“The Leopard’s Paw” by Edmond Hamilton

Edmond Hamilton was a Science Fiction writer who is loved for his Captain Future novels, his Star Kings and any number of other Pulp stories. He was an important innovator of the 1920s and early 30s, as well as one of the best writers of Superman comics in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. But there was this time when Ed wrote Mystery stories for money…

Hamilton was one of the first SF writers who tried to make a living writing only Science Fiction and Fantasy. He succeeded for the most part but there were lean years in the Great Depression when he turned to Mystery fiction. He couldn’t do Westerns like Clifford Simak or Murray Leinster. Ed’s Mystery markets were Thrilling Mystery and Popular Detective.

In Popular Detective for March 1936, Hamilton wrote a short one called “The Leopard’s Paw”. Detective Dan Healy discovers the body of Martin Vale, African explorer. Vale’s body has been ravaged by claws, turning him into a gory mess. Over his head, sitting on a desk is a statuette of leopard. In the pages of Weird Tales, this would go one way… a were-leopard or ghost of an animal. But this isn’t WT. This is a Mystery Pulp…

Healy questions the others in the house: exploring partner, Wallace Ross, beautiful Nadia Vale, daughter of the dead man, Ned Thalman, Nadia’s fiance and Frank Vale, brother of the deceased. Ross explains he put the statuette on the desk after the killing. He and Martin had taken the idol from a voodoo hut in the depths of Africa. A curse hangs over the statuette so the men planned to return it. But it is too late, the curse has claimed Martin Vale!

Dan looks the statue over, breaking off the paw by accident. Only it’s not an accident. Once the others leave, the detective weighs the broken piece and the idol separately. He has suspicions but they are interrupted by the scream of a panther. The lights go out. A shape slinks into the darkness and attacks the man. A terrible leopard paw claws at his throat. Only a quick grab for his gun and a blow made with the weapon saves him.

The lights come on. Nadia and Thad and Frank are at the bottom of the stairs. Dan Healy explains that he was attacked and the attacker is still there. It is William Ross, knocked unconscious on the floor. Dan explains what it is all about. The idol was full of diamonds. The two explorers weren’t interested in archaeology but smuggling. With Martin killed, the job of “returning the statue to Africa” would fall to Ross. In fact, he would get all the diamonds.

It’s a quick story, not really surprising, not overly developed. It’s three pages to fill the back of a magazine of better stories. Hamilton does a professional job but no one is going to give him medals for this. What surprised me was the use of the old idea of a club with claws on it to simulate an animal attack. I knew right from the start that this would be the weapon. Why?

Tarzan and the Leopard Men (Blue Book, August 1932-January 1933) was not one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ best Tarzan novels. But it did have the leopard cult that dressed worshippers up in costumes with clawed gauntlets. And this is where I actually remember this from. Not the novel, which I read in my teens, but the movie, Tarzan and the Great River (1967) starring Mike Henry. I actually got to see it in 1975 at school of all places. A film night presented at my local elementary. Talk about luck! I was ERB mad then and what movie could be better? Anyway, the movie has a jaguar cult (in South America ’cause it’s cheaper to film there!) that uses a clawed club as a weapon. The idea was used earlier in Tarzan and the Leopard Woman (1946), which I have yet to see.

But what about the Mystery angle? Perhaps the most famous use of this idea comes from Cornell Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi (1942). Filmed as The Leopard Man (1943), the story involves a second-rate singer who makes it big down in South America. as a publicity stunt, they have her walk with a black panther on the red carpet. the flash bulbs of the reporters send the big cat into a frenzy, attacking people then escaping. A psycho killer uses the animal’s escape to cover his killing. In the end the detective explains how the killer destroyed the cat: “So he killed it, and from then on he was. With gauntlets that retained the death-dealing claws.” My first exposure to this was the Warner Bros. cartoon where a panther gets loose in the city. “Tree For Two’ (1952) featured Spike and Chester, two dogs, who encounter Sylvester and the panther at different times. I had no idea about the Woolrich connection for decades.

Now, of course, Edmond Hamilton wrote “The Leopard’s Paw” in 1936, six years before Woolrich. In essence, the idea is the same though far less developed with a supernatural angle worthy of Jules de Grandin. Hamilton was a Burroughs fan so he may have got the idea from Tarzan. (I was so glad to see the new Tarzan film had some echo of the leopard men novel with the costumes of the men of Opar.) Hamilton might have picked it up from any number of other African adventures, hundreds of which filled magazines like Adventure and Argosy.

We will never know. The fact remains, even when Hamilton writes Mystery filler, he infuses it with a little fantastic material. Another story he did for Thrilling Mystery (May 1936) called “Beasts That Once Were Men” takes page from Dr. Moreau and Hamilton’s obsession with evolution. The solution is, of course, ordinary enough.