Tom Curry (1900-1976) has won his place in the Pulps as a Western writer, the main author of the Rio Kid Magazine stories as well as one of the detective story writers in the early days of Black Mask, alongside Dashiell Hammett and Erle Stanley Gardner. What may not be so well known is Tom Curry tried his hand at Science Fiction for a year or so back in 1930.
Unlike many horse opera writers, Curry was qualified to write early Science Fiction because he, like E. E. “Doc” Smith, studied Chemical Engineering, at Columbia. Success at Adventure and Western stories found him working in journalism instead of the food industry. The crime beat supplied him with plenty of material for detective stories, which he sold to Black Mask in the 1920s. By 1930, he was selling them to the Clayton chain’s All-Star Detective and Clues.
It was here he would write for Harry Bates, the editor who created Astounding Stories of Super-Science (better known as the Clayton Astounding today). Bates struggled at first to fill his new SF pulp as he didn’t have a stable of pros he could turn to. Where he did go was to the writers who filled his other magazines with tales of crooks, ghosts and adventurers such as Hugh Cave, Arthur J. Burks and Victor Rousseau. Tom Curry was another.
Curry’s first attempt at Science Fiction was “Rays of Death” for Hugo Gernsback’s Scientific Detective Monthly, April-May 1930, a magazine specializing in Mystery stories with scientific detectives, but he really got his start with “The Soul Snatcher” (Astounding, April 1930). A young doctor named Allen Baker is facing the death sentence so his mother seeks out Dr. Ramsey Burr, Allen’s old mentor, to try and save her son. Allen is charged with murdering Burr’s assistant, Smith, but in truth Burr has disintegrated him in a failed experiment. The unsympathetic doctor declares Smith (and Allen too) a martyr to Science. Mrs. Baker begs Burr to tell the police. Instead he suggests another plan since he has now perfected the machine that killed Smith. He will trade places with Allen via radio, as Burr has been working on a form of matter transmission. Mrs. Baker supports the plan by smuggling the necessary equipment into her son. Step one of the process works, transferring Allen’s mind into Dr. Burr’s body but an unscheduled execution by electric chair stops the experiment before completion. Allen Baker, now looking like Burr, declares the poor doctor a martyr to Science. Everyone is surprised at how much kinder and gentler Burr has becoming, taking care of Mrs. Baker.
Curry’s concept of “soul” or mind transfer is not new in 1930. Edgar Rice Burroughs had used it in The Mastermind of Mars (Amazing Stories Annual, 1927) and H. G. Wells before him in “The Story of Mr. Elvesham” in 1896. The idea has became one of the clichés of Science Fiction devolving down to TV shows like Gilligan’s Island‘s “The Friendly Physician” (April 7, 1966) where Gilligan and Mr. Howell and the Professor and Mrs. Howell trade bodies.
“Giants of the Ray” (Astounding, June 1930) puts Curry in more familiar territory, with two bad hats, Durkin and Maget, who plan to follow an expedition into the Mato Grosso to rob a mine filled with valuable material. Juan, one of the peons, works as their “inside man”, leaving them food along the trail. They instruct Juan to steal a sample of the valuable material, thinking it gold or diamonds. When they next encounter the peon he has opened the sample and been stricken with a horrible form of death.
When the thieves get to the mine, they see Professor Gurlone and his son, and a blind man named Espinoza, the mine’s owner, have a large group of peons caged up nearby. They see a strange outbuilding as well, heavily padlocked. Gurlone and his men go into the mine armed with heavy arms, fighting what turns out to be a gigantic frog and tadpole. Maget comes to the professor’s rescue with some good shooting, while Durkin kills himself by sneaking into the lead-lined hut.
Maget joins the expedition, agreeing to face the horrors of another foray of the mine. With dynamite and guns, the men plan to blow up an opening inside the mountain that is allowing gigantic creatures: bats, insects, centipedes, frogs access to the outside world. The professor explains that the radioactivity of the radium in the mountain has caused the animals to grow to such large size.
The raid goes badly, not blocking the opening but enlarging it. A multitude of giant vermin pours out of the mine, killing all the trapped peons. The expedition flees into the jungle. Professor Gurlone tells Maget it is alright. The cannibalistic giants will eat each other and the few remaining survivors can be killed with guns. Curry ends the tale with Maget proudly joining the scientists and sharing their new wealth. He has reformed himself from being a thief and a drunkard. Sadly, Curry makes no comment on Professor Gurlone, who callously allowed a number of locals to died so he could have his radium mine.
“From an Amber Block” (Astounding, July 1930) sees Curry change genres from jungle adventure to monster horror. The Museum of Natural History receives several immense blocks of amber. Professor Young and his beautiful daughter, Betty, are assisted by Dr. Walter Marable in removing fossils from the stone. Betty and Walter both believe they see a set of weird eyes moving inside a black liquid spot inside one of the blocks. After a day of chipping and recording, the scientists leave, with trusted guard, Rooney, left to watch over the new treasures.
Next morning the guard is dead and Marable and Betty’s fears are realized. The floor is covered in a black inky liquid from inside the amber and Rooney has had all his blood sucked out of him. Later the horror attacks again, by generating a thick black cloud. The millionaire philanthropist and sponsor of the amber research, Andrew Leffler, is drained this time.
The third and final attack finds Marable in the thick of the cloud. It is Betty who comes to the rescue, using one of the guard’s guns to smash out some windows and clear the air. Marable uncovers the block in which the monster is hiding, revealing its ancient, weird form:
Betty Young screamed. At last she had a sight of the terrible creature which her imagination had painted in loathing and horror. A flash of brilliant scarlet, dabbed with black patches, was her impression of the beast. A head flat and reptilian, long, tubular, with movable nostrils and antennae at the end, framed two eyes which were familiar enough to her, for they were the orbs which had stared from the inside of the amber block. She had dreamed of those eyes. But the reptile moved like a flash of red light, though she knew its bulk was great; it sprayed forth black mist from the appendages at the end of its nose, and the crumpling of canvas reached her ears as the beast endeavored to conceal itself on the opposite side of the block.
Marable sees the creature and hesitates. As a scientist he doesn’t want to kill such a rare specimen. This pause allows the monster to go after Betty. Marable pumps bullets into it. Betty, the real hero once again, gives him her gun then gets Walter a fire ax. Marable chops the monster to death.
The story ends with Professor Young explaining the creature was a missing link between the elasmosaurus and other dinosaurs. He chides Marable for killing the thing. Marable says he doesn’t care and proposes to Betty on the spot, who fervently says yes. It has taken this weird scenario for Marable to see what is really important to him.
“From an Amber Block” is interesting on several levels. As a monster tale it is perfectly effective. Tales of this sort date back to H. G. Wells and A. Conan Doyle, but Curry creates an interesting creature and doesn’t reveal it too soon, though I doubt today’s reader could buy a dinosaur that produces smoke clouds. The idea of a terror escaping from a scientific specimen will appear again in the horror film, Horror Express (1972) with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. The concept of resurrecting dinosaurs from amber was revived by Michael Crichton for Jurassic Park (1990) and its many movie sequels.
More interesting is the similarities between this story and the first half of Frank Belknap Long’s “The Horror From the Hills” (Weird Tales, January-February/March, 1931) which appeared six months after Curry’s tale. Again we have the acquisition of a strange object by a museum , a blood-drinking monster and a dead security guard. The similarities are striking though Long only uses this as a set-up for a much longer, weirder story of inter-dimensional beings. Of all of Long’s horror tales, it is one of the most Science Fictional. FBL did not appear in the Clayton Astounding but would appear years later during John W. Campbell’s Golden Age.
“Hell’s Dimension” (Astounding, April 1931) goes back to the ideas in “The Soul Snatcher”, with a scientist being charged with murder because of an experiment gone wrong. This time Curry has the good sense to start the story with the police waiting to arrest the hero, not after the fact. The cops want to know what has happened to Professor Lambert’s sweetheart, Madge Crawford. The scientist convinces one of the officers, Phillips, to allow him to finish his experiment with sound, for Madge’s disappearance is directly related to this. Lambert fails again and again until he twigs into a small error. His sound projection machine is now ready.
Lambert crosses over into another dimension in search of his lost love. In this other world he encounters ghostly forms that are hostile to humans but unable to directly hurt them. Lambert finds Madge only to have both of them overwhelmed and then thrown into a vague sort of pit where they fall and fall. There is a terrible snap and then the two humans are back in our dimension, horribly thirsty and hungry. Lambert sees his old mentor, Dr. Morgan, has shown up and affected their escape. Safe once again, having escaped the Hell dimension, the two lovers are in heaven with their impending nuptials.
“Hell’s Dimension” shares a common theme with many of the stories written in the early magazine SF, in which a stalwart scientist crosses a barrier of some sort to find a weird world on the other side. Ray Cummings may have been one of the first in his Golden Atom series (All-Story, 1919), where a machine that shrinks you does this. He was followed by S. P. Meek’s Submicroscopic series (Amazing Stories, August 1931). In the Clayton Astounding, Murray Leinster wrote “The Fifth Dimensional Catapult” (January 1931) and Clifford D. Simak had “Hellhounds of the Cosmos”(June 1932). Leinster would try again in “The Fourth Dimensional Demonstrator” in the Tremaine Astounding, in 1935. Curry isn’t the innovator here but he was one of the earlier users of the idea. Curry was most likely inspired by H. G. Wells’ “The Plattner Story” (The New Review, April 1896) where a man is pressed into another dimension through the explosion of a mysterious substance. In this other realm, perhaps the place where souls go after death, he sees malignant forms trying to influence the living. He escapes torn and bruised and with his physique strangely reversed.
The Science Fiction of Tom Curry, like that of editor Harry Bates who penned the Hawk Carse tales as Anthony Gilmore, have a genre flavor to them, whether it is Adventure with a tale about haunted mines, Mystery, with men facing a death sentence as a consequence of their scientific work, or Horror, as might have appeared in Weird Tales. Tom Curry was no innovator but he helped out an editor that needed stories to fill a new type of magazine. Though Curry’s reputation will remain with Western fiction, with 175 novels and hundreds of stories, he may have been memorialized in DC Comics, like editor Ray Palmer, as a character, Tom Curry, Aquaman’s adoptive father. Aquaman was created by Mort Weisinger in 1941. (I can’t prove this is the case but Weisinger worked for Standard Magazines who published Thrilling Western and Thrilling Adventure, two of Curry’s markets.)
