This is the Back Matter section of the previous “Doc Savage at 90” review, for April, 1933’s The Land of Terror. Although he wouldn’t introduce it until Quest of Qui in July, 1935, I’d like to talk about the Doc Savage Method.
The Doc Savage Method is Dent, with suicidal overconfidence, trying to define Doc’s mysterious two-hour daily exercise regimen, the source of his physical and sensory powers. But it was one of Dent’s fixations, and with either masterful cynicism or genuine idealism, he wrote up a series of “modified” exercises that readers could practice at home to hone their own bodies, intellects, and senses.
What sets the Doc Savage Method apart from modern (or even contemporary) workout regimens is the focus on the last two elements of those. Integral to the exercises aren’t just the dynamic tension of your biceps and triceps, but reciting the times tables and Kipling’s “Gunga Din” as you do so and cataloguing all the green items in the room with your eyes closed while you do it. Far beyond Kim’s Game and layered listening, Dent goes into comparative taste-testing and a variety of progressive subtle discernments. Far beyond Roman rooms and funny pictures, Dent demands raw memory power.
This exercise Doc Savage usually takes immediately on rising in the morning. Standing before an open window in shorts, feet wide apart and body relaxed, he breathes deeply and slowly eight or ten times.
Then, still relaxed, he reaches down to the right foot and, bending from the hips only grasps an imaginary hundred-pound weight. Slowly and without jerking, muscles tensed, the imaginary weight is lifted above his head. It is held there while Doc inhales and exhales deeply, having held his breath while lifting.
The weight is heavy, and requires tremendous exertion of every muscle of the body. Doc’s legs are tense and quivering, and his back muscles stand out as they aid the arms and stomach tendons. This is accomplished by opposing the pull of the muscles with mental resistance.
After reaching the top of the lift, Doc sets the imaginary weight down beside his left foot, straightens up and relaxes.
At the same time while taking the above exercises, Doc also trains his powers of observation by looking out the window and mentally cataloguing everything that comes within his range of vision. He then turns his back and repeats the physical exercise, lifting the imaginary weight up from the left foot and lowering it to the right, reviewing in his mind all the while that which the eye had photographed through the window.
This exercise is usually repeated five times by Doc, and at its conclusion he lists on paper all the objects he can remember seeing outside the window.
Only at the end of seven days does Doc check one list against the other…and sees much improvement after that period; for the mind is grasping more details each day.
When possible, Doc completes these exercises in a room with four windows, using a different one each week for the test, and for the fifth week goes back to the first window. Again list-checking shows him much improvement over the first week.
(Of course he’s in his shorts, one of Dent’s other fixations was unconscious homoeroticism)
The physical aspect of Exercise II is what we now call “mental imaging,” which enjoys an occasional revival in fitness science (and “science”) every few decades or so (in the 1960s/70s among the human potential movement, in goal-setting in the 2000s). I sometimes pretend at such things myself, though usually for writing purposes. The sensory aspect here is old as the hills – Robert-Houdin would take his son in front of shop windows to do exactly this in the 1880s and 90s. Combining them is the real innovation here – and it’s why I listen to audiobooks and podcasts when I work out, or count cars out the window when I’m standing in the company gym doing my karate kata.
Let’s try another.
Exercise VI
One of the first taste exercises ever used by Doc Savage was the attempted identification of individual solutions of coffee, tea, salt water, sugar water, diluted vinegar, and mustard water. He prepared six one-ounce bottles and, after sterilizing them, filled them three-quarters full with drinking water.
Into each bottle he poured a teaspoonful of each of the beforementioned Iiquids. Each bottle was labeled, naming the contents within. Then he closed his eyes and sipped from each bottle in turn, noting on paper what he thought the flavor to be.
After reaching the stage where he could differentiate correctly, he added water to the bottles until the flavor was barely perceptible…and then tried identifying them.
During this exercise, Doc recited aloud John McRae’s poem “In Flanders Fields.”
This is a fine example of one of Dent’s many ‘discernment’ exercises. I’m given to understand the like was fairly common among the nascent self-help culture in the 1930s, but the Doc Savage Method is the only place I’ve encountered them directly. This is also a great example of Dent (either with a fig leaf or without even bothering) adapting Doc’s no-doubt highly scientific exercises to items the average 11-year-old boy would find around the house in 1935. This is also how I memorized “In Flanders Fields,” practicing a variant on this back in China in the Learning to Think days.
Exercise CVII
Through his many adventures in the far places of the world, Doc Savage has come to a complete knowledge of all countries, their climates, whether mountainous or plain, whether hot or cold, the accessibility and the means of getting there.
A study of his youth helped to gain this information, for Doc played at times a game with himself. It might have been called “expedition going.”
Doc would sit in front of a globe of the world and spin it. While the globe was turning, Doc would close his eyes and then reach forward and stop the whirling with his finger. Where the finger rested, there would be the country which Doc would visit mentally.
For example, if the country were Tibet, Doc would trace the means of getting there and the transportation to be used. This would mean a perusal of steamship schedules across the Atlantic, railroad maps, and times of train departures in India…if entrance to Tibet were to be made that way. Passing through the Khyber Pass in northern India would give Doc historical background of that bloody gash through the hills.
Study of the climate was necessary, for Doc would have to prepare mentally the clothing he would take on the trip. The topography of Tibet would come in for study, for upon that would hinge the method of transportation…whether pack mule, on foot, or by modern motor car equipped to cover the rugged country.
Study of the nature of the people would tell if guns to any number would be needed for protection. If permission from the local authorities would be necessary before entrance to the country, Doc would be called upon to study the political situation and gain knowledge of what personages to approach.
Since he was going to Tibet, Doc had to look up in archeological books that which he might search for that would be of value to mankind in explaining past civilizations.
While on these mental expeditions, Doc would name the States or provinces of the country to which he was going, the capital of each, and its present ruler.
This is my favorite one. I have a globe on my desk right now. And looking up geographic and travel information is mind-bogglingly easier now when compared to the 1930s.
It beats “memorize the names and capitols of the countries of the world in alphabetical order” absolutely hollow.
In the course of researching for your mental expedition, each nation takes on a flavor and a color, and you discover a few salient facts to hang your hat on (putting my thumb on India many years back is how I discovered Vikram and the Vampire and the existence of the Blue City of Jodhpur and the noble knightly class of Rajputs). It becomes a place in your head.
My daughter will be practicing this for her geography lessons, when I homeschool her. Fantastic writing practice, too.
My finger landed in the Philippines. A splendid place to expedition in my mind.
This is a longer entry on the back matter than usual, but that’s because this is what first drew me to Doc Savage – this eerie, alien way to Learn to Think (and tone my body at the same time). A lot of it is nonsense. But there are some real jewels in the Doc Savage Method. For reference, I’ve included the complete Method in a document, here, as originally listed on The Eighty-Sixth Floor.
DATELINE – APRIL, 1933 – NEW YORK/VOLCANIC ISLAND OF THE SOUTH SEAS – In New York, renowned chemist Dr. Jerome Coffer gives the usual “who is Doc Savage?” speech to his incredulous co-workers, notes that he’s dining with his former pupil, the Man of Bronze himself, that evening, then steps out of his factory and explodes into a puff of thundercloud leaving only an arm behind. Two sinister men, Squint and an associate, flee the scene.
Doc, sitting in the idling car, is horrified.
He investigates the scene and puts his woodcraft to good use pursuing the two men. He chases down their accelerating car, despite deployed roscoes to dissuade his pursuit. Switching to his own roadster and a disguise of …a tweed cap, Doc follows them down to Riverside Drive. He closes on the five men, and in his anger and rage at losing a second father (after losing his own father so recently in his first adventure, The Man of Bronze) he takes the killer and swings him around like a rag-doll to drive the others into their inexplicable 18th century pirate ship in New York Harbor.
Did I mention the pirate ship? It comes up again. They have a pirate ship.
The old ship had a truculent, sinister appearance. Atop the deck house, a large sign stood. It read:
THE JOLLY ROGER Former Pirate Ship. (Admission Fifty Cents)
Doc straight-up murders a guy, then investigates THE JOLLY ROGER. It’s filled with torture equipment and death traps. Obviously. Doc maims another fellow, and interrogates him as he lay dying of dope-fiend withdrawal. The man confesses that the killing smoke is called the Smoke of Eternity, and that low-level mooks such as himself have no idea what it is. He rasps out the start of a name, “K,” but dies dramatically. Doc dispatches the remaining mooks, leaving only Squint. Doc lets him escape and follows him up Riverside Drive to his mysterious master.
Squint arrives at number ten of a “narrow street which had a long row of houses exactly alike,” and Doc tails him over the roofs. He meets with another four-pack of mook, and calls “Kar,” the mastermind. He’s authorized to spill all the beans, offering each mook a million dollars, using the Smoke of Eternity to dissolve bank vaults, trains, and anyone in their way. They’ve got two jobs to start: a train job, and to kill Doc Savage! Doc surprises them, and does the eerie trilling over the phone, scaring Kar.
Having scared off the mooks and Squint, Doc heads to Coffer’s home. He finds the typewriter ribbon with Coffer’s message to the police, mentioning the names Oliver Wording Bittman and Gabe Yuder…and a mysterious spot known only as Thunder Island. He next pays a visit to this Oliver Wording Bittman, the renowned taxidermist, a skeletal soul with a penknife. Lester Dent would like to remind you of the penknife on his watch chain. Bittman reveals he knew Doc’s sainted father, and that the Savages owe him gratitude and help. Which comes in helpful, as Oliver Wording Bittman, renowned taxidermist, realizes that whoever used the Smoke of Eternity on Jerome will come after him next, for the terrible secret of Thunder Island. Doc decides it’s time to call in the cavalry.
“Monk,” Doc suggested, “could you take on a little trouble right now?”
“I’m on my way!” chuckled Monk. “Where do I find this trouble?”
“Call Renny, Long Tom, Johnny and Ham,” Doc directed. “All of you show up at my place right away. I think I’m mixed up in something that will make us all hump.”
“I’ll get hold of them,” Monk promised.
After ducking a Smoke of Eternity bomb that takes out the George Washington Bridge, Doc meets up with the boys on the eighty-sixth floor. Well, almost all the boys…according to “the prettiest secretary in New York,” Monk has been kidnapped! The bad guys (including Squint) take him to THE JOLLY ROGER, which drops a regular smoke bomb to disguise the seaplane and submarine, the latter of which carries Monk off for Kar to interrogate. The interrogation goes nowhere, thanks to Monk’s nerves of steel, so they jam him out a torpedo hatch in a box and slowly let the sea in.
Long Tom traces the phone wire at the tenth-house address, which Dent describes in loving detail. Johnny, Doc dispatches to locate Thunder Island and tell him something of the rock formations there. They discuss the possible atomic implications of the Smoke of Eternity.
“I am not sure what the Smoke of Eternity is,” Doc explained. “But I have an idea what it could be. When the substance dissolves anything, there is a weird electrical display. This leads me to believe it operates through the disintegration of atoms. In other words, the dissolving is simply a disruption of the atomic structure.”
“I thought it was generally believed there would be a great explosion once the atom was shattered!” Johnny murmured.
“That was largely disproved by recent accomplishments of scientists who have succeeded in cracking the atom,” Doc corrected. “I have experimented extensively along that line myself. There is no explosion., for the very simple reason that it takes as much energy to shatter the atom as is released.”
Renny and Ham are dispatched to Monk’s penthouse place, as Doc heads down to the Hudson to investigate THE JOLLY ROGER. After investigating the ancient ship, he locates the box that Monk was shoved into and rescues the renowned chemist and ape impersonator. They take on the submarine, docked cunningly beneath THE JOLLY ROGER, and successfully round up all the mooks on the poop deck. Attempts to interrogate are interrupted by the usual bullets to silence prisoners forever. Kar escapes but not for lack of trying on Doc and Monk’s part.
Upon return to the eighty-sixth floor, Doc and Monk hear from Long Tom that the phone calls all came from the submarine, and find Oliver Wording Bittman (the renowned taxidermist) waiting! He wants to join them…for safety’s sake. Doc graciously accepts, and sketches the third man of the expedition, Gabe Yuder, from Bittman’s memory. The put out the APB, and no sooner do Ham and Renny eulogize Monk as the chemist delightedly listens in. Then they return in force to THE JOLLY ROGER.
This attack goes rather better than the first two. There is too much over-the-top two-fisted pulp action to summarize here, but suffice to say a bank gets robbed, Doc is cunning, and THE JOLLY ROGER goes up in the Smoke of Eternity, along with half the Hudson and a sizeable chunk of the dock.
A week later, Doc has sent the mooks to his Crime College and given the bank’s money to the finest restaurant in town to hand out free food to the bums, and we are treated to another installment of Doc’s daily exercise regimen, reading Braille while detecting high-frequency sounds. They get word from San Francisco that four of Squint’s crew were seen boarding a tramp liner there, bound for that most sinister and spine-chilling of countries: New Zealand! Doc, the Fabulous Five, and Oliver Wording Bittman (the renowned taxidermist) board one of Doc’s planes to follow at fabulous speeds of 300 miles per hour. They meet the liner, only to find out the four men had met a yacht in international waters and escaped! As they cannot take to the air (the liner not being equipped with the “modern catapults with which some ocean greyhounds are now equipped”), they sail to Auckland, where Kar has murdered all of the native guides who once took Jerome, Bittman, and the mysterious Gabe Yuder to Thunder Island.
There is thus only one choice: they themselves must head to Thunder Island, with Bittman as their guide. They descend into the smoke and mist of the caldera, only to be menaced by a dark shadow in the mists – a prehistoric pterodactyl! “A flying reptile of the Pterosauri order,” according to Johnny. “A gigantic, eerie thing reminiscent of a mangy crocodile clad in a great gray cape,” according to Dent.
Doc’s plane goes down this time due to pterodactyl bite, and the men resort to parachutes. The pterodactyls (plural) continue to bedevil the men, and they in turn continue to fire recklessly on endangered species in their native environment. They survive the attacks, and also the bubbling red-hot mud lake of convection-free magma. They drift to one of the cooler outer edges of the caldera as Dent explains how volcanoes work. But they are scattered, and Doc lands in “a tangle of creepers and low trees which looked like ordinary evergreens.” Out of the mist emerges “as fearful and loathsome a sight as human eyes ever beheld!”
Doc says to look lively. They look lively. In the course of the T-Rex chasing Monk, they find everyone (except for Renny), and discern that the T-Rex hunts in a very peculiar way – no, not by movement, by voice! They glide silently away while Doc decoys the Tyrannosaurus away. As night falls, they scramble up into some tree ferns for safety. The night is filled with “titanic struggles of reptilian monsters” and there is not much sleep to be had. Come morning, they find Renny’s bloodied hat and parachute. In their grief, they are ambushed by a cat-dog-weasel-bear, a creodont.
MEANWHILE, WITH RENNY…
Renny had fallen into the first “terrible monster fight” the evening before, blinding a T-Rex with his parachute and springing onto her enemy – a terrifying triceratops! And spring he does – riding the trike by the horns, each “gallon of knuckles” hand wrapped around her two upper horns and cinched around her lower horn! When she finally goes down, Renny grabs hold of a vine, goes exploring, and explains how evolution works for the reader, before encountering an ordinary giant dire serpent, longer than a freight car – which on closer inspection is the colossal bulk of a brontosaurus! He climbs a tree, only to be assaulted by a miniature pterodactyl. He fires, but the pterodactyl closes its jaws around his parachute. Renny succeeds in choking the pterodactyl with his own two hands and leaves it for a charging, murderous stegosaur, running as it gives chase to him instead. He stumbles and falls into a trench, the roaring stego rushing past him, clawing his way out of the suffocating grave! But “sharp teeth sink into his body!”
MEANWHILE, WITH DOC…
Doc again pulls the sacrifice play, decoying the creodont while the others escape. This time, he takes Monk’s tobacco (Monk rolls his own. Why does that make perfect sense?) and springs on the creodont, stuffing its eyes with R. J. Reynolds’ finest! Monk chirps, “I was thinkin’ about quittin’ anyway!” as the gang are reunited. They philosophize about how this lost world could have survived and maintained itself (with some genuinely interesting musings on the fantastic ecology), and look for Kar.
“We’ve got to count every bullet. Although the weapons are virtually useless against these prehistoric monsters, they will be effective upon Kar.”
“Kar!” Ham clipped. “I had nearly forgotten that devil!”
Ham speaks for us all
They make their way past some certainly-just-scene-dressing geysers to the edge of the convection-free magma, hunting for breakfast. Ham skewers an animal “about the size of a large calf […] spongy looking antlers, two in the usual spot […] the other lower down below the eyes. It had a cloven hoof and looked edible.” This primitive deer they cook the primitive deer in a natural cauldron after taste-testing the cooled water. But Kar may not have been so clever – they spot smoke out in the mist! Not Kar…Renny! The sharp teeth had belonged to a tiny hyena-like thing that he easily dispatched after sacrificing some shoulder skin.
Yet the fires still burn!
Doc scouts ahead, and nearly gets his head shot off. But when he gets back to his men, Oliver Wording Bittman (the renowned taxidermist) has vanished! But he did not make it far before something felled him. Further shots bring Bittman around as the shooter goes down from one of Doc’s shots between the eyes. They rejoin the others and close on the fire. Closer…and closer…
Abandoned! The fire has died down, the men’s equipment scattered about, but no bushwhackers await them. Attempting to trail the missing men avails nothing, so the Fabulous Five, Doc, and Oliver Wording Bittman climb their trees for the night. Their attempts at rest are interrupted by a sinister shuffling below, as of scores of great beasts!
To Doc’s keen ears came the sound of grinding teeth at work on the base of Monk’s fern. Then big incisors began on his own tree!
Capable bronze hands working swiftly, Doc picked off a fragment of his own shirt. He put a flame to it, got it blazing, and dropped it. The burning fragment slithered from side to side as it fell. It left a trail of sparks. But it gave light enough to disclose an alarming scene.
A colony of monster, prehistoric beavers had attacked them!
This right here is why this book places so high in my personal list. I have no words. Dent was mad as a hatter and it is glorious.
Yet they have been sent by Kar, who tied and killed one of them and dragged it to where Doc and his men sleep, to take advantage of the beaver’s well-known and legendary lust for vengeance above all else! Yet they are scared off by a single gunshot, mistaking it for the tail-slap of warning. The only casualty of the dire beaver attack is Bittman’s pen-knife. After breakfasting on ground sloth, Doc lights out alone to trail the two men who had dragged the dead beaver the previous night. Dent treats this as a safari, showcasing Doc’s woodcraft and a variety of strange animals like giant prehistoric skunks, tiny horses, and more pterodactyls. Doc squares off against a T-Rex, which hops kangaroo-like across the land. Then he finds Kar’s two men…what is left of them. They were not as cunning as Doc, and met a grisly fate between the jaws of the terrible thunder lizard!
Worse, Kar has snatched his friends!
Doc follows their trail, nimbly evading each of the Fallout-style traps that Kar has left him (thanks in no small part to some cunning signals on Monk’s part). Finally, he stumbles upon Kar’s plane, and the secret hangar that shields it. He comes upon his Fabulous Five, but they’re in no immediate danger…and Oliver Wording Bittman, renowned taxidermist, has been taken away for fiendish reasons unknown! Doc stumbles over Gabe Yuder’s grave (trampled to death by a hopping tyrannosaurus), and realizes what most of us realized three chapters ago. Two expositing bad guys exposit until Doc emerges from hiding and silently dares them to shoot first, before he caps a couple of punks for raising iron in his direction. This signals the Five to make their escape.
But the plane is launching! Doc hops from rock to rock and goes into a dead sprint to catch up to the departing aircraft, catching it just as it takes to the air. Kar tries to shoot him off the wing like he’s William Shatner, but runs out of bullets before Doc runs out of vengeance. He explains how he always knew Kar was Oliver Wording Bittman, renowned taxidermist, and all Bittman can exclaim is “you won’t kill me!”
He’s right – Doc can’t kill his father’s savior. He allows Bittman to parachute out back into the crater, but casually hurls his suitcase full of Smoke of Eternity after him, narrowly avoiding crashing the plane in a great fireball in the rocky caldera while he’s at it. He watches as Bittman gets bogged down and eaten by a hopping Tyrannosaur which foolishly falls in the magma.
But greater things are afoot – the Smoke of Eternity is eating Thunder Island alive! Doc quickly picks up the Five and they watch, spellbound, as the South Seas Lost World is consumed in the terrible thundercloud of the Smoke of Eternity, every ancient horror and wonder of that choking jungle consumed by the strange stuff! Now the raw materials of the Smoke of Eternity are eternally beyond reach, as Doc nudges the plane and rises out of the steam and into the sun.
AN EERIE TRILLING SOUND – This is Doc’s second adventure, and the last that would hang on “Doc is out to avenge a fatherly figure in his life” motivation. So he straight up murders some dudes, something that would be anathema by the end of this year.
Doc has more of an internal life here, both in mourning the second father in Jerome Coffern (whose death almost in front of Doc’s own eyes clearly shakes him) and in the rising dichotomy between his father’s debt to Oliver Wording Bittman and the increasing evidence that Bittman is the mastermind Kar. One could almost speculate that it was in losing his own father and Jerome in so short a time and the way Bittman was able to manipulate him that Doc becomes the withdrawn, Stoic man of bronze that we all know, trusting only to the Fabulous Five (and later Pat) and even then, only so far.
FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny introduces himself by smashing in Doc’s door on the eighty-sixth floor. He comports himself like a true Great War vet on THE JOLLY ROGER and throws each of those “a gallon of knuckles” left and right. But it’s on Thunder Island where he comes into his own, getting his own chapter dedicated to catching up with his independent adventures (something I’ve never seen done so extensively in any other Doc Savage novel). He RIDES A TRICERATOPS BY THE HORNS!
SUPERAMALGAMATED! – Johnny has not yet discovered that mighty thesaurus, and is introduced bantering with Long Tom in a very Monk-and-Ham manner. He’s on top of getting a hold of the rock samples, one of the early McGuffins, and comes into his own lecturing on geology on the trip to and deep within Thunder Island. Geology, evolutionary theory, paleontology, paleobotany, he’s a walking encyclopedia. He even offers up his monocle for a loupe as both he and Doc examine an outcropping of strange rock that might be the source of the Smoke of Eternity.
“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – Ham’s sword-cane comes in spearing a deer for dinner. He mentions that he similarly captured and cooked a deer in a natural caldera in Yellowstone once. This is never elaborated upon. Mainly, Ham is here to be the straight man, offering the adventurous layman’s opinions and questions…which is interesting, as later that would be Monk’s M.O.
“YOU MISSING LINK!” – Monk drew the short straw and was the designated kidnappee today! He holds up under interrogation and survives in his water coffin long enough for Doc to come, going back-to-back badass with the Man of Bronze against Squint and his gang on THE JOLLY ROGER. His smoking habit (never mentioned again – presumably he succeeded in quitting) also saves all of their lives, after being effectively set up chapters before, disguised as a clue that he was taken from his office by force.
WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Long Tom is also here!
WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – Aside from the soundproof plane, Doc is remarkably low-tech this adventure. Which makes sense – Dent hadn’t invented most of the toys yet. Although Doc’s superfirers are in evidence, they neither moan nor shoot mercy bullets, but very deadly real bullets, being more semiautomatic pistols than anything else. The main attraction here is the villain’s Smoke of Eternity pistols and bombs, but, eh, ya seen one chemist dissolve in a miniature thundercloud leaving only a grisly limb behind, ya seen ‘em all.
CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – Oliver Wording Bittman is a fine example of the early-Doc genre of “character introduced in Chapter 2 who turns out to be the sinister disguised villain on the second to last page.” While a lot of them wore hoods or masks, Bittman-as-Kar worked exclusively over the phone or intercom and disguised his voice instead. In Bittman’s case, it’s perfectly obvious from his early manipulation of Doc, constant attendance on Doc and the Five, and hilariously over-the-top cowardice that the Lion would sneer at that he has to be the bad guy. Dent would tinker with this formula a bit to make it ever so slightly more difficult to discern who the man behind the mask (or phone line) is.
AGED LIKE FINE MILK – The statements about the lack of any explosion when splitting the atom and the hopping kangaroo T-Rexes would seem to be just ordinary pulp technobabble, but Dent was up on his science. Both were indeed the going theories at the time, and Doc is right in that scientists “proved” that splitting the atom was net-neutral in terms of energy in late 1932. Which is why I’m filing it here, under “aged like fine milk,” because the only thing that happened was that science advanced in the past 90 years. As we would hope it would.
Doesn’t make those bits any less snicker-worthy though.
The, uh, South Seas cannibals are rather less defensible. Interspersed with Johnny and Doc both delivering the finest encyclopedia entries on local geology and flora that Dent could find are the “natives” of the atoll surrounding Thunder Island made entirely of stereotypes that Moby Dick harpooned back in 1851. They have a “devil-devil house” with human skulls mounted in front, no knowledge of guns, but are incredibly impressed when Doc addresses them in their own tongue. Fortunately, other than looking menacing, they don’t act on any of those century-old stereotypes and in fact are quite hospitable to the Fabulous Five and Doc (and Bittman).
Still distasteful in a book that’s otherwise remarkably free of authentic 1930s bigotry, though.
BACK MATTER – I have split this week’s Back Matter entry into its own separate post, as this is a special entry requiring much more detail.
THE VERDICT – This is the raw, vigorous early Doc in fine form. Dent still hadn’t nailed everything down yet and was still experimenting (hence Jonny and Renny trying to replicate the Monk/Ham dynamic, Doc relying more on woodcraft and environment than on his wonderful toys, Bittman being the obvious villain by dint of being the only suspect, and Doc’s reckless waste of human lives). Some of it doesn’t work, and some of it really does. We go from a random pirate ship in the Hudson River to a lost world of hopping T-Rexes and dire beavers! Each of the Fabulous Five gets a moment to shine in his own field – even Long Tom! What’s not to love? Even the one scene of odious dirty-30s racism both surprised me with its presence and with its surprisingly light touch.
If the airship sequence from The Lost Oasis was a pinnacle of classic pulp action, and the Lost Oasis itself a pinnacle of pulp weirdness, then Thunder Island is the happy marriage of both into one package. And the New York sequence is nothing to sneeze at either.
Honestly, if you liked Fear Cay, I recommend reading Land of Terror next, “the finest and first” as it were. But next week, we arrive at my very favorite Doc Savage story of all:
DATELINE – AUGUST 1938 – PARIS/WEST AFRICA – In Paris, Doc Savage, Ham, Monk, and Ham’s pet chimpanzee Chemistry are enjoying a military parade, while a hiliariously sinister Russian, Carloff Traniv, looks on. Yet a man carrying that most suspicious of Parisian goods, a sack of baguettes, is on the move. And then, suddenly, the crème de la crème of the French National Guard have their legs…melted! Not more surprising are the attempts of the gendarmerie to arrest Doc Savage, or of the stricken Parisian crowd calling for his blood! Traniv congratulates himself on framing Doc, as radios blare that the recent shocks in China and the Soviet Union and now Paris are the fault of one man – Doc Savage!
Doc is abducted by two dancers, John and Mary, just as “Doc Savage” comes on the radio for an announcement:
“I, Doc Savage, am going to rule the world!”
obviously the real Doc Savage
He promises another demonstration on an American battleship within a few hours, which he delivers with grisly precision. In Washington, both Johnny and Renny are arrested. Long Tom gets picked up by air. In Paris, Monk and Ham are gassed trying to escape and Doc accidentally bisects a man trying to interrogate him. It was the machinations of Traniv, of course, who exposits to “Pecos” Allbellin, the South American dandy, about his plans for Doc Savage. Doc infiltrates the room, but is turned to ice!
Monk and Ham make good an escape, and follow Doc’s refrigerated body to an “abandoned” airport outside of Paris. Using his eyes as Morse code, Doc fills them in on Traniv, Pecos, and their attempted switcheroo. After Traniv’s plane shoots down six French flyers, they unleash Chemistry on the plane’s crew, following it up with thick hairy fists and the slashing sword-cane of Harvard. Things look bad before Doc springs into action. Traniv mocks him from afar, as Long Tom (now in London) enjoys a rescue from John and Mary (remember them?). They demand Long Tom help them locate Doc, but Long Tom hesitates – just long enough for the English Grenadier Guards to be cut down as the American battleship, the French, Soviets, and Chinese had been!
Meanwhile, aboard the transport, the three men can’t get the autopilot (or “robot pilot” as Dent calls it) off, and are being flown to the secret base somewhere in Africa. Doc advises his two men “brush up on [their] Yoruba dialect” as some kind of unmanned flying machine guns, “drone” planes if you will, carve their wings clean off! They crash near the “largest, most complete munitions factory in the world,” a “secret one” to “disrupt the peace of the world.” They are beset upon by things, dressed as soldiers, that remind Ham of nothing more than the Zombi legends of Haiti.
Doc surrenders, and they are led into an ancient stone temple turned modern munitions factory (no doubt to disrupt the peace of the world). Traniv kills his own men to establish his villain credentials, but refrains (for the moment) from his Bond Villain Speech. Doc is separated from Monk and Ham by advanced electrical field, and the two men are ambushed by Pecos Allbellin to test the nefarious belts he believes Traniv is using to cause the killings and destruction. As if in answer, Traniv demonstrates his “murderous radio waves” which take down a South African mail runner while the vast machine works assemble plans, guns, and tanks all around them.
Finally, Traniv reveals his plan – he wishes Doc’s vast surgical expertise, especially his capacity to make “slight operations” to the brains of those under his care. Traniv’s own surgeon makes the Living Dead operations of his soldiers possible, he asks Doc to perform a similar operation on “all the world’s dictators,” to follow his commands alone. When he resists, Doc is taken away to be operated on – “in ten minutes, he will be a living dead man!”
That’s when Long Tom, John, and most important, Mary crash into the place. Mary was once Allbellin’s great love (…this month…) and distracts him long enough for Long Tom to take his chance. Long Tom winds up taken to Cell 3, where Monk and Ham (who were not dead!) catch him up and they escape by mechanically altering their voices, some 60 years before Kevin McAllister was even born. Their escape is cut short by a group of gangsters, the “royal guard,” who are not so easily fooled as the Living Dead.
The operation on Doc goes smoothly, as Mary and John find out when Allbellin reveals he knew the whole time they were British secret agents. John is apparently killed, and Mary led out to meet the new Doc and get her own operation as Allbellin’s toy. John, free and unobserved, goes to the radio room. He manages to get word out, but it does Mary no good. After his sudden death, the interrupted transmission is resumed, with directions for the Arctic. Mary is brought before the revenant that was once Doc Savage, and goes under his knife.
And then Hitler walks in.
No, really.
“The little man,” “the dictator” of a Central European country “with eyes like psychological blowtorches” shows up with Martin Bohrmann in tow, gives the salute, walks into a room, goes down a trapdoor with a Goofy cry, gets chloroformed. Bohrmann (who looks and talks like Hermann Goering) frets until the “secret radiophone” of Hitler’s turns on, ordering a surprise attack on “the defenseless Great Britain!” All in the name of self-defense of course.
Traniv turns from the radiophone and observes Doc Savage giving Adolf Hitler a delicate brain operation…
(a rare sentence)
…as tensions mount across the world, supplied by Traniv’s munitions plant.
For a moment, the lights go out in the operating room. In that time, we find out that Doc had never been operated on, had instead operated on the surgeon, Koral, to restore his senses. Maddened with anger (and frankly, wouldn’t you?), Koral is out for blood…while Doc is out to bring the whole works down.
An execution is in order, to Allbellin’s great pleasure – Mary, Monk, Ham, and Long Tom are to be an example to us all. Doc makes for them, as Dr. Koral inspects every uniform in the guardroom. Note that, it’ll be important later. He’s tied up with the rest, muttering “it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.” Chemistry (remember Chemistry?) goes absolutely apeshit on the execution squad, allowing Mary to escape, but the other four are recaptured, lined up, and shot just as Traniv departs. Mary hails the nearest plane…
…where Hitler is trying desperately to look inconspicuous. He had not been operated on, and was considering the implications. Then some rando shoots him just above the temple.
Seriously, page 109 of the Bantam paperback. Dent just casually ices Hitler in 1938.
Ahhh. The Thirties.
Anyway, back in the execution yard, of course Doc and his men had switched uniforms with the guards. Even Chemistry gets his own uniform! Doc produces some liquid smoke from his vest of many wonders and brings the rains down in Africa.
(Blessing status unknown)
In London, the men of Downing Street are long-faced, as “a certain unfriendly power” are conducting an aërial assault over their heads. In Siberia, in Manchuria, in South America, bands of soldiers are staging sudden attacks and disappearing. “Hundreds of small, radio-controlled flying machine guns had been dispatched,” in preparation for Traniv’s cadres in every world capital to seize control on behalf of their would-boukoun master.
Doc and his men (and Chemistry) rush into the compound for the radio room, but are trapped and suffocated in the dark. Allbellin goes into investigate, and falls right into their trap. Travin smashes his desk as the message goes out: “This is Doc Savage, the real Doc Savage, speaking.” He gives their latitude and longitude for the combined fleets of the world’s naval powers (England, France, America, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Brazil) to converge on his location, down in Africa. Traniv demands they be belted, so there can be no mistake of killing them this time!
Doc’s aides are re-re-recaptured, Doc escapes across a roof. Doc locks himself in the chemical weapons room, steals a gas mask, and proceeds to do some muthafuckin’ science. He spots Allbellin, the dandy South American ex-dictator, doing himself up in one of the uniforms, feeling the fastenings with girlish glee. Making his escape, he runs into Mary (remember Mary?), loosed for exactly this purpose. When confronted with “surrender or the girl dies!” Doc has no more mettle than Indiana Jones in the same situation, and taken to …the theater of Death!
In a vast auditorium, the soldiers and gangsters watch Doc and his aides and Mary and Chemistry. Behind him, in windowed room, Traniv plays with his mechanisms as Allbellin lights a cigar. Now, now, in his moment of triumph, Traniv unleashes a Bond Villain Speech with a side of ham that would stop Auric Goldfinger cold. The belts now cinched around all their waists are listening devices and instruments of death. These are all on the same wavelength, so a single signal will kill them all. Traniv throws the lever…and is shocked as it is his own legs that melt away in pieces, along with Allbellin and the “royal guard” of gangsters in the auditorium! Too, above the capitols of the world, the “mother ships” controlling the “flying machine guns” sputter and crash, their crews bisected.
Doc, Mary, and his aides are unharmed.
Meeting with the combined admirals, Doc explains the finer points while Monk strikes out with Mary (by no small effort of Ham’s). Involving odorless colorless gasses and strange pastes and radio frequencies, the upshot (as Doc explains to Monk) is that when Koral was released, he doctored the receivers and pasted the belts of Traniv, Allbellin, and his gangsters…leaving Doc and his men’s untouched. We end on a kiss, as Mary decides to give the hairy chemist another chance.
AN EERIE TRILLING SOUND – Doc goes through more quick costume changes here than Taylor Swift. The switcheroo on the operating room table has to be the icing on the cake, though. Half the captures are on purpose (or at least can be turned to good use) and no matter how many changes of costume he has, Doc still has his utility belt.
FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny spends the adventure punching doors in prison.
SUPERAMALGAMATED! – Next to Johnny, who no doubt spends the time catching up on his thesaurus.
“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – Ham opens by siccing Chemistry on Monk for wearing the same outfit as himself and doesn’t let up. He and Monk do share their act of true mateship under fire in the execution yard…before going back to the hijinx.
“YOU MISSING LINK!” – …wait, had Monk even met Mary before the second-to-last chapter? You dog, you, you move fast.
WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Long Tom is also here! Mainly holding out hope for Doc no matter what the odds.
WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – Traniv, you old bastard! Drones! Force-fields! Zombie brain treatments! That weird-ass paste/gas/radio waves killing method! This is stuff Doc never imagined even while hallucinating on peyote way back in ’34!
CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – I have to wonder if Traniv’s Living Dead weren’t commentary on Doc’s Crime College (explored below) and the backlash Dent got over it.
There’s not much to say about the bad guys here, Traniv twirls his mustache like any decent White Russian with a grudge, Allbellin practically wears a black trenchcoat and specs and giggles like a girl when he tortures people. All I’m saying is, if you’re the guys who relegated Adolf fuckin’ Hitler to C-list fodder, you have got to be badder than him. And these boys…ain’t it, chief.
AGED LIKE FINE MILK – Now is a great time to talk about Doc’s Crime College. In the early days, Doc’s “Crime College,” located in upstate New York, was where he sent the unconscious and captured henchmen and lieutenants of his various enemies (as the leaders always died of petard-hoisting on the second-to-last page, as Traniv and Allbellin do here). There, a “delicate brain operation” by surgeons trained by Doc himself left them with no memory of their previous criminal lives, and job and lifestyle training meant each graduate of the Crime College had “a trade and the chance at an honest life.” No graduate of the Crime College ever reverted to criminal ways.
You might say this aged like fine milk, but the backlash was immediate and ongoing. As early as 1934, Dent felt it necessary to spell out that “this was NOT a lobotomy in any way” and by WW2, the Crime College had been quietly retired (but not before spectacularly featuring in John Sunlight’s unprecedented second attack on Doc in Fortress of Solitude). Dent tried to hang onto the concept, as it was clearly one of his fixations, like Doc’s two-hour exercise regime, ultraviolet lanterns, and Monk’s chemical skill, but even he had to knuckle under the public’s clear distaste for actual mind control via brain damage…no matter how well intentioned.
Other than that, any vaguely-serious writer after 1941 would have treated Hitler with more respect for his monstrousness and his capacity to inflict pain and death. The fact that here “the dictator” gets mocked for his stature, given a once-over like Mel Brooks on a bender, and finally casually shot by some rando on page 108 is just… *chef’s kiss*
BACK MATTER – The Bantam reissues in the 1960s (of which my copy of The Munitions Master is certainly one) dispensed with the cliffhanger endings, the letters, the Doc Savage Method, the oath, and the essays. I, for one, think they are poorer for it…though Bama’s covers certainly count for a lot.
THE VERDICT – They killed Hitler with a shot to the back of the head in 1938 in the middle of Act II. So casual, you know that bitch wasn’t even a player.
As if that weren’t enough for you, DRONES! FORCE FIELDS! SELF-AWARE BRAIN OPERATIONS COMMENTARY! All the tensions of 1938 expressed powerfully through the asides to the world capitals, the touching united front of the combined fleet, and the corking of Adolph Hitler as he leaves the story.
Did I mention he just off-handedly kills Hitler?
Sure, the biggest, baddest guy isn’t even the biggest, baddest guy, Doc’s various switcheroos border on ludicrous, the Fabulous Five have so little to do that two of them sat out, and the killing method is absolutely what Dent was thinking of when he warned of “getting too outlandish”. But what the hell, there’s enough madness to go around, and it’s not the madness of the usual pulp.
The fears and tensions that Dent was speaking to were very real, and it gives The Munitions Master a kind of poignancy your average T-Rex riding cowboy with a superfirer doesn’t quite hit. Dent really wanted the world’s troubles to be caused by a single madman with a munitions plant, so he could send down Doc Savage to hoist the man on his own petard and be done with it. He meant the allied fleet’s message to all nations and he meant the name of the final chapter – “Peace.”
Next week, some authentic T-rex riding pulp from 1933, and the week after, we conclude with my very favorite Doc Savage of all…which addresses fears and tensions of a very different era.
When Mackenzie embarked Marie-Pier Corriveau’s ancient Prius after winter finals, the muggy slurry of rain had been falling on Montréal for two weeks. A La Presse headline bubbled up in her Google-vision that it was officially the heaviest since the 2045 tipping point, and recommended some journalistic debate on whether this meant climate change was plateauing. She waved it away as if it were one of the malarial mosquitos that had plagued Quebec since she’d enrolled at McGill. Finals were over, and she didn’t have to worry about risks of the Quebec City dikes failing and flooding the Plains of Abraham, or persistent malaria outbreaks in Three-Rivers, or threats to the wine grapes in what remained of the Gaspé peninsula.
“Bonjour-hi!” she chirped, clapping the passenger door shut. Marie-Pier replied in kind. “What’s with the blue-and-white bumper sticker?”
“Protective camouflage.” Marie-Pier’s French accent was the carefully precise and internationalized sort favored by Quebec’s more cosmopolitan classes. “We are going upriver to the heart of the Republic.”
Come in out of the warm and wet into the bite of the last land that is not land, but winter. Buy “Glâcehouse” today…before winter disappears completely.
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 honorable mention of the 2006 Tellus Prize, first story I ever sold, here is “Gods of War,” available for free for one week only.
It was about three in the afternoon, at least that’s what it would’ve been on Earth. The sky was an angry purplish, like blood on the inside of your helmet, and it was ripping around, trying to kill us. The worst was behind, but the destruction lay ahead.
Marquez, a Mandarin-speaking Earth boy, and Harris, a grim Martian colonist, are Red Cross volunteers traversing the Martian wastes. They come to the Chinese settlement of Zheng-we, decimated by a dust storm, and hunt for survivors. They thought there would be none. They were wrong.
“Gods of War” was the first of my “Asian philosophical SF,” stories where I explore concepts I’ve read and learned from China and elsewhere, concepts like the difference between do and jutsu, the ineffability of the Dao, or the extent of iron-body techniques. It’s always been one of my favorites, for the multicultural Mars and for the sense of active, muscular hope under pressure. Hope is not something you have, it is something you practice, and nowhere do I say that clearer than in “Gods of War.”
Long-gone MindFlights.com published it, paying me a handsome $25 for it. At the time, I was working in my father’s company, videotaping government meetings. I got the news checking my email surreptitiously some five minutes after a California Coastal Commission meeting had broken for the day, the commissioners still easy in their chairs. I rushed to the public podium, switched it on, and announced to the sitting Commission that I’d just made my first professional sale, and got paid for it. The august politicos broke out in applause for me, and my father grinned from behind the switchboard. This will always be one of my fondest memories.
Some of them even read the story when it came out. I hope you do, too.
For one week, to celebrate the coming of les printemps, “Gods of War” is free on Amazon. Get your copy today, and be swept away to the red sands of Mars, after the storm Guan Yu has passed leaving so much devastation in its wake…
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s-a me! Da Clima!
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.
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 Magazine, March 1933. 10c
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.
Legend.
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!!!).
Originally the last word in Triangulation: Dark Skies, now available for the first time standing on its own.
Five thousand years before the end of the Earth, the star called WR-104 went supernova. Over the intervening centuries, its deadly gamma-ray burst hurtled across silent planets and empty space on a death-errand to that distant world. And, in the intervening five thousand years, Earth learned to listen, and learned to see, and learned to contemplate its coming demise.
Robinson and Campbell are the last two astronomers left at Mount Pleasant Radio Observatory as downtown Hobart, and the whole world, descend into chaos. The Earth’s biosphere is coming to an end, thanks to a gamma ray burst five thousand years in the making. There will be nothing left. Except that the two astronomers might, just might, be able to leave a message encoded in Earth’s Sun, a message to whoever is out there, and whoever comes after…
What message do they struggle to gift to a vast post-Earth universe? Find out in “Earth Epitaph” on Amazon.com.
Recent Comments