SKULL-FACE

[ArK]

From 1929, this appeared as a serial in WEIRD TALES for October, November and December. It's essentially a Robert E Howard version of a Fu Manchu story. Now, at that time, there had been no new book about the genuine Devil Doctor since 1917, so Howard wasn't exactly competing with Sax Rohmer for the audience but the similarities are so thorough that it wouldn't take much to re-write SKULL-FACE as a genuine Fu Manchu novel.

We have John Gordon, a lean, bronzed Scotland Yard inspector with a roving commission. Stand him alongside Sir Denis Nayland Smith and you'd have to wait until Smith tugged at his left ear to pick him out. Instead of the love-smitten and slightly dim Dr Petrie, the story is narrated by Stephen Costigan-- a real Howard hero. Costigan is an American of Irish descent, abnormally strong and prone to violence, over-reacting to almost everything. First becoming involved with the villain's schemes through his hasish addiction (our hero seems to reside in a London opium den), Costigan is given an elixir that frees him of his drug habit but which also binds him to the fiend's service, because now he can't survive without the serum.

The Howard touch shows as the elixir temporarily stimulates its user to heightened awareness and superhuman strength. At a crucial moment, when everything is at stake, Costigan drinks a huge dose of the stuff and turns into a door-smashing neck-breaking monster that sweeps all obstacles aside. Howard's heroes don't usually rely on subtle strategy or contingency plans-- swift and devastating action is their way.

As an aside, it seems clear that Howard had not the vaguest clue about hard drugs. The way he describes hashish hallucinations is just colorfully vague gibberish, and it seems odd that a sword-wielding assassin would load up on heroin (of all things) to become ready to fight.

The saving grace of the story is the villain, Skull-Face himself, who goes beyond even the origins which Sax Rohmer gave to Fu Manchu. The sorceror Kathulos is actually a living mummy from Atlantis, released from his undead slumber beneath the ocean as his coffin floated to the surface. Like the Devil Doctor, Kathulos is working to unite all the third world nations to overthrow the empires of Europe and the United States, but he has something even worse as his ultimate goal. "Under the green seas they lie, the ancient masters, in their lacquered cases, dead as men reckon death, but only sleeping." Yes, the horrible wizard intends to resurrect the ancient Atlanteans and put the modern world under their control. EEK!

The image of the undead sleeping horrors, seaweed growing on their caskets, in the dark cold city at the bottom of the ocean clearly owes a lot to Robert E Howard's penpal and WEIRD TALES colleague, H.P. Lovecraft. I don't know if the name 'Kathulos' is meant to remind the reader of 'Cthulhu' but it certainly does. The undertones of horror as our heroes explore secret tunnels that extend under London like a black honeycomb are genuinely unsettling.

There's a certain amount of understated racism in the story, not just in the basic premise of all the world's races getting together to overthrow the white nations (not entirely impossible, as empires do rise and fall), but in a few remarks like the observation that most of the black people in London are voodoo worshippers at heart-- or that of "Orientals" only Jews are more despised than Egyptians. Sheesh. Still, as offensive as the comments sound, I would never want to see published books re-written to suit current sensibilities. You start doing that, and before you know it, "Romeo and Juliet" has a happy ending and Captain Ahab becomes friends with Moby Dick. Maybe a cautionary foreword to any future reprints would help prepare readers.

Howard also used the name 'Stephen Costigan' for a different character in his fighting sailor stories, but these were sometimes renamed as "Dennis Dorgan', and there was a sequel to SKULL-FACE where Stephen Costigan became Steve Harrison and Kathulos was Erlik Khan...but I'm getting loopy just trying to keep it straight.

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