Operator #5, America’s Undercover Ace

Of Popular Publication’s pulp heroes, Operator #5 is their third longest-running one. A superspy billed as “America’s Undercover Ace,” Operator #5 lasted for 48 issues from 1934 to 1939.

He started after the longer-running G-8 and The Spider, but ended long before them. I’m not sure why he ended so early, unless it was poor sales.

He was created by Frederick Davis under the “Curtis Steele” housename, and later taken on by Emile C. Tepperman and then Wayne Rogers.

Operator #5 was really Jimmy Christopher, though I’m not sure if the agency he worked for was really identified. Other characters included Diane Elliot, his girlfriend. There was Tim Donovan, a kid who Jimmy saved who helped him out. His twin sister, Nan Christopher, was involved, and his father, John Christopher, a retired operative known as Q-6, also helped. His boss is the unnamed Washington chief of intelligence Z-7.

Jimmy was your typical master of armed and unarmed combat. He had a scar like an eagle on the back of one hand. He wore a skull ring with poison, and he had a rapier hidden in his belt that, yes, he used. His identification was a skull-shaped watch fob.

His foes were all sinister foreign powers, never identified. The most well-known appeared in a 13-story sequence, the longest in the pulps, sometimes called the “war and peace of the pulps”: the Purple Invasion, or the Purple War, saga. This ran from 1936 to 1938.

The closest to it was the Dusty Ayres series that ran for 12 issues in 1934-35 that didn’t have the U.S. invaded, but holding out against Fiery Eyes and his hordes who has conquered most of the world.

In the Purple Invasion series, the United States was invaded by the Purple Empire, a European power (a disguised Nazi Germany). The saga told of Jimmy and his friends working to free the U.S. from the forces of the Empire. Even when it was done, the U.S. was still open to invasion as it was still recovering.

Another similar saga started with the 45th issue with the Yellow Vulture, a disguised Japan, that invaded the U.S. This saga lasted through the end of the series, and was unfinished. The next issue would have had an additional story, but it’s unclear if it was even written. It’s sad the Popular left it unfinished, as they allowed for the Dusty Ayres series to wrap up with its last issue.

Interestingly, Temperman did the Purple Invasion series, while Rogers did the Yellow Vulture.

For non-fiction works on Operator #5, there is the excellent work by Nick Carr done as part of Robert Weinberg‘s Pulp Classics series, and reprinted by Wildside Press: America’s Secret Service Ace: Operator #5. There is also a volume on just the Purple Invasion by Tom Johnson that is currently published by Steeger Books: Operator 5: The History of the Purple Invasions as by Harrison Stievers. It makes use of the footnotes that ran during the saga that claimed to be from a history of the war written by “Harrison Stievers.”

Comics

There has yet to be any Operator #5 comics, though he has appeared in a few other titles.

In Moonstone’s final Spider series in 2011 (just 2 issues), he got a backup series that has him go up against Bundists.

Then in Dynamite‘s Codename: Action (2013), which was a sort of “origin story” for Captain Action that included Operator #5 as an older, prior spy that assisted the operative who would become Captain Action.  It has been collected in trade paperback.

Reprints

Over the years, there have been a handful of reprints of Operator #5. The first was a brief run done by Corinth (owned by soft-porn publisher Regency). Next was an even more brief run by Freeway that included nice covers by George Gross, better known for his Avenger covers. An unused cover planned for this series was recycled for a previously unpublished Spider novel, renamed as “Blue Steel.” Dimedia, connected to Argosy Communications which owns the character, put out a trio of poorly done sort of facsimile reprints in 1980. Wildside Press did some reprints; then Girasol did a series of pulp facsimiles, but I’m not sure if they did the whole run.

The Purple Invasion cycle is of interest, and Adventure House reprinted this series in its Pulp Review/High Adventure reprint fanzine. More recently Altus Press/Steeger Books put this out in a two-volume deluxe hardcover edition.

Currently, Steeger Books is reprinting the whole series in single volumes and is about halfway through.

New Pulp

While there was one new short story, by James Van Hise in one of his collections of pulp hero articles, there has yet to be a new Operator #5 novel. He has appeared in a few new works.

In fact, Moonstone Books put together a mosaic novel, The Day of the Destroyers, that was supposed to have Operator #5, but something went wrong and instead the character was renamed as Jimmy Flint, Agent X-11. I suspect the move of the rights to the Popular characters to Dynamite caused this, though I wish they had separated the prose and comics rights, and left the prose with Moonstone.

Operator #5 has co-starred in a recent new Spider novel: Fury in Steel.

I keep hoping we’ll see a new Operator #5 novel. With Will Murray and Steeger Books doing new Spider novels, maybe there is a chance for Operator #5? Maybe someone can finish the Yellow Vulture storyline.