The Spider

Mysterious death, suicide, and madness took uncanny toll of New York's most prominent citizens. Only the Spider sensed the presence of the criminal genius whose tentacles were strangling the city - and the Spider was next on the crime monster's death list! Here is the second and final Spider novel penned by the mysterious R.T.M. Scott, the author of a series of hardcover novels featuring sophisticated detective Aurelius Smith and his Hindu aide, Langa Doonh.

RadioArchives.com is proud to present Norvell Page's debut Spider exploit - a desperate struggle against overwhelming odds to save Manhattan from being overwhelmed by a man-made Plague. In a few short months, Page remade Richard Wentworth alias the Spider into a messianic avenger unlike anything pulp readers ever read before. Driven, deadly, the Spider was a daredevil caught between the law that branded him as a criminal and the underworld he terrorized with his metallic laugh and searing lead.

For ten grim years, The Spider battled the underworld, imprinting his scarlet seal on the bodies of the criminals he slew. No one knew his name. His face was unknown. Pursued by the police, sought by the mob, the Master of Men crushed crime with a blazing intensity never witnessed before or since. Now he's back with a vengeance in a new series of audiobooks retelling his pulp-pounding exploits, as chronicled by Norvell W. Page, writing as Grant Stockbridge.

A faceless terrorist calling himself the Green Hand has unleashed a corrosive gas on the lumber town of Elkhorn, Michigan, killing its inhabitants - by stripping the living meat from their bones! His next victim will be another Michigan hamlet. And this unknown monster vows to keep snuffing out entire cities until Washington pays him a $5 billion ransom. But the Green Hand has reckoned without another powerful force: the Spider!

This exciting audiobook also includes two short stories, "Killer's Knout" by Anson Hatch and G. T. Fleming Roberts' "The Standing Corpse".

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?

Above the panicked cries of terrified humans there rose the eerie howling of dogs gone mad. Scores of them! A hydrophobic army of destruction loosed cold-bloodedly to rend and tear and spread their shrieking madness through town and countryside.... And once more the crisis finds the Spider battling single-handed, fighting alone to save a people who have, in their blindness, put a price upon his head.

How do you fight a menace that strikes without warning - that disintegrates flesh and blood and stone to mere chemical atoms? Men flee 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 that obliterates its victims in the fraction of time between two heartbeats!

It began with the torture-killing of a innocent young boy - a loyal member of the Spider Club. The weapon employed was a knife with eerie electrical properties. Discovering the hapless body, Richard Wentworth vowed to avenge this insult to the "Spider's" power.

During the difficult decade encompassed by the years 1933-43, a commanding figure blazed his way through a legion of Depression-era supercriminals, Nazi spies and saboteurs. He was wealthy criminologist Richard Wentworth. He was also secretly the Spider!

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 that impended, fought through black, bodiless shadows to reach and destroy the menace that festered underground!

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 above the city skyline.

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. 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?

During the difficult decade encompassed by the years 1933-43, a commanding figure blazed his way through a legion of Depression-era supercriminals, Nazi spies and saboteurs. He was wealthy criminologist Richard Wentworth. He was also secretly The Spider!

Thousands of busy persons were 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....

In 100,000 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.

Another epic exploit of America's best-loved pulp-fiction character of the 1930s and 1940s: The Spider - Master of Men! Richard Wentworth - the dread Spider, nemesis of the underworld, lone wolf anticrime crusader who always fights in that grim no-man's land between law and lawless - returns in vintage pulp tales of the Spider, reissued for today's listeners in audio format.

Exactly at 11:30 each Thursday night, the Death Fiddler conducted his unholy orchestra in a symphony of murder that sounded the doom of some marked victim. A master of the grotesque, he held an entire city in the stranglehold of a helpless terror; even the forces of the law stood in shuddery, superstitious fear of this new destroyer. And then the Spider, Master of Men, modern knight-errant of mankind, rose up against him! But the Spider, too, was baffled.