Dr Hermes Reviews - THE SPIDER Back to our Contents Page

REIGN OF THE SILVER TERROR (April 3, 2006) Norvell W Page's Spider novels always give me the impression of getting out of control toward the end. My guess is that he was not one of those writers who work out a meticulous outline, with estimated wordcounts for each chapter beforehand. His stories start off on a hectic note, with the nation threatened by some horrifying menace which only the Spider can hope to stop, and as the pages hurtle by, both the author and the hero seem to be winging it as unexpected complications keep rearing up. REIGN OF THE SILVER TERROR from September 1934 is a good example. I give up on trying to summarize the final third of the story without either hopelessly giving away the surprises or making myself gawk at just how outrageous and improbable the shenanigans are. And yet, by the time you get to those final pages, the events of the story have been overheating so much that the momentum just yanks you along. The basic premise is that Congress is being pressured to pass legislation that will ruin the economy and put a bunch of heartless criminals in charge. You may well say, what else is new? Still, it's worse than usual in DC. Senators and Representatives who oppose the new bill are being bribed, blackmailed, extorted and even strangled to death. By the time the story opens, only a handful of Congressmen are still defiant and their chances of living for another term are slim. At the same time, silver mines out West are being sabotaged with great loss of life. Forget about checks and balances, the nation's only hope is a wealthy young criminologist who has the odd habit of leaving a red spider imprint on the foreheads of the thugs he kills. The story is called REIGN OF THE SILVER TERROR and the vile mastermind is known as the Silver KIng because the plot is to get the United States off the gold standard and start issuing money backed by silver. I'm no expert but as I understand it, this was a genuine controversy for many years. Originally, every US dollar was actually matched by a dollar's worth of gold in the reserves (Fort Knox, for example) and money was literally worth something. This has long since fallen by the side of the road and our money today is essentially just promises with nothing behind it but a vague hope that the government will stay in business to keep it valid. (It reminds me of someone living on credit cards and racking up ever-increasing debts each month, but supposedly wiser minds than mine are running the show.) The Free Silver premise doesn't really matter, for the purposes of the story. All we need to know is that yet another twisted genius is trying to take over and make everyone's lives even more miserable than they were in 1934, and it's up to the Spider to save the day. Wentworth uses many impromptu disguises, clever strategies, quick-thinking ruses and (mostly) lethal force to carry out his crusade. As tricky and violent as he is, his success never seems guaranteed, and things get ever more desperate as the deadline approaches for the Silver Bill to be passed. The action is all over the genres in this one. At one point, Richard Wentworth is in his Northrup ten thousand feet up, engaging a faster and more powerful plane in a machine-gun dogfight to save a Condor full of Congressmen. Immediately after that nail-baiting duel, we find him on horseback within sight of Pike's Peak, shooting it out with an outlaw band. Quite a transition. He also has to deal with boulders being thrown down the mine shaft he's climbing and later on, trying to clamber up a ladder ahead of a flood of boiling-hot water that's filling the shaft faster than he can climb. Page knew how to keep your attention, that's for sure. (I have to note that the mention of a "glory-hole" raised an eyebrow, but it's used here in its original and quite proper meaning of the way a mine is dug.) Although Nita Van Sloan is on hand (she is more real help than most pulp sidekicks), nothing is seen of Commissioner Kirkpatrick. So we are spared another tense confrontation between the two friends as one normally puts a "wanted dead or alive" order on the other. Professor Brownlee also shows up; he's one of those multiple discipline geniuses who can devise an antidote to a new poison or rig up fifty tiny radio receivers with equal skill. (His absence would be missed from the series as it deprived Wentworth both of cool gadgets and an emotional anchor.) Ram Singh is his usual reliable (if bloodthirsty self). In an odd digression, he wastes some time trying to find if any genuine Thugs from India are in the country and possibly behind the garroting of the Senators (nope). Ram Singh is still described as Hindu at this point, but he "was from the northern provinces of India, the hill country whence powerful fighters sprang. He had fought Afghans with the knife and won." Later, he is definitely a Sikh. I don't know what his problem is; maybe he was a Hindu raised by a Sikh family, or he had a Sikh father and Hindu mother, or something. One of the things I like best about Norvell Page's writing is the way he interrupts the story with little vignettes introducing ordinary men and women, showing how they are affected by the apocalyptic events going on. As the villains placidly ride high overhead in a plane and chuckles at the success of the scheme, we stop to observe a group of desperate families wailing and wringing their hands helplessly as rescue efforts go on to reach their husbands and brothers trapped in a mine cave-in. It's a heartbreaking moment in the middle of all the carnage, made even more affecting by real tragedies in the news not long ago. Then it's back to the smirking brute behind the sabotage, and the reader is really eager to see this guy end up with a crimson mark of a hairy-legged spider on his dead brow. We learn in this story that, like Doc Savage, Richard Wentworth employs a clipping service to keep him informed of suspicious events that might need the Spider's attention. As usual, he takes considerable physical abuse during this adventure (although it's nothing compared to what he dishes out!) and he survives some experiences that would have most people visiting a therapist for years to come. All this will have its toll on his nerves, but at this point he is still composed enough that he "glanced at his watch again and found he had just time for a leisurely meal before he burglarized the agency offices." I've learned to space out my reading of THE SPIDER. At first, I was diving through issues in close succession but you soon become numbed by all the close calls and imminent catastrophes. Skipping from one genre to another helps me appreciate each in its own way. Now, where's my copy of BRAVE NEW WORLD...?

THE RED DEATH RAIN (Nov 9, 2002) From December 1934, this Spider adventure has me exhausted just from reading it. I don't know how Wentworth does it; once the case begins, he apparently runs all over Manhattan for three days and nights without once stopping to eat or sleep (except when he's knocked unconscious). Professor Brownlee must be brewing him up some amphetamine or something. If you want frantic, headlong action as a single man fights desperately to save the public from an evil mastermind, this book delivers it. All over Manhattan, thousands of people suddenly start screaming, clawing at their throats and dropping lifeless to the street. It turns out someone has been tampering with tobacco and now cigarettes are deadly. (What? Cigarettes are harmful? Come on now...) As Brownlee explains to our hero, "...this gas has the power of building up the nicotine in one cigarette to the killing point." It's hard to realize today, when people pretty much have to go outside to smoke, but in 1934 there were almost no restrictions on the habit. Restaurants, theaters and stores were filled with people puffing away. Men used pipes and cigars a lot more, but smoking was about as common as wearing shoes. So the idea of poisoned tobacco must have really hit home to readers of the story when it first came out. Imagine all the guys on the subway, lighting up a cig and reading about people dying horribly from smoking. (And behind this is the fiendish plot to corner the market with safe Denict cigarettes which will then gradually have dope introduced into them, so that they will become addictive. Whoa...) By this point, the Spider novels had moved on from their rather traditional mystery origins and were starting to be apocalyptic disaster stories with huge body counts and the end of the world seemingly at hand. Right away, Wentworth's sweetie Nita has been kidnapped by the unknown enemy, his semi-friend Commissioner Kirkpatrick has apparently turned against him and ordered him shot on sight, and his attempts to warn the public are laughed at (they think he's just another reformer preaching about the evils of modern life.) Well. The Spider has a real challenge this time. In addition to being on the run from the police and heartsick over Nita's kidnapping, Wentworth finds he seems to be investigating two seperate gang of Chinese criminals. One is led by a skeleton thin creep with a red veil but the other, more serious threat, is the organization run by the Red Mandarin... a genuine supervillain worthy of any pulp hero's mettle. There are enough running gunfights and car chases and desperate narrow escapes to make your average private eye think about changing careers, but Wentworth thrives on this stuff. As fast as he sends a bullet through a crook's forehead, he's reloading. I have to say that (as Norvell Page presents him) the Spider is one of the most dangerous characters in adventure fiction; I think he could hold his own against Robert E. Howard heroes like Francis X. Gordon or even Solomon Kane. It's not so much that he's cornered in a room with a dozen killers, it's more like they're trapped in there with HIM. After a sword fight with two giant guards and then plowing through a dozen Chinese fighters, when Wentworth is finally brought down and dragged away, he starts laughing at seeing the carnage he's caused. That gave me an uneasy chill. Two scenes in particular stand out. In a small unlit room with a group of gangsters, Wentworth sits on a corpse's stomach and makes it groan when he expells air from its lungs... and since this seems to unnerve the crooks, he does it again and scares the thugs into thinking the dead man is talking. But what I will always remember from this book is one very unlikely series of events. In crowded Manhattan, absolutely packed with Christmas shoppers, several people scream and began thrashing around from the poisoned cigarettes (is that a tautology?), and the mob starts to panic. Hundreds will be hurt in the stampede, so Richard Wentworth seizes a cornet and gets them all to start singing, "Silent Night". I kid you not. I don't know if this scene stands up to cold examination, but caught up in the heat of Norvell Page's overwrought writing style, I believed it while it was happening.... I should note here that Page (along with Harold Davis in a few Doc Savage novels) seems to have the idea that hypnosis is some sort of telepathic emanation, and that the moment the hypnotist is killed, all his subjects will snap out of their spells wherever they are. Maybe he was thinking of Dracula. The big finale has our beloved Nita in a cell, with a lustful orangutan just aching to have his way with her. Now my first thought was, "Not Clyde! He would never be so crude!" But a little research shows that in fact subdominant male orangutans do routinely rape their females as well as other males, despite the victim's struggles. There are even documented cases of orangutans raised in human households becoming sexually aggressive with human females, and of course the peoples who are native to the areas where these apes live have always said the hairy brutes will occasionally carry off a woman for an unpleasant experience. So I'll never be able to watch EVERY WHICH WAY BUT LOOSE again wtthout keeping a suspicious eye on that Clyde character (although not even he found Sondra Locke attractive).

THE CITY DESTROYER (Oct 5, 2005) Here's an example of diminishing returns. With the first horrifying disaster in this Spider novel, the effect stupefied me. It was presented with a well-written build-up of suspense and tension, and when the cataclysm finally happened, the damage was even worse than I imagined. Other similar, lesser disasters followed quickly and some of the impact was increasingly lost. It would be as if, after your house burned down with your family in it, you immediately totalled your car against a tree and then tripped and broke your ankle getting out of the wreck. The later two are bad enough, but taken in that sequence, they don't have quite the same bite. So it is with THE CITY DESTROYER. This January 1935 exploit of Richard Wentworth has more sheer catastrophe packed in it than any I've read so far (of course, I've got a ways to go). The vile fiend at large has some gas that turns steel brittle as pretzel sticks, and he loves to use it. Police guns blow up when fired, cars skid and fall apart, ships shake to pieces in gales, trains go off shattered tracks. Those are all minor uses of the "steel-eater", though. Most of the story is concerned with the enormous loss of life as most of New York City's famous landmarks are brought down in crashing ruin, still filled with people. The Brooklyn Bridge*, the "Plymouth" (Chrysler Building), various banks and office buildings... all tumble into piles of rubble with untold thousands of victims smushed to red slime in the wreckage. I don't know of any way to reconcile the incredible carnage that goes on in each Spider story with the fact that, a month later, things are back to normal. It's not like the Operator 5 books where the Purple Invasion was treated as a war that had permanent effects carrying on from one issue to the next. The following Spider novels probably had no mention of the Brooklyn Bridge being rebuilt or the new "Sky" (Empire State) Building going up. For that matter, most Spider stories had death tolls in the tens if not hundred of thousands, yet when the Iron Man or the Fly was captured, New Yorkers just brushed themselves off and went back to work the next day. If there had only been one Spider story, or if they had been actual books with a year or two between them, the effect wouldn't be so pronounced. Here is where the wisdom of Joel Hodgson should be paraphrased, "Repeat to yourself it's just a pulp, I should really just relax." This story features the Spider in his classic glory. Despite a fifty thousand dollar reward out for him, with the underworld and the police eager to nail him, Richard Wentworth still carries out his mission of service. Disguised as a dirty old derelict with a hunchback, lank black hair, cloak and hat and vampire fangs, Wentworth dutifully goes out into the night to shoot down criminals and leave the little red mark of the Spider on their foreheads. His best friend, Stanley Kirkpatrick has to know Wentworth is the Spider but they have a tacit agreement that the vigilante can remain in action until overwhelming evidence forces the commissioner to send Wentworth to the chair on a list of charges that would take up five or six pages. (In a cute touch, Wentworth has his aide Jackson make a phone call in the Spider's voice to Kirk while Wentworth is standing right there... you know, just to keep him guessing a little.) Nita, Ram Singh, Professor Brownlee, Jackson and even good old Apollo the Great Dane are on hand. Wentworth's supporting cast wasn't as bizarre as the crews led by Doc Savage or the Avenger, but they were memorable and maybe a bit more likeable. The villain this time out is the Master (rather uninspired, that) and being a pulp mastermind, he could not possibly stay safely on the other side of the country and delegate everything to henchmen over the phone or radio. No, he insists on appearing in the cast, so that the hero (and the reader) can mull over the various characters and try to decide which one is the culprit. Among the gang are a guy called "Devil" because of his satanic eyebrows and a geek nicknamed "Baldy" because he has an oversized hairless head and weak face... sort of like a murderous Elmer Fudd. For most of the story, Wentworth keeps shooting the bad guys dead and the Master just hires new ones. Between the vast number of bodies from all the collapsing buildings and the litter of corpses plugged by the Spider, the fatality count in this yarn is unusually high. There are a few other supporting characters who seem to be straightforward decent citizens or just greedy businessmen, but you never know. Rest assured, though, that the City Destroyer meets retribution for all the thousands of innocents he has killed or crippled. (Even the Spider shudders at the man's final gruesome fate. "It was horrible. But it was necessary and it was just. God knows it was just!") What can I say about Norvell Page? The guy knew how to keep you turning those pages while biting your nails and sitting on the edge of your seat with your hair standing up (all at the same time, mind you.) Sometimes he casually throws out a vivid phrase another writer might have milked for a few sentences ("The ludicrous surprise on his face was instantly erased by the sponge of death"). Page goes to town in the action scenes, as when Wentworth leads a bayonet squad against the gangsters (guns aren't safe because of the steel-eater) but he's just as good at describing a tense verbal confrontation. I never have trouble visualizing what's going on in a Page story. The opening scene where Kirkpatrick and Wentworth frantically try to evacuate the Sky Building, not knowing how many minutes they have before it breaks apart and starting to get a little anxiety themselves, is so detailed and brisk that it's one of my favorite sequences in the Spider series... maybe in pulp adventure altogether. ___________ *How come the Empire State Building is renamed the "Sky" and the Chrysler Building the "Plymouth" but the Brooklyn Bridge keeps its own name? Maybe an editorial slip?

THE PAIN EMPEROR

(Jan 15, 2004)

From February 1935, this is a thunderstorm of a book, one of my all-time favorite Spider novels. If you had a friend who wanted to try, say, a half dozen Spider adventures to see if he liked them, THE PAIN EMPEROR would be a good choice to include in the sample.

For one thing, the story hurtles along so fast it's practically a blur. On the first page, we start out running with reports of mass deaths from poisoned consumer goods (including cosmetics with acid in them; thousands of women are horribly scarred for life) and a suspicious new crimefighter in action. After that, it's just an escalating barrage of one desperate crisis after another. Richard Wentworth has never been in a more hopeless situation. As he tries to identify who is behind the contamination of items like canned meat and cold cream ("Yesterday, seven thousand died of poison over the country. Today, there were more than ten thousand more."), he is also being harassed by a mysterious new masked rival, the Avenger (no relation to Richard Henry Benson; good names are hard to find). The Avenger is both cunning and aggressive, more than a match for the Spider, whom he promptly identifies as Wentworth and frames for murder

Things gets much worse. Finally exposed as being the Spider, Wentworth has a sixty thousand dollar reward on his head, which quickly becomes a "dead or alive" prize. The citizens of Manhattan are eyeing him with fear and greed, he can only stay on the run in various disguises as he still keeps trying to catch the mastermind behind the mass killings. The blizzard which has paralyzed the East Coast under several feet of snow doesn't help either. (At one point, trying doggedly to get back to NYC, Wentworth dives out of his rented plane to hitch a ride on a train. ("But Wentworth, by kidnapping a locomotive, engineer and fireman at pistol point and offering them a ten thousand dollar bonus, managed to leave Cleveland.")

Wait, wait, it hasn't hit rock bottom yet for our boy. Jackson, his faithful servant and friend, has started goofing up big time. Having been smitten with a treacherous moll Jackson betrays Wentworth, getting his employer in deeper and deeper. Commisioner Kirkpatrick openly pleads with Wentworth to give up being the Spider before he inevitably goes to that chair where no one sits more than once. ("For God's sake, Dick, quit before it is too late. I feel.. I feel that the end is near.")

Then Nita gets in on begging Wentworth to abandon the Spider identity, to run away and start life over under a new name so they can finally be happy together. As she starts to cry, Wentworth is about ready for a breakdown. ("Don't! Good God, Nita, I'm human as well as you. Don't you suppose that sometimes this gets to be almost more than I can bear? Don't you know that sometimes the torture of the service I have sworn tears at my heart?")

I'll say it again. No other pulp hero goes through as much emotional suffering and turmoil as Richard Wentworth. Usually in stories like these, we just get a token reference to the hero being torn between love and duty, or being hurt by the ingratitude of the public, but here we see all the pain Wentworth puts himself through to carry out his self-imposed mission.

SPOILER Ahead

To be honest, I had no idea how Norvell Page was going to get Wentworth out of this dreadful mess. It really looked as if this might be the last adventure of the Spider. The stunning solution involves Ronald Jackson making an appearance in the grisly vampiric Spider getup and meeting his death in a shootout with the Avenger in front of the entire cast. Atoning for his blunder, claiming that he alone had been the Spider working out of Wentworth's home, Jackson dies and is believed by the authorities to have been the Spider all along. (Although Kirkpatrick knows better.) What an emotional scene. Cleared of all charges for the Spider's crimes and restored to good citizenship, Wentworth is free to start over.

(No one mentions the dozen cops he's slugged with his blackjack, the cars he's stolen and the people he's endangered in the past few days. In the pulp universe, any crimes you commit to prove your innocence are automatically forgiven.)

Even with all the suffering and slaughter going on here (the final toll is estimated at twenty-five thousand dead), the most interesting part of the story to me is how the Spider reacts to a possible rival. A mystery man calling himself the Avenger has ".. publicized himself as a nemesis of the underworld, even as the Spider was. He had snared a number of criminals in a spectacular way, recovering thousands of dollars in loot."
The Avenger claims to actually be a famous detective working on cases the police can't solve.

Right off the bat, Wenworth is suspicious for no good reason of this new crimefighter. Later on, he starts to figure that the Avenger is keeping a good chunk of the recovered boodle for himself. (Hey, Richard, not everyone was born into a family fortune so vast they can just blithely purchase office buildings and spend thousands of 1935 dollars on a crosscountry chase. Besides, Simon Templar kept a percentage of his recovered loot for expenses...hmm, maybe it's just as well that the Spider and the Saint never crossed swords.)

What really gets me, though, is that
"Wentworth realized, too, what a threat to morality such a figure as the Avenger might become; how he might lead astray the youth of the land by his false example." Ho, ho, that`s rich. The freakin' SPIDER, of all people, is concerned that a masked vigilante will be a poor role model for young folk. At least, we have a glimpse here of how Richard Wentworth would react if he ever had to deal with the Shadow or Doc Savage or the more famous Avenger who would be raising his expressionless white face a few years later.

REIGN OF THE DEATH FIDDLER (Dec 1, 2006) SPOILERS AHEAD (Spoilers for a Norvell Page book....?) Once again, I must take comfort from the (paraphrased) wisdom of the great Joel Hodgson. "Repeat to yourself, it's just a pulp – I should really just relax." This story features the return to service of a cast member who was definitely killed and buried months earlier, and the rationale for his resurrection is about as convincing as your nine-year-old's impromptu explanation of what happened to the math homework that was supposed to be done before dinner. Still, with Norvell Page's Spider saga, continuity and logic are fairly low on the list of ingredients. Frantic suspense, hair-curling violence, emotional anguish and brilliant (if twisted) visuals are far more important. So if you're looking for those elements in a pulp thriller, grab a Spider novel and kick back for a few hours. REIGN OF THE DEATH FIDDLER is from the May 1935 issue, and it's not quite as literally apocalyptic as some of the stories where skyscrapers are falling over like dominoes and people are spontaneously combusting by the thousands. The mastermind this time is just another schemer trying to unite the metropolitan area underworld under his his rule. The whole "Death Fiddler" aspect seems like a false start. Once or twice, he leaves a branded mark of a violin on a victim (rather like the infamous Spider insignia), but that's really not what he's all about. I was expecting murders announced by the eerie strains of music nearby, or people being killed by high-pitched sounds or something like that. Nope. Instead, his main gimmick is that he makes himself up to look like his next intended victim. (What...?) So he's walking around in disguise with fake wounds or a knife hilt in his shirt, or (as the interior art shows) a bullet hole in his forehead, with blood trickling down over his grinning face. It's a fairly twisted concept, to be sure. I imagine Norvell Page was making this stuff up as he went along, or he likely would have re-named the villain the Cadaver or Death's Mocker, and saved the Fiddler motif for another bad guy down the line. But deadlines were tight, there were other stories aching to be pounded out and mailed off, and the clock was ticking. The Death Fiddler also is noted for committing a murder every Thursday night at eleven-thirty (midnight is so trite). And, despite all the remarks how clever and ingenious the Fiddler is at overcoming precautions taken against him, I have to say he twice kills someone by shooting them through an open window from the street – not the sign of well planned police protection. ("You'll be safe here, sitting right by the sidewalk, let's just let some air in.") There are some changes in the status quo here. Limpy Magee, one of Wentworth's undercover identities for infiltrating crookland, is outed and will have to be retired. Never fear, the more colorful and even less attractive Blinky McQuade will step up to act as the Spider's lurking guise. (Did you ever reflect on how much time and energy pulp avengers put into these third and fourth identities? How many long Friday nights did Wentworth or the Shadow or Doc Savage spend in wild getups hanging around filthy dives with cheap dames, drinking bootleg gin and listening to jazz? Maybe they started to like the undercover work a wee bit too much....) Police Commissioner Stanley Kirkpatrick is seriously wounded (not for the last time, to be sure) and forced to step down by the mayor; his response will be to run for governor and clean up all the graft and corruption once and for all. (Good luck, Kirk.) In a very satisfying touch, Wentworth maneuvers things so that the hospital-bound Kirkpatrick will receive credit for assigning a police officer to work (under cover of being thought dead) tracking down the Death Fiddler, thus starting that political career on a strong note. But then we have to cope with the unexpected (to put it mildly) return of Ronald Jackson. Gracious. Jackson had been a mainstay since the early days of the series, a burly blunt ex-soldier who had served with "the Major" since the Great War. Unfortunately, a few issues earlier, the big galoot had been smitten by a bad girl and had screwed up badly. His way of redeeming himself led to a dramatic and touching moment. Dressing himself up in the DIrty Old Man rig of the Spider (black cloak and hat, lank black hair and beaked nose, hunchback, fangs), Jackson had shot it out with the rival Avenger. Dying of perforated organs, he nobly confessed to having had been the Spider all along. So, with his death, Jackson atoned for his recent lapses and cleared his boss of all the myriad crimes and murders which the Spider was wanted for; it gave Wentworth a fresh new start o life. (I thought this would have been a neat place to close the saga, if this had been the last issue.) Not that Wentworth could keep the Spider retired for long, of course. And here, just two months later, Jackson pops up again, not the slightest bit dead, thank you. He reveals that he had still had a teeny spark of life in him when Ram Singh had hauled him away. The fierce Hindu-Sikh hybrid first threw the Spider outfit on one of the numerous convenient dead crooks sprawled nearby. This makes my frontal lobe ache. Are we supposed to think that the gangster was buried in the Spider gear AS Ronald Jackson? No autopsy, no mortician making the deceased presentable? That, as a veteran, "Jackson" was laid to rest at Arlington dressed like a movie vampire, with no proper identification of the remains? Or even more strangely, that both Ram Singh and Jackson himself allowed Wentworth and Nita to attend the spurious funeral and grieve in vain? And now, healed and sprightly as ever, the ex-soldier just turns up as though nothing had happened? You know, does it seem as if this is not the sort of cruel joke you should pull on Richard Wentworth, of all people? Aside from the Jackson scandal, REIGN OF THE DEATH FIDDLER has the usual mass hysteria and carnage we have come to demand from the Spider. Wentworth engages in a frantic running shoot-out within Macy's that KId Colt would not be ashamed to claim as his own. Nita is her usual enterprising self, investigating on her own as an old lady, and she shows perceptiveness when she points out some fake cops, noticing that one is too short to meet the minimum height requirement. And Norvell Page, balancing the juggling of various suspects and subplots, still manages to throw in an occasional light moment. Leaving yet another scene of horrendous slaughter, Wentworth returns to his care, where "a policeman bawled him out for parking in front of the station entrance and gave him a ticket."