The Vampire Master and Other Tales of Horror (2000) was Edmond Hamilton’s seventh collection. Like his first, it was intended to present Hamilton as horror writer, though this time there is far less Science Fiction in the mix. It was published by Haffer Press in 1000 copies, with 100 signed in a box set.
“Introduction” by Hugh B. Cave was a little disappointing to me. Cave, like Hamilton, was a word-slinger for the same publications: Weird Tales, Strange Tales, Thrilling Mystery and other Shudder Pulps. But he says very little about any of that. He says very little at all, making it mostly a waste of time. (I am not completely surprised by this. Many of the penny-a-worders found they could recall almost nothing about their stories decades later. They wrote so fast, recycled so much, and tried to forget plots so they could use them again, that not much is remembered.)
“Dead Legs” (Strange Tales, January 1932) is an odd Hamilton piece. It tells the tale of ‘Dead Legs’ Dall, a ruthless gangster. Born with crippled legs, the street kid had to become ruthless to survive. He has successfully wiped out the last rival gang in town, that of Roper. Dall takes special attention in killing the mob leader. Not only does he kill him, but he steals his legs. Dr. Carson, a renowned surgeon with an undisclosed sin in his past, is blackmailed by Dall to do the operation. Roper’s body is buried under the cement in Dall’s office.
Dead Legs walks around after a long, painful recovery. Passing a taxi on the street, the legs try to throw him in front of the vehicle. Later, two trucks almost get him. Roper’s old legs are trying to take the revenge he promised, “You’ll walk on them to hell!” Dall’s henchmen, Quinn, Burke and Spinetti, rescue him from throwing himself out windows while sleeping and other attempts. Roper’s legs kick Dr. Carson ruthlessly when Dall calls him back.
In the end, Carson commits suicide, the henchmen run away and Dall has to take things into his own hands. When the cops finally break down his door, they find Dall dead, his legs cut off at the knees. The legs, with bloody footprints, are found on the spot in the cement floor where Roper is buried. The cops can see Dall died in the other room…and the legs walked on their own to the far corner!
The entire story is so unlike most of Hamilton’s controlled material he wrote for Weird Tales. “Dead Legs” is done in a style that will be seen later in the Shudder Pulp, Thrilling Mystery. The style of Weird Menace, as it is also known, is a frenetic, over-the-top kind of horror. Hamilton used it first for this Weird Tales rival, Strange Tales.
What fascinates me is that the tale of the re-attached limb became a standard trope in the 1950s horror comics. Hamilton has used the very same ideas twenty years earlier. As so often is the case, when you read him now your reaction is “Well, that’s typical!” but when Ed did it, it wasn’t the norm yet.
The next three stories I have written about before when I talked about the Hugh Davidson pen name.
“Vampire Village” (Weird Tales, November 1932) as Hugh Davidson has two men spend a night in a village full of vampires.
“Snake-Man” (Weird Tales, January 1933) as Hugh Davidson is set in the Florida swamp where a were-snake is killing people.
“The Vampire Master” (Weird Tales, October 1933-January 1934) as Hugh Davidson was a four-part serial that introduced Dr. Dale, the ghostbreaker. More on this story and its sequel here.
Most of what followed was Hamilton’s work for Thrilling Mystery. The formula for these tales was to create a situation that looked supernatural but to pull the rubber mask off at the end Scooby-Doo style. Many Weird Tales writers wrote for Thrilling Mystery.
“The Earth Dwellers” (Thrilling Mystery, April 1936) has a group of archaeologists exploring an ancient cave. When Doctor Merriam disappears after weird Morlock-like creatures are seen, the party goes underground to save him. Christa Thorne and the homely looking David Strang discover the truth. (We know he is homely looking because Ed mentions it three times.) The monsters are fake and the good-looking Sanders Andrew is behind it all. Andrews discovered a rich vein of gold and wanted to scare the scientists away. He murdered Merriam and was prepared to murder Dave and Christa too.
“Beasts That Once Were Men” (Thrilling Mystery, May 1936) was discussed in the piece on Thrilling Mystery. Ed returns to an old favorite, mutation. A mad scientist may (or may not) succeeded devolving men back into cavemen.
“The House of the Evil Eye” (Weird Tales, June 1936) as Hugh Davidson was the second Dr. Dale story discussed elsewhere.
“Children of Terror” (Thrilling Mystery, September 1936) has Paul and Virginia going back to Paul’s old home in the Pennsylvania woods where Dr. Blaine raised him and his three siblings. When they arrive they see Paul’s brother, Leigh, acting like a wolf. His sister, Martha, is like a panther and his brother, Roger, like a mastiff. Dr. Blaine explains to Paul in private that his siblings are not human but the experiments his father had created before his death. Paul becomes convinced he too is not a man but a mutated lion. Fortunately, Virginia is around to put him straight. Blaine has hypnotized them all. The doctor, who is no Moreau, admits he spent the kids’ trust fund and was trying to have them all placed in an asylum to hide the fact.
“Woman From the Ice” (Thrilling Mystery, September 1938) starts when Dick Morris and Wythe Borrow go to the Cascade Mountains. They are visiting a friend who owns a ski resort, one that has fallen on hard times because of competition. While out hiking on a glacier, they come across a woman in the ice. They dig her up. She appears to be an hundred year old Russian woman who was lost in the 1840s. Dick falls madly in love with the beautiful woman. Later he finds Borrow dead, stabbed with the small dagger the ice woman wore around her neck. He also finds the woman, who can’t speak English, and follows her to a clue. He finds an exact replica of the woman in the snow. James Marsten, the hotel owner, discovers them and admits he cooked the whole thing up. With the sensation of the ice woman, his hotel was sure to be a hit again. He tries to kill them but fails. The woman is actually a Russian refugee that Dick has fallen for.
Hamilton has once again used a comic book cliche decades before the Horror comics existed. The body in the ice dates date to at least the first issue of Weird Tales (March 1923) though Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote one like it for Argosy (February 27, 1937), a year before Hamilton’s tale.
The “Afterword” of the book was actually written in 1968. Ed looks back on his days of writing for Weird Tales. Ed talks about how WT was not a magazine to him, but a club. He waxes on about meeting Jack Williamson as a young writer, then visiting the Weird Tales offices, his time with E. Hoffman Price, Henry Kuttner and his new wife, C. L. Moore (with a funny bit about how a teenage Kuttner had written “The Eyrie” saying Hamilton was his favorite writer. Later he wrote C. L. Moore was his favorite) and finally about all the SF writers hanging out with him, including Leigh Brackett (who Ed would marry) and a very young Ray Bradbury. The whole thing is a love letter to a time that once was. It is everything the Hugh Cave introduction wasn’t.
Conclusion
This time around Hamilton’s work is clearly Horror without the “planetary” that earlier collections got. This shouldn’t be surprising since the volume was collected twenty three years after his death. Hamilton’s reputation was largely that of a Space Opera writer by this time. Haffner editors wanted to show this other side to his work. It really grabs hold of a couple of different moments in his career First, the Hugh Davidson pen name period , where he tried (and failed) to carve a second niche for himself in Weird Tales. Hamilton could be SF and Davidson would be traditional Horror like vampires. Readers weren’t fooled.
The second period was around 1935-36 when Ed tried to find markets (and better pay!) away from Farnsworth Wright, Hugo Gernsback and his usual buyers. The Detective and Shudder Pulps of Leo Marguiles offered him something new. It only lasted a short while but it did bring Hamilton to their SF Pulps like Thrilling Wonder and Startling Stories. By 1940 he would be writing a Captain Future adventure for them four time a year.
The Vampire Master and Other Tales of Horror is a collection Hamilton fans should be thankful for. It would be all too easy to let Ed Hamilton be remembered as the creator of the Interstellar Patrol or as that guy who wrote all those Wellsian disasters for Weird Tales. But he was so much more complex than that, writing wonderful Fantasy tales, classic Science Fiction and even some of the best Superman comics. The Vampire Master and Other Tales of Horror lets us see another facet to this wonderful writer.
