conceiving and preparation.’

Infernal devices:

• Poison mustard-like gas, first released in front of Doc’s airplane, then later in Big Eric’s lumber company office
• Swampers’ blowguns & darts
• Harness-mounted aircraft-style machine guns
• Most diabolical of all, poisonous flies, the bites of which bring agonizing death

Doc’s Devices:

• Introducing: Anæsthetic-gas-filled glass globes!
• ‘A wonderfully compact machine gun—undoubtedly the smallest and most efficient killing mechanism in existence’ – still using ammo of the merciless variety
• UV-fluorescing ‘invisible message’ chalk
• Super-sensitive microphonic ‘ear’
• Ten Browning machine guns installed in the wings of Doc’s plane
• Quick-growing timber trees, which will revolutionize the lumber industry
• Collapsible silk boat
• Zombie obedience serum: ‘a drug which affects a certain portion of the brain, rendering the victim incapable of thinking. This fellow, for instance, will now do anything I tell him because he cannot think of reasons why he shouldn’t. I could tell him to go over and jump out of the window, and he’d do it without being able to think that the fall meant certain death.’
• Zipper-fastened alligator suit as a cunning disguise

Trilliant: ‘the melodious but untuned note of a wayward breeze filtering among the pipes of a great organ.’

The Amazing Aides are all present and accounted for:

• Monk: the long arm of the simian – he carries five unconscious swamp thugs under his arms at the same time, thumping their heads against walls if they showed signs of reviving
• Can take a joke: “Yeah,” Renny couldn’t resist razzing Monk. “The cops would take one look at you and swear there’d been a break at the zoo.” Monk grinned widely. Strangely enough, any and all nasty cracks about his looks tickled Monk. He was one of those rare individuals—a homely man who was genuinely proud of the fact that his features were something to stop a clock.
• Ham: Went to Harvard with Big Eric Danielson
• According to Big Eric: ‘He was always tumbling into trouble. But he still managed to become the greatest lawyer Harvard ever turned out.’
• For having such a superior legal mind, Ham sure gets taken in fairly often by the identities of the masterminds behind evil schemes: ‘It was upon the masks of the men in the center of the hollow that Long Tom and Ham rested their gaze. These were of gaudy silk! “Remember that flashy silk handkerchief Horace Haas carried in his coat pocket?” Ham inquired. “Yes,” replied Long Tom. “Why?” “I was just thinking,” Ham muttered.’
• Harvard’s finest don’t talk so good: “Doc!” called Ham’s voice softly. “There was only four of them here.” Umm… I think you mean ‘There WERE only four of them here,’ Mr. Brooks.
• Renny: His fists are still gallon-sized in this one: ‘The outstanding thing about the giant, though, was his hands—for each was composed of about a gallon of knuckles that looked like rusted iron.’
• Hot Rod Renny: …the touring car flung into New Orleans. The engine was throwing off waves of heat. The radiator was boiling. Renny, at the wheel, had latched the hand throttle clear out and let it stay. He had taken many a corner at sixty. “If I ever ride with you again, I want my head examined!” Monk complained. “Such crazy driving I never saw!”
• Johnny: He was tall and gaunt, with a half-starved look. His hair was thin, and gray at the temples. He had the appearance of a studious scientist rather than an adventurer.
• Calls himself the world’s second best geologist.
• Remarkable endurance: A lesser man than Johnny would have collapsed long ago, for Johnny’s remarkable physical quality was his endurance. Ordinarily, he was tireless. But carrying the shaver and outrunning the bloodhound pack was taxing even his abilities.
• Long Tom: His ears were big and thin and pale, and since they were between Doc and Monk and the light, it was almost possible to see through them.
• LT wants everyone to think he’s a misogynist, but in point of fact: Long Tom, it was to be suspected, had exercised an eye for pulchritude as well as efficiency when he hired his working force. He had picked a number of peaches.

Underworld Undergrads: The Crime College Concept is still developing… in this one, it’s still being run by a psychologist administering an involuntary cure, but later in the story Doc explains there is generally a brain operation, to wipe out memory of the past, that goes along with the head shrinking.

After the events of Quest of the Spider, the Upstate Institute Class of ’33 is jam-packed; Doc and the boys round up an impressive one score of hoodlums and swampers to haul back north for re-education

God of Bronze? He (Big Eric) mentioned Doc Savage in the same manner an Italian peasant would speak of Mussolini, or a deeply religious Mohammedan would refer to Allah, or a Christian minister to his deity. It was obvious from Big Eric’s tone that he considered Doc Savage nothing less than a supreme being.

Lester Dent’s Depression-Era Values: It’s the Depression, but Big Eric is lauded for not cutting his workers’ wages: “More on the pay roll than we ever had,” Big Eric replied proudly. “And I’m one lumberman who has not taken advantage of conditions to cut salaries.”

The Savage Humanitarian:

• Doc’s fee for helping Big Eric: a million simoleons, devoted to providing food, clothing, and education to Louisiana’s poor
• Doc ‘selected a small garage that seemed to need business and bought a good, used roadster for cash;’
• Doc also operated on the swamp kid, Sill Boontown, and provided enough money to give the kid an education

Attorney Brooks’ Backstory: Big Eric had gone to Harvard with Ham; he explains to his daughter that during the war Ham’s ‘quick thinking saved the lives of thousands of our soldiers.’

Pulp Humor: A freckled stenographer strangled on the gum she was chewing as the big bronze man appeared like magic in the window beside her desk… She had received the shock of her gum-chewing career.

The Body Count: It’s only the third adventure, and, although there are quite a few de-animated bodies lying around by the end of the tale, Doc and crew are responsible for a surprisingly small number of them:

• Doc plunges a swamper’s own knife into his heart
• Doc breaks another’s neck with his bare hands
• Renny machine-guns another goon into shapelessness: Renny’s deadly machine gun burred loudly. The pistol wielder gave an imitation of a sack emptying itself.

• The rest of the bad guys either die of second-hand causes (e.g. being bitten by the Gray Spider’s own poison flies), or are involuntarily inducted into the Crime College’s Class of ’33.

Monk’s Unconscious Baggage: At one point, Monk carries five (admittedly undersized) insensible swamp goons under his arms at one time.

Happy Doc: There’s a lot of emotion shown here, for Doc:

• He smiles at Renny’s giant thumbprint on a note.
• His voice has a loud glad ring at seeing Monk alive after an explosion.
• He smiles at Johnny being ‘in blackface,’ and…

Just Call him ‘Chuckles:’ Doc possibly does more chuckling in this one than in any other tale:

1. He chuckles at having cleaned up all four swampers that were holding Big Eric, Edna, and Ham prisoner
2. He chuckles at Johnny’s threats to a swamper, because You would have just about as much success trying to scare an Apache Indian into talking
3. He chuckles about dyeing Johnny’s skin dark for only… six months or so

Doc Knock: Doc tells Monk to, this time, use that brain nobody would suspect you’ve got.

Vocabulary of Bronze:

• Cake-eater: an effeminate party-going dandy; a lounge lizard; a slick young Romeo who wows the flappers and likes the high life
• Tonneau: used in reference to a car, it is the part with seats, or just the rear section of the vehicle
• “My results so far are what the little boy shot at,” is usually the phrase Monk uses to indicate ‘nuttin’,’ but in this case it’s pre-big-word Johnny slinging the slang
• Pirogue: a long, narrow canoe made from a single tree trunk
• Shinny stick: a slightly curved hockey-type stick, used in playing ‘shinny,’ an informal game of pick-up street or pond hockey.

Booboos in Bronze: There were at least three times when a word employed in the original pulp text of Quest of the Spider was close, but not quite the right word:

1. In the first instance, Doc has just discovered the corpse of a man who was going to provide him with the identity of the Gray Spider:

• Several letters reposed in an inner pocket. The addresses were still legible. They bore the name of Topper Beed. The man had surfeited his life for his activities against the Gray Spider!
• Clearly, the correct word here is forfeited, not surfeited. To be surfeited means ‘to desire no more of something as a result of having consumed or done it to excess,’ and Topper Beed did not die as a result of imbibing too much life.
• As to how such an error could creep into the text, whether in Lester Dent’s original type-written manuscript, through editorial error, or due to a typesetter’s holiday, I will leave up to the serious scholars to debate!

2. Next, after the room that the aides took in a New Orleans hotel has been bombed, one of the thugs made his way through the hotel lobby:

• He scurried down successive flights of stairs, reached the lobby, and worked across it. Excitement raged in the lobby. Wiremen were arriving, although there was no need of them. Bell boys and guests charged about, adding to the general confusion. Bugs walked outside.
• Why would ‘wiremen’ (electricians who specialize in connecting their customers’ electrical systems to an outside power source) be Johnny-on-the-spots when a room on an upper floor of a hotel has just exploded?
• It makes far better sense for the correct word to be ‘firemen,’ who are showing up quickly at the scene of an explosion.
• Again, I will leave it to our pool of learned Savageologists to debate the provenance of the mitsake!

3. The third instance of almost-but-not-quite-the-right-word is strange, because the same incorrect word choice occurs in quite a few early Doc Savage stories (i.e. The Man of Bronze, The Sargasso Ogre, The Polar Treasure, The South Pole Terror, and Resurrection Day). Toward the end of Chapter 11, we have this description of Doc desperately trying to avoid a mined roadway:

• Doc trod the brake. The suspicious stick was only a few yards away. The roadster was doing sixty. It skewered. It careened from side to side, skidding. All four tires, frozen immobile by the brakes, squealed like hungry pigs.
• But cars don’t skewer, unless they happen to run headlong into a giant marshmallow. They do, however, skew (in the sense of suddenly changing direction or position), especially when brakes are violently applied.

End quote:

It’s tough for her to fall like that,” said Monk. “For the woman isn’t made who can get a rise out of Doc.”