The Flying Death and The Giant Claw share a common source, Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871-1958). Adams was famous as a muckraker and newspaperman. He was also a writer of fiction, producing the short story “The Flying Death” for McClures‘ in January-February 1903. (Hard to imagine slicks publishing monster stories but there you are…) He rewrote that story into a novel The Flying Death (1908), completely changing the answer to the question: what is killing men on the coast of Long Island?
McClure’s 1903
The original story is a wonderful example of an impossible crime story, much as John Dickson Carr would write a few decades later. The story is subtitled as “Three Writings and a Telegram”. The first missive is a report from Harris Haynes to his editor back in NYC. A local mystery revolves around a man who is murdered on a beach but no footprints show where the killer stepped. The victim is the unlikable Paul Serdholm, his throat stabbed by some mysterious weapon.
Harris offers four possible incidents that might prove important: he fought with a local farmer, he was accused of stealing a fisherman’s tobacco, his cousin, a wandering juggler made things hard for him until Paul threw him out of town, and Serdholm argued with a coast-guard named Schenck over a farmer’s daughter.
But all of these explanations go out the window when the footprints are discovered. They aren’t human, as the local professor, Ravendon, shows them but the exact mark that the pterodon made back in prehistoric times. He has the fossils to prove it. Harris and the local doctor, Colton, plan to return to the beach at night to investigate. There is a telegram sent by Ravendon explaining that Haynes was found dead on the beach in the same circumstances as Serdholm.
The Second Act
The magazine serial breaks there. If you never read the second half, you still got a fairly decent horror tale out of it. But there is more. February’s portion begins with our next writing: Dr. John Colton to his father. Colton explains Haynes tale before promising to go to the beach again that night himself.
The next writing is Colton’s statement of what happened that night. He was supposed to go on his vigil with Professor Ravendon but the two get their times mixed up. (Ravendon is a butterfly nut and gets sidetracked by a new species.) Colton goes to the beach and is attacked, getting knocked out.
The last missive is Professor Ravendon’s account. He heads for the beach with his butterfly collecting gear. He claims the handle of his net is a heavy rod and would make a good weapon. He arrives to see Colton on the sand. He thinks he is dead. He also sees the killer (Ready for a pterodon?) and it proves to be a man, one who is about to stab Colton with a long knife. Ravendon rushes down the bank and intercepts the man. He strikes him with his killing jar, spraying cyanide over the man. Colton revives.
The killer, no giant prehistoric beast, proves to be Serdholm’s juggler cousin. The weird footprints were not prehistoric at all but the marks of his hands. He is an acrobat. The stab wounds were caused by thrown daggers. he killed his cousin out of hate then returned to kill Haynes in case he could testify against him. Logic and reason returns to the world and those who didn’t really want there to do a pterodon sigh with pleasure. (The rest of us grit out teeth and say, “There shoulda been a monster…”)
But Wait! There’s More!
But fret not monster fans. Five years later, Adams would expand the story into a full novel of the same name. What a surprise for those who enjoyed the story to find the author has gone the other way! The solution of the novel, while having the same characters and some of the same events delivers this villain:
Far in the radiant void, at a distance immeasurable to the estimate, soared terrifically an unknown creature. Its wings, spreading over a huge expanse, bore up with unimaginable lightness a bloated and misshapen body. From a neck that writhed hideously, as a serpent in pain, wavered a knobbed head, terminating in a great bladed beak. With slow sweep it described majestic circles. Always the waving head gave the impression of hopeless search. It was like a foul and monstrous gnat buzzing in futile endeavour at the pale-lit window of the infinite. Suddenly it fell, plunging headlong, then over and over, like a tumbler pigeon, miles and miles, so it seemed, through the empty air, only to bring up with a turn that carried it just above the sea, in a ghastly and horrid playfulness.
Macauley Magic
The book was illustrated by C. R. Macauley (1871-1934). He provides four images, none of a pterodon. (Mostly people pointing at the sky.) Perhaps the publisher thought if the book contained images of the monster, readers would feel cheated. If you want to keep them guessing, an illo is dead giveaway!
Say what you want about Adams betraying the forces of Logic but he knew better than to merely expand the tale and deliver the same ending. He is also saavy enough to add some sex appeal too. Professor Ravendon now has a daughter named Dolly. Women were about as extinct as pterodactyls in the first story. (If there had been some around they might have said something like: “Don’t go down to the beach alone…”)
Those That Went Before…and After
Also remember this was 1908. Arthur Conan Doyle had yet to take us to South America with Professor Challenger to see The Lost World. (His “The Horror of the Heights” was also in the future.) Edgar Rice Burroughs was an employee of the Sears Roebuck Co. and Caspak, Pellucidar and Pal-U-Don were yet the stuff of dreams. A novel with a real dinosaur might have been a real treat even if it wasn’t startlingly new. (Phil Robinson wrote “The Last of the Vampires” (1893) in which a blood-sucking monster proves to be a pterodactyl and Wardon Allan Curtis “The Monster of Lake La Metrie” for Pearson’s in September 1899.)
Drive-In Drama
Jump to 1957. The Second Age of the Movie Monsters is filling Drive-In theaters with giant insects and spiders, UFOs and triffids. One of the lesser examples of this thrill-o-rama genre is The Giant Claw. The story of the film is familiar enough: a monster shows up, no one thinks it’s real until lots of people get killed, a scientist comes up with a way to kill the thing, end film. That describes just about every monster movie since King Kong. And if you think they have gone the way of the dinosaur remember The Meg was only 2018.
What is perhaps best remembered about The Giant Claw is the lousy special effects. Originally meant to have wonderful Ray Harryhausen animation, the loss of budget produced a marionette that looks like a cross between vulture and a turkey on a string. The film is a cheezy laugh-fest for those who enjoy such things (people like me!) Even Jeff Morrow and Mara Corday can’t save this turkey. (This was Corday’s second monster outing. She was in Tarantula (1955).
But buried in the film is the presence of Samuel Hopkins Adams. Not “The Flying Death” but another work. Adams wrote a series of stories set in around the Erie Canal but some go as far north as French Canada collected as Grandfather Stories (1955). Among these tales is the monster known as La Carcagne. The La Carcagne is supposed to be a cross between a woman, a bird and a wolf. To see it is to signal your impending doom, much as the English Black Dog. La Carcagne has the advantage of being able to fly.
Pierre, a local Frenchman in the film, sees the bird omen that predicts death. The Giant Claw has a nest near Quebec somewhere, thus the French Canadian connection. Later our bird monster kills him, fulfilling the prophecy of doom. The film doesn’t mention Adams but it does the French legend.
Conclusion
Samuel Hopkins Adams wrote for The New Yorker and other prestigious periodicals. History will remember him for his daring investigative journalism on patent medicines. I will remember him as a monster writer. He was good enough to give us both flavors: the fake and the real. As for The Giant Claw? While it is a terrible movie, I find it the Balm of Gilead on a Sunday afternoon. When I can take life just a little less seriously. (Even if my children laugh at me.)
