It is odd for me to stumble onto a book that is thrill after thrill. Most old books have good bits but plenty of dull stuff, too. One exception to this was Philip Verril Mighels’s The Crystal Sceptre (1901), which I loved from beginning to end. It was like finding a lost Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. You finish it and ask, why didn’t anybody ever tell me about this book? Why was it kept secret from me? The answer is: because people forgot about it. There was no conspiracy to hide it. Time simply obscures.
The Wolf-Men by Frank Powell (1845-1906) is not in the same league as Mighels but it has pace. Probably too much of it. Written in 1905, serialized in 1906 then published in book form in 1911 with eight illustrations by an unknown illustrator. This is another tale I had never heard of. (This is six years before The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle and seven for ERB’s At the Earth’s Core.) Powell was a writer of dime novels so I guess that is why I didn’t know his name. He actually knew Buffalo Bill Cody and helped turn him into the Dime Novel legend. The dime novel pace is certainly to be found in The Wolf-Men as well. In the first two chapters we get a conspiracy to commit a crime, a knock out, and then in chapter two a desperate car chase and a shoot-out on a stolen sub called The Seal. And that’s before we even get to exploring the Arctic in a sub or wolf-headed men.
What follows after is exciting scene after exciting scene until you want to get off this roller coaster. And this should surprise no one. The story papers required a cliffhanger at the end of each chapter. Twenty chapters, twenty exciting scenes. The Jules Verne style plot has the submariners go to north to find the Pole. After going under a reef of rock and ice they get sucked down a water spout that takes them to the center of the Earth and a strange island. On the island are dinosaurs, giant spiders, giant octopi, giant crabs, exploding mushrooms, moose (which they call elk in the European manner) and their worst enemy, the Wolf-Men, who are like cavemen with wolf fangs. These awful creatures are savage and deadly. Of course, the men go ashore but get split into three parties if you include Hilton the Engineer who stays on the ship and has to outsmart an Ichthyosaurus.
The cast is a boys’ club of Hanley the American (who never pronounces his gs, shure as shootin’), Professor James Mervyn, the Scientist, Garth, the inventor and creator of The Seal, Seymour the baronet, and Chenovi, King of the Ayuti, a giant warrior of great prowess who they met on the island. These men have to face off against the terrors of the underground world and the war-like behavior of the Wolf-Men in particular.
The artist of the book version is not named but the images remind me of Harry Parkhurst.
Conclusion
Despite all the Jukes Vernian and Edgar Rice Burroughsian stuff, which is great fun, there are early 20th Century attitudes that are quite distasteful. Seymour and Hanley (after using the N-Word) have no hesitation in choosing to kill an entire tribe of Wolf-Men, because they don’t want any of them following them back to the sub. The killers are blown to bits by accident so they don’t have to do this, but they were quite prepared to do so. The really sad thing is that the novel was written for boys. This is the risk you take with old books. You may come across some forgotten treasure or you may come across something better left in the past. The Wolf-Men had a sequel “The Vengeance of the Wolf-Men” (1906 Boy’s World) but it never was reprinted as a book so I have some hard searching if I want to read more.
