Otis Adelbert Kline is probably remembered best for his Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches set on Venus and the Moon as well as the Tarzan clone, Jan of the Jungle. Despite this popular line of novels, Kline wrote many short stories for the Pulps. Three of these form a short series about Dr. Dorp, a psychologist who acts as a ghostbreaker of sorts. (A Dorp is very small rural village.)
“The Phantom Wolfhound” (Weird Tales, June 1923) has Private Detective Harry Hoyne approaching Doctor Dorp, the author of Investigations of Materialization Phenomenon, to help him with a case. Hoyne’s client is Mr. Ritsky, a creepy-looking person that Dorp takes an immediate dislike to. The man is haunted by the ghost of a dog he shot. Each night the hound whimpers until it attacks Ritsky. Turning on the lights, sends the phantasm away in time.
Dorp goes to spend the night with Ritsky, Hoyne tagging along. We meet Ritsky’s niece and ward, the twelve-year old Olga Rogers. The girl is sickly looking. Her millionaire parents had died while on a trip to Russia, making her the ward of her uncle.
Dorp sets up cameras and then places Hoyne in Olga’s room. Ritsky goes to bed and the two men wait to see what happens. Hoyne sees a cloud of ectoplasm escape Olga’s mouth. Shortly after Ritsky is attacked. Turning on the lights they find the man dead, his heart failed due to fear. The whole story comes out now. The dog is the spirit of a pet wolfhound that Olga received from her parents. It had bitten Ritsky and he had shot it. A month later the hauntings began.
Hoyne feels a drop of sadness for the haunted Ritsky, but Dorp puts him straight. On his body is a cylinder of arsenic, which he has been giving to Olga. In another month or two she would have died, making Ritsky wealthy. Dorp develops the photographs. They clearly show the man having his throat torn out by a wolfhound.
This pretty standard occult detective story sets a pattern that Kline will abandon. The solution is clearly supernatural. In the next two stories, the author will jettison Hoyne, replacing him with writer, Evans. More important, he dumps the supernatural for more Science Fictiony explanations.
The second tale “The Malignant Entity” appeared in Weird Tales (May-June-July 1924, an issue Kline was assistant editor on). Hugo Gernsback reprinted the piece in Amazing Stories (June 1926) and so did T. O’Conor Sloane in Amazing Stories Quarterly (October 1934). Each time it received a new illustration.
Kline opens the scene with Dr. Dorp and his Watson, Mr. Evans (a thinly veiled Kline) discussing scientists and spiritualism. Dorp says: “There are times in the life of every man…when emotion dethrones reason. At such a crisis the most keen-witted of scientists may be blinded to truth by the overpowering influence of his own desires. Sir Oliver lost a beloved son. Only those who have suffered similar losses can appreciate the keen anguish that followed his bereavement, or sympathize with his intense longing to communicate with Raymond. Most men are creatures of their desires. They believe what they want to believe.”
There can be little doubt that Sir Oliver is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who by 1920 had become something of laughingstock over his belief in Spiritualism (and even fairies). Kline uses the example to show that Dorp is a believer in psychology and not the occult. Dorp is now of the “No Ghost Need Apply” school.
Lecture over, the plot starts up when a visitor comes to the door. Chief McGraw of the detective bureau wants Dorp’s help with a strange case. An inventor, Albert Townsend, who was working on synthetic life, has disappeared and in his place is a skeleton wearing his clothes. Evans tags along as they run over to the house to speak with the daughter.
The men arrive at the house and examine the bones. Dorp even probes the eye sockets, exclaiming on how clean the skeleton is. They notice a vat, one third full of a clear-colored slime. Dorp speaks with the daughter in private. This leaves Evans to listen to the neighbor, a board house owner, rattle on. She mentions a death that happened in her house three weeks previously. The dead man was a notorious murderer, Immune Benny. McGraw says he will send over a cop named Rooney to watch the crime scene.
Later Dorp explains to Evans what he learned from the daughter. She was the inventor’s secretary and typed all his manuscripts, answered letters. She said her father had been quite irritable while trying to prove that life could be made from inorganic matter. His mood changed the night the man died next door. Since then he had been in a good mood. He had procured many animal specimens, going from mice to large mastiffs. No animal remains had ever been seen.
Dorp is about to explain his theory when another cop shows up. His name is Burke. He is there to replace Rooney. Dorp mentions the skeleton when Burke interrupts him. “You mean them skeletons.” There is now a second set of bones, wearing the uniform of a policeman. Dorp expounds some of his theory, with a long lecture on microbes. He suggests Townsend may have created a brood of microscopic killers.
McGrew comes back with more cops, demanding answers. Dorp only offers the beginning of a theory. (Every time Dorp is about to explain, he is cut off by a new bit of excitement.) McGraw says theories be damned and begins searching the house. It is then that Evans and Dorp notice the vat is now half full of a pink slime. McGraw finds drawers full of animal bones. The thing in the vat turns clear again.
McGraw has the coroner and his jury show up. Dorp ignores them and retreats to read Townsend’s manuscript. Dorp and Evans look at the slime under a microscope. The writer sees that the slime is made up of protoplasm that is devouring some larger form of life. Dorp tells Evans that the scientist was both successful and not. He had created life but he failed to endow it with any kind of mind.
The coroner’s inquest ends with a verdict of “death by unknown causes”. Dorp illuminates his theory but McGraw is confused. Dorp explains about the slime in the vat. He tells the policemen to open the windows because it is going to smell when he pours sulfuric acid into the vat to kill the slime. The jelly shakes and jumps in pain. Dorp notices a nucleus in the body of the slime, attacks that. The monster leaps out of the vat, now much smaller than previously. The policemen chase the thing around the room until they corner it, when it disappears. A hole in the floor has allowed the slime to escape. Dorp cries: “The Malignant Entity has escaped…No one in this house–in this community, even– is safe until it is captured or killed.”
The police surround the house with men armed with shotguns. Dorp asks Miss Townsend if her father kept a secret account of his experiments. She believes if he did it would be in his safe. Unfortunately she does not know the combo. McGraw sends for a safecracker. The cops spread out. Evans ends up in the basement with a cop named Black. Evans hears a mouse squeak and finds the protoplasmic monster devouring the rodent. He captures the slime in a jar and takes it upstairs where the safecracker has finished blowing up the safe. Dorp reads the doctor’s account of how he feed larger and larger animals to the slime until (it is assumed) the creature ate him.
Evans asks what will they do with the slime in the jar? Dorp picks it up and takes it to the furnace, where he incinerates it. Before the heat kills the slime it forms into a recognizable human face. Dorp mutters: “It was a perfect double for the face of Immune Benny!” in Lovecraftian italics.
Since this story appeared in 1924, its inspiration was mostly Sherlock Holmes. Jules de Grandin, Keith Pursuivant, John Thunstone and Peter D’Artois, the ghostbreakers of Weird Tales, all lie in the future. The reference to Doyle at the opening would also suggest this. Of other ghostbreakers, like John Silence, Carnacki,or even other Mystery characters such as Father Brown, Kline doesn’t seem to acknowledge or copy. His story moves with a Pulp swiftness that the Victorians did not have.
The sequel didn’t go to Farnsworth Wright (who hadn’t bought the first story. That was Edwin Baird.) but again to Hugo Gernsback for the September 1927 issue of Amazing Stories. “The Radio Ghost” begins with a pile of obvious Sherlock pastiching. The two men in discussion when interrupted by the landlady, a lady calling for assistance, Dorp temples his fingers in contemplation, etc. The woman is Miss Van Loan, niece of Dorp’s late friend, spiritualist, Gordon Van Loan. The niece has to live in the house a year to get the half million dollar inheritance. Originally the fortune was to go to her cousin, Ernest Hegel, but his leanings toward Germany during WWI had lost him the money. Hegel leaves the country on a vacation. Unfortunately the house appears to be haunted. The two men immediately suggest spending the night to solve the mystery.
The first incident is a fireside poker that moves of its own accord. Miss Van Loan’s airdale becomes jittery, then a horrible smell fills the room. The men take Miss Van Loan outside for air. Dorp fans her with a copy of Gernsback’s Science and Invention. Dorp goes back in and Evans begins to worry about him. The couple go back inside to look for him. They save him from a door that locks and relocks itself to pull him out of a freezing cold closet. Evans is later attacked by the dog, having to fight it in the darkness when the lights go out. Again the doors lock and relock, trapping him inside with the animal. Miss van Sloan shoots her pet with a gun, saving him.
Evans gets medical treatment for a bite wound, worrying about rabies. Dorp takes the dog and leaves, returning the next evening with four men and a load of equipment. After replacing himself and Evans with doubles the two men go for a drive, using the radio equipment to locate a spot where a strong signal is coming from. Sneaking up to a farm house, they find Ernest Hegel and a radio control board. They arrest him.
Later, back at the house, Dorp in his best Holmesian style explains all the radio gizmos that Hegel used. While Gordon Van Sloan had been in Florida for cancer treatment, Hegel had been contracted to fix up the house. During that time he planted cameras, microphones, wires to control the doors and refrigeration equipment. Also in the farmhouse had been a vial of rabies serum with which he had infected the dog.
Someone asks what he will be charged with? Robbery, resisting an officer, and attempted murder. Hegel, who was poor, had to steal all the equipment for his haunting. Caught in the act, he had shot an officer. Ernest Hegel was headed for a long stay in prison.
I wondered at first about the reason why this story hadn’t been in Weird Tales. I don’t think it was every offered to Farnsworth Wright, as the piece panders to Hugo Gernsback in several instances. The supernatural first act was alright, but the heavy technical ending would never have appealed to Wright. Worse yet, Hugo ruins the fun by giving away the whole thing is a fake done with radio in his intro blurb. (Almost as if he was telegraphing to readers who don’t like horror fiction, that it was all going to turn technological by the end.) As an epilogue at the end this might have been fine, but at the beginning of what would have been a pretty standard Jules de Grandin adventure, it’s a total bummer.
Kline didn’t write a fourth Dorp adventure. I can only suspect it didn’t turn into a lengthy Amazing Stories series because of Gernsback’s poor history of paying his authors. Kline was a working writer and editor and wouldn’t have been interested in writing just for fun. There is another possibility, and that was that he had begun to write his Argosy novels. His output for 1928 is a single story “Treasure Accursed—and Mescal” (Argosy-All-Story, August 11, 1928) but in 1929 he published The Planet of Peril, The Secret Kingdom, and Maza of the Moon, the works his reputation is built upon.
