The Spider #18: The Flame Master
Richard Wentworth was playing the most dangerous game in the world—a man-hunter outside the law; a righteous lone-wolf avenger of the weak; a scourge of the evil, the wicked and the corrupt! Loathed by the organized armies of the underworld, hunted ruthlessly by the forces of the law, he was ever between two raking cross-fires… Seldom, however, had the Spider, Master of men, faced the odds which challenged him when the man called Aronk Dong summoned all the underworld to serve him in the most ghastly campaign of rampant crime and wholesale slaughter this country had ever experienced. Armed with a weapon which struck through stone walls at victims sleeping peacefully in their beds, it was small wonder that criminals everywhere hailed the new leader—and flocked in evil glee to his dark banner!
The Spider #17: The Pain Emperor
In a hundred thousand homes, families sat down together at the supper table. A few hours later, those persons were dead—killed by poison in canned foods! Thousands of women used cosmetics, and acid made their faces forever hideously scarred. A master criminal, daring and clever, was ruthlessly slaughtering Americans to win immense illicit profits for himself. Only one man was powerful enough and wise enough to stop this wholesale murder—Richard Wentworth, champion of oppressed humanity, better known as the Spider. And the Spider was engaged in the bitterest battle of his career, fighting the Avenger, a false, wily crusader who was determined to destroy him!
Operator 5 #9: Legions of Starvation
Speeding through the silent blackness of the night, a long freight-train was laden with a cargo more precious than fine gold—wheat! Then suddenly, the hirelings of Apocryphos unleashed red destruction, and the great machine lay wrecked, its cars of priceless grain afire… Another blow in the ruthless campaign that was driving a proud people, whimpering, to slavery—overwhelmed by the cruel pangs of hunger! The four horsemen of the Apocalypse, thundered sharp-hoofed over the sterile reaches of a famine-wasted continent, while only one man—Operator 5—realized the ghastly extent of the diabolical plot. And only he—America’s undercover ace—could hope to bring the canny schemer to the justice he deserved—death!
Captain Satan #5: The Ambassador From Hell
Phony guys and phony money, protected by a squadron of killers with hot guns in their hands! These are the men that Satan must fight as he becomes the Ambassador From Hell! The rivers of blood flow swiftly through the Underworld where the law has lost its grip, and Satan alone has the guns and the fists, plus the courage and brains to defeat them!
The Spider #16: The City Destroyer
Thousands of busy persons bent over their desks in the tallest building in the world—conducting the commerce of the nation—when suddenly the steel girders began to creak and twist, and the gigantic edifice swayed giddily in the rising wind. Never before had criminal brains devised a more cunning or a more horrible weapon to garner their ill-gotten treasures. And never before was the Spider so strenuously put to test—for the Master, the man behind the devastation and death, eluded every suspicion, foresaw every contingency, left no tell-tale clues behind him as he ravaged, slayed and pillaged… Richard Wentworth, working for once hand in hand with the organized forces of law and order, fights the grimmest battle of his long career. Can the Spider avenge the countless dead who have already fallen? Can he bring the Murder Master to the justice he so richly deserves?
Dr. Yen Sin: The Complete Series (Deluxe Edition)
One of the great villain pulps from the 1930s is finally available in a complete, deluxe edition. Owing certain similarities to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu, the Dr. Yen Sin series of three novels features “The Invisible Emperor” and his machinations to conquer the world using his unique mixture of futuristic science and ancient Asian technology. However, Yen Sin has met his match: “The Man Who Never Slept”—agent Michael Traile—who has the strange capability of not require sleep.
Includes an all-new introduction by current Fu Manchu author William Patrick Maynard, as well as a chronology of the character by Rick Lai.
The Spider #15: The Red Death Rain
A woman lighted a cigarette, puffed it a few times, and began to scream, to tear her clothes from her body. Her head twisted back between her shoulders and she died a horrible convulsive death-death from tobacco smoke! The lascivious cultist, Deacon Coslin, had seen his mad prophecy fulfilled… for already other smokers, everywhere throughout the land, were dying by tens of thousands! With Richard Wentworth’s beloved Nita in the power of the enemy, facing an unspeakable death; with his faithful servants drugged and out of the battle; with the police hounding hint and the arch-criminal foreseeing every strategy, how can the Spider combat the overwhelming odds aligned against him? How can he save his compatriots from the Red Death Rain—save the land he loves from domination by an ambition-twisted brain?
Operator 5 #8: The Green Death Mists
The mad Emperor, warrior descendant of the ravagers of Asia, unleashed a new, horrible, ingenious weapon against the American people. While slant-eyed Mongols bent over a powerful death-machine, a thousand miles away, the air became unbreathable! Men and women and children—all living things—gasped for life-giving oxygen, and with searing, heaving lungs, fell strangled by the mysterious, deadly element. Against these demoniacal hordes, one man alone—Operator 5—struggles while red revolt and destruction blasts America!
Captain Satan #4: A Ghost Rides the Dawn
A hot gun speaks above the streets of New York, and Satan returns to his kingdom of Hell! There can be no compromise with the men he fights, for the hot fires of hate are eating out lives—lives that mean much to Satan and his swashbuckling crew. There’s gold at the end of this bloody trail and Satan intends to have it!
The Spider #14: Death’s Crimson Juggernaut
Hideous maniacal laughter shattered the dark silence of ghostly tenements. Sleepy-eyed men and women, stumbling through the dim halls of the building, found a sight that chilled their souls with terror. On a blank wall, spikes driven through her, hands and feet, blood coursing down her arms and breasts in tiny rivulets, a beautiful young woman was hanging, crucified, dying. Still another victim of the Torture Trust! And while panic spreads, while hundreds die victims of the Killers, the Spider is blinded, his faithful servants imprisoned, his friends dishonored! How can Richard Wentworth, desperate and alone, combat the powerful, well-organized Murder Syndicate whose gun hirelings hunt him down like a vicious mad dog?
Operator 5 #7: Invasion of the Dark Legions
A powerful army of invasion—armed with the most ghastly modern weapons: bacteria, plagues, hideous diseases—lay carefully hidden within the borders of the United States, ready to strike at the heart of the nation, to kill, pillage, demolish… A foreign demagogue, mad-drunk with power, greed, and lust, planned the slaughter of a million helpless men and women, to sate his twisted, race-proud ambition. Belligerent nations watched and waited, sighting America helpless before them. One man—Operator 5—read the crimson writing on the wall—and he alone was left to battle the frightful odds!
The Spider #13: Builders of the Dark Empire
By what strange twist of Fate did the fearful menace which was to shadow every man and woman in New York City first rear its venomous head in the distant Caribbean? When terror suddenly boarded a little tramp steamer and left crimson havoc littering its narrow decks a spluttering wireless flashed the doom of every living thing aboard. Within a week, the same ghastly fate struck a gigantic new ocean liner, its luxurious cabins occupied by the elite and powerful of a dozen different nations! Death—swift and terrible—rode the ocean lanes. And the Spider—taken for once off guard—was supposedly dying in a hospital room on the very day when that terror from the seas first showed itself in all its terror above the city skyline. How can the Spider, fighting death himself, help the nation he loves in her hour of greatest need?
Captain Satan #3: The Dead Man Express
Death, with its hungry hands, is the companion of Crime, and both are the enemies of the living! Now Satan returns with his steely fists and guns, climbing over the corpses of the damned. He’s out to wreck the Dead Man Express and prove that not even the Hyena can laugh his way out of Hell! But who is the Hyena? And what means his bloody laughter?
The Spider #12: Reign of the Silver Terror
Fear stalked the corridors and offices on Capitol Hill, for it was from the ranks of the mighty—the rulers and lawmakers of America—that the Silver Assassins sought their victims! Singly, in pairs and in numbered groups they died, laying down their lives for their country—while panic spread, and the Spider, alone aware of the terrific catastrophe which impended, fought through black, bodiless shadows to reach and destroy the menace which festered underground!
Operator 5 #6: Master of Broken Men
Chaos, confusion, disintegration fall with swift, breath-taking disaster upon America! Already terrorized by a tottering, unstable world, American men and women are swept into a mad stampede when the great leaders of the nation are spirited away, one by one, to return broken men, useless, inept. Here Jimmy Christopher—Operator 5—sets forth on his most thrilling and dangerous exploit while the great brains of America surrender to madness and despair; as a leaderless people seethe in revolt against a government which is crumbling before their eyes. How can Operator 5, single-handed, hope to prevail against that dread Master of Broken Men?
The Spider #11: Prince of the Red Looters
Never before had any criminal dared give open challenge to the Spider! Never before had Richard Wentworth faced a foe who welcomed personal combat with the grim avenger whom all others feared… And while they fought—the Spider and the Fly—a new and fearless criminal army was forming; men and women were dying by the scores; and the youth of a nation was flocking to the dark banner of that gentlemanly killer whose battle cry was “Kill the Spider—and the world is ours!”
Captain Satan #2: Parole for the Dead
The grim gray rocks of prison walls had finally sprung a leak, but only the greatest of gangdom’s chiefs could taste the fresh air outside. Crime!—with its many bloody fingers—Crime!—with a single master! Who was the man behind these prison breaks who fed the fat keepers of Hell and laughed at the Law? Satan came up with the answer—while the hot guns spoke of Death and the Law held up its hands!
The Spider #10: The Corpse Cargo
Thundering far beneath Manhattan’s thronging streets came the Death Express—a crack New York Central train bearing a gruesome cargo of lifeless men, women and children—their bodies stripped of valuables, naked and mutilated! A grim warning of the terror-reign that threatened America—at the hands of Twentieth Century land-pirates, whose weapon was neither gun nor sword, but the stunning, body-shivering force which lies in electricity! Can the Spider, using mortal weapons, fight the numbing power of the thunderbolt—and survive?
The Spider #9: Satan’s Death Blast
How fight a menace which strikes without warning—which disintegrates flesh and blood and stone to mere chemical atoms! Men fled in blind panic from the merest rumor of a new attack, and even the Spider—dodging the death blasts—can find at first no weapon with which to combat this new and devastating evil which obliterates its victims in the fraction of time between two heart-beats!
Operator 5 #5: Cavern of the Damned
Secretly, behind closed doors and guarded portals the mysterious Black Power of Zaava spread its hidden terror throughout America. What evil force was behind the destruction of churches; the wholesale disappearance of entire congregations? What sinister spell had fallen upon American men and women to make them hurl themselves into white-hot flaming furnaces. A trap worse than death is laid for Operator 5 when, in a final effort to combat this monstrous hidden power, he makes his way alone into the Cavern of the Damned!
Operator 5: The Complete Purple Wars (2 Volume Deluxe Edition)
The “War and Peace of the Pulps” is finally collected in a two-volume deluxe, hardcover edition. Running in the pages of Operator #5 magazine from 1936–38, this 14-part epic chronicled the invasion and conquering of America by a mysterious foe from Europe: The Purple Empire. As Will Murray describes in this edition’s Introduction: “Battles rage from coast to coast. The exploits of Operator 5 shift from espionage and counterespionage to straight military adventure. Through it all, Jimmy Christopher rises to become the de facto leader of the resistance.” Written by Emile C. Tepperman (author of The Spider and The Masked Marksman) and containing nearly 300 illustrations by John Fleming Gould, this half-million-word saga remains the greatest epic to see print in Golden Age of the pulps and is still considered most risky and ambitious experiment ever undertaken in the single-character magazines.
This two-volume deluxe, hardcover edition includes an all-new Introduction by pulp historian Will Murray, as well as Tom Johnson’s retrospective on the series, The History of the Purple Wars. It also collects the rarely-reprinted Epilogue to the Purple War, “Revolt of the Devil Men.” Also restored are all of author Tepperman’s rarely-reprinted footnotes which graced the original pulp editions of the stories. Never-before collected, this remastered, comprehensive collection of Operator 5: The Complete Purple Wars has been one of the most eagerly-anticipated pulp publications of all time.
Captain Satan #1: The Mask of the Damned
He held in his hands the burning Brand of Hell, and in his heart was locked the courage of the Gods! Wise guys and tough mugs, crooks and their thieving mobs knew the Mark of Satan; and they knew the swift ghosts of Fear and Destruction that rode by his side—the many fierce hands of Justice that fought in Satan’s Crew!
The Spider #8: The Mad Horde
Never before in history had anything quite so horrible as the Mad Horde been loosed upon a terrified humanity! In rural towns and through the thronging streets of great cities the death-bringers stalked, spreading the slow madness of which they themselves must soon die! The Spider, dismayed and horrified as never before in his long career, is forced at last into risking the life of the girl he loves—so that a million others may live!
The Spider #7: The Serpent of Destruction
When the Underworld united in one compact army of crime, the Spider—his prestige gone—faced the most vicious collection of criminals and degenerate killers ever assembled under one dark banner of bloody social war! How can Richard Wentworth, robbed of Kirkpatrick and Nita, renew the Spider-fear which alone can bring him victory from a menace that is making casualty columns of our daily papers and filling our institutions with driveling victims of the new madness?
Operator 5 #4: The Melting Death
Out of the blue it struck—that dread, mysterious force, dealing death, destruction and misery to millions. America found herself stripped of her strongest defenses as battleships, huge guns, skyscrapers, factories and transportation systems crumbled to dust before the voracious flame. No one could tell where it came from; where it would next strike; no one was safe from its hot, devouring maw. An entire nation stood crippled, paralyzed by panic as Operator 5, alone, fought to save America from the red ruin loosed upon it.
The Spider #6: Citadel of Hell
What manner of men were these who burned their victims alive—and in public! With flaming pyres adding their nightly terror to a city already tasting the grim pangs of slow starvation, the Spider, revealed at last, is forced to disappear! Can Richard Wentworth, unmasked and in hiding, successfully combat the Flame Men?
Dusty Ayres and his Battle Birds #12: The Tesla Raiders
“Special emergency report from the Atlanta, Georgia, area. The 25th air concentration depot was completely destroyed fifteen minutes ago… All communication cut off… No details available….” Dusty Ayres heard this report grimly. He knew it meant that Fire-Eyes had caught America unprepared, had struck where he was least expected. How could we parry this new blow? How could our nation, tricked and worn out with war, outwit the Blacks in their most gigantic attempt to conquer the western world?
The Spider #5: Empire of Doom!
America faces certain doom as its citizens fall in screaming thousands before the noxious death vapors loosed upon them by the Green Hand. How can the Spider, harried and threatened by a hundred new and deadly perils, check the rising power of the next Dictator—and lay bare the scheming, criminal mind which seeks to enslave the nation?
Operator 5 #3: The Yellow Scourge
One moment good-will bound the United States and the great Power across the sea… the next, shells screamed their death wails into Coast homes and factories. No citizen was safe from the bloody holocaust when the Yellow Empire struck without warning from the Pacific. With fiendish artifice the world was turned against us. And somewhere in this country, covertly completing the terrifying work of wholesale destruction, lurked the ruthless agent of the invading hordes. Operator 5 alone guessed the dread secret and matched his individual might against a million war-drunk terrorists—while the nation trembled on the brink of red wreckage!
The Spider #4: City of Flaming Shadows
The Flaming Shadows fell upon the city, shrouding whole neighborhoods in a fiery gloom—wherein walked screaming death and merciless destruction… Go with the Spider as he battles, single-handedly, the Flaming Shadows—to save the very people who pray for his destruction!