Tom Mason - Spicy Mystery Stories

Hamlin Daly - Medusa's Kiss: (Spicy Mystery Stories, Jan. 1936). One man succumbed to her beauty and died - was it from fear? Another who loved her was found "as though torn to pieces by a million barnacles!"

Of course, taking her measurements for tailor-made lingerie would be even better, but then a fellow has to start at the bottom and work his way up."
"Her dark eyes were somewhat sombre, but her face was as sweet as the white roundness's that would make her a million if she ever tried posing for brassiere ads."

That's Mr. Frost, shoe salesman, doing what Spicy guy's tend to do an awful lot of and little good ever comes of it. No need for me to bother with a spoiler warning as, in the fine tradition of the Spicy's, the illustrator has already let the cat out of the bag. Commendably Medusa's Kiss is straight suburban Gorgon fiction, none of that "it was the mayor in drag with a mechanical serpent contraption on his head" malarkey so beloved of the shudder pulps. The divine Irene Lambert is a sympathetic monster in that her head is oblivious to what her hair ("an incredible cascade of blackness" which she combs incessantly and washes in chicken blood) is getting up yo until a particularly grisly episode on the road to Jacksonville incites her to cremate her designer footwear. Frost and Diana (i.e., his fantasy glamour model) grimly conclude that Irene was an atavism, a throwback to ages past. "There are such things. More than the public ever suspects."

Robert Leslie Bellem - Princess Of Dreams: (Spicy Mystery Stories, Aug. 1938). Was it reincarnation? Was it a product of a split personality? What was it that his wife's friend meant when she had whispered: "Tonight you will remember!"?

When Judith, his wife of less than a year, introduces a former roommate, Sylvia Lencross, Trent Denton recognises her as Sylvie LeCroix, a spurned lover from a centuries-previous life in Breton. The glamorous Ms. Lencross is thrilled; once again she and her beloved "D'Antoine" will make sacrifice to the Sea-Gods — starting with the body of her rival!

"An ocean denizened by strange creatures, half-human, half-sea-monster; beautiful women with the heads and tentacles of octopi; huge, shapeless fish-eating things with the features of men; and rotting, mutilated cadavers whose flesh was ripped and mangled and nibbled by obscene ichthyous mouths.

And one of those horrid corpses seemed to be the body of Judith — Trent Danton's wife! "

Charles A. Baker, jnr. - The Door On The Stairs: (Spicy Mystery Stories, Jan. 1937). Centuries before, a woman had been murdered in that house. Now the new owners wanted to dispel the rumors that the house is haunted. But once he has passed down the stairs, even though he finds romance, he learns that there are some doors which should never be opened.

Love in a Plategenet dungeon. On unlocking the long-sealed door of Trelawny Hall, the protagonist is transported back three centuries to the bedroom of the Lady Alice. The notoriously cruel Third Baron walks in on the couple, holds a sword to the stranger's throat and leads them down to the torture chamber. Tied to a rack, the Lady Alice will be torn limb from limb unless she let loose a weight to crush flat her "lover."