Category: reviews (Page 2 of 3)

Bonus post: The Doc Savage Method of Personal Development

“The Woman from the Ocean,” by Karl Bunker

23 March, 2023 / roscoe.mathieu

In 2014, I returned to America. I flew into Boston to graduate from Northeastern, cum laude, and step foot onto my putative alma mater for the first time. Hanging around in Cambridge the day before, I stopped by an honest-to-God newsstand and picked up next month’s issue of Asimov’s, feeling extremely Benny Russell as I did so.

In a nearby café whose name I long forgot, I opened it up and began to read.

I’ve thought of this story ever since. Through the end of Obama, the madness of 2016, the Trump presidency, hanging beef, selling cell phones, working tech support, through COVID, layoffs, and the coming of Lyra, I’ve thought of this story. It strikes me at odd moments, and I shiver a little.

The prose is workmanlike, but so was Asimov’s. But the idea…

Michael works in wood, in the village where Jim throws pots and Sarah dispenses medicines and Ann weaves cloth. And his is the first cabin, closest to the shore, when the woman from the ocean comes. She helps herself in, warms herself by the fire, and when she can be civilized again after her trials, she introduces herself as Kali. Her bright clothes and strange accent mark her a stranger, but everyone in the village is helpful and hopeful to anyone they meet in the flesh.

Kali’s ship had crashed, and she, ultimately, the only survivor. She and her people had left a world of war, on the brink of self-destruction, and she has found herself in a new world where the people barter for what they need, where they learn from master to apprentice, where no one has ever heard of writing.

And no one has heard of war.

“Wars…” Susan repeated, mouthing the word in a way that suggested it was a sound with no meaning.

“People killing people, in large numbers.”

Furrows deepened in Susan’s face. “People? Which people? Killing…which people?”

“That’s a very good question, Susan.” Kali lay back down on her side, pulling the blankets up and closing her eyes.

Kali follows the script everyone suggests to her, goes to apprentice to Michael, gets romanced by Michael. Michael plays her some of his songs on a homemade zither, the folk songs handed down from one voice to another and some of his own compositions. She asks about written music, but he doesn’t understand the concept.

“I do share my music with everyone,” Michael said. “I teach my songs to anyone who asks.”

“But what about other people? What about people you might never meet, people far away, people in the future, after you’re gone? If you wrote your music down, it could last forever. Isn’t that a lovely thought?”

Michael frowned, as if struggling to understand. “But … who are these people? Why would they want to know my songs?”

An edge came to Kali’s voice. “Some people would want to. Not everyone, but some people would see them and love them. Can you see the beauty of that idea?”

Michael started to speak, stopped, started again. “It seems … strange. Why would I give something to someone I don’t know, someone I’ve never even met? Someone who has never asked me for the thing I’m giving? If I could see this person, if he told me he wanted to learn my songs, then I would understand …” His voice faded.

After muttering some Shakespeare, Kali theorizes what may have happened. A virus (Michael mouths ‘vi-rus?’, another unknown to him), probably man-made, released into the air, changing the DNA and cerebral expression of all the newborn babies. Affecting the expression of social behavior – how we think of social behavior. Michael, and Susan and Jim and Ann and everyone in this brave new world, are unable to think of social structures in the abstract – unable to identify with nation, with distant ancestors, even with “the village” as a thing unto itself, separate from other villages. They only identify with the people in front of them.

Some distant spark eliminated ‘them’ from our consciousness…along with ‘us.’ Oxytocin, after all, is the hormone of family love, and also tribalistic hatred. Kali bitterly calls it “probably the least invasive thing, the smallest possible change you could make to human nature and still make war impossible.” As she puts it: “People are as intelligent, as aggressive, as passionate as they ever were, but they won’t make war.”

It’s Michael’s incomprehension, Kali’s bitterness, that always comes back to me. This notion of a pacifist people without flags, without place names, without memory and without future, the generations turning over in stagnancy, that haunts me. Surely, someone thought this was a utopia. Surely enough, some people IRL absolutely do. I’d like to see what they make of this little village where the woman from the ocean came to live.

Michael points out that things do change, even without things like war and scholarship and literature and history. Kali came from the ocean. That changed his life. Michael is right.

Kali follows the script, marries Michael, bears him a daughter, Asha. Asha is a bright and beautiful child, beloved of the village…but as Kali tries to teach her letters, she proves Michael’s child. The virus is still in the air, Kali herself is “the last of an extinct species, a species that failed and died out long ago.” She wonders what the hell she was thinking – what difference could one child make? Or a dozen? And to what end? To bring back the world set to annihilate itself? To bring back war?

Kali walks back out into the ocean, in her tattered but still-bright ship’s uniform, and does not come back.

Michael did not marry again. He was devoted to his daughter and lavished all his love and attention on her. As she grew older she would sometimes speak about people in the world outside the village in strange ways, almost as if they were people that she knew. Her father only smiled at this, and didn’t criticize her for her odd ideas.

It’s long past Nebulas season for this little story from 2014. Then, and now, I don’t think it would appeal to enough folks to garner a Hugo. But it’s collected a very select prize indeed – it rattles around in the back of my head, years later, so much so I specifically sought out and bought another copy of Asimov’s just to read it again.

I think of this story every time someone describes a utopia, and in my business, I hear a lot of utopias. Would this utopia be capable of war? Of scholarship? Of memory? Of descent? Or would they be pleasant, bland nothings, generation on generation, like the village by the ocean that Kali found? Would a Kali fallen into this utopia, or that one, or mine, find a place for herself? Or would she have to march back out into the ocean again?

What Bunker describes is no less than the death of the social sciences I had spent four years studying in China when I picked up that newsstand copy in Boston. And it was a dark world, unlit by science and unhallowed by history, and it is a world that many people fervently wish to plunge us into. One small change, and we are placid tribes again.

It’s enough to make you want to take a long walk off the shore.

The Lost Oasis, original printing (1933)

Doc Savage at 90: The Lost Oasis

16 March, 2023 / roscoe.mathieu

DATELINE – SEPTEMBER 1933 – NEW YORK CITY/THE SUDAN – A ship is docked in New York harbor, a ship offering one million dollars for the sight of one man: Doc Savage! Newsies loudly crow the top headline (the ghost Zeppelin over Maine is relegated to page 2). Doc, being a modest sort, strips to his skivvies in an alley and swims over instead of dealing with the crowds and the money.

After playing witness to an expiring Frenchman and pocketing his goods, Doc overhears two people talking in their cabin: Lady Nelia Sealing and a Rufus known, innovatively, as “Red.” They speak of “those left behind,” slavery, and diamonds, and their fear of two men: slim dark Hadi-Mot and rotund Brooklynite Sol Yuttal. All very cryptic for the Man of Bronze to unravel! And yet, speak of the Devils, the two men appear, chasing off Red and Lady Nelia with gunshots and with the mysterious “flapping darkness” that permanently rendered the Frenchman beyond all charcuterie courses. They ransack the staterooms and alert the crew – but not before Doc escapes, and with a mysterious package all his own!

Making the shore once again by turning his body into a surfboard in the wake of Red and Lady Nelia’s boat, Doc meets up with Renny, idling by the shore in guise of a hackman. The nearly naked Doc, unnoticed by the good people of New York, discovers some of what it’s all about: diamonds! Juicy big ones, too. Also the dead Frenchman’s marked-up Zeppelin homework.

Doc leaves Renny with instructions to pick up Lady Nelia and Red, before haring off after Hadi-Mot and Yuttal. He runs almost totally naked through the middle of the streets of New York, finding this a more pleasant means of crossing the Big Apple at near midnight than taking a cab, but he’s driven down an alley and under a manhole cover by the mysterious flapping darkness which craves Frenchman’s (an apparently also American) blood! It skitters needle-like on the manhole cover before departing at the call of its master.

Finally, Doc arrives at the eighty-sixth floor, where the other four of the Fabulous Five (or, as the chapter is titled, TROUBLE BUSTER, INC.) await. He instructs Long Tom to whip up some infra-red lenses and projectors, Monk to concoct a wide-acting nonfatal instant sedation formula, hands the stones to Johnny to determine their providence, and hands the Frenchman’s Zeppelin homework to Ham to follow up on. The man of bronze himself looks up Lady Nelia first in Who’s Who, then in Royalty of England – the aristocratic Spirited Young Lady had disappeared while flying over the Sahara some years before.

Not actually a clone of this woman! Earhart’s disappearance was still four years in the future.

But he’s interrupted by a call from Ham, at the hotel where Lady Nelia and Red have taken up quarters…and which Hadi-Mot and Yuttal have just entered, carrying a sinister-looking wicker basket! Doc fires off for the hotel, to the disappointment of the other four, who were hoping to join in on the action. He finds the place in shambles, the two dastards departed with Lady Nelia in tow, the rooms ransacked, Red (as the least good-looking of a set of Doc Savage victims by chapter 7) dead, and Renny defenestrated to twelve stories below! Fortunately, it was an improvised dummy in Renny’s clothes, Renny himself is clinging to the next window in a bedsheet toga.

Doc calls up the others, and Johnny and Ham have news: the stones are the finest quality, the first water, but of no known provenance in the book – mystery stones from a mystery mine, and the Zeppelin mentioned in the Frenchman’s homework is none other than the disappeared Aëromunde of a decade earlier (which is definitely not the Dixmunde with the serial numbers filed off glad we had this talk). What’s more, the dead Frenchman (not dead at the time) and a man fitting the description of the dead Rufus (also not dead at the time, but notably still redheaded) in the other room were on the crew!

Yuttal gives Doc a threatening phone call as a sinister cab pulls up in the pay parking lot opposite the hotel – and no New York cabbie would willingly enter a pay lot if his life depended on it. Monk, being Monk, is all for going down and smashing heads, but Doc demures, siccing Long Tom on the job with his mystery briefcase instead. The cab easily gets away before the men even make it downstairs…but Renny is on the job, in a high-tech autogyro, tracing the black-light lantern that Long Tom attached to Yuttal’s cab with his “supraluminal” goggles.

Zis time, ze goggles, zey DO do somezink!

And, it must be stressed, still wearing nothing but a bedsheet toga.

This book has an awful lot of strapping men nearly naked for Reasons.

Trailing Hadi-Mot and Yuttal, the Fabulous Five and Doc head north in their autogyro, expansive and expensive as no autogyro had ever been before (or since), but the two wily customers are always one step ahead of the bronze man! They confront some toughs at an airport dodgier than “Errol International” who think they’ve got one over when they sneak a bomb onto the autogyro.

It goes up like fireworks on the Fourth of July, but neither Doc nor his men were on it, controlling it, as it were, by remote, using a kind of control, devised on the spot by the wizard of the juice, Long Tom. Ham had driven back to New York to retrieve one of Doc’s super monoplanes, and surreptitiously picked up the rest of the gang. Believing themselves free of the menace of Doc Savage’s justice, the two masterminds fail to notice the huge plane trailing north behind them, even as dawn breaks and the sun rises toward noon. Doc’s plane inexplicably survives this adventure, they park it just outside the Maine ‘cup valley’ where the disappeared Zeppelin is hiding. They sneak aboard by the tried and true “inexplicably poorly guarded guyline” gag, finding it necessary to gas three guards and make them look like they got drunk and passed out on wild berries just as the ship launches.

Doc and the Five hide out in the great balloons of the stolen airship, which Dent takes great pleasure in describing the technical details of as if he were the Tom Clancy of the Depression. They poke holes in the skin at will (which is actually not as fatal to Zeppelins as most media would make you think) and are forced, forced mind you, to strip down in the rising heat as the ship approaches their destination, in the Sudan. They meet the inevitable fight with the guards in hand-to-hand combat, as the hydrogen gas is highly flammable!

At the time, merely a fun technical fact. Later, though…

Throwing a mook from the narrow catwalks and gantries they fight on tears a rent in the Zeppelin that forces them ever downward, so Hadi-Mot orders all the mooks out of the action and readies his wicker basket of flying death. The named villains all draw guns, full willing to set the Zeppelin on fire in some kind of unimaginable airship-ending inferno the likes of which had never been seen on Earth rather than face …that terrible thing! Doc, alerted by Lady Nelia’s cry, punches his way out of a flying Zeppelin just in time to see Hadi-Mot release the terror into the airship balloon. With only seconds to spare and without risking the ignition of the airship with a powder flash, Doc takes the creature out of action with one of his patented glass marbles of one-minute anaesthetic. A few more put the villains (and Lady Nelia) out of action, and Doc and his men gain the control car.

Finally, they approach their final destination, the desert fastness of Hadi-Mot, Yuttal, and their sinister allies.

Hang onto your hats, here’s where this ordinary yarn of autogyros, faked fatalities, stolen airships, inexplicable male dishabille, flying death, and blacklight chases gets weird.

In the center of the stony ring [of mountains] lay an oasis. A lost oasis! For certainly no hint of its presence would have reached a traveler in the desert.

A vast platter of green! The utter denseness of the vegetation caused the men to turn binoculars upon it. They saw such a jungle as they had seldom beheld.

Tropical trees were matted in such profusion that they seemed to grow one out of the other. Lianas and aërial creepers [sic] tied the whole into an impenetrable mat. Orchids and other rare and brilliantly colored blooms could be seen.

Luxuriant though the jungle was, and contrasting as it did with the blazing desert, the oasis, nevertheless, possessed a sinister and unwholesome air. It was like something green and hideous lying there in an infinity of furnace-hot, wind-tortured sand.

[…]

The black scavenger bird [a vulture, or as Johnny calls it, a ‘Pharaoh’s hen’] settled swiftly into the vegetation. Apparently, it grasped some titbit of food.

The vulture sought to lift into the air again. Its hideous black wings flapped madly. But it did not get off! The plant, the sickly-hued shrub upon which it had landed, seemed to have grasped the bird.

Slowly, the shrub closed its tentacle-like shoots. It enveloped the vulture!

“Holy cow!” Renny croaked.

The entire jungle is composed entirely of carnivorous plants.

“But what do they EAT?” “WHATEVER THEY DAMN WELL PLEASE!”

Within the jungle, though, is a rocky promontory split by a deep crevasse and possessed of a naturally-occurring dirigible hangar. Presumably a naturally-occurring nuclear furnace is just down the way. The promontory also sports a ton of men with guns and a stockade filled with “wasted hulls of human beings” chained together by the neck ten to a line. My God, what kind of monsters could do such a thing to their fellow humans in this Modern age?!

I couldn’t decide what gallows humor colonialism joke to finish this off with. Write in your own punchline and leave it in the comments!

Despite a shocking improvised twist, Doc, the Five, and Lady Nelia are besieged in a rock cleft. The vampire bats (for that is what the flying death is, ordinary vampire bats…except much larger, trainable, and also venomous, unlike vampire bats) attack, as do the men in various volleys. After much chivalry and daring-do, mainly thanks to Monk’s improved anaesthetic chemical warfare, Doc slips out toward the stockade and notices the strange apparel of their guards – bottomless cages of rattan, making the guards resemble “an oversize, toast-colored canary in a cage.” It protects them from the bats, which surround the stockade “like so many guard dogs.”

Lady Nelia relates her story: Yuttal and Hadi-Mot had been in the slave and ivory trade, but were driven deep into the desert some fifteen years before (1919) by the twin forces of law and angry fathers. They discovered the jungle composed entirely of carnivorous plants, poison thorns, poisonous snakes, and vultures, and the diamonds in the vultures’ beaks. With a little seed money (donated by vultures’ beaks), they hired a gang of ruffians to storm and steal the Aëromunde, enslaving its crew to mine for diamonds. As they died of overwork, underfeeding, savage punishment, or the jaws of the green hell, they were replaced with fresh European slaves bought from Cairo. Lady Nelia herself had developed engine trouble and landed in the worst spot in the Sahara, her life and virtue only preserved by Yuttal’s insistence she’d come ‘round one of these years. Instead, she worked with the dead Frenchman (at that time not yet dead) and Red to cobble together a second balloon and escaped out to the desert an onto a steamer…but had been followed by Yuttal and Hadi-Mot and their terrible flying death, all bound for New York and the legendary Doc Savage.

In the night, Doc escapes and liberates one of the wicker cages. He disables the stolen Zeppelin and buries the parts where they won’t be found. But a stray flashlight finds him, and bullets follow. Doc is forced into the jungle in his cage. The tentacles and jaws of carnivorous plants tear at him, venomous snakes slither in with him, all falling before Doc’s flashlight and Army knife. He emerges at great distance from his hunters, none the worse for wear, and rejoins his friends. Johnny goes in search of water, and drinks of a poison pool, but Doc saves him in time. A final volley leads to a parlay, their lives for the location of the stolen engine parts – a deal everyone knows the bad guys have no intention of keeping.

Doc and the Five are separated from Lady Nelia and forced to strip…

…again…

and Doc in particular gets the third degree so that Yuttal and Hadi-Mot can be totally sure he has none of those Wonderful Toys squirrelled away in his ass or something. We are then taken to a “very modern, up-to-date operation” of diamond mining which Dent describes in excited technical detail. Along with the indignities and horrors of modern slavery. Back in the stockade for the night, Doc produces stolen diamonds to cut their iron bonds with. He douses all the cages with chloroform (secreted earlier during the night of the carnivorous plants) and frees Lady Nelia, riling the other slaves for the obligatory Uprising. The slaves all break for the Aëromunde, while Doc and his men liberate their various weapons and go after the guards. Lady Nelia even saves Doc’s life with two well-aimed rocks.

The slaves prep the Zeppelin for takeoff as Hadi-Mot releases all the vampire bats at once, the bad guys rushing for their (doctored) cages. As the airship rises out of danger with Doc at the helm, he watches the cages fall apart from the acid, the confederates doomed by their own vampire bats. Hadi-Mot and Yuttal are consumed together. They return long enough to rescue the few remaining men, kill all the vampire bats, and divvy up the diamonds – Lady Nelia insisting her share go to building hospitals for orphans in England. Then it’s off up the Cairo for Trouble Buster, Inc.

“Cairo – on the banks of the lazy River Nile!” [Long Tom] chuckled. “That sounds peaceful enough.”

AN EERIE TRILLING SOUND – Doc spends a good third of the book running around New York at night wearing nothing but a Speedo for never-clearly-defined reasons. Sadly, CBGB’s did not yet exist to be thrilled by this news. He’s in fine form here, a science detective aboard the Yankee Beauty, a cunning guile hero in New York, a grim yet nonlethal MacGuyver aboard the Aëromunde and in the Lost Oasis itself.

But today’s ultimate Doc moment is when he navigates a jungle of carnivorous plants in his skivvies inside a rattan cage with a flashlight and a knife. Just uttering that sentence caused my chest to grow a luxuriant mat of hair in the shape of Australia. That is Weasels Ripped My Flesh level pulp manliness.

FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny here is what Johnny was to Fear Cay. He drives a hack! He interrogates the victims! He pulls a dead-dummy fast one! He flies an autogyro! He punches through doors! He even navigates the stolen Zeppelin on three separate occasions! Not bad for one Puritan-faced engineer with fists like Virginia hams.

SUPERAMALGAMATED! – For whatever reason, Dent tries to introduce a new tic for Johnny: he never wagers except on a sure thing. Monk calls him out for it, and Dent spells it out later in narration when, aboard the airship, he quips “So, anyone willing to bet this tub isn’t going to Africa?” It never stuck, so he mostly just seems to be on a winning streak at the ponies and letting it leak out.

“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – Ham gets an awesome kill in of a sword-thrust through the shoulder, and enjoys some fine bickering with Monk because Dent hadn’t run out of bicker yet. They also share a quiet moment while besieged flipping a coin to see who gets the one remaining gas mask. Ham loses with great dignity.

“YOU MISSING LINK!” – Monk goes apeshit or expresses his desire to go apeshit about once a scene, but his introduction is dressing like Ham and making it look like a sideshow barker and his next scene is casually whipping up a chemical concoction (nonlethal long-lasting anaesthetic gas) that we still haven’t invented today. Mostly, though, Monk’s the trigger-happy heavy, almost as ready to kill Ham as he is to kill mooks.

WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Boy is Long Tom on the trolley here. He introduces Doc’s blacklight goggles and equips them for the entire gang (although he notes he’d already come up with them a few adventures ago and just needed to make sure they were in working order) and puts them to good use bugging Yuttal’s stolen hack. Later, he grouses he should have introduced blacklight search lights, but will tomorrow. Sure beats your college roommate’s Alice in Wonderland poster, huh?

WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – And what wonderful toys they are! From dust that sparkles in the night only when disturbed to the first deployment of Long Tom’s night vision goggles (and mention of the night vision searchlights) to old standards like the one-minute anaesthetic marbles, Doc has a full range of toys to play with today. It’s quite understandable that the bad guys took a moment to strip him, wash him, remove false teeth, trim his nails, and pull out hairs in case he had any more.

CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – Yuttal and Hadi-Mot are hardly memorable material. I think Dent was going for a Ham-and-Monk contrast beween streetwise Yuttal with his spat gangsterisms (like “Nix!”) and Hadi-Mot and his mannered, textbook-English, The Sheikh-esque “swarthy foreign gentleman” air, but it never quite comes off and Dent more or less abandons any character study of the two by time Doc and the gang climb onto the Zeppelin. The four wicked aviators are clever for one scene, get mentioned twice more, and then disappear. Honestly, the vampire bats are better bad guys than the bad guys.

AGED LIKE FINE MILK – With the exception of Yankee Yuttal (who is another of Dent’s fat bastards), all the bad guys are swarthy, shifty, and speak Arabic. In his Master Pulp Plot Formula, Dent gives an example of finding an “Egyptian” phrasebook and pulling phrases out of it, as “this kids editors into thinking the scribe knows something about Egypt.” This must have been the example he was thinking of, because Dent misses no opportunity to remind the reader that these are all “some kind of natives, not whites” and peppering all the dialogue with redundantly-translated Arabic. While not one of Dent’s worst offenses, it combines with the next point for a truly fine aged-milk flavor.

All the slaves at Hadi-Mot and Yuttal’s secret diamond mine in the deserts (and jungles?) of Egypt are aristocratic Europeans. Because when you think “Africa” and “hard slavery in mines,” you definitely think “aristocratic white people.”

But, seriously, take a moment to donate to Diamonds for Peace. Blood diamonds are very real, and still with us, and horrifying in their implications. And their conditions almost as terrible today as Dent imagined in 1933.

BACK MATTER – Lost Oasis was the first issue of Doc Savage Magazine to include an essay alongside the reader letters, Doc Savage’s Oath, and original (teaser) endings. Unfortunately, I have never seen this first Doc Savage essay, though I’m sure a few mildewed copies of the original 1933 publication are still floating around on eBay for $5 apiece. I linked one of the essays, last week, from the December 1933 issue, The Phantom City.

So, let’s discuss interior art! I’ve used some of it before, but this is where we can really discuss it. Paul Orban’s (and others’) interior art were stripped out of the 1960s Bantam reissues, like all of the back matter. When I can, I love to get a hold of copies of the original ‘30s editions, because I love the dynamism and energy of those original interior art pieces.

Thanks to the Eighty-Sixth Floor for preserving these treasures into the digital age.

THE VERDICT – The New York segment is nicely odd (both for the adventures in New York harbor and for taking place all in a single night, when most of the New York portions are daytime affairs as in Fear Cay), but the airship sequence is an absolute jewel of truly vintage action and adventure, a full Rocketeer service

…and then we get to Egypt and everything goes absolutely batshit. A JUNGLE OF CARNIVOROUS PLANTS! FLYING VAMPIRE BATS OF DOOM! A DEATH CAMP OF CAREFULLY INTERNATIONALIZED SLAVE MINERS! A RATTAN WALKING-CAGE TO SAVE THE HERO! A WWI REENACTMENT WHERE THE GAS ATTACK IS FROM THE GOOD GUYS! If the Zeppelin sequence was a jewel of traditional pulp action, the Sudan section absolutely excels at first-water pulp weirdness. This is the stuff the men’s adventures of the 60s were so desperate to, and always failed to, recapture, the stuff that dreams are made of. Despite anti-Arab racism that would make George W. Bush blush, this is still one of my favorite Doc Savage novels for how completely unhinged it progressively becomes.

Doc Savage at 90

Bonus post: The Doc Savage Method of Personal Development

Doc Savage at 90: Fear Cay

9 March, 2023 / roscoe.mathieu

DATELINE – SEPTEMBER 1934 – NEW YORK CITY/THE CARRIBBEAN – Doc Savage, walking down the street, is ambushed by the old “wallet with a hidden hypodermic needle of mickey left lying in the street” gag! How many times have we seen that old hat? Abducted by two sinister shysters, the fat Hallet and the sweaty Leakey, Doc is transported to their law offices for interrogation. Doc springs into action, having foreseen the old “wallet with a hidden hypodermic needle of mickey left lying in the street” gag, by moving his thumb just so. He out-and-out mindfucks both men, applying a variant of the Ginger Beer Trick seventy years before Sam Vimes, and discovers that they’re working for Fountain of Youth, Inc., and they kidnapped him to keep a particular sample of the species of heroine in these stories from getting to him – Kel Avery. Proactive villains, these boys are. He calls up some of his men, but Leakey and Hallet escape.

They raid the offices of Fountain of Youth, despite the best efforts of a mustachio with a red silk sash across his chest named Santini and his gang of ruffians. Doc also unearths an invisible note that Kel Avery is out in Flushing, at an address on Fish Lane. On their way out, Pat Savage makes her entrance, to the delight of Monk and Ham in particular, and Doc makes pro forma protests against her insistence on joining the adventure and defending their car from Santini and his men.

Doc, the Five, and Pat head out for Fish Lane in Flushing, an unpaved lane in a bog, the address a shack barely worthy of being called a chicken coop. Kel Avery isn’t there – but someone is. An old man hanging from a noose in the rafters introduces himself as John Thunden, 131 years young, draws two blue-steel revolvers, jumps down, accuses them of working for Santini, and beats the tar out of the boys – including both fighting Doc to a standstill and escaping when Santini’s crew show up. After a brief shootout where Pat saves all their lives (but especially Monk’s), they return to the eighty-sixth floor to use highly advanced telephone party lines to contact some of Fountain of Youth’s clients.

One of them, an incredibly rich banker that Monk wants to bash in the face of because he’s an asshole rich banker in the Great Depression, swears he can’t reveal anything…except that what’s on offer is apparently the secret of eternal life at a price of one million 1933 dollars a pop. Then the man is shot by Fountain of Youth operatives.

And nothing of value was lost.

Discovering that Kel Avery is arriving by plane that night, Pat disguises herself in Ham’s best topcoat, dons a pair of Doc’s glasses, and arranges her hair to become totally unrecognizable at the airport. And a damn good thing, too – the boys are waylaid by a bunch of randos paid off by Fountain of Youth to shout “I’m Kel Avery!” like they’re Spartacus and start a fight. But Fountain of Youth just goes ahead and kidnaps both Pat and Kel Avery (secretly the movie starlet Maureen Doreen). The boys meet up with her bodyguard, the overbuilt da Clima, and take him along for poorly-articulated reasons.

They find Kel Avery by the side of the road, and it all comes spilling out: her great-grandfather, Dan Thunden, sent her a mysterious package and when Santini entered the picture, she decided to hunt down Doc Savage for help. She and Pat were kidnapped, but Pat stepped up to the plate and insisted she was ~~Spartacus~~ Kel Avery so Santini kicked the real Kel to the curb. She mailed the package to Doc, and could use the help. They return to the eighty-sixth floor where Doc casually manipulates Kel, da Clima, Monk, Santini, and the US Postal Service for reasons to be explained later.

Johnny, disguised as a hack cabby, follows Santini retreating with the package, all the way out to the most fetid, rank, decaying, villainous spot within driving distance – the Jersey shore! He sneaks up on the seaside cabin where Santini, Leakey, Hallet, and his men regularly keep their hostage(s) and loudly discuss their double-cross of Dan Thunden. The man himself appears just in time for Santini to realize that, like disappointed college kids thirty years later, all they had in the package was oregano. A brawl ensues, with Thunden felled after killing three men, Johnny shot, and Pat at one point temporarily in control of the situation while bound and gagged with a gun in her hands. But Johnny wore his bulletproof vest, and while the bad guys take off in their plane to Fear Cay with Pat, he overhears everything, and when Monk shows up, passes out.

Johnny awakes in one of Doc’s own planes, en route to Fear Cay following Santini and his men, with a few cracked ribs for all his trouble. They are able to land on the forgotten yet strangely verdant coral islet unmolested, but not for long. After discovering a fully-dressed skeleton, Dan Thunden leads them on a merry chase to a shootout with Santini’s men at his plane, and they discover some of Thunden’s history. After washing ashore on the island in the 1830s, Dan Thunden settled in for a 90-year Caribbean vacation, taking up wholesome hobbies like hunting, fishing, and constructing fiendish death-traps in the conveniently provided cave complex beneath the surface of Fear Cay (despite the water line being almost above ground). Various parties are captured, escaped, rescued, recaptured, and always the “sound of frying fat” presaging death that leaves only a fully-dressed skeleton behind. Petards are hoisted by each of the bad guys in turn as all their secrets come out. It is all as over-the-top pulp as it sounds, but I won’t spoil it.

Maybe one thing.

At the end, triumphantly, Johnny and Doc jointly announce the cause of all the trouble:

Spoiler

SYLPHIUM! The Roman medicinal thought extinct grows wild on Fear Cay, with Dan Thunden its exhibit A. But Thunden’s longevity was from clean living under the Caribbean sun, though Doc takes samples home to advance medical science. And then, onto the next adventure!

AN EERIE TRILLING SOUNDED – Doc is in top form here, even getting unusually playful for a man usually a grave-faced cipher and Very Serious Tom-of-Finland model. His top-tier bullshit of the adventure has to be untying the knots he’s tied in at the base of his ribs behind his back with his toes, after removing his boots and socks with them. It’s so over-the-top you have to laugh.

FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny: 1. Doors: 0. He throws those fists around with a “Holy Cow!” or two, but Renny is somewhat out-of-focus for this adventure. He mostly pals around with Johnny and swings some fists to take out Santini’s mooks.

SUPERAMALGAMATED! – Johnny gets almost more play here than in any other book in the series. The gaunt archaeologist/geologist is the one to infiltrate the cabin on the Jersey shore, taking the brunt of Dan Thunden’s damage and visibly suffering for it, making two attempts to rescue Pat, and pressing through his broken ribs all over Fear Cay. Doc, as always, plays the invincible Schwartzenegger action hero, but today, Johnny shines as the John McClane-style action survivor straight outta the Harrison Ford school of action acting. He’ll be superamalgamated, indeed.

“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – The sword-cane gets a little use, and Ham’s banter with Monk is even more homoerotic than usual (although not to the level it would reach in a later book where they were both absent from the adventure because they were in their upstate private New York cabin for the week to go fishing). Ham’s topcoat being cut like a woman’s suit-top was pretty funny though.

“YOU MISSING LINK!” – Monk’s bashful in the presence of Kel Avery the movie starlet, and, frankly, why wouldn’t he be? He also gets his once-a-book going absolutely apeshit (pardon the pun), though this time he doesn’t kill anybody for Doc to admonish him over later. I get the impression Doc kind of misses it.

WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Long Tom is also here! …I’m gonna be saying that a lot, Lester Dent kind of ran out of ideas for the electrical wizard early on. At least in this adventure, he actually gets to put his wizardry to good use, rigging up radios and triangulating Fear Cay.

STAY IN THE SALON! – This is Pat Savage’s second adventure, back by popular demand, and though she spends most of it captured, it’s because she volunteered for the job to shield the real Kel Avery from harm. Because, hey, it’s not like Pat isn’t a trained professional at being a hostage. She leaps at adventure and although Doc puts up a token protest that she should Go Back in the Salon, It’s Too Dangerous for a Girl, even he gives up in the face of her cheerful insistence of going in harm’s way. She even pops off a few rounds from Granddad’s Colt .45, although she uncharacteristically misses her target because the plot needs Santini to get away.

WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – Doc’s plane is SOUNDPROOFED! So you can have a conversation at NORMAL VOLUME INSIDE! Can you even imagine?

All of Doc’s standard toys are firmly in play here, and by now, Dent is perfectly comfortable with them. The superfirers with their semi-automatic firing of “mercy bullets” that can leave cuts and bruises and deploy a soporific on contact but never kill, with their “bull fiddle moan” and their “ram’s horns” cartridges, get special ammo today of rounds that leave traces, “tracer rounds” if you will, to assist in aiming. Doc’s glass marbles (that never break in his pocket, no matter how many punches and bruises he takes to the chest) with their soporific gas that last for exactly one minute (so you can hold your breath!) get use against Doc and his friends, and cunningly, too. Even his high-tech vests that have been proofed against bullets get plenty of action!

CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – Leakey, Hallet, and Santini are some of the best broad-strokes villains of the series – everyone who’s read Fear Cay can remember them if you jog their memory a little. They each have their tags and their traits, their two-note personalities, they twirl their mustaches and tie people to train tracks entertainingly.

But today’s Crime College valedictorian is absolutely Dan Thunden. The 131-year-old boy-man with his white whiskers and baby face is one of exactly two villains to fight Doc to a standstill in hand-to-hand combat, and the other is Doc’s evil twin! Thunden is cunning, crafty, almost kills Doc twice, talks like a weird Southerner, and effortlessly runs rings around the Fabulous Five and Pat, whether for or again’ ‘em. The only downside is that his petard-hoisting death is relatively underplayed and pro forma, compared to the vitality of his live performance. He’s one of the handful of villains any fan of Doc’s can absolutely name without prompting, and for damn good reason.

AGED LIKE FINE MILK – Boy oh boy are Santini and da Clima excellent case studies of anti-Italian bigotry in the Fascist era. Da Clima is a blowhard miles gloriosus that Monk correctly identifies as “all talk, no steak” who gets tagged as “over-muscled” and “muscle-bound,” unable to fit through doors even Doc’s six-foot-from-shoulder-to-shoulder frame can navigate with eas. Santini is a faux-aristocrat with radio mustaches and a red sash for no damn reason across his chest except to make him an easier target for Pat’s Colt .45. Both backstab their respective allies at the first opportunity, and both get hoisted on their own petards for it. It’s a wonder neither of them pulls out a rosary or mutters an Ave Maria to work in some good, old-fashioned Know Nothing anti-Catholicism while they’re here.

Hallet’s weight and bulk are aging increasingly poorly, especially as they form his tag and the only note to his character except his cowardice. I give it another five to ten years before he’s a liability for the discerning reader.

All in all though, this book has aged really well for a series that also sports Danger Lies East, The Infernal Buddha, and Land of Long Juju. No one does blackface, no shifty Chinese show up to predictably betray the upstanding white characters at the dumbest possible time, Kel Avery and Pat both have agency and dynamism. This is one of the most approachable of the books for a reader in 2023, and that is much to its advantage.

BACK MATTER – After Pat’s first appearance, a 10-year-old fan wrote in to say that he hates when “girl characters” show up in his adventure pulps, because they’re always weak, simpering dead weights for the boys to fight over and rescue. “But if Pat Savage ever wants to come back, that’s A-OK with me!” That 10-year-old boy is the reason Pat comes back here, and for her handful of future appearances.

And he wasn’t the only reader that thought so. Dent (and his editors) downright encouraged girls to read Doc Savage too, remarkable in the sea of boy adventurers and men’s adventures that composed the (non-Romance) pulps in those days. This essay, “Are Only Men Men?”, from the back of December 1933’s The Phantom City, well spells out their opinion of girl readers who saw something of themselves in Pat Savage when the likes of Dale Arden or Pauline had left them cold.

THE VERDICT – What can be said that hasn’t been said? Fear Cay is the consensus favorite of all 181 adventures, like “City on the Edge of Forever” for Star Trek: The Original Series. Even if it’s not your favorite (and it’s not mine), you nod in understanding when it comes in first on everyone’s list. It’s got creative action, adventure, cleverness, some of it unbelievable and over-the-top just the way we want it, most of it just believable enough to pass (like Johnny’s cracked ribs dogging him the whole second half the book).

This book is also one of the two traditional gateway drugs to the series (along with the first book, The Man of Bronze). And it benefits from how well it aged like fine milk. The main brunt of Dent’s bigotry are the Italians, suspect in the 30s, but like the québécois, no longer suffering the brunt of prosecution today. Hallet the fat lawyer may make this book increasingly unpalatable, but it has nothing on the paternalistic treatment of Latin Americans, especially indigenous Latin Americans (there are six million Mayans alive today, Les, and they’re not all lost tribes in lost valleys either) in The Man of Bronze. And yet it has the vigor and virility and breezy language of Dent at his best, the things that right-wingers like to decry the loss of when you strip out the racism and misogyny.

It’s not my favorite, but I do love Fear Cay, for the uniqueness of the New York half (Doc gets captured! The bad guys are the ones to hunt him down! There’s no milksop victim! Doc viciously mindfucks motherfuckers!), for the creative action bits, and for Pat having something to do and getting to be proactive.

A top-shelf Doc Savage adventure, and the best place to start for fans new and old of the Man of Bronze.

Doc Savage at 90

Bonus post: The Doc Savage Method of Personal Development

Doc Savage - the Man of Bronze (James Bama)

Doc Savage at 90: Introduction – The Man of Bronze

2 March, 2023 / roscoe.mathieu

I think the thing I hate worst about the querying process is the comps.

These are messages along the lines of “FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST: BROTHERHOOD x THE MURDERBOT DIARIES” that you see on pitch events on Twitter and in the query letters crossing agents’ and editors’ desks. There are a bunch of asinine “rules” that have sprung up in the five or six years since they were invented and became mandatory, and I hate them.

Partly because the most perfect comp I have is 90 years old this very month, and the once tens-of-thousands-strong fandom is so forgotten, there isn’t even a wiki for it.

And yet, we’ve all stolen from him. Doña Ana Lucía gets her language, her standards, her aristocratic mien, her physical and intellectual development, even her sword-cane from this one towering figure, this Man of Bronze.

I’ve talked about the solar, I think it’s a good day to talk about the pulp.

And if pulp has a name, that name is…

Doc Savage.

“Doc Savage!” Said the eccentric first character. “I hear some funny stories about that bird. Supposedly, him and his gang go all over the world, righting wrongs and punishing the wicked!”

“I don’t believe a word of it!” A cynic with some forgettable yet memorable physical disfigurement groused.

“Supposed to be a miracle of science,” explained the explainer, “and his crew are no slouches either. Each best in their field – except for him. Young [man|lady], if you got trouble, you can find him up on the eighty-sixth floor of that skyscraper there.”
A requisite passage in every of the first fifty Doc Savage novels. I think one of them uses this exact wording.

Doc Savage hit the newsstands in March 1933, the brainchild of Lester Dent (writing under the house name Kenneth Robeson), fresh off The Shadow, and for over a decade, Doc was the greatest adventure hero in American media. His bastard children litter our pages and spangle our screens – Superman stole his Fortress of Solitude, James Bond his suit and his suite of toys, Indiana Jones his globe-trotting quests. Dent conceived of Doc as “[taking] Sherlock Holmes with his deductive ability, Tarzan of the Apes with his towering physique and muscular ability, Craig Kennedy with his scientific knowledge, and Abraham Lincoln with his Christliness,” all rolled into one package, a hero for the Modern age.

Doc is also, both in person and in writing, a product of his times and subject to damn near every single bigotry, prejudice, and intolerance of the 1930s except (as near as I can tell) open anti-Semetism. With the sterling exception of cousin Pat Savage, the female characters are wilting flowers and forgettable milquetoasts, the Asian characters interchangeably shifty, the Latin characters lazy, the Spaniards/Italians/Greeks both, and the Black characters always worse. Dent appears to have no particular hatred for anybody (as opposed to, say, Lovecraft or Ian Fleming) but was merely relaying every unthinking bigotry in his New York head – and that is plenty bad enough.

I refuse to apologize for the (sometimes horrifyingly) racist, misogynist, classist, bigoted content. It is wrong now, and it was wrong then, but I also refuse to pretend it isn’t there, and that some of it hasn’t followed Doc’s bastards even to the present day. Everyone has to decide what they have the stomach for and where they draw the line. There are some I refuse to read a second time, like The Infernal Buddha, but the only one I refuse to read at all is Land of Long Juju – an adventure in Darkest Africa where the only civilized tribe are the ones descended from the Lost Roman Legion, and the others are all extras from a Tarzan book.

Despite their multitude of moral and aesthetic flaws, some of them glaring, I do love these books, especially the early run from ’33 to the outbreak of World War II. Doc’s physical/intellectual regimen (an obsession of Dent’s) fed into Learning to Think, the prose is punchy yet florid and breezy as only the old 30s hacks could manage, and the technology is almost a fascinating alternate reality at this point – spectacular prop planes that go 300 miles per hour, glass balls of instant sedation, wristwatch radios, Doc’s bull-fiddle superfirers. And they’re pablum. Glorious pablum. There’ve been months of my life where about all I could do was drink citronade and read Doc Savage. Earlier this month, someone asked what I was reading these days – “When I can brain, Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson. When I can’t brain, Doc Savage.”

Originally aided by his Fabulous Five and Dent’s many, many personal quirks and scientific interests, over the course of his sixteen-year career, the Great Depression, the World War and the oncoming of the Cold War, Doc slowly whittled down until he took his last bow in his Summer 1949 issue. He got a new lease on life with the 1964 reissue of The Man of Bronze, followed by the other 180 issues, an unpublished story, and a few extras from Dent’s outlines finished by modern writers, all legendarily cover-illustrated by James Bama.

But who is Doc Savage?

Clarke Savage, Jr., is a scientific miracle, raised by his father and a coterie of scientists using the latest scientific techniques and advanced training to near-superhuman abilities. He has photographic memory, immense strength and endurance, a mastery of martial arts, vast knowledge of all sciences, precisely honed senses, mastery of disguise and psychology, and preternatural skill in medicine. About the only field of which Doc has no mastery* is women, who politely confound him due to the “lack of maternal influence” in his childhood**. His father also trained him in compassion for all the world, requiring the oath of him we call the Doc Savage Oath:

Let me strive every moment of my life to make myself better and better, to the best of my ability, that all may profit by it. Let me think of the right and lend all my assistance to those who need it, with no regard for anything but justice. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and my associates in everything I say and do. Let me do right to all, and wrong no man.

During the Great War as a young man, Doc comes into contact with the “Fabulous Five,” stalwart aides and adventure-seekers each of whom emerges as the foremost man in his field short of Doc himself.

Colonel John Renwick – better known as Renny – is a giant of a man with fists of gristle like Virginia hams, which he loves to blast through doors for entertainment. A construction engineer of great renown, he’s never at his happiest than when violence is about to ensue and his “Puritanical face” is long and drawn.

William Harper “Johnny” Littlejohn is an archaeologist and geologist with limitless knowledge of rocks and ancient peoples, and apparently swallowed a dictionary because he won’t use a small word where at two-bit mot will do. His exclamation – “I’ll be superamalgamated!” – says it all. Originally equipped with a loupe-monocle over his blind left eye, Johnny put it in his pocket as a magnifier and memento after Doc performed experimental surgery in The Man Who Shook the Earth.

(Despite Dent’s racial biases, for some reason I always pictured Johnny as a Black man, a son of the Talented Tenth doing his part for the human race)

Major Thomas J. Roberts – “Long Tom” to his friends – is the electrical engineer, a “wizard of the juice” as Dent always insists, and the sick man of the group – at least to judge by his looks. Short, wizened, he looks like he’d fall over in a headwind and takes out men twice his size with his tenacity and hard fists. He got that name wielding an ancient artillery piece against the Hun and saving a French village in the War.

Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks – nicknamed “Ham” after a certain amusing incident during the War – is “one of the finest legal minds Harvard ever turned out” and is so sartorially perfect that tailors follow him down the streets of New York to see how clothes should be worn. He carries a sword-cane*** with a fast-acting anesthetic of Doc’s design on the tip. He is in an eternal private war of words, women, and sometimes blows with his milleur enemi, the last of Doc’s five aides…

Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair – called “Monk” for obvious reasons – is short, squat, covered in red hair, with arms longer than his legs, a brow that looks like “it wouldn’t contain a spoonful of brains”…and one of the greatest chemical minds alive. Squeaky-voiced and homely, Monk loves a good dust-up, killing bad guys, and the ladies – and is usually the once to win the heart of the latest damsel in distress (much to Ham’s dismay).

In the best of the books, they are joined by a seventh member –

Patricia “Pat” Savage, the spitfire sole family Doc has left after Brand of the Werewolf, grew up in the Canadian wilderness with her father wielding rifles and her grandfather’s antique Colt .44 to defend her land and her rights. She joined Doc in New York, where she runs one of the most exclusive salons in the Big Apple, a testament to the inherent adaptability of the Savage clan. But, despite Doc’s best efforts, she’d much rather be tagging along for a fistful of trouble and putting her dead-eye to good use saving the boys’ bacon.

Together, Doc, the Fabulous Five, and sometimes Pat light out from Doc’s eighty-sixth floor penthouse to cover New York and uncover the first clues of some sinister and far-reaching plot, before globe-trotting it in one of Doc’s fabulous conveyances (usually airplanes from his Hidalgo Trading Company hangar on the Hudson), to the depths of the Amazon, forgotten islands in the South Pacific, the Arctic, or (surprisingly often) the American southwest. They battle mook after mook, evade trap after trap, get captured (often, and Pat no more than anyone else), Doc does some wildly improbable thing with his toes or utility belt, and (especially in the early days) uncover the mysterious masked leader of the cult was one of the people they met in chapter 2 the whole time!

To give you a better idea of what it is I see in this yellowed old proto-Scholastic series, I’m going to be reviewing some of my favorites, breaking down plots and prose of the pulps. To start with, everybody’s favorite but mine – Fear Cay (featuring Pat Savage!!!).

Doc Savage at 90

Bonus post: The Doc Savage Method of Personal Development