Pulp reprint company Steeger Books has provided me with a number of neat books such as Hades and Hocus Pocus. When they had a pre-Christmas sales I picked up the two sequels to Lester Dent’s Talking Toad and threw in the ebook of Paul Ernst’s THE COMPLETE TALES OF DOCTOR SATAN.
I know Paul Ernst primarily from the Avenger, a pulp crimefighter from Street and Smith who appeared under the same Kenneth Robeson house name as Doc Savage (the introduction by John Pelan lists many other works by Eernst). Doctor Satan was a villain-centric series of eight stories that ran in multiple issues of Weird Tales. Pelan says, correctly, that reading them too close together will make the formula stale. He’s correct, but they don’t work any better read individually.
Certainly the openings are impressive. In the first story, “Doctor Satan,” for instance, several wealthy men die when a small tree roots in their body and grows rapidly through their skulls. It’s the work of the eponymous villain, the son of one of America’s most prestigious, wealthiest families. Bored with the perks of his status, he itches for more thrills, and he’s getting them through crime. A master of weird science and the occult, his tricks in subsequent stories including summoning lightning bolts, turning flesh transparent (pay up or walk around like a skeleton), and contacting the dead to learn their secrets. While he’s into crime for thrills, he does want the money: forcing his victims to pay up is proof he’s won the game.
Opposing him is Ascott Keane, another child of wealth who lets the world think of him as another callow socialite. In reality Keane has mastered the same skills as Doctor Satan and uses them in his vocation, fighting crime. In the first story he realizes how Doctor Satan is growing those hell-trees and sets out to thwart his blackmail scam. Once Keane crosses Satan’s path, the schemer will stop at nothing to destroy the man who defeated him.
Pelan suggests Satan turning to crime out of boredom is inadequate as a motive. I disagree: it’s a large part of what drives Dr. Mabuse in his first film and that’s a classic. Mabuse, however, plays on a much bigger scale than Doctor Satan: for all his spectacular murder methods, each story deals with a single crime campaign so the villain never builds up any momentum.
A bigger problem is that being a thrill-killer doesn’t give him any personality — he’s interchangeable with any mad, cackling fiend from that era, whether in serials, comics or pulps. He could enjoy having a worthy opponent, as the Joker often did with Batman … instead, he just hates Keane. Who has no personality either, other than being heroic. And as we never see Keane when he’s not on the case his having a secret identity doesn’t matter much. Even Satan’s aides, a fur-covered monkey man (not literally, more like a sideshow freak) and a legless brute man, could as easily be generic thugs. We never see the brute throw down with Keane, as I usually expect with that kind of hired muscle.
Overall, it’s a useful guide in how not to do it.
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