Tag: Robert Leslie Bellem

The Pulps: ‘Labyrinth of Monsters’

We now come to what is probably the second worst story in the collection, “Labyrinth of Monsters” by Robert Leslie Bellem, who had a previouly entry in the form of one of his infamous Dan Turner stories. “Labyrinth of Monsters” appeared in Spicy Mystery in 1937. Like the other magazines of the “spicy” line, this one featured a heavy dose of sexual content to go with the otherwise common genre themes.

In reviewing these stories, I have repeatedly used the word workmanlike. These are shorts by men who knew their craft, who could sit down at a typewriter and pound out, at the rate of at least one a week, a story with a well-designed plot and good prose. Their work was almost always of good quality even if it was only rarely that they produced a true gem. Some of the authors featured here would win accolades in other fields: Some are pulitzer winners, and some, like Ray Bradbury, wrote on such a level that they commanded respect despite their chosen medium.

Bellem, on the other hand, is purely an exploitation writer whose skill is outrageous metaphors and carefully described women’s torsos. Most of the stories in this collection are better edited than a typical mainstream novel today, but “Labyrinth of Monsters” has grammatical errors and malapropisms left and right.

The story features a he-man named Travis Brant, who for reasons I forget is renting half a duplex in an isolated town called Ghost Cove. Next door to him is a voluptuous woman, Anne Barnard, who screams in terror when she witnesses another woman having her throat torn out by a half-human, half-spider monstrosity. Travis kills the monster and rescues Anne, and then the two them, naturally, call the police. The policeman who arrives on the scene acts oddly, but Travis and Anne are curiously unsuspicious as he takes them up to an old mansion where a mad scientist, Dr. Zenarro, soon takes them prisoner. A Frankenstein of a particularly exploitative variety, Zenarro kidnaps women and forces them to breed with a mutant beast who sires monstrous offspring with multiple heads or limbs.

The story then proceeds much as expected with horrifying vistas, harrowing escapes, and bloody action scenes. Although morbid and poorly written, it’s reasonable effective as a horror story. Had it more dignity, it might have come from the pen of Lovecraft. What really mars it is Travis’s ridiculously inappropriate habit of trying to cop a feel from Anne at every opportunity: The poor woman has just witnessed murder by an arachnoid mutant, so she flies to Travis’s arms for safety, and his first instinct is to grab her breasts. As with the other examples of “spicy” stories here, the spiciness is a detriment.

The Pulps: ‘Death’s Passport’

This collection contains two stories by Robert Leslie Bellem, unfortunately. Bellem wrote racy work that appeared in so-called “under the counter” pulps, and his sexually charged writing was infamous enough to get a mocking in The New Yorker, where satirist S. J. Perelman skewered his purple prose in the essay “Somewhere a Roscoe,” which is a truly entertaining work if you can find it (The New Yorker has it behind a paywall, but the Internet Archive will let you borrow it).

If you ever have the chance to read Perelman, you will discover some delightful wordplay as well as several snapshots of serial publications before the middle of the last century. But in “Somewhere a Roscoe,” he does not have to employ his usual wit: He simply quotes Bellem repeatedly, and the quotes are sufficiently goofy to supply all the necessary jokes.

The first example of Bellem’s writing in this anthology is easily the better of the two, though it is the worst of the mystery stories. “Death’s Passport” features Bellem’s most famous creation, the hard-boiled and perpetually horny detective Dan Turner. This story appeared in 1940 in Spicy Detective, a pulp dedicated to mystery stories with risqué content and themes. According to Perelman, Spicy Detective published “the sauciest blend of libido and murder this side of the Gille de Rais.” Dan Turner eventually got his own magazine, Hollywood Detective, which ran from 1942 to 1950. There have also been a couple of movies based on Dan Turner—both of them, as far as I can tell, obscure.

As for “Death’s Passport,” it has a good story buried under it, but that good story is covered with a heavy layer of stupid. Turner comes home one night to find a man in his apartment who’s supposed to be dead: Kensington had supposedly attempted a trans-Atlantic solo flight and died in a crash over the ocean, but he had in fact chickened out and sent another man in his place, a man who was murdered by means of a sabotaged plane.

The story features some double-crosses and dangerous femmes fatales. It is most notable for being written in overdone slang so inventive and absurd that this story is reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange. While the slang is merely silly, the obligatory sexual elements do damage to an otherwise engaging plot: At one point, Turner follows a woman back to her place and attempts to seduce her, but when she acts distracted, he instantly concludes that she must be the killer—because only a woman who had recently committed murder could possibly be less than enthusiastic about Turner’s affections!

To give some flavor, I’ll give some quotes. Here is a typical example of Dan Turner describing a woman:

She was embellished in a nightgown three shades thinner than watered whiskey and a lot more potent. Through the gossamer material I could tab her various tempting thems and thoses—including a pair of tapered white gams, a set of lyric hips, and a duet of curves that made my fingers tingle up to the elbows. Some damsels are built that way: just looking at them makes you pine for your vanished youth.

In fact, every damsel Turner encounters is built that way. Plain, dumpy, elderly, or fully clothed women simply don’t exist in his universe. Every woman is in her twenties, scantily clad, round in all the right places, and willing.

And every passage, no matter how mundane its contents, contains a barrage of inventive analogies:

I’ll say one thing for Dave Donaldson: when he scents a pinch in the offing he can drive like a maniac. He blooped that sedan up to seventy from a standing start; kicked the everlasting tripes out of it. The yellow-haired Vale cutie shivered against me like a cat coughing up lamb-chops; she must have thought she was headed for the pearly gates. Her even little teeth chattered like pennies in a Salvation Army tambourine.

Admittedly, this is one of the most entertaining stories in the collection, but it’s entertaining in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way. Although this anthology contains no true standouts, most of the stories display the workmanlike style and solid construction that characterized the pulps. Bellem’s work, on the other hand, represents what the pulps have unjustly been remembered for—overwrought prose and exploitative themes.