Category Archives: Doc Savage

The Fred Pfeiffer cover for the Bantam reprint of QUEST OF THE SPIDER is a lie. Doc does not deal with a giant spider. It’s a strictly mundane story with some severe problems, but I like it perhaps more than it deserves. Certainly it shows the style and formula for the series firming up.

The opening, for example, is one Dent would use multiple times: frightened people try to reach Doc for help but bad guys try to stop them. The frightened people are lumber tycoon Ed Danielsen and his gorgeous daughter Edna. An agent for the Grey Spider sabotages the commercial plane they’re taking to NYC, having already destroyed their parachutes. The Danielsens survive, however, and reach Ed’s old WW I buddy Ham, who introduces them to Dco.

Danielsen explains the Grey Spider is making a fortune by taking over lumber companies, then selling off the assets; he executes the takeovers by intimidation, violence or any other means that work. Now Danielsen’s company is in the spider’s gunsights; can Doc help.

In contrast to Thunder Island and the Valley of the Vanished, we get New Orleans and Louisiana swampland. Even the villain’s base is just a mundane big house hidden by trees. That said, it’s action-packed and effective … but also racist. The Grey Spider’s forces are ignorant, half-savage voodoo worshippers from the depths of the swamp, probably mixed race (Dent doesn’t specify but the description and the voodoo make me think so). Though one of them gets to die a hero, sacrificing himself to save Doc from a deathtrap when he learns the Man of Bronze has cured the swamp man’s mentally handicapped son (just a shard of bone pressing in the wrong place).

Dent does better on gender, with Edna the first of the smart, competent beauties he’d write into the book. She’s stunning enough that Hollywood offered her a career in the movies; she replied that as vice-president of her dad’s company she already makes more than the studio was offering.

While the foe is mundane, Doc’s weapons are getting more fantastic. He uses a drug that renders its victims complacent so they’ll blandly follow orders; more notably Quest of the Spider introduces Doc’s glass grenades, which knock their targets out with quick-acting anesthetic gas. He’d go on using them for years. We also learn Doc and his men have become fluent in Mayan, which they use here to communicate without anyone following the conversation. That would also become a series staple. The villain’s financial shenanigans would also be a recurring element in Doc’s adventures; the Grey Spider’s scheme here is a dry run for the more interesting money games in Death in Silver.

Dent brings up the crime college again but unlike Land of Terror, it now uses brain surgery rather than psychotherapy to cure crooks of crime. While Doc has fewer qualms killing in combat than he did later, there’s much less emphasis on his ruthlessness. His charity gets played up a lot. As a condition for helping Danielsen he wants a cool million which outrages Big Ed. Then Doc tells him it’s to set up a Louisiana charity that will feed, clothe and educate the poor.

On the downside, Doc for the first time fakes his death, something his five sidekicks fall for every time. It’s particularly uninspired here, involving a fake crocodile Doc just happens to have handy. We also get Dent starting to buff up Doc’s CV.  Here we learn his handwriting is so neat and perfect, nobody could possibly duplicate it. More impressively, Edna recognizes the name of Clark Savage Jr. from a new, fast-growing tree he’s developed to replenish forests around the world.

Dent is still tinkering with the team’s personalities. Long Tom here has an eye for pretty girls; he becomes much less interested in them in later books.

After this, I don’t think I’ll need to do any more rereads unless I’m looking for specific details.

#SFWApro. Death in Silver cover by James Bama, all rights to images remain with current holder.

THE LAND OF TERROR is the second Doc Savage novel and in several ways it’s an outlier, a clear sign Lester Dent and his editors were still figuring the series out.

At the same time the book follows the formula of The Man of Bronze. Both start with the murder of someone close to Doc (though his father’s death in the first book happened before the first chapter); both split time between New York and exotic location; both have a mystery mastermind with a secret identity. There’s a unique weapon the bad guys to use to kill, something Dent recommends in his writing rules.

Instead of the Red Death of the first book, though, the weapon here is the much more formidable Smoke of Eternity. In the opening chapter, crooks working for the sinister Kar murder Doc’s former teacher Jerome Coffern, then fire a pellet containing the Smoke of Eternity at his body. Once the casing shatters the substance disintegrates Coffern’s body and the street he’s lying on, leaving behind a cloud of grey smoke laced with electric sparks.

With no body Coffern’s disappearance would never be explained, except that a)his forearm and expensive watch fall just outside the radius of the Smoke’s effect; b)Doc Savage showed up to meet him. Doc tracks the gang, killing several of them, learns about Kar and his plans to use the Smoke of Eternity for crime.

The first four chapters are all Doc, with none of his five aides. He’s more ruthless than in any other book, killing one crook after the other when they try to shoot him (he’s not wearing a bulletproof shirt yet). While this could be grief over Coffern’s death, the narration makes it clear this is Doc’s code: cross him and you either reform or die. Doc doesn’t “mollycoddle” crooks.

Doc’s more than just a Shadow/Punisher-type vigilante though. When he encounters a poor, half-blind old woman while hunting the killers, he takes the time to give her some money and send her to an eye surgeon who’ll fix her vision for free, at Doc’s request. When a bank rewards him for stopping a robbery by Kar’s gang, he pays several restaurants to provide food to the homeless and poor. And for all the violence, his preferred solution to crime is sending them to a clinic for extensive psychotherapy to reform them (all crooks are mentally ill, you see), the initial concept for the crime college.

While Dent devotes the opening chapters to demonstrating Doc’s awesomeness there’s more show, less tell than in Man of Bronze. Coffern kicks things up by asking his colleagues if they’ve heard of Clark Savage; one remembers his recent groundbreaking work in organic chemical analysis, another remembers a breakthrough in brain surgery. Can one person be a giant in two such unrelated fields? Coffern says yes. Despite Doc’s father being a legend himself, nobody here thinks of Clark Savage Sr.

After the death, Doc goes into action. He can hurdle over a security fence effortless, track the crooks by the slightest traces left behind, outrun a car when it’s in first or second gear and kill one hood by throwing a pike through his body. Plus a few more spectacular stunts.

Kar’s secret identity is more prominent in the story than the official behind the mask of the Son of the Feathered Serpent in the previous book. That works better but I’m puzzled by his choice of pseudonym. Kar is a bland nom du crime compared to the Squeaking Goblin or the Man in the Moon but it’s distinctive enough I’d like to know why the villain picked it. We never do.

Just as the Smoke of Eternity is the most science-fictional weapon of the first year of Doc Savage Magazine, Thunder Isle is more SF than the Valley of the Vanished or the lost cities lying ahead. It’s a thousand-foot high volcanic crater in the Pacific and inside it lies the mineral from which Kar developed the Smoke of Eternity. When Doc’s plane descends through the thick mist over the crater they’re attacked by a pterodactyl; cut off from the outside, dinosaurs have survived on Thunder Isle into the present. This makes it a very bad place for the plane to crash as the good guys face both Kar’s goons and prehistoric wildlife.

Among other notes of interest:

•Doc still doesn’t have a bulletproof shirt or a pocketful of gadgets. He has no issues with using guns. His team have special guns but they’re simply compact machine guns rather than the superfirer pistols that would become standard later.

•It’s the only novel in the series I can remember with no pretty woman in it. Other thank walk-ons, the cast is all male. There’s a reference to Monk’s beautiful secretary but she doesn’t appear on the page.

•Monk rolls his own cigarettes. Dent went back and forth through the series on whether any of Doc’s men smoke — but of course Monk could have quit, then gone back to it.

•Johnny shows extensive knowledge of dinosaurs, as he would in several later books. Dent seems to assume that paleontology and geology are more or less the same thing. Dent has dropped the idea in Man of Bronze that Johnny gets crazy but accurate hunches. While the first book told us Johnny’s tall and skinny, this one emphasizes that he’s so “tall and gaunt” his shoulders “were like a coat hanger under his coat.” We also learn that his left eye is almost useless so he has a magnifying lens in the left side of his spectacles for convenience.

#SFWAPro. Covers by Douglas Rosa (top) and Walter Baumhofer.

One of my goals for this year — realistically 2024 — is to take my Doc Savage blog posts and convert them into a self-published book. As my first posts weren’t terribly detailed, I’m going back and rereading Man of Bronze, Land of Terror and Quest of the Spider. And needless to say, blog about them. This may be counter-productive as it’s less reason to buy the book; then again, I’ll be able to go into more detail there.

The Man of Bronze is particularly interesting to read with the remaining 181 (counting In Hell, Madonna) books fresh in my mind. It’s easy to see how it introduces many of the series standard elements, but also places where Lester Dent hasn’t gotten everything established yet. In one place it’s funny: when a Mayan assassin fires through the window of Doc’s 86th floor HQ, one of his team suggests installing bulletproof glass. The others laugh at the idea their enemies will be shooting through 86th floor windows on a regular basis (they were kind of wrong about that).

The book opens with Doc returning from the Fortress of Solitude to the news that his father has just died from a mysterious, swift-acting disease. As Doc learns about a fabulous legacy Clark Savage Senior left him, the assassin fires from a construction site across the seat. After some spectacular action chasing the bad guys, Doc and his five friends head down into Hidalgo, where the legacy lies.

It turns out that Hidalgo’s jungles hide a lost city of pureblood Mayans. Savage Senior came there years ago and formed a friendship with their king, Chac. If Chac approves of Doc, he’ll underwrite his crimefighting and dogooding with a fortune in Mayan gold. The villainous Son of the Feathered Serpent, however, plans to use a bioweapon, the Red Death, to extract the gold and finance the overthrow of Hidalgo’s democratic government.

Familiar series elements include the lost civilization; an adventure that starts in New York and moves to a colorful foreign setting; lots of airplane flying ; a masked villain; a beautiful woman falling for Doc; a super-weapon; and a beautiful woman (Chac’s daughter Monja) falling for Doc.

The science fictional component is very low compared to many later novels: the Red Death is simply a disease the Son of the Feathered Serpent found in another part of Central America and grew in the lab. It’s the only SF element in the book. It’s also unusual, IIRC, in opening from the villain’s point of view.

Ham gets one of his rare opportunities to do something legal, when he confronts a Hidalgo official who denies Doc’s legal claims. Ham demolishes his argument in short order. That rarely happens (according to Will Murray’s Writings in Bronze Dent didn’t like lawyers but his editor insisted on Ham). Johnny’s character trait — other than being skeletally thin and a brilliant archeologist/geologist — is that he gets hunches that are almost invariably right (but when they’re wrong, they’re way wrong). I don’t believe that lasted even to the next book; later we’d get Johnny offering to bet on sure things before Dent struck gold by making him the guy who speaks in big, polysyllabic words.

Doc himself is a barebones version: no bulletproof vest and none of the gadgets he’d later carry around with him. He’s much quicker to kill his enemies than he’d become by the end of the year. The story emphasizes his adrenalin-junkie side: when he thinks of what he can do with the gold, having exciting adventures is up there with helping people and fighting crime.  And we learn more about Doc’s father than I remembered: he himself was a philanthropist, an adventurer and an MD just like his son, traveling all over the world to do good.

Another detail: Doc refers to his land grant in Hidalgo having been drawn up twenty years earlier, when he was a kid. Based on that, we can safely assume he’s either late twenties or early thirties in 1933.

The handling of the Mayans is interesting. They’re very much noble savages but also simple and superstitious. However Doc treats them with unusual respect compared to most stories: if Chac doesn’t think Doc deserves the gold Doc will accept that. In most stories, natives who get between white men and gold are treated like a natural obstacle to be swept aside, rather than people with rights.

Monja is a fan favorite love interest and I’ve thought of her that way in the past. Here, though, she doesn’t seem any more special or have any more impact on Doc than many later women would. Monk assures her she’s come closer to melting Doc’s heart than any other women but I think he’s just saying that to comfort her.

As I said in my first review, the book is a slow start to the series: jam-packed with action but also several slow descriptive passages to introduce Doc’s awesomeness or his five aides. Still, I can see how it launched the second-longest running series in pulp fiction.

#SFWApro. Cover by James Bama, all rights remain with current holder.

THE MILLENNIUM BUG: Doc Brazen #1 by Jeff Deischer feels more like Lester Dent than any Doc Savage pastiche I’ve ever read. I’m not entirely sure that works, though I’m sure I’ll read Book Two eventually. Caution: spoilers included below.

Deischer is a die-hard Doc Savage fan who’s written both Man of Bronze fanfic and a chronology (not the one I read a couple of years back); his cover design was a deliberate attempt to capture some of the stylized covers of the post-war novels (I’ve got an example by Walter Swenson below). He says in the afterword his dream was to write an authorized Doc Savage novel; as he wasn’t in a position to do that, writing the adventures of Ulysses Brazen was the next best thing.

As the title suggests, this 2018 novel is set in the late 1990s. Doc Brazen has retired to Coronado (equivalent of Hidalgo) happily married to the counterpart of Princess Monja (here an Aztec rather than Mayan). Then several graduates of the Crime College — er, Brazen Institute — revert to their criminal ways. Doc investigates, accompanied by two Aztecs (Monk and Ham analogs, though not exactly). During the investigation, he acquires an added team: a computer expert, a French cat burglar (one of the reprogrammed graduates) and the daughter of the female adventurer in The South Pole Terror.What’s behind it? It turns out John Sunlight‘s followers — er John Spectrum’s — cloned what was left of him after The Devil Genghis. The clone is now a thirteen year old boy and while he didn’t inherit Spectrum’s memory he’s been trained and conditioned to think just like him (a nice variation on the usual clone-the-memory techniques). Targeting the Brazen Institute is meant to blacken Doc’s name, discrediting him before Spectrum Jr. launches his master plan.

I read this enjoying Deischer’s knowledge of and love for the original series. Millennium Bug itself, though, feels more like a so-so original novel such as The Devil’s Playground than, say, Millennium’s excellent Doc Savage comic. Deischer said setting Doc in the modern world was a way to make the book stand-out, as most pastiches (e.g, Doc Sidhe) go for a 1930s setting. The trouble is, nothing felt terribly 1990s other than people having cell-phones and computers; despite the title, the Y2K bug doesn’t figure into the plot at all. The language is outdated too (calling “Thunderbird” Crale an aviatrix rather than a pilot is very pulp-era). DC Comics did better contemporary Doc stories.

Another problem is that Spectrum’s plan doesn’t make any sense: the only thing targeting the Brazen Institute accomplishes is bringing Doc out of retirement. Though that may be intentional: Spectrum, for all his brainwashing, is still a thirteen-year-old boy so it’s not surprising his plan is more about spite for “his” old foe than a tactical master-stroke.

A minor but annoying point for me is that like Will Murray Deischer insists John Sunlight’s death at the end of Devil Genghis can’t be changed out of respect for Dent; he dislikes Millennium’s decision to show Sunlight escaped death (I found it perfectly plausible myself). And like a number of fans he takes John Sunlight’s declaration in that novel that he wants to build a peaceful utopia at face value; I can’t see it as anything but a lie to get Doc off-guard. Plus of course, what constitutes a utopia for the monstrous Sunlight is probably dystopia for anyone else.

(As a minor point, has anyone ever done a sequel to Repel? Cadwiller Olden was a formidable foe and the ending clearly leaves his death in doubt. If not, someone should get on it … hmm …)

I may be making Millennium Bug sound worse than it is; it’s hard for me not to approach something like this more analytically than enthusiastically. Certainly it’s a better story than Dynamite’s initial comics story arc or Lin Carter’s Prince Zarkon. Or, you know, James Patterson’s take. I’ll see what I think when I finally get around to book 2.

#SFWApro. All rights to cover images remain with current holder.

Given what a mess James Patterson and Brian Sitts made of The Shadow, I read their Doc Savage reboot, THE PERFECT ASSASSIN, without much enthusiasm. It isn’t good, but it doesn’t mangle the Man of Bronze the way the duo (which I assume is mostly Sitts, with Patterson providing marquee value) mangled the Master of Darkness.

Our protagonist is Brandt Savage, grandson of Clark Savage Junior. He’s aware of his ancestor’s legend, though he assumes it’s exaggerated, and the apple has fallen far from the tree: Brandt is a dull, scholarly introvert who’s happiest spending his evenings reading at home (I did bristle a little at the implication this is a bad lifestyle choice). Then he’s kidnapped by a woman named Meed. She subjects him to an insanely intensive training course that also remakes his body (taller, buffer) in ways I doubt made sense but I wasn’t reading closely enough to find out.

These scenes alternate with scenes of Meed’s past, undergoing training in what looks like a rip off of the Red Room that gave birth to Black Widow at Marvel. Eventually she balked at the ugly hits she was sent to do and escaped, but the Russian establishment is still training kidnapped girls. She wants to end it. Brandt is going to help, like it or not (contrary to the cover copy he is not being made into a perfect assassin).

Why pick Brandt? Meed eventually reveals she’s John Sunlight‘s daughter Kyra. The Red Room knockoff operates on a twisted version of the training program that created Doc Savage, based on information Sunlight got from the twin brother we didn’t know Doc had. The twin was Clark Savage Sr.’s test case, given none of the training Doc did so their father could quantify it’s effectiveness. I can understand the brother having issues.

Together, Brandt and Kyra take down the organization, become lovers and Brandt becomes a true heir to his grandfather — don’t call him doctor or professor, just call him “Doc,” okay?

As the book doesn’t use Lester Dent’s Doc Savage, it doesn’t piss me off the way The Shadow did. The Perfect Assassin doesn’t rewrite Doc’s history the way they authors did the Shadow, either. One of the best moments is when Brandt winds up in Doc’s Fortress of Solitude and it finally sinks in that everything he’s ever heard about Clark Savage Junior is true. There’s a genuine sense of awe in that moment.

Despite that, and some good action scenes, I did not care for the book. The long training sequences are dull, the scenes from Kyra’s past are stock (she’s not far off from assassin-turned-Batgirl Cassandra Cain) and after the bad guys go down we spend a pointless amount of time on wrapping the story up. I skimmed more than half of the story and don’t feel I missed anything.

On top of which I have some picky fan criticisms. Back when Marvel had the Doc Savage rights they had a team-up with Spider-Man — actually a story where Doc and Spidey fight the same menace in the 1930s and the 1970s. Rereading it along with Marvel’s first Doc Savage series, it struck me that instead of Peter Parker vaguely remembering Doc as an early superhero, a science nerd like Peter would probably remember him as a groundbreaking scientist (e.g., “I read his Atomic Science Simplified when I was 10, it made the physics so clear!”).

Same problem here: long after Doc’s adventures have faded, his science work would keep his name alive. Brandt’s an anthropologist so he ought to remember Johnny Littlejohn, Doc’s aide, as a top guy in the field. I can’t believe Johnny didn’t have some landmark research that Brandt would have heard of.

And John Sunlight’s daughter really should be more distinctive than Kyra. If she were just a straight graduate of the assassin academy with no significant parents it wouldn’t have changed anything. Being Kyra Sunlight rationalizes her going to Brandt for help, but that’s it.

#SFWApro. Covers by James Bama, Bama again, and Gil Kane. All rights remain with current holders.