The Spider #31: The Cholera King, by Grant Stockbridge
April, 1936 Popular Publications
It’s funny; the volumes of The Spider that I think I won’t enjoy turn out to be the most entertaining. It happened before with Reign Of The Death Fiddler, and now again with The Cholera King. Norvell “Grant Stockbridge” Page really keeps the story moving…mostly because he changes the direction of the plot so many times that the book veritably speeds by.
It’s a month after the previous volume, the events of which aren’t mentioned, but when we meet him Richard “The Spider” Wentworth is taking a much-needed vacation, along with his ever-suffering fiance, Nita Van Sloan. On a boat in the mid-Atlantic, Wentworth is in the process of having a marksman contest with a fellow shipmate, when the shipmate abruptly tries to kill Wentworth. The man then jumps off the ship and is picked up by a plane, making his escape.
However, this is not the plot Page wants to fool around with. Immediately thereafter we learn that cholera is rampant on the boat, and what’s more, Wentworth is informed that there’s been a cholera outbreak back in New York City. Wentworth does what any other pulp hero would do; he commandeers the boat’s sea-airplane and takes off for New York.
One thing I have been much appreciating about the latest volumes of The Spider is Nita’s growing involvement. Whereas past volumes shunted her off to the side, only appearing long enough to be captured, this time out Nita flat-out insists that she go to New York with Wentworth; she demands to take part in his adventures, now. This leads to a great bit where Wentworth, after flying alone in what he’s thought was a solo capacity for several hours, finds himself attacked by dogfighting planes – and is saved by the surprise appearance of a stowaway on his little airplane.
However this sequence is the only part of The Cholera King that I didn’t enjoy, as Page indulges in several pages of “aeronautical fiction.” Once Wentworth lands in New York, though, we get back on firmer pulp ground; Wentworth learns that cholera is rampant in the city, with thousands dead, and what’s more New York has been quarantined. This was especially timely in our post-Covid world, Norvell Page once again displaying a strange prescience:
Yes, “God help a city when the very children forget to play.” Not to mention a city where mothers are arrested for taking their children to playgrounds. Or where a man is arrested for paddleboarding on an empty beach. Not to mention the hundreds of other injustices the ruling class of “experts” perpetrated on we the public in the reign of Covid – things which they just wish we’d forget about, today – all in the name of “public health.”
It’s pretty sad that even the imagination of a 1930s pulp writer pales in comparison to reality, especially given that the New Yorkers in Page’s novel rebel against these injustices, and indeed unite, rise up together, and take their salvation into their own hands. But then, these people have none other than the Spider to lead them.
Page isn’t content to just write a novel about New York under a cholera quarantine, though. He also works in a murder-mystery plot, with city notables getting killed, and “tit-tat-toe” (or, more commonly today, tic-tac-toe) diagrams carved into their torsos. Wentworth is certain these murders are related to the cholera outbreak, but police boss Kirkpatrick doesn’t believe it.
We get more flying fiction as Wentworth (with Nita!) goes off in pursuit of men who try to sabotage a supply of acids or whatnot that’s being brought in to counteract the cholera in the city’s water. After this it’s back to the murder mystery subplot as Wentworth chases down various red herrings, certain that someone is the mastermind behind this nefarious plot.
Once again Wentworth himself names the villain of the piece: it’s the Plague Master, and sadly he continues the trend of being a poorly-costumed villain. He’s tall, bald, wears a crimson robe, and has a mummy-like face. He operates mostly in the background, but like all other Spider villains, he not only has an army of criminals at his command but he also knows who the Spider really is.
Speaking of the Spider, the best part in The Cholera King entails Wentworth donning his Spider guise and going out into the city to take down the looters – yet more prescience on Page’s part, with the caveat that in his day looters were still considered criminals. Wentworth, slouching through the city in his cloak and deformed mask, comes upon a pair of sadists as they toss a woman out of a window, and the Spider goes up there to dish out some bloody payback. It’s a cool moment, the best in the book, and it would’ve been great if Page had just written the entire novel in this manner.
Unfortunately, our author has other intentions: for one, he introduces yet another subplot where Wentworth disguises himself yet again and goes into the slums of the Bowery, posing as a criminal in the hopes of being drafted into the Plague Master’s criminal empire. This subplot is humorously dropped as Page changes his mind and instead has the Spider become a hero for the downtrodden, quarantined masses of New York City.
If only there had been a Spider in the real world of 2020! After taking down many of the looters and criminals who are plaguing the disease-ridden, quarantined city (not to mention being chased by the cops himself), Wentworth the next day comes upon a group of desperate people who are about to drink from a water hose, even though the water is contaminated with cholera and it will mean sudden death if they drink it. Wentworth is driven to help them and, still in his cape and whatnot, makes a stirring speech and says he will lead them to safety.
This part is great and shows that Page understood the concept of masculine strength, another thing the “experts” have tried to make us forget. There are constant asides of “What a man!” from the women who flock to the powerful leader that is Richard Wentworth, one of them even mentioning later on how no man will ever equal Wentworth in her eyes. Wentworth, we’ll recall, is a man of wealth who has seen a need in people and has willingly put himself in harm’s way to help them, despite being branded as a criminal and hated by the authorities. Boy, this sure reminds me of a particular real-world person…
Now The Cholera King becomes a survival yarn as Wentworth, still posing as the Spider, leads a few million New Yorkers on an “exodus” into the country, where they can have fresh water and live again, away from the cholera. Again there’s that prescience as they are constantly impeded by the authorities, ie the “experts,” who even draw guns on them and tell them they cannot proceed, because they are infected with cholera and it’s important for the “public health” that they stay in New York. To die.
But Norvell Page and Richard Wentworth are on the side of freedom and life, not tyranny and death, and Wentworth leads his millions on into the wilderness, breaking right through the government troops who have lined up to stop them. It was awesome to read this and to be reminded that there was a time when a pulp writer could still believe in the independence and free spirit of the American people, to imagine that they would buck against the forces of oppression. Sadly, as demonstrated by the willful masking, one-way-aisles-at-the-grocery-store, and “six feet of separation” of the Covid years (the majority of which was bullshit that was made up on the fly), this independence and free will has either been lost in the 89 years since The Cholera King was published, or it never existed in the first place and is just the product of a pulp writer’s imagination. Personally, I believe the former.
The exodus sequence is almost disconnected from the rest of the book, but is entertaining as hell, especially given its connotations with our modern day, or at least the modern day of a few years ago. (Fortunately, things seem to be changing profoundly.) But then it’s back to the “posing as a criminal to get hired” subplot, which of course leads to Wentworth being trapped by the Plague Master, who by the way also has Nita prisoner – and also wants her to marry him!
There’s no big action finale for The Cholera King; indeed, Norvell Page relies on deus ex machina, with Wentworth being saved as he’s being led to his death. Really, Page has spent so much of the narrative on the tic-tac-toe mystery (including a super-long footnote in which he tells how to solve the various ciphers in the text, perhaps unintentionally inspiring the future Zodiac Killer), not to mention the exodus from New York, that the poor Plague Master himself is reduced to almost a footnote…and the “revelation” of his real identity is (intentionally?) hilarious, as it’s some dude Wentworth and Nita knows, but the guy hasn’t even been mentioned in the book!
Anyway, I really enjoyed The Cholera King; the plot was all over the place, but the high points were really high, and Norvell Page’s unwitting prediction of the Covid era gave the book a lot of resonance with today.
