Fri 1 Jan 2021
Pulp Stories I’m Reading: CARL JACOBI “Crocodile.â€
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[9] Comments
CARL JACOBI “Crocodile.†Short story. First published in Complete Stories, 30 April 1934. Collected in East of Samarinda, edited by Carl Jacobi & R. Dixon Smith (Bowling Green University Popular Press, softcover, 1989).
If Carl Jacobi (1908-1997) is remembered as a writer today, it is by collectors of such long ago pulp magazines such as Weird Tales, Thrilling Mystery, Marvel Tales, Planet Stories and the like. He was, however, an equal hand with adventure stories that appeared in titles such as Top Notch, Short Stories, and Complete Stories, which is where this lead-off story in the collection East of Samarinda first appeared.
I haven’t read all of the stories in that modest compendium yet, more than twenty of them, but the ones I’ve read or browsed though take place in Dutch Borneo, which in the 1930s was as much an out of the world place for adventurers tohave adventures as there ever could be. The jungles teeming with snakes, the native Dyaks, not all friendly, the rivers filled with crocodiles, all grist for Jacobi’s mill.
But was he ever there? In a word, no. He may have never taken a step outside his native Minnesota. So how did he get the details to sound so right? In another word, research. Libraries existed before Google came along, and as a matter of fact they still do.
In “Crocodile,†a collector of animals for zoos and the like, comes staggering into the camp of a surveyor for the Dutch named McNair, and once fortified with enough whiskey, the former tells the latter of how he killed his partner who’d come across a priceless emerald by tricking him into falling into a river swarming with crocodiles.
Sometimes fate needs a helping hand, and that’s exactly what happens here.
January 1st, 2021 at 5:33 am
That’s a nice collection of atmospheric action stories set in and around what was then the Dutch East Indies. I’d never have read those stories if they weren’t collected in this book, some appeared in the hero pulps, which i don’t collect; some in rare and expensive action pulps like Dime Adventure, Complete Stories and Thrilling Adventures.
The introduction and the preface of this collection give more details of how Jacobi did the research for his stories. He haunted libraries, read any books set in the area, corresponded with soldiers, engineers and ship’s crews. The journey of one of his letters sounds like an adventure in itself:
My letter of inquiry went first to San Francisco, then to Hongkong, then to Singapore. From there it went by coastwise freighter to Bandjermasin in Borneo. Here I had routed the letter up the Mahakam River to a vaguely designated unexplored area called Apo Kayan. But the Mahakam was not navigable that season, so my letter went around to the east coast to a place called Tandjong-Selor. Here it waited six weeks and finally went up the Kayan River by military transport. It was sealed in a soldered-shut tin to prevent the excessive humidity from blurring the ink. The final lap was overland by native runner.
The research paid off in that the setting seemed like a real, dangerous place. Among other authors who did something similar were Arthur O. Friel, whose first visit to South America was much after he’d sold several stories set there to Adventure and Hugh B. Cave in his stories of Tsiang House.
Unusual to find such a collection from a University Press.
January 1st, 2021 at 10:40 am
It wasn’t just any University Press, Sai. The full title was the Bowling Green State University Popular Press, with BGU a repository of all items considered under the general concept of “Popular Culture,” including long runs of pulp magazines.
For more information about them, here’s a link:
https://lib.bgsu.edu/finding_aids/items/show/2415
January 1st, 2021 at 8:11 am
I like this type of adventure. Robert Simpson in Adventure magazine also had an excellent series about a trading company in Africa called Marsden and Company. Short Stories also had a series about some Dutch govt officials in the Dutch possessions.
January 1st, 2021 at 10:46 am
While I think Borneo was the epitome of unexplored jungle wilderness in the 1920s and 30s, it’s good to remember that to most Americans, Africa was still a continent of mystery as well, not to mention large swathes of South America. All settings perfect for tales of adventure in the general fiction pulps.
January 1st, 2021 at 8:33 am
Of interest is LOST IN THE RENTHARPIAN HILLS: SAPANNING TNE DECADES WITH CARL JACOBI by R. Dixon Smith (Popular Press, 1981), an interesting account of Jacobi and his writings.
January 1st, 2021 at 10:51 am
Some of that is gone into in Dixon Smith’s introduction to Jacobi’s “Samarinda” collection. The Rentharpian Hills book expands on it, making it a good companion piece to go along with it. Since Jacobi was still alive at the time, it helps ensure that the facts are right.
January 1st, 2021 at 8:05 pm
These stories used to be referred to as “white man grave” tales. Young men would sign up for a 3 year hitch with some trading company that dealt with natives in Africa, Borneo, or some god forsaken island in the South Seas. They often met bad ends either through an early death or from drugs and alcoholism. The heat and insects were killers also.
Now that I think about it the best writer of this type of tale was not a pulp writer at all. Somerset Maugham wrote many novelets for the slicks. I’ve read and reread a couple dozen 30 to 40 pagers by Maugham about trading company and govt. officials meeting an early doom or just living miserable lives in the tropics.
The Collected Short Stories in the two volume edition is excellent(available on abebooks.com)
January 1st, 2021 at 9:49 pm
In his study of John Buchan, Dornford Yates, and Sapper, all of who had that occasional bright young man who signed up for foreign adventure and ran afoul of foreign ports in their adventures THE CLUBLAND HEROES, Richard Usborne writes about the impact of Maugham’s stories in that genre on popular fiction.
Jacobi has a deceptively straight forward style that disguises a bit of art amid the thrills. Like many pulp writers in the adventure field he was a prodigious researcher, and had a talent for absorbing from the pages of a dry history or travel book the romance and danger of distant locales.
January 1st, 2021 at 10:08 pm
Steve,
Thanks for the pointer to BGSU. I didn’t dig deeper even though i own about ten books from them – this collection, Robert Sampson’s fantastic five part study of series characters in the pulps, Yesterday’s Faces, and two volumes of the Defective Detective, a quirky favorite.
They have a wonderful collection of titles
Woolrich’s autobiography
Studies of Ed McBain, Chester Himes, Stephen King, Max Brand, Irving Wallace, Jonathan Latimer and Black Mask writers in Hollywood
A collection of W.T. Ballard’s Bill Lennox stories
What’s not to like? Thank you.