Thorp McClusky (1906-1975) was of that breed of Weird Tales writer who gained a small audience during the time of the magazine’s publication, but fell into obscurity after 1954. Like Carl Jacobi, Grey La Spina and Dorothy Quick, McClusky was anthologized after the Pulps were gone but remains little known except by a cult following. This is probably largely due to McClusky not writing novels that could cement his works in the age of the paperback.
Thorp McClusky was a Pulpster who wrote for the Westerns, Mystery and primarily is remembered as a Horror writer. He worked as the editor of Motor, as well as writing books for children and about chiropractics. He studied music at Syracuse University. After his Pulp career, he lived and died in New Jersey. That he is remembered at all today is partly due to his straight forward storytelling. Though he never created a memorable horror icon, he told his stories economically and in a way horror fans enjoy.
Of McClusky’s two dozen fantastic stories, all but seven appearing in “The Unique Magazine”. Amongst the weird appearances there is one series, five stories revolving around two investigators, Commissioner Etheridge and Police Detective Peters, two city crime fighters who have no reason to come face-to-face with terror. They do so, and with pluck and the occasional drink of whiskey to calm their nerves, they meet it head-on.
“The Loot of the Vampire” was a two-parter (June and July 1936) in Weird Tales and perhaps is McClusky’s closest attempt at a novel. A jeweller named Eichelmann is murdered and a precious pearl necklace is stolen. At first the cops think it was Eichelmann’s assistant, Segel, but when the dead man’s body disappears from the morgue then turns up quite alive, Eichelmann kicks the police out of his shop. Later the dead-alive man is found again, quite dead with a silver knife in his heart. The coroner is stumped because the body clearly shows that the man had been dead for thirty-six hours.
Etheridge uses good police work to track down the real culprit, a nobleman who drives a Rolls-Royce and spoke to Eichelmann in German. This is Count Woerz, a tall Satanically handsome playboy with a reputation as a lady chaser. His last girl friend, Katharine Grant, had died of a wasting disease. Woerz is familiar in fact with Etheridge’s fiancée, Miss Mary Roberts. When the commissioner goes to Woerz’s house and openly accuses him, the Count warns him to be careful, for Mary’s sake. To make his point, the Count invites Mary to a charity bazaar where he is doing a mind-reading act. While there, he not only hypnotizes Mary, he also meets with his fence for the pearls. Detective Peters confronts him with a mirror that Woerz smashes, but not before Peters can see what is shown there.
Etheridge and Peters regroup. It is now that Peters explains his “crazy” idea that Count Woerz is a vampire. Vampire lore was only a hobby to Peters but now it seems deadly serious. He has a theory he has been working on for a while, that where there is smoke there is fire. Some of the vampire lore must be true. While he is trying to convince Etheridge, Mary goes missing, victim to the hypnotic command of the vampire.
The two men go to Woerz’s house, breaking in illegally and finding a woman lying on a desk in a dark room. They also find Count Woerz in a similar state. He has pinned a message onto his lapel. It tells Etheridge that Mary is under a hypnotic command and only Woerz can remove it. If the cops kill him, Mary dies too. Etheridge waits for dark when the Count awakens. Both men are overcome by the woman from the other room and the Count.
When they come to, they find that the vampires have fled and taken Mary with them. Etheridge does some deduction and figures they have fled on the yacht, The Cynthia. The commissioner gets a daring young pilot to take a float plane and fly in a wide circle to locate them. When he does, they crash the plane in front of the ship and get picked up by Captain Halliday. Even though they have no authority on the high seas, the captain allows them to try and arrest Woerz and his companions including Beniati, a human criminal and watchdog.
After taking out Beniati and the idiot that guards the vampires by day, the policemen encounter Woerz and Katharine Grant, and the sun has set! Mary appears freed from her hypnotic spell but the vampires laugh at the policemen and their guns. Etheridge stabs the Count with a silver knife while Peters shoots Katharine Grant and kills her. He has melted down his wife’s prize silver so the ballistic boys at the station could make him silver bullets. With the unexplainable bodies thrown overboard and the stolen goods recovered, they return to the city, promising that no one ever speak about the truth. Etheridge and his sweetheart can’t wait to get home and get married.
The plot is lengthy, with many clichéd incidents (and some poor logic – why doesn’t Woerz kill Etheridge and Peters after he knocks them out?) but it all hangs together fairly well because of McClusky action-oriented style and dual narrative. While we can see the supernatural happening, the characters don’t and Etheridge and Peters have to work pretty hard to believe they are actually encountering the unnatural. If they had non-chalantly accepted the existence of vampires, the story would not have worked so well.
“The Woman in Room 607” (Weird Tales, January 1937) begins with Etheridge walking down the street when he is met by a beautiful woman, Marilyn Des Lys. She takes him to the seedy Northrup Hotel and the Room 607 of the title. There, under a weird spell that makes him forget Mary Roberts, the woman tries to seduce him. Etheridge breaks free of the spell and flees. The next day he hears about a drug ring working out of Room 607 and that Marilyn Des Lys has been dead for a week. Later, Etheridge goes to the room, following a weird mist that eventually becomes a strange slime. This ectoplasm is the spirit of Marilyn, who has been feeding on men and becoming more substantial. Etheridge fails to stop her from leaving, falling under her depredations.
The now solid-appearing Marilyn goes to the home of the night clerk of the hotel, Nicky Gallicchio, and explains how she and her cult members were able to pull her spirit from her dead body. All week Marilyn has been feeding, an act that sucks the flesh from the bones and drives men mad. Nicky tells her that he loves her, but Marilyn cruelly discards him, wanting only Etheridge. Nicky leaves and tells all to the two policemen, who decide they must kill Marilyn Des Lys. Peters chooses a silver letter opener as the weapon for the deed.
Etheridge and Peters go to Nicky’s apartment and confront Marilyn. The woman’s power to fascinate is stronger than ever. She draws the sickly Etheridge to her. Peters, who at first was also entranced, stabs her and she falls to the floor, bleeding. But Marilyn is not finished yet. Her spirit draws Etheridge to her and begins to suck the flesh from his bones. Peters is powerless to stop her but he knows who might. He has the landlady call for Mary Roberts, Etheridge’s fiancée. Mary is able to break the monster’s hold. Not able to feed, Marilyn Des Lys dissolves into a puddle of goo. Moving ectoplasm or slime would become McClusky’s trademark in stories like “The Crawling Horror” (Weird Tales, November 1936).
One thing that strikes me about this story and the series as a whole is McClusky’s modern-edged sense of vice. Weird Tales writers like H. P. Lovecraft, H. Russell Wakefield or August Derleth look back to an earlier time when a writer could suggest the presence of the lurid side of life but never really explore it, when the female character might “meet a fate worse than death” but never really go into details. McClusky, perhaps because he wrote for magazines like Thrilling Mystery, is no such lightweight. “The Woman in Room 609” is a prostitute. The people who frequent her floor of the hotel are drug addicts. When Nicky Gallicchio declares his love for the resurrected Marilyn, she calls him a “wop” and says “Fool, you were just the rent!” This is a hard-boiled moll despite her incredible beauty and powerful spirit. Racism was not unfamiliar in Weird Tales but at least in this story we feel it is Marilyn Des Lys’s racism and not the author’s, as McClusky ends the story with Gallicchio’s suicide and a note of sadness.
In his next Etheridge and Peters tale, “The Thing on the Floor” (Weird Tales, March 1938), McKlusky returns to the idea of hypnotism that he used in “The Loot of the Vampire”. This time it is the immensely fat Dmitri Vassilievitch who takes control of Mary Roberts, using her to lure her many rich friends to his Thursday night performances, where for large sums of money he would perform faith healing. The cops stake out one of Dmitri’s meetings and hear Dmitri’s theory that there is no reality, only that which is created by the mind. He demonstrates the power of this philosophy by hypnotizing his assistant, the diminutive Stepan, to believe he is impenetrable. Dmitri burns his face with a blowtorch and even shoots bullets into his face. Stepan is unharmed.
When Etheridge becomes convinced that his fiancée has stolen Priscilla Luce’s jewels under the hypnotic command of Dmitri, the two policemen try to strong-arm the hypnotist into releasing Mary from his service. Etheridge must wrestle Stepan to the floor and hold him, for bullets won’t hurt him. Dmitri proves duplicitous and tells Mary, instead of being free, that she is writhing in the greatest agony ever. The policemen will submit to Dmitri and allow him to continue his crime spree. Etheridge is powerless as he watches Mary crawling on the floor in pain. Peters throws himself on Dmitri, forcing a pill down his throat. It tastes like bitter almonds. Peters tells him it is cyanide. Dmitri dies a terrible death, and Peters’ gambit works. Once Mary sees that Dmitri is dead, the spell is broken and she stops writhing. It also has a similar effect on Stepan, who converts to the thing on the floor of the title. All the burning and shooting demonstrations take their toll and he turns into a charred and bloody corpse.
“Monstrosity of Evolution” is the odd-man-out here, appearing not in the Weird Tales but in Ray Palmer’s Amazing Stories, November 1938. The story takes place after the Etheridges are married. The couple meet an old friend, Dr. Raymond Trafforn at the train. Dr. Ray, as he is called, seems distant after their two years apart. He has with him an old woman in a wheelchair, who he calls his Aunt Hermione. When Etheridge tries to help the workers lower her from the train he sees her eyes, which do not look human, and then feels a mental blast of utter hate.
Months later, after Dr. Ray has bought a house, the Etheridges don’t see him again. Mary admits to Charles that she too had felt the blast of hate from Aunt Hermione. She has done a little research and found Trafforn has no such relative. She has also been collecting newspaper clippings about missing women, all of which began disappearing only three weeks after Trafforn bought his house.
Etheridge discloses the evidence to Peters. He plans to visit Trafforn, but will leave the door unlocked for Peters to sneak into the house. Peters is, of course, captured and Etheridge himself walks into the villain’s lair and is likewise taken over. What he finds is Aunt Hermoine is actually a small creature that wears a costume to assume the old woman’s form. The thing is actually an evolved man, a Canadian trapper named Pierre Brunelle, that Dr. Ray has engineered. The creature and Ray take Etheridge upstairs to the lab, which is filled with seven-foot glass tubes where naked bodies float as they evolve. The plan is to evolve Peters and Etheridge just enough to make them willing accomplices. Etheridge has left Mary at home with a mission to bring the cavalry. But like all Pulp darlings she walks into the house with a gun and is the third one to join the soon-to-be-evolved.
Mary’s plan to stop the evolution machines is to convince Dr. Ray he is mistaken. She does this by showing him that the evolved creature is a falsehood. That since it did not evolve as the world changed, it really isn’t more advanced, only an anomaly. She goes on like a scientist for some while, as Ray Palmer adds his two-cents in editorial comments. Her ploy works, with Dr. Ray telling his master that the experiments will stop. The evolved man laughs and uses his immense mental powers to drive all three humans to the evolving tubes. Only the police arriving with screaming sirens stops him. Turning its attention to the police, Dr. Ray regains his power of movement and shoots the creature dead with Mary’s gun. Everything is hushed up, the kidnapped girls each dropped off in a motel with a hundred dollars in their purse. Dr. Ray is not arrested but allowed to live with his sister in his old age. Etheridge is happy to be alone with his wife again, and he is also glad she told the police to come at eleven and not twelve as instructed.
The story is a pretty typical mad scientist story and borrows heavily from one of the earlier masters of this type of tale, Edmond Hamilton. Hamilton wrote “Evolution Island (Weird Tales, March 1927) as well as the classic “The Man Who Evolved” (Wonder Stories, April 1931) and others like “Devolution” (Amazing Stories, December 1936). McClusky is adding nothing new to these previous tales and Farnsworth Wright, as the editor who published “Evolution Island” may not have felt inclined to go there again.
“Slaves of the Gray Mold” (Weird Tales, March 1940) takes place before the Etheridges’ marriage, so it chronologically comes before “The Monstrosity of Evolution”. Perhaps McClusky offered Farnsworth Wright all three but he only took two of them. Ray Palmer snapped up the odd man out and published it first. Whatever the facts, this story was published last. Unlike “The Monstrosity of Evolution” it is science fictional but seems much fresher and more Lovecraftian.
It begins when Detective Peters is out on a walk and he sees a man with a briefcase stop suddenly and leave the important documents for a derelict. Intrigued, he follows the bum to the offices of Page, Dean & Wentworth, where the derelict receives a cash reward. Peters confronts the man only to find himself at home, with little memory of what happened. Later Etheridge sees the bum, Jimmie Dunn, at the track where he wins repeatedly on long shots, making $83,000. When a reporter tries to pull him by the arm, the man falls dead of a heart attack.
Later the police are involved when Jimmie Dunn is found dead in the home of Paul Caldwell, a man Etheridge dislikes because he is an old suitor of Mary Roberts. Peters is suspicious because Caldwell’s butler, Morency, changes his story about Mr. Dunn’s arrival. He had, in fact, snuck into the house and confronted Mr. Caldwell. Etheridge doesn’t share Peters’ suspicions until he receives a note from Mary, saying she is leaving Etheridge for Paul and going away to his cabin at Big Bear Mountain.
Etheridge is now ready to believe Peters’ theory that whatever resided inside Jimmie Dunn had the power of mind control, and has transferred to Paul Caldwell’s body. Peters claims this form of mind control is even worse than mere hypnotism because Jimmie Dunn had been able to control race horses as well as people. The two men go to Big Bear and Etheridge goes to the cabin alone to talk to Mary. She repeats her claim she loves Paul but her eyes seem distant. When Etheridge finds a severed head covered in gray mold in a cupboard he is knocked unconscious.
Etheridge flees the cabin, driving fast with little memory of what has happened. Peters stops him, recognizing the symptoms of mind control. The two men sneak back to the cabin that night equipped with Peters’ impromptu gear, plastic sheeting to cover the head and lead-lined goggles to protect the eyes. They enter the cabin and find a secret room filled with weird blue light and a strange alien device. Paul Caldwell, now covered in mold, is opening a doorway to another dimension, where mold-covered slug creatures are about to claim Mary and then invade the world. Etheridge fights with Caldwell but when his head gear is torn off he is knocked unconscious. It is up to Peters to draw his pistol and shoot the machine to bits. He fights with Caldwell, shooting him twice in the face. The alien mold and the body are thrown into the rapidly shrinking gate. With the mold gone, everyone returns to normal. The detectives once more are faced with covering up the truth, and enlist Morency the butler in this.
“Slaves of the Gray Mold” is a better story than “Monstrosity of Evolution”, probably taking some of its inspiration from A. Conan Doyle’s “The Parasite” (1894), a story much closer to “The Thing on the Floor”, with McClusky taking that title literally. William Hope Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night” is another obvious precursor, with its slowly growing gray mold. McClusky’s descriptions of mold-covered eyes and creepy transference between hosts is far ahead of its time. It is common today to see this in movies like The Hidden (1987) or on television shows like The Strain (2014-2016), but back in 1940 it is pretty fresh. It predates Hal Clement’s Needle (1950),the most famous example of this idea, by ten years.
The one theme that ties all five stories together is mind control. Whether by a vampire, a ghost, a hypnotist, an evolved psychic human or an alien fungus, all the baddies have the ability to control those around them. This is often Mary Roberts, but in the case of “The Woman in Room 607”, it is Etheridge himself. McClusky is using the threat of mind control to build the tension between Mary and Charles. In each story, one or the other is controlled and the other must fight to save them. (Though oddly, there is never any mention of previous mind control in later stories. Peters never says anything like: “Mind control? Just like that pesty vampire used on Mary!” Each story stands alone.) The bond is strong enough to pull Etheridge from Marilyn de Lys’s control but it takes bullets and bravery to rescue Mary from repeated enemies. He let the series lapse after 1940, probably because it was beginning to wear thin if “The Monstrosity of Evolution” is any example. It is too bad he didn’t try to use Peters and Etheridge in another kind of story, perhaps one without mind control elements. They were a great ghostbreaking team that were uniquely positioned to face the outré.