Category Archives: Doc Savage

With the end of the Doc Savage canon approaching (about two more months and I’ll be done) I thought I’d take a break and check a couple of Will Murray’s “Kenneth Robeson” books from the 1990s. I own several, and would probably have more if money hadn’t been so tight in that decade, so presumably I enjoyed them back then. Rereading them with the original books fresh in my mind, not so much. Murray’s an amazing Doc Savage scholar but the two I read this month remind me of Lancer Books’ Conan series — bland imitations of the real thing.

PYTHON ISLE is based on an early 1930s outline by Lester Dent that his editor rejected. Snake stories, the editor believed, didn’t sell, though he also turned it down when Dent proposed making it Lion Island . We open with Doc in his first Fortress of Solitude (before he built the blue dome of Fortress of Solitude) then cut to a gang of South African smugglers led by Blackbird Hinton and King Hancock (“He hadn’t an evil bone in his body. Nor a good one either.”) who shoot down a plane coming too close to their boat. Then they realize the plane is a patchwork held together by gold plates and patches and decide to take a good look. The plane carries Tom Franklin, a pilot who vanished several years earlier, and the beautiful Lha of Ophir (an obvious Tarzan joke by Dent). Franklin escapes and gets a message to Renny, who’s working on a dam project nearby.

Renny gets word to Doc before he’s captured. Hinton gets word to Bull Pizano, a hulking brute (with a soft spot for animals) who can slap Monk around and more than hold his own fighting Doc. There’s the usual assortment of danger and escapes before Doc and his crew wind up on the eponymous island, currently in the grip of  evil high priest, Taxus, whose “invisible wrath” reduces his enemies to zombies (villains used similar gimmicks in Hex and The Czar of Fear but it’s unimpressive here). Eventually Taxus and the smugglers go down; Pizano winds up being eaten by sharks without a final battle with Doc or Monk (Murray says he didn’t think he could do justice to that showdown).

Dent wanted to do a series of stories spotlighting Doc’s aides, starting with Death In Silver but the rejection put paid to that (only The Sea Magician saw print). He did reuse several elements of Python Isle in later stories, for example turning the opening with Lha into the first appearance of the much more impressive Z in The Mental Wizard.  Murray follows Dent’s outline more faithfully than Dent might have (he often made changes when he got to the writing); Murray’s desire to make this just like a 1934 Dent novel is a weakness, reproducing the long detailed descriptions of Doc and his crew that Dent wrote into the early books. It wouldn’t have hurt to leave that out. Though the continuity references to earlier books are good.

THE FRIGHTENED FISH is based on a Dent plot synopsis rather than a detailed outline. Set after The Red Spider (unpublished until Murray dusted it off and got Bantam Books to reprint it in the 1970s) starts off effectively, as three hoods terrify a man with images of fish. The bad guys escape Doc but then the obnoxious, arrogant Celia Adams “of the Massachusetts Adams” shows up, demanding Doc find her missing boyfriend — why, yes, boyfriend Baker Eastland is unwittingly caught up in the same plot, how did you know? Investigating leads Doc & Co. to Massachusetts, where the fishing areas are mysteriously empty of fish; from there they eventually travel to occupied post-war Japan, where the same thing is happening. Doc points out that with Russia now having the a-bomb, the world is already unstable; Japan losing its primary food source would result in even more stability.

Enter Jonas Sown, the mastermind from The Screaming Man, to conform this is exactly his plan: just as his mind-control tech whipped the Axis leaders into war mode a couple of decades earlier, now he’ll do the same with the communist bloc. Japan will become communist and then WW III begins! This time Sown won’t fail!

Unfortunately Sown — added by Murray to Dent’s plot — remains underwhelming. Part of that is that like a lot of post-war Dent stories for the series, this is very talky: Sown spends much more time detailing his big and evil plans for the world than actually doing evil. Eliminating fish as a source of food is indeed a serious threat, but it’s not a very scary one. John Sunlight could have put this across, but Murray says that violates his What Would Lester Do? approach: Dent left Sunlight dead, so dead he must remain.

And then there’s the women of the book. Seryi, the Russian anticommunist from Red Spider, returns but only to break Doc’s heart by sacrificing herself to save him; Celia is written as a bitch with no redeeming features. Dent’s women were usually more capable and likable; even “she-male” Velma Crale in The South Pole Terror comes off better than Celia. She feels like a leftover from when Murray was ghostwriting The Destroyer, a series I found horribly sexist whenever I read it.

Despite my disappointment, I couldn’t resist picking up one of Murray’s later works, Doc Savage: Skull Island because a Doc/King Kong crossover set right after WW I seems irresistible. But that one will get a separate post after I finish it.

#SFWApro. Covers by Joe DeVito, all rights to images remain with current holders.

This trio of yarns, running from late 1947 to 1948, wraps up the string of first-person narration that began with No Light to Die By. They’re also the first to appear under the magazine’s new label, Doc Savage — Science Detective. It’s an oddly retro title, as Science Detectives using forensics, lie detectors and other methods had been a thing 40 years earlier (Craig Kennedy being one of the best known), but as Will Murray says the editorship at the time was experimenting with new ways to boost sales. I think the weird-looking cover below must have been part of that (all three covers are by Walter Swenson)

The narrator of LET’S KILL AMES is Ames, specifically Travice Ames, one time professional chemist turned grifter. As the story begins, her hotel discovers her history of skipping without paying and locks up her rooms. With no other options, she reluctantly allows persistent suitor Nat Pulaski (he’s short. Ames hates short men) to take her out to dinner. Under the influence of a lot of liquor Pulaski lets slip that he’s onto something big: someone is paying him big money to provide a slow-acting poison that the someone will slip to three men; either they pay for the antidote or they die. The treatment is radioactive and Ames remembers the case of the radium girls from a couple of decades earlier, grounding the idea in reality. Nevertheless she figures Pulaski’s just talking big and there’s no real scheme. However this gives her the idea to con one of the men by making it look like he’s been poisoned (she has the chemical know-how) and then offering to find a cure.

Oops. Turns out the poisoning is real, which doesn’t make the dude very happy (“his hands began picking up ruling pens, protractors and rulers and laying them down again without his hands having told him what they were doing. His breathing was hard and audible, like someone sandpapering a bone.”). Ames isn’t too happy either when people start trying to kill her with cyanide. Her solution is to call Doc Savage, figuring she can con him into helping her — he can’t be as savvy and tricky as his press clipping say, right? Suffice to say Ames comes through alive but she doesn’t walk out with a cash bonus.

It’s a fun story and does play up the CSI aspects of Doc’s investigation. The next two novels surprisingly don’t make him any more of a science detective than usual.

The woman narrator of ONCE OVER LIGHTLY is Mary Olga “Mote” Trunnels, who does office work for a PI firm. At least she did until he screwball BFF Glacia calls and demands Mote visit, with promises of a fabulous job and an atypical offer to pay for Mote’s ticket. Mote waits for her paper-pushing boss to do something stupid, makes a big stink out of it when he does, and gets fired, thereby eliminating any need to give two week’s notice. She arrives at a very bizarre, contemporary-styled hotel she describes as the kind of thing an artist would draw for a story set on Mars. Awaiting her is another Dent’s Native American sidekicks a la Secret of the Su and The Goblins, though “Coming Going” turns out to be a federal agent undercover in redface makeup. Shortly after Mote arrives, Glacia’s uncle is murdered. Mote realizes Glacia was hoping she had enough PI experience to help with whatever she’s enmeshed in, which involves a mysterious inheritance and something called “Keeper.” But wait, Doc Savage is passing through town — any chance he can help?

Turns out Doc’s already on the case. The inheritance is the location of a ship that went down with a boatload of processed, atom-bomb ready uranium, “enough to be worth the destiny of several nations.” That’s a very lucrative McGuffin and some very nasty people are, of course, after it. Not bad, and Mote’s a fun narrator, though not as interesting as Travice.

The third novel, I DIED YESTERDAY is Pat Savage’s swan song and gives her the narrator’s role. It opens at Patricia Incorporated, Pat’s ultra-chic, ultra-expensive spa. Miss Colfax, the ice cube who presides over the front desk and makes getting  appointment tougher than being presented to the King of England (the customers pay more because they know they’re an exclusive breed) informs her boss that the young man who just came in is more than she can deal with. Surprised, Pat meets the guy and discovers he has an icepick wedged deep in his back, handle broken off so it can’t just be pulled out. Pat knows if she calls Doc in on whatever’s happening he’ll insist on keeping her out of it so she arranges for her on-call surgeon to treat the guy. He, however, says it requires Doc’s touch — and sure enough, Doc wants Pat safe, especially when he learns there’s already been shooting (someone trying to finish the job on the ice-picked guy). He and Monk waste time trapping Pat and making her think it’s the bad guys doing it so that she’ll stay in the trap. Doesn’t work, of course.

The plot turns out to involve plant biochemistry, a scientific secret worth a fortune and Lucia, a mystical woman convinced destiny is involved. It’s a more SF secret than the first two stories, a chlorophyll-based method for growing food in a lab, thereby potentially eliminating world hunger. The real fun of the story, though, is getting to look in on Pat’s world. We learn a lot about Patricia, Incorporated, including that the staff are generally in awe of her adventurous reputation and slightly disappointed she hasn’t been doing much lately. The salon is decorated by A-list designers who indulge in the same kind of malarkey I only thought came into vogue years later (“the threshold of symphonic harmony with nectarian living.”).

Then there’s the gadgets. It turns out has Doc has been de-emphasizing his gadgetry in favor of relying on his wits — he figures it’ll keep him more resourceful — Pat has been collecting and storing them. She has a fashionable jacket, for instance, that’s actually a utility belt with gas bombs, smoke bombs and thermite sewn into the sleeve (after seeing it at work, she reconsiders the risks of that one).

That makes it all the more frustrating that at the end of the story, Pat’s contemplating quitting adventuring. She wonders if it’s fear, then realizes she’s not scared, she just doesn’t want to stick her neck out like this. Admittedly the cast is dwindling — Johnny’s gone, Renny and Long Tom have one story each left — but the guys aren’t contemplating retirement. The book deserves a better ending. But still, giving us a Pat-centered novel is more than I’d have expected.

#SFWApro. Rights to covers remain with current holders.

This month’s set of adventures feel very strongly post-WW II, not so much in style as in the issues: escaped Nazis lingering on after the war, the fear of nukes (only the U.S. had any atomic bombs, but would it stay that way?) and the post-war housing boom.

THE EXPLODING LAKE opens with Juan Russell, an Argentinian metallurgist, out in the wilds hunting for ores… when a lake literally explodes in a ball of fire. Staring at where the water used to be, Russell worries the only explanation is that someone’s testing a nuclear bomb. He tries his best to contact Doc Savage, but the sinister, icy Paul Cort eliminates Russell first. Cort subsequently winds up on a flight to the U.S. along with eccentric fat man Orlin Dartlic and flamboyant Susan Lane, who’s trying to smuggle an ocelot cub onto the plane (she claims she shot its mother). Despite Cort shadowing him, Dartlic makes it to Doc and shares the news that someone might be developing atom bombs. In Argentina. Which was a notorious haven for ex-Nazis at the time (and for years afterwards).

For technical reasons, Doc doesn’t think this is a nuclear case, but still… So off he goes with Monk, Ham and Renny to investigate. Cort, Dantlic and Lane all get involved and it soon looks like Cort might not be the only bad guy in the batch. As it turns out, though, Dantlic is a Dutch Nazi-hunter and Lane is a U.S. agent (unlike the previous a-bomb story, Terror and the Lonely Widow, there’s no suggestion Susan shouldn’t be in this line of work).

It turns out the bad guy is indeed a fugitive Nazi, scientist Hans Boehl, but nukes aren’t an issue. The exploding lake was just a fake staged with gasoline to grab Doc’s attention (why they killed Russell to stop him contacting Doc goes unexplained).  Boehl has a transmutation machine he stole from Germany before the war ended, and he wants Doc to get it in working order so Boehl can make enough gold for his future plans. Doc insists transmutation is impossible, but cooperates long enough to take him down. In a nice touch, Doc speculates that Boehl may have been scammed by a con man into believing the machine works.

This feels very pre-war in a lot of ways, such as Doc using his anesthetic grenades again. Maybe that’s because he co-wrote this one with Harold Davis.

DEATH IN LITTLE HOUSES is another co-written job, with William Bogart this time. Like Fire and Ice, Davis goes way heavy on travel brochure descriptions, this time on Lake Michigan. The story starts looking for a friend, electrical engineer Daniel Jameson, who’s mysteriously vanished, then turns up murdered. We also have a bearded hulk of a man visiting a display of tiny model homes and stealing one of them. Before long it appears there are multiple bearded hulks lurking around Chicago.The scheme behind it has a ripped-from-the-headlines quality: the bad guys are in the prefabricated housing business and beating the competition by stealing housing plans, electrical patents and such. The beards hide that several of the crooks are ex-cons busted out of prison, and confuse things by making them look like members of a local monastic order. It’s an ingenious idea, but the story never catches fire. The best bit is Marjorie “Speed” Calloway, the tough-talking head of a trucking outfit who gets involved in the case (thirty years later, the same kind of character would be spouting CB-radio slang).

THE DEVIL IS JONES is all Dent, and interesting, but not entirely satisfying. Hazard, a political boss in the Midwest (loosely based on the recently deceased Tom Pendergast of Missouri) to deal with the mysterious Jones, a shadowy, Keyzer Soze-like criminal figure (“Nobody knows what the Devil looks like and nobody has seen the Devil.”) whose activities include blackmailing a variety of people. The initial leads take Doc to a kind of floating cocktail party stuffed with bored sophisticates, most notably Smokey, a long-legged brunette who throws Doc off-balance by flirting with him. When murder disrupts the party, it’s obvious Doc’s being framed yet again; fortunately Madison, one of the state troopers on the case is on the level and helps out. Doc brings him into the investigation, which proves to be a mistake, as Madison’s actually a rat working for Jones. Who it turns out is Hazard; the governor of the state wanted Doc called in to deal with Jones, so Hazard took point, hoping he could get Doc out of the way.

Dent was writing straight mysteries at the time and this fits into the genre: you could substitute any reasonably competent PI and get the same story. It’s well-written and the cynical eye Dent casts on the characters is quite entertaining. However, the whole set-up using the party to frame Doc feels pointless. Like a number of mystery-novel plots, it’s way too elaborate to work.

#SFWApro. Covers by Charles J. Ravel (and I must say the Exploding Lake image is a real grabber), all rights to images remain with current holders.

For writing Doc Savage (or anything else), Lester Dent’s all-purpose plot outline says to start the story with either an unusual murder method; a normal method but bizarre circumstances; an unusual McGuffin; or a different setting. By 1946, he was definitely not hewing to that approach, but he does know how to hook readers with a striking opening, even if the story doesn’t stay at that level.

Dent and his occasional ghost writers also tried coming up with good titles, many of which, like all three novels I read this month, got changed by his editors. Sometimes these were minor: The Crime Annihilist became The Annihilist. Sometimes they missed the boat: Crew of Skeletons became Brand of the Werewolf, but Dent’s title makes much more sense. Now, as to this month’s reading —

COLORS FOR MURDER was originally titled Jonah Had a Whale which, while a little whimsical, made more sense, as you’ll see. The opening is great: Della Nelson has just seen her brother seized by bad guys who’ve warned her to stay silent. She’s terrified. The crooks recommend a vacation to Cuba, paid for by her brother; just stay out of the way and everything will be fine.

It won’t. Della knows that. And for confirmation, when the stewardess hands her some aspirin, a jerk passenger snatches them for himself — and dies, poisoned. The killer, South, is displeased but rationalizes that fat people suck, so the overweight dead guy had it coming; justifying his murders is a quirk with him, but not one that plays any role in the rest of the book. And the rest of the book, is unfortunately, dull. The scheme involves Arthur Pogany, a whaling enthusiast who it turns out has found a treatment to make whales generate extra ambergris, potentially making him a fortune. The four captive whales have been painted different colors so he can tell which ones he’s treated on a given day (the treatment of whales would not go over well today, I suspect). South’s group want to kill Pogany and take his discovery.

The only really good moment after the opening is the end, when it turns out Pogany’s a fraud. His treatment doesn’t work but he thought South was a rich mark he could swindle easily. Oops.

A curious detail is that Dent avoids any actual description of Doc, as if he wants to leave the usual awed descriptions of Doc’s physique behind with the gadgets and the supervillains.

FIRE AND ICE is the first story in four years by ghost-writer William Bogart, whose own title, Deuces Wild, was slightly more interesting. Nothing else in this story is. Bogart begins with travel-brochure writing about the Alaskan wilderness before getting to the action, Doc rescuing Patience, a beautiful woman with plane problems (Doc’s up there looking at possible tourist flights for one of the airlines he owns). Doc puts her up in a nearby town, but she’s attacked by a sniper in the night. Fortunately Doc’s swapped rooms with her. They eventually head back to New York to figure out what’s really going on.

It turns out Patience’s twin sister, nicknamed “Impatience,” has discovered a ring smuggling Nazi war criminals into the U.S. (a popular postwar plot in fiction, which is ironic given the government actively recruited useful Nazis to its service). Impatience reported this to the FBI, narrowly escaping death. Patience hoped to draw the crooks’ fire by posing as her sister, then figured the crooks would back off once she joined forces with Doc. They didn’t.

It’s a dull, routine thriller, not up to Dent’s post-war stuff and the villains are surprisingly inefficient. Their attacks on Patience aren’t above the level of what a gang of juvenile delinquents could manage. There is one joke, when a pilot tells a friend “I’ll see you in Gotham, Alfred” — Superman jokes in the previous couple of stories, now Batman.

THREE TIMES A CORPSE is the pick of this month’s reading, and easily the best title, even though Dent’s Sea Snare makes more sense. It starts with Doc on vacation in Miami, where a couple of engaging low-lifes, Sam and Petey, have accepted a commission to play a practical joke on Doc. The joke takes the form of a gun set up to detonate and fire a shot into the table where Doc’s eating dinner across the street (in an odd detail, part of the Rube Goldberg mechanism is a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People used as part of the trigger device). The idea is that this will lead Doc on a wild goose chase to Montana, and out of the clutches of the sexy gambler Lucky, who supposedly has her hooks in him.

The gun goes off as its supposed to, but Sam’s snooping about when Doc has his meals tipped off the restaurateur that something’s fishy so Sam and Petey wind up in Doc’s clutches. The local police are fans of Doc (not something we see a lot in this period) and are happy to play games to get the truth out of the guys. The truth leads them to Lucky, a stunning redhead whose name refers to her uncanny gambling luck: if she plays the slots they pay out, ditto any other game she plays. In a nice touch, she only recognizes Doc’s name because she uses his cousin Pat’s line of high-priced beauty products.

This is not, of course, the first time Doc’s vacation has been ruined by someone causing trouble, but he’s actually happy about it, accepting that a nice, relaxing vacation doesn’t suit him as well as a bit of danger. Doc, Ham, Monk investigate who’s trying to get him out of Miami, accompanied by the cops, Lucky and the low-lifes. The title comes when one of the bad guys gets murdered apparently three different ways before he can talk: poisoned cigarette, needle fired into his heart, another fired into his brain.

The McGuffin is dull, a shipload of beryllium that sank offshore and (as so often during this period), now has two gangs of crooks hunting for it. But up to that point, the story is engaging enough I can forgive the bland McGuffin.

#SFWApro. First two covers by Emery Clarke, third by Charles J. Ravel. Rights to all images remain with current holders.