“Frozen Hell” is a very strange Northern. I discovered the author, Victor Rousseau (Emmanuel) (1879-?) through Science Fiction and Horror. He was the headliner for the very first issue of Astounding with his two-part serial “The Beetle Horde”. He is perhaps even more famous for the novel, The Messiah of the Cylinder (1914). His later short stories appeared in Weird Tales. What I never knew was he was actually more successful as a writer of Canadian fiction.
Victor Rousseau Emmanuel
Rousseau was English. He had gone to Harrow and Baliol College before running off to South Africa. He served shortly in the Boer War. His first book was a parody of these experiences called Derwent’s Horse (1900). With that sale, he went to New York to take up journalism. It was during this time he made his first magazine story sale, a short Northern called “The Last Cartridge,” (The Munsey, September 1907). Here Rousseau established the one genre he was guaranteed to sell well in.
Giving up the United States, and editing jobs on big magazines like Harper’s Weekly, Rousseau took his family to Canada. Here he wrote two popular serials, Jacqueline of Golden River and Wooden Spoil. He followed this up with a series of stories Tales of the St. Lawrence Riverway sold to Blue Book magazine (1914 September through 1915 May) and reprinted in The Toronto Star and the Boston Globe.
It is during this time that Rousseau explored Science Fiction, much of which goes unnoticed. These works will gain a new respect later in the Pulps. He would never return to it on a large scale, knowing there was little money in writing for small circulation SF magazines.
The Northern Writer
By 1922, Rousseau is writing about Canada again. The Home Trail in People’s Story Magazine (August 25 to September 25, 1922) which sold for one thousand dollars. Lee of the Northwest Mounted appeared in People’s Popular Monthly (January- August, 1923) also got him a thousand dollars and again, with Sergeant Forbes, Alias in four installments of People’s Magazine (August 15 to October 1, 1923).
Rousseau finally realizes he had found his meter and continues to write Northerns until 1942. Despite that, he did return to SF. From September 1926 to July 1927, Rousseau would sell a series of Science Fiction stories to Weird Tales. These tales revolve around a psychic detective named Brodsky.) In 1930, Harry Bates was able to pull him away for Astounding with two-cent-a-word rates, the top in the field for 1930-1932.
By 1935, the Bernarr McFadden’s magazines would cut Rousseau and he would spend the last part of his career writing “spicy” Pulps, high paying but zero prestige smutty versions of adventure tales. By 1950, Rousseau was gone from writing, never to be heard of again (except as a reprint author). We don’t know where or when he died.
Thanks to Morgan A. Wallace for the biographical information used here. For more on Rousseau, check out this book.
Frozen Hell
“Frozen Hell” was originally written for the North-West Romances, Fall 1941 (and was reprinted Spring 1951) so it is from his Spicy period. As a pre-war story the villains are the Japanese and the Russians. (Tensions and suspicions can be seen in the Pulps before Pearl Harbor in December 1941.) Our hero is Will Hammond of the Bureau of Education (and caribou monitoring)(?) As a government agent he will pose as a school inspector, a prospector, a trapper, whatever to get to the Uniak territory in Alaska. Rumors have the Japanese and Russians up to something… The Alaska & Far North Trading Company is a front for enemy spies. Hammond will infiltrate the area and find out what. So far, not really a “strange Nothern” except the rumors also talk of giant white Siberian snow apes!
The first job is getting to Alaska. Hammond catches a ride on the battleship Shrimp. Once off the shore from Uniak, he witnesses a sea battle between the Shrimp and foreign boats, with the big guns fired but unable to sink the pirates who flee into the fog. (This is oddly the scene the illustrator chose to do for the story. I wanted giant snow apes!) Commander Keyes explains that lights have been seen on shore and a mysterious radio broadcast in an unknown language prove the infiltrators are up to something.
Wartime Writing
Going ashore, Hammond walks to the town of St. Isadore. Here he asks around about gold, posing as a prospector. He meets the Russian, Schmidt and his Japanese handler, Mr. Ohashi. They tell him to forget about anywhere north in Uniak territory, to leave. Schmidt tries to punch Hammond but he dodges the blow and twists the Russian’s wrist. The brute sees red but Ohashi uses pressure points to disarm him. They leave but the other prospectors advise Hammond to get out of town tonight. He doesn’t. (I suspect the 1941 version had Schmidt as a German, but I am reading the 1951 reprint and Russian is now America’s enemy. I’d have to have both versions to confirm this, alas.)
The next day, Will goes to the local Eskimos, looking to buy sled dogs. They refuse to sell, so he has to hike north on foot. This is fairly easy as the beach is not covered in ice. Hammond finds reindeer tracks and thinks he might be ambushed. It isn’t until he is camped that he sets a trap for his enemies. He fits up a dummy under his sleeping fur and waits. Ohashi, armed with a pistol. and Schultz with a big knife, appear. (And here is where you really know you are reading a wartime piece. Hammond trounces both of them, because the Japanese are weak and the Russians slow. These cliches unfortunately for the modern reader ruin the willing suspension of disbelief.) He sends them on their way in their reindeer sleigh, Ohashi with a broken jaw.
The agent continues north and arrives in Uniak. There he meets Miss Kenton, the school mistress. She is anxious that Hammond plans to close the school. She calms down when he assures her that all her work with the locale children is appreciated. Will asks Miss Kenton about Mr. Tallboys, the chief of the Company. Kenton introduces Will to Olaf Magnus, the Finnish reindeer herder. Magnus is in charge of a project to breed thousands of reindeer to feed the cities of America. Will asks Magnus about the ape-men. Magnus doesn’t agree they are men dressed up in costumes.
The Ape-Men
Later Will gets a glimpse of the ape creatures. The apemen are described:
— a huge, bestial face, with shaggy hair, and a beard that grew right up to the eye sockets, exactly as Miss Kenton had described. The upper portion of the body, so much of it as was visible, seemed to be covered with a growth of dense, matted fur. And natural hair of fur! Dark as it was, Will was convinced that this was no Indian masquerade.
Hammond gets to meet Tallboys. The head of the Company tries to buy him off. Will refuses. Tallboys insinuates that Hammond — if that is his name— is a fool, going to die horribly, and not an official of the Government at all. (Hammond’s cover as a Government on hiatus works against him here.)
Hammond joins up with Magnus, allowing him to scout where Tallboys and the foreigners are hiding their secrets. Searching, Will finds a secret valley that leads to a secret corral. He now knows what Tallboys is up to. He plans to steal Magnus’s reindeer. Returning to camp, he runs across Miss Kenton and Schmidt. Will kills a henchman, while Miss Kenton shoots the Russian. Hammond allows the wounded man to go. He and Miss Kenton return to Magnus’s cabin.
Things Get Good
Upon arrival, Hammond finds the building empty. In the bedroom he finds the corpse of Ippenook, Magnus’s right hand man. He has been strangled. Miss Kenton screams and Hammond knows they are in trouble. The apeman attack in numbers. He fights them in the dark, dodging their knives. He recognizes them, not as apes, but Ainu, a hairy race from Japan. He fights and fights, the bodies piling up. This chapter is the best reason to read this tale. Rousseau tells it well, with violence and suspense.
Will and Miss Kenton sneak out in the dark and ride away in their pulka (a boat-shaped sled pulled by reindeer). The bad guys show up and kill the deer pulling the sled. They take Kenton but tie Will up on the bed. The cabin is lit on fire, a good way to erase evidence of their crimes. When the ruins are found with two skeletons, nobody will know how they died.
But Hammond doesn’t die. Magnus rescues him. The two men decide to use the element of surprise and go to Tallboys’s secret corral. As they leave, Magnus drives his pulka wildly. A herd of wild caribou has shown up. He knows that his reindeer will join the wild herd if he doesn’t do something. But there is nothing to do. The herd passes, and the men follow. It takes them to the secret corral, where they find hundreds of dead and dying animals, victims of the men driving the beasts. Magnus swears he will kill Tallboys for this.
Just a Little Like James Bond
They follow the carcasses to Tallboys’s secret processing plant. There is a tower with a seaward-pointing gun. The two men sneak inside, finding Tallboys and Miss Kenton. Tallboys hits a switch, warning his men that the good guys have arrived. Miss K throws herself at Wiil, pleading for him to rescue her. He leaves her guarding the tied-up bad guys. Magnus doesn’t trust her but Will gives her a gun with no bullets.
The two men go to deal with the gang of Eskimos led by Schmidt and Ohashi. The Russian attacks Will but it is Magnus who fights him. Hammond manages to shoot Schmidt but the brute doesn’t fall until Will and Magnus tackle him. The other bad guys have fled, locking themselves inside another part of the base. It is now that Will notices Magnus isn’t doing so well. Schmidt managed to stab him. He dies, happy he has saved the reindeer. Will finds a radio set and tries to contact the Shrimp.
Will notices the air has becomes strange. The baddies are filling the room with gas. He falls unconscious, to wake onboard the ship. Captain Keyes tells him how things panned out. The sailors got Will’s radio call, took the base. Tallboys and Miss Kenton fled together. She was always Tallboys’s woman. Will tells them that the strange language they have been hearing is Ainu, and what the apes were. A strange and abrupt ending. I had expected Tallboys and Ohashi to get death scenes and all the usual rah-rah stuff of adventure fiction. I have to assume Rousseau was saving some villains for a sequel.
Conclusion
Rousseau’s use of the Ainu as ape monsters is right up there with Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1888), where he has the Andaman Islander, Tonga, function in a similar fashion. Rousseau exaggerates their hairiness for the sake of the story. There is much in this tale that is not PC but it does have some exciting scenes like the Ainu fight and the caribou stampede. Rousseau, despite his use of the Ainu, did write with good accuracy about the North. His use of the Finnish pulk is a good example.
