The Spider: Slaughter, Inc.

Moonstone Books finally published the last, "unpublished" Spider novel written for the original pulp magazine, but never published there.For those not aware, The Spider was a classic pulp hero from the 1930s and 40s published by Popular Publications, one of the major pulp publishers. Unlike other pulp publishers, Popular was standalone. They were not part of a larger publisher, they never got into books or non-pulp magazines or comic books (tho that was thought about). The Spider was one of their major hero pulps, lasting 118 issues over ten issues (other major pulp from Popular include G-8, 110 issues and Operator #5, 48 issues), and was created to cash in on the popularity of The Shadow (but turned up a notch).The introduction to this book by Will Murray explains what lead to this work, written by Donald Cormack. The main writer on the Spider was Norvel Page. But it was thought he might step down, or they might need a new direction (similar thing had happened to several other pulps, but not until the post War period), so Cormack wrote this novel. But it was never used. Page kept writing. But then due to several things, the pulp ended and this work was never published.Until the 70s boom in paperback pulp reprints happened, and a very short-lived published called Python published this story under an unused cover by George Gross intended for an Operator #5 reprint by Freeway. (weird, huh?) But to avoid copyright issues, the name of the characters were changed, with the Spider becoming "Blue Steel", and the book credited to "Spider Page". I was lucky enough to find a copy of this paperback years back, and figured out most of this when I read Robert Sampson's work on The Spider. (strangely enough, the copyright owners of The Spider would use "Blue Steel" as the name for a new character in one of their comic books in the 90s.)I would have liked to have learned more about who was behind Python (I don't know if they published anything else), how they got the unpublished Spider novel and how they got the Gross cover.Now, finally, the original novel is published as it was written, properly credited to the author and as a Spider novel.[more to come soon]

Just started reading the lost spider novel, will update later+

This entry falls far short of Norvel Page's Spider tales. Of course, by this time editors were toning down every story to a pale imitation of what The Spider had been. The edginess of the character has been reined in so much that any detective pulp could have printed it.

Good .