The Spider #32: Slaves Of The Dragon

The Spider #32: Slaves Of The Dragon, by Grant Stockbridge

May, 1936  Popular Publications

One of the best volumes of The Spider I’ve yet read, Slaves Of The Dragon features the return of the “Yellow Peril” storylines as seen in previous Spider yarns as The Red Death Rain and Emperor Of The Yellow Death. This one is just as good as either of them, given that it deals with a rather risque topic for a 1936 pulp novel: sexual slavery, or rather “white slavery,” as it’s most often referred to, given that the titular Dragon is a Chinese sadist who is kidnapping thousands of white American women to be sold as sex slaves to the Mongols, the women fated to give birth to “half-breed slaves” until they are no longer fertile. 

Norvell “Grant Stockbridge” Page lays the “evil Chinese” stuff on thick, but I saw little to get my panties in a bunch over; I mean seriously, if you are woke or easily offended, you shouldn’t be reading 1930s pulp to begin with. But there are random asides on how loathsome and cunning the Chinese are; Richard Wentworth, The Spider, clearly fears them more than any other enemy, and there are many times where he gives in to a paranoia when he discovers, early in the book, that his opponents are Chinese. 

Page as ever keeps the plot moving, and one thing I’ve noticed with the Yellow Peril storylines is that he doesn’t waste our time with the usual “red herring” subplot that mars so many Spider yarns. This is clearly because the villain is Asian, and not someone who would be in Wentworth’s upper-crust circle, so there’s no opportunity for Page to do his usual “it was really so-and-so!” schtick…but at the same time, it’s an interesting reminder of when Chinese people were a rarity in New York City, sequestered solely to Chinatown. 

Random subject-change warning, but did you all know that Princess Ariel on Thundarr The Barbarian is Chinese?? I’ve been watching that show with my kid – I loved it when I was a kid, back when it first came on in the very early ‘80s – and there’s an episode where they go to Chinatown, and Ariel says something to the effect of “This is where my ancestors might once have lived.” Anyway, I was surprised…I mean the animators gave Ariel dark skin (and a very impressive rack that those perv animators prominently feature in every shot they can, god bless ‘em), so I assumed she was Arabic or something, but I was surprised to discover she was Chinese. 

Anyway, I think I was talking about Slaves Of The Dragon. Well, it’s a good one, and not marred by the usual red herring stuff, which I think I already mentioned. It hits the ground running, per the Page template, with Wentworth coming across a lingerie shop in the city that’s being hit by the cops. Only Wentworth soon figures these aren’t really cops, particularly the one holding the machine gun who is clearly under the influence of heroin. 

Page gets pretty risque here with “models” from the store being taken out by the pseudo-cops, many of them in various states of undress; the idea is they’re being arrested for indecency and the like, this being 1936 and there still being standards of decency and stuff like that. But when Wentworth sees the badge number on a cop heimmediately knows the guy is imposter – Wentworth knows the real cop who has that badge number, you see – it’s blazing guns to the rescue as Wentworth takes on the bad guys. 

We do get the expected random subplot with the appearance of Margaret Stone, a hotstuff young woman who sees Wentworth put the Spider seal on the forehead of a corpse, while in his everyday guise as Wentworth, something he’s never done before. And of course Margaret immediately suspects Wentworth is really the Spider, and there’s a dangling plot that she might out him to the police – which is a laugh, because the police already know – but then Page changes his mind and has Margaret infatuated with Wentworth, in a plot development that makes little sense. 

A cool thing about Slaves Of The Dragon is that the threat is a little more smallscale and personal than previous volumes, which adds more impact to the narrative. That said, the women-kidnapping scenes aren’t as prevalent as you might think, but I did think it was interesting that the novel was essentially a precursor of the later Super Cop Joe Blaze #2. 

Page as ever excels in scenes of personal and heroic sacrifice, and also as ever puts his hero through the wringer. One thing I learned about those wily Chinese from Slaves Of The Dragon is that practically every place they live in is filled with traps, though I learned this already many years ago in my in-laws’ house, where the bathroom door didn’t close unless you really pushed it in. Nothing like taking a leak and then turning around to discover that the door was wide open behind you the entire time. “What’s for dinner, everyone?” Those wily Chinese! 

I keep getting distracted. Yes, there’s a great part where Wentworth goes into the bowls of the Dragon’s crypt, led by the “childlike” and small female servant expected in the Yellow Peril trope, here named Ya Hsai. But she leads Wentworth to this crazy trap where starving rats are in the floor below and somehow Ram Singh is here and he’s been shot in the chest by Wentworth (unintentionally, of course), and there’s a desperate scene where they gun down rats and chop them with knives and Ram Singh begs to give up his life for Master Wentworth. 

We also get a lot of Spider appearances here, with Wentworth disguising his face with makeup and a floppy hat, including a humorous part where he walks around Broadway in full Spider get-up. But as ever the entire thing is a ruse because everyone knows Richard Wentworth is the Spider; there’s a part early on where they even attack him in his home. A scene, now that I think of it, that Page doesn’t follow up on; Wentworth’s fiancé, Nita Van Sloan, comes over with a young boy whose mother was kidnapped, and Nita mentions that she might adopt the child…and the child is never seen nor mentioned again. 

As for Nita, she really shines here, as she has been in the more recent volumes. There’s a great part toward the end where Page for once actually breaks away from Wentworth’s perspective and features Nita alone, outside Washington, D.C. (believe it or not, in the swamp! Talk about timely – they need to drain that thing!), and she’s been captured with the other women, and she gets hold of a whip from one of the female guards and starts up a slave revolt. 

The only failing with the book is the Dragon himself, who is just an old Chinese man; Page doesn’t do much to make the villain memorable. There’s no costume, no grand speech, nothing. He’s just a wily old Chinese guy who has an army at his disposal and has been hired to kidnap white women to be given to Mongols for slave-breeding purposes. In other words, pretty forgettable as a Spider villain. 

Action is frequent and as ever sees Wentworth using dual .45s; there’s a modern Paul Verhoeven vibe where both he and Nita start using corpses as “human shields” during the bloody firefights. Unfortunately Page delivers an overlong aerial combat sequence later in the book, and I’ve never been a fan of those in the series. 

There are a lot of “big moments,” though, particularly a part where the Dragon announces that the Spider is dead, and right after he says that the Spider himself shows up, guns blazing. Page also tries to do something different with the character of Ya Hsai, building up a rapport between her and Wentworth. But the stuff with Margaret, who develops an almost fatal attraction for Wentworth, is much less believable. 

Page has so much fun with Slaves Of The Dragon that he ends the novel mid-battle; Chinese military planes are attacking the Dragon’s ruined base in the Virginia swamps, and Wentworth, Nita, and a G-man are shooting at them, and Wentworth tells Nita to call the FBI, and the novel ends! Speaking of which, there’s a lot of talk about “Hoover’s FBI,” all of it praiseworthy, and so far as I can recall this is the first time the FBI has been mentioned in The Spider. 

Overall Slaves Of The Dragon was certainly entertaining, and moved at a faster clip than many other Spider stories, mostly because it followed a single plot from beginning to end and didn’t jump wily-nily to various action setpieces.