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
Introduction – The Man of Bronze
Bonus post: The Doc Savage Method of Personal Development
* Like a third of the SUPER-racist moments are when Doc does blackface to play a New York cabbie, or yellowface to pass for an opium dealer.
** I warned you.
*** What? You think I didn’t steal something off Doc? Keep reading, see how much of Doña Ana Lucía descends lineally from Doc and his Five
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