(1888-1949)
Tod Robbins was a popular contributor to the pulp magazines of the 1900s, a stylish writer who specialized in tales of the eerie and the grotesque. In novels and short stories about murder, revenge, and fate, recounted in tones both poetic and cruel, Robbins had the power to haunt and disturb long after his last sentences had been read.
The Brooklyn-born writer began appearing in top-of-the-line fiction magazines like All-Story Weekly (where Edgar Rice burroughs would get his start at about the same time), Top Notch, and other Munsey and Street & Smith publications. With his taste for the uncanny already in evidence, Robbins was a natural recruit for an innovative new magazine that would be the first pulp devoted exclusively to stories of horror and the fantastic. The Thrill topic, from Street & Smith, made its debut in February 1919 and lasted just 16 issues. Robbins’s stories appeared in five of these (with more work scheduled at the time the plug was pulled), including his extraordinary “The Bibulous Baby,” a tale told by an absinthe-swigging “infant” in a perambulator who recounts how his grandfather—cursing the aging process—made a pact with the devil that reversed his grandson’s—the narrator’s—physical life, born with a white-bearded old body and now, in appearance a baby, about to die.
What name recognition Tod Robbins retains is due entirely to a pair of famous film adaptations of his work, both brought to the screen by the legendary director Tod Browning, Robbins’s spiritual brother in devotion to the bizarre. The Unholy Three, a novel first serialized in the pulps, was a strange thriller about a trio of sideshow oddities— a childlike midget, a giant strongman, and a schizophrenic ventriloquist—who band together as a criminal syndicate, aiming to loot the riches of the “normal” world that has scorned them and that they in turn despise. The midget in particu-lar—the brains of the outfit—is consumed with hatred for the freak show patrons who have stared and pointed and pawed at him, especially the children: “Their piping voices, their pointed fingers, their curious eyes—all filled him with a nauseating hatred hard to bear. At the sight of them, he felt tempted to spring forward, to dig his fingernails into their soft flesh, to hurl them to the ground, to stamp them into unrecognizable bloody heaps . . .”
The short story “Spurs” was still more unusual. First appearing in the general fiction pulp Munsey’s in February 1923, it was set entirely among the attractions of a small wandering circus, and largely among the strange individuals known as the circus freaks. In the story, a beautiful, scheming bareback rider conspires to exploit a lovestruck midget with a large inheritance, but the plan backfires with an ironic and grotesque result. Written as a kind of dirty fairy tale, “Spurs” treated the deformed entertainers with a disturbing mix of compassion and cruel, pitiless humor—a tone that was taken to even more unsettling lengths when Browning, working with real sideshow performers (pinheads, dwarfs, a “human torso,” and the like) filmed the story in 1932 as Freaks.
Robbins faded from the scene in the 1930s, and in the 1940s was unheard from for good reason: living on the French Riviera when the war erupted and the country was invaded by Hitler’s army, Robbins was captured and held prisoner for the duration. He remained in France after the war, and died in the beautiful coastal resort village of St.-Jean-Cap-Ferrat.
Works
- In the Shadow (1929);
- Master of Murder, The (1933);
- Mysterious Martin (1912);
- Silent, White and Beautiful, and Other Stories (1920);
- Unholy Three, The (1917);
- Who Wants a Green Bottle? and Other Uneasy Tales (1926)
