Creepy Crawlers: "Tarantula Bait" (1932) by Paul Chadwick

Paul Chadwick was a pulp writer of many pennames and created the Secret Agent X series, but from 1931 to 1936 he wrote close to forty short stories about an unusual detective-character, Wade Hammond – which appeared in Dragnet-Detective Magazine and Ten Detective Aces. Hammond is a newspaper writer and amateur detective specialized in strange, out-of-this-world criminal cases. A category known in the pulps as weird menace, which has close, familial ties to the impossible crime story.

Chadwick is not listed in Robert Adey's Locked Room Murders (1991), but, on his website, Mike Grost briefly discussed one of Chadwick's short stories, "Tarantula Bait," which he described as an "example of a true impossible crime tale" with "numerous impossibilities." As you can probably guess, my interest was piqued by this obscure, long-overlooked impossible crime story.

"Tarantula Bait" was originally published in the September, 1932, issue of Dragnet-Detective Magazine, but the story can more easily be found in Tough Guys & Dangerous Dames (1993) and The Weird Detective Adventures of Hammond Wade (2006). The plot frames the impossible crime tale as a weird menace story and is (somewhat) comparable to Theodore Roscoe's Murder on the Way (1935), Fredric Brown's "The Spherical Ghoul" (collected in Death Locked In, 1987) and John Russell Fearn's Within That Room (1946) – basically a Scooby Doo for grown-ups kind of story. And this one comes even with its very own monster-of-the-week!

An unnamed city, which could be New York, is gripped by sightings of an abnormally large spider.

The first sighting of the "Tarantula" occurred a couple of nights before the opening of the story, when a man crossing Hamilton Square claimed to have seen "a great, black, eight-legged creature," which was seven feet in diameter – moved like "the spirit of death" itself. Faith Tashman is the latest to have a close encounter with the giant spider, but the beast has followed her back to her home. And attacks her in the bedroom, while there were policemen in the house!

Faith Tashman is found on the sidewalk, beneath her bedroom window, with two "terrible wounds" in her neck. Holes where "gigantic fangs" seemed to have penetrated!

Wade Hammond is tasked with putting a stop to this creature, whatever it may be, but, before he can do that, has a close brush, or two, with the Tarantula. Hammond is an eye-witness to the two second, seemingly impossible murder by the spider when its shadowy body ambushes a man. The spider had struck for its victim's jugular veins, but, before Hammond can raise his gun, the black, "ghastly shadow" had disappeared as mysteriously as it had come – as if it had blended with the larger shadows of the trees. A second, too close for comfort confrontation happened during a warm night when a huge, black "something with hairy legs" attempted to attack Hammond in his bedroom. But "the black bulk" vanishes as miraculously as before.

This attack on Hammond reminded me of one of the many impossibilities from Lou Cameron's Behind the Scarlet Door (1971), in which the detective is attacked by an invisible, cat-like creature when he entered his locked, darkened apartment. Funnily enough, "Tarantula Bait" and Behind the Scarlet Door are both weird menace/impossible crime stories with a locked room idea that ran along similar lines. Only difference is that Hammond took that idea to a whole new level. And on a much larger scale.

Hammond has only two clues to work with: a white powdery substance and "a strange whisper of sound" that "seemed to fill the air" when the spider vanished from his bedroom. These clues nicely fit with one of the suspects from a small group of characters, who could have been plucked from the pages of a Clayton Rawson detective story. So the story worked as a fair play detective story, because there were essential clues to the who-and how.

However, I'm afraid Grost has slightly oversold the story, as an impossible crime tale, by calling it "a gem." The story was a fun read and (sort of) works as a fair play detective story, but the solution to the impossibilities, original as the trick may be, is hard to take seriously – pure Scooby Doo with a dash of Wile E. Coyote. And grotesquely humorous when presented with a straight face.

So, "Tarantula Bait" is a good, pure pulp detective story with an entertaining take on the impossible crime problem and deserves to be considered for inclusion in a future locked room anthology, but hardly a gem of the locked room and impossible crime genre. You can put that down to the silly, cartoon-like explanation for the spider-like killer. Still, if you like weird, carny and pulp detective stories, like Brown or Rawson, you can't go wrong with Chadwick's "Tarantula Bait."