Curt Siodmak's Donovan’s Brain

Donovan’s Brain is a 1942 science fiction novel by Curt Siodmak.

German-born Curt Siodmak (1902-2000) enjoyed success as an author, screenwriter and film director.

The fact that it’s about a disembodied brain kept alive in a laboratory might tempt some readers to dismiss this book as mere pulp science fiction but Siodmak was a writer with more substance than that.

He addressed a similar theme again much later in his excellent 1968 novel Hauser's Memory.

Donovan’s Brain is the story of a bizarre medical experiment carried out by Dr Patrick Cory. He is obsessed by the idea of keeping a brain alive outside the body. He has had limited success with monkeys. Then a golden opportunity is dropped into his lap. A light plane has crashed in the mountains. Dr Cory is first on the scene. A man in his sixties is horribly injured and his chances of survival are nil, but his brain is undamaged. Dr Cory is able to remove the brain. The brain is placed in a large glass jar filled with serum and surprisingly remains alive.

Keeping Donovan’s brain alive is all well and good but Dr Cory wants to find a way to communicate with it. There’s no doubt that Donovan’s personality still exists.

He finds a way to communicate but Donovan’s messages are rather cryptic.

There’s also a mystery story of sorts. Donovan’s behaviour just before the plane crash was puzzling. And Donovan has some odd obsessions. It’s possible that those obsessions now dominate his personality. Dr Cory needs to find out more about Donovan in order to make sense of whatever it is that Donovan is trying to tell him. Donovan’s surviving children may have their own reasons for not wanting Cory to learn certain things. It’s also apparent that they think Donovan told Dr Cory something important before dying (they of course do not know that Donovan is still alive after a fashion).

Donovan’s personality has to some extent taken lodgement in Dr Cory’s brain. And Donovan is a very strong personality. And, perhaps, not quite sane. Perhaps he was never quite sane.

The idea of two personalities, with conflicting agendas, occupying the same brain has been used countless times but it’s worth remembering that Siodmak was utilising this idea way back in 1942.

And he was doing it skilfully. Neither the reader nor Dr Cory have any reason to think that there is anything sinister about Donovan, at first. Donovan was a remarkable man. Dr Cory was particularly excited to have the opportunity to preserve his brain - it would be an opportunity to learn about the workings of the mind of a man who had achieved great success. And for quite a while Cory isn’t concerned. Donovan’s obsessions seem to be simply a desire to correct mistakes that he made. Nothing worrying about that. It’s only very gradually that Cory begins to suspect that perhaps Donovan was somewhat sinister. But what I like about this story is that Dr Cory is not having his mind invaded by the mind of a psycho killer. Donovan is more complicated than that.

Dr Cory is confident that he can remain in control. Donovan’s brain is just a mass of brain tissue sitting in a glass jar filled with nutrients.

This is a story focused not just on Donovan’s obsessions but on Dr Cory’s as well. They are perhaps similar in some ways - both are men driven by ambition. Dr Cory is driven by ambition in a good way. He wants to advance scientific knowledge. There’s no harm in that is there?

This is fine intelligent science fiction with some dashes of mystery and horror. Curt Siodmak certainly deserves to be appreciated more. Highly recommended.

And Siodmak’s Hauser’s Memory is very much worth reading as well.

Dr Death: The Gray Creatures

Dr Death: The Gray Creatures is a 1935 crime/supernatural horror pulp novel written by Harold Ward under the pseudonym Zorro.

Dr Death had made his first appearance a year earlier in the pulp magazine All Detective Magazine. He figured in four stories in that magazine. In 1935 All Detective Magazine was renamed Dr Death. Each issue would feature a Dr Death novel. The Gray Creatures was the second such novel, appearing in the March 1935 issue. In the event only three issues of the Doctor Death magazine were published although two further novels were written.

Dr Death is actually a brilliant but insane scientist, Rance Mandarin. He believes he has been chosen by the Almighty to restore the world to its proper order. This will require the destruction of modern civilisation. Dr Death’s first step was to be the assassination of the world’s top scientists. To Dr Death science is an evil that must be eradicated.

Jimmy Holm is the one man who may be able to stop Dr Death. Jimmy is a millionaire criminologist and a police detective whose speciality is cases involving the occult.

Dr Death’s chief assistant has been a beautiful young woman, Nina Ferrera. Nina turned against Dr Death and joined forces with Jimmy Holm. In fact they were to be married. Now Dr Death wants Nina back.

The most terrifying weapon in Dr Death’s arsenal is his ability to create zombies, or at least dead men brought back to life in a way that resembles zombies.

Dr Death’s latest target is a mysterious Egyptian named Harmachis. It appears that Dr Death thinks that Harmachis has access to the occult knowledge of Ancient Egypt.

Dr Death is now headed for Egypt to find a hidden tomb and Jimmy has to find a way to follow him without his presence being suspected. He also has to rescue Nina. Dr Death would never physically harm Nina. The worry is that he will manipulate her into serving evil purposes.

The voyage to that tomb in Egypt is by air, by yacht, by submarine and by truck. With lots of explosions and mayhem on the way.

There will be epic battles against supernatural forces.

There are monsters of various kinds. The monsters are genuinely weird and scary. There’s plenty of out-and-horror in this tale and it gets very creepy and grisly at times.

Of course there has to be a beautiful queen in such a story, and there is.

The action is relentless, the hazards are many and the body count is high. You are very unlikely to be bored by this novel.

Dr Death is an evil mad scientist rather than a sorcerer so while he appears to command supernatural forces some of those forces might in fact be scientifically created. There are however quite a few elements in the story that are difficult to explain away as anything other than supernatural.

The lines between the supernatural, the paranormal and the scientific are constantly blurred in this story which gives it a rather interesting flavour.

It’s also a story in which the evil genius has something more interesting in mind than a straightforward plan for world domination.

It’s all very pulpy and very exciting. This is great stuff and it’s a mystery to me that the Doctor Death magazine wasn’t a success. Dr Death: The Gray Creatures is highly recommended.

Don Wilcox’s Slave Raiders from Mercury

Don Wilcox’s Slave Raiders from Mercury was published in Amazing Stories in 1940. Cleo Eldon Wilcox (1905-2000) was an American science fiction author who wrote under a number of pseudonyms, most notably Don Wilcox.

Slave Raiders from Mercury opens in America in contemporary times. A carnival huckster has found an abandoned spaceship and has turned it into a major carnival attraction. Lester Allison (the hero of several other Wilcox stories) is a young man who meets a pretty girl named June at the carnival. People are queueing up to pay their fifty cents to sit inside the spaceship. Lester and June and a guy named Tyndall (who clams to be June’s boyfriend although she denies it) end up in the spaceship and then, much to everybody’s surprise, the spacecraft blasts off into outer space! And starts heading towards Mercury. What nobody knew was that it was an automated spacecraft controlled by slave traders on Mercury.

Mercury is inhabited by the Dazzalox, a degenerated dying race. They’re humanoid and mostly pretty similar to humans, apart from being very long-lived. The main interest of the Dazzalox is funerals - their own funerals. When you’re a thousand years old your funeral is something you look forward to. You have a great time, it’s a great status display, and then you go into a tunnel and you can look forward to a painless death. The Dazzalox may have been a great civilisation once but now they don’t even understand the technology that keeps their civilisation going. Apart from displays of status and owning slaves there’s not much else other than funerals that they’re interested in.

They don’t even need slaves. Everything is automated. Slaves are just a means of demonstrating status. The slaves are collected for them from Earth by a renegade Earthman named Kilhide. The slaves are all healthy young American males. Any slaves who aren’t healthy and young are painlessly disposed of.

It’s not that bad a life in some ways. Being a slave involves very little actual work.

Everything changes with June’s arrival. You see the Dazzalox have never seen a human female. They didn’t even know that human females existed. Now they know and they’re very excited. Mostly they’re excited by the novelty. Novelty is something they rarely get to experience. A human female is a major novelty and possession of such a novelty brings enormous status. The Dazzalox men are so excited that many are even prepared to cancel their own funerals. They all want to own a human female. They want Kilhide to bring them lots more Earth women.

The Dazzalox women (there are Dazzalox women) are not so happy about all this.

Lester Allison and June have of course fallen hopelessly in love. And Lester Allison’s thoughts have now turned to rebellion. But that means facing the Floating Chop. It’s likely to lead to a blood-drenched finale.

The dying civilisation angle is intriguing and it’s handled fairly well. The Dazzalox are decadent but it’s an interesting kind of decadence, centred purely on status displays. It’s a kind of senile decadence. The Dazzalox can be cruel but it’s a child-like kind of cruelty. They’re scarcely even aware of it. They’re not stereotypically evil. They’re just massively self-centred and self-indulgent.

Kilhide is the real villain and he’s just selfish and greedy.

Lester Allison is your typical all-American hero but in a quiet unostentatious way. He has to become a hero by force of circumstances. Mostly he’s motivated by his love for June. Without her he would have accepted his slavery as the other slaves have accepted theirs.

This is pure pulp science fiction, totally lacking in any literary aspirations, but with a few interesting ideas. It’s moderately entertaining silly fun if you’re in the mood for extra pulpy 1940s science fiction.

G-8 and his Battle Aces #1 The Bat Staffel

Robert J. Hogan (1897–1963) was an American pulp writer, best known for his aviation adventure stories. He wrote the Red Falcon and Smoke Wade stories for Popular Publications and from 1933 wrote 110 issues of the G-8 and his Battle Aces pulp magazine, each issue including a short novel. Hogan had trailed as a pilot during the First World War so wartime aviation stories were obvious subject matter for him. He also wrote seven Mysterious Wu Fang Yellow Peril pulp novels and later turned to westerns.

The Bat Staffel was the first of the G-8 and his Battle Aces novels. The hero is an American aviator and spy code-named G-8. There’s plenty of air combat (with G-8 almost single-handedly winning the air war) but there are some mild science fiction elements and hints of the occult and the supernatural although Hogan’s novel is not as outrageous (or as imaginative) as Donald Keyhoe’s roughly contemporary stories about Captain Philip Strange, the Brain-Devil.

There’s an evil German mad scientist, Herr Doctor Kreuger, who has come across mediæval legends of giant bats spreading death and destruction across the countryside with their poisonous bat breath. He decides that those giant bats will fly again, devastating France and allowing Germany to win the war. G-8’s job is to discover whether these giant bats are actual bats or ingenious machines, and to find a way to stop them.

G-8 gets some help from two heroic American flyers, Nippy Weston and Bull Martin. This gives G-8 the opportunity to explain crucial plot points to his side-kicks. In the process they shoot down most of the Imperial German Air Force. What chance do fifty Fokkers have against three Americans in their trusty Spads?

Hogan resorts to quite a few standard pulp plot devices. The chief villain, instead of doing the sensible thing and just shooting G-8 out of hand as a spy, carefully explains all the details of his master plan to him first and then of course G-8 escapes. Pulp villains just never learn not to do that. And the Germans just don’t seem to be able to tie up prisoners in such a way that they cannot escape. Of course it goes without saying that the Germans are all lousy shots, whether in the air or on the ground while G-8 and his buddies rarely miss. The Germans are all either evil or they’re fools. But of course this is what the pulp readership expected and wanted. Hogan understand his market.

The bats and their poison bat breath are a nicely sinister touch. The bats are almost impossible to destroy which makes them a suitably terrifying menace.

Hogan certainly knew how to pace a pulp story. This one hits the ground running and the action don’t let up. There are no romantic sub-plots to distract from the action (the readership of such tales was not going to want any soppy romance stuff). There’s no characterisation to speak of. G-8 is a square-jawed all-American action hero. The villain  is pure evil and degeneracy personified.

There are some plot holes but it’s pulp fiction and it’s fast-moving and the readers were unlikely to notice such details.

It might seem like I’m damning The Bat Staffel with faint praise but it’s actually pretty good fun. This is pulp fiction that is very very pulpy. As First World War aviation adventures go it’s not as good as Donald Keyhoe’s Strange War or The Vanished Legion but it’s still quite enjoyable and if you like air combat stories with a few hints of science fiction and weird fiction then I’d recommend it.

Adventure House have republished The Bat Staffel as well as quite a few of the other G-8 and his Battle Aces novels. Their edition also includes a short story by R. Sidney Bowen, The Floating Runt (which has been included in the original pulp magazine as well). It’s a rather contrived story about the rivalry between a pilot and a balloon observer. It's not great but since it's essentially a free added extra it would be churlish to complain too much.

The Global Globules Affair (The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. tie-in novel)

The Global Globules Affair, written by Simon Latter and published in 1967, was one of five tie-in novels associated with the short-lived television series The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. which aired on NBC in 1966-67.

Like the television series on which it’s based it’s a light-hearted and enjoyable mix of science fiction and spy thriller.

It’s basically harmless fun and if you’re a fan of the original television series it's worth a look. Here’s the link to my full review at Cult TV Lounge.

Otis Adelbert Kline's Jan of the Jungle

Otis Adelbert Kline (1891–1946) was an American pulp writer in the mould of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In fact he is sometimes dismissed as a mere imitator of Burroughs. Whatever sub-genres Burroughs worked in (or often invented) you could be pretty sure that Kline would soon be working in as well. Like Burroughs he wrote sword-and-planet adventures set on Mars and Venus, he wrote lost world stories and he wrote jungle adventure stories. An imitator he may have been, but at the time he was considered to be possibly Burroughs’ most serious rival in those genres.

Jan of the Jungle, published in 1931, is a jungle adventure tale about a boy raised by chimpanzees, which certainly does sound remarkably close to Burroughs’ most famous creation, Tarzan.

Jan is the son of a millionaire. For complicated reasons he is kidnapped as a baby by the evil mad scientist Dr Bracken and raised by a female chimpanzee. He can understand the primitive language of chimpanzees but he has no knowledge of any human languages. Since the book takes place in South America you may be about to object that there are no chimpanzees in South America but Kline has that objection neatly covered.

He escapes and has various adventures in the jungles of South America, with Dr Bracken pursuing him remorselessly. He also meet Ramona and falls in love with her. We will later discover that her personal history is as strange as Jan’s.

So far it sounds like an exact Tarzan clone but things are about to change. Jan chances upon the entrance to an underground river which takes him to a hidden valley. Jan of the Jungle is about to become a lost world tale.

At this point Kline decides to abandon any pretence at plausibility. The hidden valley contains not only a Mesoamerican lost civilisation but a huge variety of extinct animals, ranging from species extinct for thousands of years (such as sabre-toothed cats) to those that have been extinct for tens of millions of years (such as the stegasaurus). No explanation is offered for the survival of either the lost civilisation or the extinct animals. Not that it matters - if one demanded strict plausibility of lost world takes one would end with no more than a tiny handful to choose from.

There are two main sub-plots, the Jan sub-plot which concerns his parentage and Dr Bracken’s many attempts to recapture him, and the Ramona sub-plot which concerns her parentage and an attempt to kidnap her. Kline also at least pays lip service to the “boy caught between two worlds” theme but with an added twist since Jan is caught between three worlds - the modern world, the world of the jungle and the world of the hidden valley. To Jan it seems like the latter two are more likely to bring him contentment but then there’s the question of Ramona.

Dr Bracken is obviously a serious villain but in the hidden valley Jan will find another equally dangerous and treacherous enemy.

The important thing is that there’s enough here to satisfy the tastes of both jungle adventure and lost world fans and if you’re a straightforward fan of action and adventure you’ll find both those commodities in generous quantities.

Now if this had been an Edgar Rice Burroughs story there would have been a lot more attention paid to making the lost world more complex and more interesting and to explaining how it actually works. It would have been a much more fully developed lost world. Kline however has no such ambitions. He’s content to write an exciting pulp adventure yarn.

In other words there’s a reason Edgar Rice Burroughs is still a household name and Otis Adalbert Kline isn’t.

That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with Jan of the Jungle. As long as you accept its pulp limitations it’s enjoyable. If you’re a Tarzan fan and you’ve read all the Tarzan stories or if you’re a lost world buff like me you’ll want to check this one out. Not great but still fun.

The Duel of Shadows

The Duel of Shadows, published by Crippen & Landru Publishers in 2011, includes eleven of Vincent Cornier’s Barnabas Hildreth stories, written mostly in the 1930s. 

Vincent Cornier was the pseudonym of William Vincent Corner (1898-1976), an English author whose stories often blurred the boundaries between weird fiction and detective fiction. Early in his career Cornier tried his hand at both science fiction and supernatural tales. He eventually came to specialise in detective stories, but detective stories of a rather unusual type.

Cornier’s stories appeared in various British magazines in the 1920s and 1930s and thereafter very sporadically until the 1960s. Several of his 1930s stories were republished in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in the late 1940s, Frederic Dannay (one half of the Ellery Queen writing team) being a great admirer of Cornier’s work.

Barnabas Hildreth himself is a somewhat unconventional detective. He is an agent of the British Secret Service but in between his official duties he amuses himself by solving crimes that appeal to him because of their bizarre nature.

The emphasis in these stories is not on detection as such. In some stories there is not even an actual crime in the technical sense. There is however always a mystery of some sort.

The mysteries are often very esoteric indeed. What connection could there possibly be between the murder of an English judge in 1932 and a Venetian glassmaker of the 16th century whose clients included the Borgias? It is unlikely that anyone but Barnabas Hildreth could find such a connection but that is exactly what he does in The Stone Ear, a strange but brilliant story that features one of strangest and most complex methods of murder to be found in crime fiction.

In The Brother of Heaven it is the background to the crime that provides the strange and exotic flavour, and a very exotic flavour it is.

The Silver Quarrel involves no actual crime but it does require Barnabas Hildreth to solve a mystery three centuries old, a mystery that involves hidden treasure and the unusual properties of 12th century Benedictine glass. It is a mystery the solution of which may well bring death. Glass with highly unusual properties seemed to be something of an obsession with Cornier.

In The Catastrophe in Clay a man is apparently turned into stone. This seems like a case that is likely to involve some supernatural agency but Barnabas Hildreth is certain there is a rational explanation. A rational explanation is however much more difficult to find in the The Throat of Green Jasper, in which the members of an archaeological expedition seem to be falling victim to an ancient Egyptian curse. Stories with ancient Egyptian themes were immensely popular in the 20s and 30s but Cornier manages to give his tale an original twist. This story is perhaps the closest approach to true weird fiction rather than detective fiction in this collection.

Some of the stories are about crimes committed by more or less conventional criminals, in others the criminal is very unconventional indeed while in at least one story we have a full-blown mad scientist with diabolical criminal mastermind tendencies. In other stories a crime appears to have been committed, but appearances can be deceptive. The Mantle that Laughed has some hints of the mad scientist to it as well.

Cornier delights in presenting rational explanations for the apparently inexplicable, but rational explanations that are themselves far more fantastic and bizarre than the supernatural. How can you rationally explain a man being shot by a pistol fired more than two centuries earlier? In the story The Duel of Shadows that is exactly what Barnabas Hildreth manages to do. Cornier displays a degree of enthusiasm for science than is matched by few other authors, in any genre.

Barnabas Hildreth himself is a bit like Philo Vance (though entirely lacking in Vance’s mannerisms that annoy so many readers) in that he proves to be an expert in just about every field of scholarship that can be imagined. For a man of unquestioned genius he is surprisingly lacking in arrogance. That’s not say he is entirely lacking in ego, but compared to a Sherlock Holmes, a Philo Vance or a Hercule Poirot he is modesty personified. He’s by no means dull and the stories do have a leavening of humour.

These stories are so ingenious, so varied, so intricately constructed and so hugely entertaining that their obscurity becomes a mystery in itself. For the tastes of the 1930s they probably crossed too many genre boundaries but for that very reason one would expect them to have built up a massive cult following in more recent years.

The Duel of Shadows is a collection that presents the reader with an intriguing blend of weird fiction and detective story, and with some of the most deliciously clever and bizarre ideas ever to be found in either genre. Very highly recommended.