The Spider #22: Dragon Lord of the Underworld

The Spider #22

by Grant Stockbridge, Norvell W. Page

In the heart of New York’s Chinatown, on his imperial throne, guarded by swordsmen and gunmen and a labyrinth of death traps, sat the Arch-Criminal of all time. Master of life and death, of disease, of horrible, crawling things—the Emperor of Vermin released destruction over city and nation. The Spider, Master of Men, champion of humanity, fought with every ounce of his cunning, against the monster who personified evil incarnate—while one faithful servant gave his life in this, the Spider’s most bitter, hopeless battle, and Nita herself was faced with a doom more ghastly than any criminal mind had conceived before!

207 pages, Paperback

Published January 23, 2020

About the author

Pen Name asociated with the pulp hero The Spider.

Reviews

[Craig]

Dragon Lord of the Underworld was the 22nd of the 118 Spider novels that were published in the titular pulp magazine 1933 - '43. It appeared in the July 1935 issue as by Grant Stockbridge, the house pseudonym for the series, though it was written by Norvell W. Page, who wrote the majority and the best of the Spider tales. It's a terrific traditional pulp story, though as one can imagine from the title and cover, it's terribly racist in tone and nature, probably because Sax Rohmer's yellow-peril stories of Fu Manchu had gained so much popularity by that time. It's graphically gruesome at times (---Spoilers upcoming! ---) (for example, bad girl Flo Delight gets torn apart, literally), and one of Richard Wentworth's assistants is killed. Professor Brownlee had been something of a mentor to Wentworth, had in fact inspired him to don the alter-ego guise of The Spider to fight crime, and had been there since the first issue. It was unusual to kill off a long-standing ally in the hero pulps, but Prof. Brownlee was really permanently gone. (Unlike Jackson, chauffeur and strong-arm specialist, whom Page had killed off in February of 1935, complete with a burial at Arlington. Mysteriously, Jackson was back for the May issue and apparently lived happily ever after... he even got married in the May 1941 issue.) The evil baddie is Ssu Hsi Tze who uses billions of spiders and bugs and snakes and poison gasses as weapons to cover his thieving operation. He's raising funds to benefit China and then decides to proclaim himself emperor of America. Wentworth looks like he's finally going to lose, but prevails thanks to Ram Singh and, of course, the plucky pep talk provided by his fiancé, Nita Van Sloan. It's a fast-paced pulp celebration but suffers from the standard racist caricature of the time.