With a title like Thrilling Mystery you aren’t expecting robots. That’s Amazing Stories or Astounding Science Fiction, right? Two important robot authors of those magazines wrote for the Shudder Pulps, offering what else? Killer robots. Writing these odd little stories may have helped improve future tales. It’s a lot easier to avoid bad ideas when you’ve already got them out of your system. More importantly, these connect with the Asimov robot mystery puzzle I have discussed previously.
“The Devil in Steel” is by Jack Williamson (July 1937). This tale has newspaperman, Jimmy Beckland going to a remote island to see a robotics demonstration at the request of the inventor, Runyon Daker. Beckland is joined by Andrew Delcrain of Effo Electricity, Jeff Kelly, a rival bidder, Tony Marvis, the inventor’s step-son, and the beautiful, Melanie Doyle, Daker’s niece. Franz Roth is an employee of Daker’s. The assembled witness a fairly boring demo of Roxar, the giant robot. Daker has it answer questions and do very little. Daker brags about the robot’s self-contained battery unit.
Later a thunderstorm threatens. The robot goes crazy from the lightning and kills Jeff Kelly. Jimmy discovers his bloody body on the lawn. He also rescues Melanie in time to see the robot kill its master. After it leaves, Beckland takes the body indoors. He wants Tony’s rifle but both Tony and the gun are gone. Instead he gets an old shotgun from the black servants. The monster smashes through the front door, intent on killing Melanie, since she is related to Daker. Beckland tries to shoot it and gets electrocuted.
When he wakes up he finds himself outside, his head in Melanie’s lap. The small group goes to the lab. They find Delcrain’s body in the bushes. Inside, they find a bearded stranger rifling through the papers. He is Leland Birkhead, Daker’s old assistant. The man insists Daker stole his robot design. He flees. Jimmy looks at the other failed prototypes. He lays a greenish copper wire on the floor.
The robot crashes into the lab. It is intent on killing Melanie. Jimmy can do nothing to stop it. He yells, “I know that E. E. is two million in the red!” The robot stops, comes for Beckland. It walks onto the copper wire and is zapped with electricity. The robot falls over dead.
When the cops arrive, Beckland explains his strange behavior. He tells everyone the robot is really a suit. Inside, electrocuted will be a human body. The deputy assumes the dead man is Marvis, the only person unaccounted for. Beckland corrects him.
It is Delcrain. The body outside is Marvis. Delcrain had dressed it in his clothing then mangled the body to be unrecognizable. The phrase “I know that E. E. is two million in the red!” referred to Delcrain’s company, Effo Electricity. Delcrain was on the verge of bankruptcy. He needed money and he knew the robot was a bust. He wanted the self-contained battery. With all of Daker’s kin dead, he could claim the patent. He was also color blind and could not see the wire.
Melanie is now a rich woman. The battery made her a fortune. She corrects Jim, “us a fortune.”
Williamson found a way to write both a killer robot story and follow the Shudder Pulp formula. The style of this robot Mystery is very “Thrilling”:
Darkness again. Melanie clung against Beckland’s arm, gasping with dry-throated dread. Daker’s quavering shriek ripped once more through the veiling rain. the clangor of the robot was nearer, a hellish alarm.
Not the way they write’em in Astounding Science Fiction, where Jack would write the robot classic “With Folded Hands” in July 1947. Perhaps more interesting is that Ray Cummings would use the same idea in “The Robot God” (Weird Tales, July 1941). In that story, a dwarfish man wears a giant robot costume to convince real robots to revolt.
The second story is “Master of the Silver Giants” (May 1940) by Robert Bloch. The story is sub-titled “A Complete Novelet of Mystery Robots”.
Jim Clayburn is going to a very lucky man. Or so you would think. He is marrying Vicky, a very wealthy woman since her uncle died. Uncle Jeff died in a car accident. His body was so badly burned they had to identify him by his jewelry. After that, things changed for the couple. Jim refuses to be a kept man and works hard at his newspaper reporting. If postponing the wedding isn’t bad enough, a Dr. Scorpo comes to collect Uncle Jeff’s brain. It is perfectly legal as Jeff agreed.
Clayburn starts poking into this strange deal and finds that Arnold Stern also agreed to. The night Jeff died, he swore he heard Stern ask him to save him. Stern had been dead for three months. It happened again later with a man named Jacob Trent.
A robot smashes Jim’s old jalopy into rubble. Later, the giant metallic bruiser comes to Jim’s apartment and tells him to leave Scorpo alone or else… This only makes him more curious.
Jim goes to pick up Vicky and finds she has gone to Dr. Scorpo’s! He rushes in but Vicky is fine. She got a call from Uncle Jeff. The Doctor is being a genial host, explaining his process of removing brains and placing them in cylinders. (Thanks, Edmond Hamilton and H.P.Lovecraft!) Things turn sour quickly because Jim is too cynical a newspaper man to fall for conjuring tricks.
Scorpo sics his robots on the couple. When Uncle Jeff’s brain is threatened she begs to give Scorpo a quarter million of her fortune. He considers the offer. Scorpo allows her to talk to her uncle. Jeff pleads to be killed, his robot life a living hell. Scorpo can turn him on and off like a light.
Jim still thinks it is a set-up. He accuses Scorpo of switching bodies at the car wreck, and the other “accidents” that took the men’s lives. Jim tells him the cops will be there any second. (He had left the cab driver with five bucks and orders to get the cops in fifteen minutes.) Scorpo shows him the cabbie’s severed head and laughs. He decides he will now turn Vicky into a robot. He has never had a girl robot.
Jim is thrown into a cell. He isn’t alone. A robot with the brain of Jacob Trent is there. He says he has been there for three weeks, but it has only a been a day. Jim convinces him to help save Vicky. Trent rips out the prison cell doors and they rush to the operating room. It is too late! Vicky is now a robot! Clayburn tears into the doctor while Trent destroys the lab. Trent knocks out the other robots.
Vicky and Jeff are crying inside their robot bodies but Jim smiles. It’s all a fake. He figured it out from Trent telling him he had been there for weeks. The missing people are inside suits. Scorpo had to move up the time frame because he didn’t want to have to feed or clean them. If he scared them into thinking they were doomed to be robot slaves, they would sign over big piles of cash.
Vicky takes off her suit and kisses Jim. The wedding is back on!
So, did Jack Williamson or Robert Bloch write the first Science Fiction or robot Mystery? Not really. They both wrote Mysteries (of the Gothic and melodramatic type) with fake robots in them. So not actually Science Fiction but a story with SF trappings. Don’t be too hard them for the Gothic touches. The Hound of the Baskervilles is a masterpiece of Mystery, and has plenty of Gothic goings-on.
Bloch would write another attempt at an SF Mystery, this time without robots, in “Murder From the Moon” (Amazing Stories, November 1942). That story is a reversal of “Silver Giants”. “Murder” is a Science Fiction tale that fails as a Mystery. “Silver Giants” is a Mystery that fails as SF. Isaac Asimov said he was the first. But was he? I will keep looking.
