This passage from the opener of Paul Chadwick’s “The Spectral Strangler” (March 1934) presents a similar tone of Gothic melodrama:
[Federal Detective] Bill Scanlon stood waiting. Then he relaxed. A cat with coal black fur and glowing green eyes spat at him and slunk away. It might have been an evil omen, but Scanlon wasn’t superstitious. He thought it was only the cat he had seen… A shadow detached itself from the blackness of a house stoop opposite the maple. Slinking spiderlike, the shadow moved after Scanlon, stalking from tree to tree, hedge to hedge, and stoop to stoop, drawing closer — always closer.
What a different way of using language that the two writers employ! Paul Chadwick’s diction is meant to convey a sense of weirdness and foreboding. However, its real effect is to cause readers to roll their eyes at the narrator’s melodramatic overkill. It is like watching really bad Vincent Price (actually a capable thespian) or, better, Bela Lugosi at his most extravagant (Think White Zombie and Lugosi’s notorious work for filmmaker Ed Wood). Emile Tepperman, on the other hand, employs the language in a much more crisp fashion, yet keeps his diction evocative. Here is realism, not Gothic melodrama. In the future career of Tepperman, it will become the hallmark of a prose style that will eventually seem to celebrate the brutal, the cruel in life.
Yet this begs the question: In popular literature, especially in the pulps, why should this kind of tougher, more realistic diction have any advantages over a more melodramatic kind? It certainly does — and it did even during the Depression. In the first place it is more in tune with the style that would become the industry standard by the mid-to-late 1930s. Second, Tepperman’s mode of expression is frankly more efficient in portraying the story. In other words his word choice is unencumbered by the unnecessary “special effects” recorded in the above passages by Paul Chadwick. Last, such word choice more effectively engages the readers’ interest. It inspires them to move more deeply into the text, not to ridicule it.
In the same vein is Tepperman’s syntax, his manner of arranging phrases, clauses, sentences, and paragraphs. As the lines from “Servants of the Skull” illustrate, Tepperman composes in a “rat-a-tat” kind of style perfectly suited to the subject matter that his fiction portrays. Note this section from the same narrative, wherein the eponymous villain threatens X’s companion Betty Dale:
The Skull went on: “What will you say, Miss Dale, when I tell you that this electric chair does not kill! It will maim you! Maim you mentally and physically, will make you an imbecile within five seconds of the moment I pull this switch… That, Miss Dale, is what will happen to you. You will be thrown out into the street to be found by your friend and protector, Secret Agent ‘X’! I shall send you as a challenge to him — a challenge from the one man who is his match!”
Like the writer’s diction, a less melodramatic style tends to move the storyline, and of a necessity the readers’ eyes’, with much greater speed over the page. Also it more realistically depicts the way people would speak (if the pulps can be said to portray realism!).
If the styles of the Tepperman and Chadwick show obvious differences, then so too do their plots. In Chadwick’s hands the Man of a Thousand Faces battles all manner of pulp super criminals wielding terrifying death weapons. In “The Torture Trust” it may be the Masters of Death, who seek money and power and who use acid to attain their goals. The devious Black Master, a Shadowesque villain, lusts after vast wealth, his method for gaining it being a new asphyxiating gas (“The Spectral Strangler”). With Chadwick’s other early “X” yarns, the Agent encounters a super flame thrower, the Flammenwurfer (“The Death-Torch Terror”), and an opportunistic master spy, the Green Mask (“Ambassador of Doom”), selling military secrets. And then there is the group of medical extortionists from the notorious “City of the Living Dead,” a story which merits no response, save, “What the hell were they thinking?” With the exception of this final entry, this is pretty standard pulp fare, if not derivative stuff, as far as Chadwick’s handling of plot goes. Every one of the villains is out for power or wealth, with little to distinguish miscreant A’s goals from those of miscreant B. Only their modus operandi might differ. In addition the order of events from one month’s adventure is nearly always the same as the next one. The Agent will investigate a criminal mastermind’s machinations, only to be exposed at a crucial time. Then he will effect a daring escape from the criminal’s clutches (or from those of the police), a la the Shadow, don a new disguise, and recommence his investigation. Altering his features like most people change socks, he will move through the remainder of the story until the final battle with the resident fiend. Here the Secret Agent will expose the man’s real identity, then, whistling his eerie call, disappear to the amazement of the police or other onlookers. This is strict adherence to a formula, plain and simple.
In Chadwick’s defense it was difficult to come up with a new menace, month after month. This may explain why his fictional threats to society had to grow ever more deadly and horrible, ever more paranoid. Though it may seem counterintuitive, this may also account for editor Rose Wyn’s likely problems with Chadwick’s narratives. Wyn, as editor, would clearly see where the book was going with Chadwick as scribe. If a plot requires a new horror every month, then the next month’s number and the next will necessitate ever more horror and fear, along with a villain just as horrible and fearsome to perpetrate it. This type of narrative circumstance will then force the writer, especially the formulaic one, to grope for plots more desperately each time. Eventually he will move in the direction of diminishing returns. Readers, too, will become satiated with such material, desensitized to the point that the pulpster’s work will have little or no impact.
Very likely, then, switching gears was uppermost in Rose Wyn’s mind when she assigned Secret Agent “X” to Emile Tepperman. He, in contrast, would bring a new kind of plot angle to the mysteries. I’ve mentioned his first “X,” “Hand of Horror,” which is not much different from one of Chadwick’s fictions. With Tepperman’s next story, “Servants of the Skull,” we see a rather imitative effort, true enough, one possibly inspired by Walter Gibson’s work on The Shadow. But in comparison to an early piece by Paul Chadwick, Tepperman executes the plot with class and style. Agent “X,” instead of being exposed early on, remains ingeniously hidden in disguise until… well, you’ll have to read this for yourself! And the resident villain, the Skull, is equally adept at maintaining his own masquerade, not being revealed until Tepperman is good and ready to unmask him — not any earlier. The point is this: here is a writer who knows how to plot a story. He gives just enough information to tantalize the readers, then compels them to move deeper into the plot. In doing so, he encourages mystery about both story and characters until the very end of the proceedings.
The same is true of Tepperman’s next novel, “The Murder Monster.” The plot revolves around a bizarre group of mute, lookalike robots who shoot flames from their fingertips, thereby murdering their victims. The Murder Monster, their weird master, is another Gibsonesque villain. And he is almost as strong an opponent for Agent “X” as is the Monster’s predecessor, the Skull. Equally as original is the explanation that Tepperman provides for the villain’s minions. A well-plotted story, “The Murder Master” moves with a relentless pace that never lets up until the final exciting scene. Lest I forget, the narrative’s plot contains an interesting sidelight that amounts to pulp social commentary, in this case regarding the treatment of criminals.