Pulp Power

Preaching From
The Pulp Pit

Pulp Power
by Neil McGinness
Abrams Books
ISBN: 9781419756160

Before I embark on this short but, very sweet review of a wonderful book given to me by a very special friend this Christmas, I should probably warn the more educated and literate readers among you of the thing on the cover which caused paroxysms of rage to manifest upon my golden aged, chiselled features because, yeah, it’s a problem. A subtitle to this glorious tome reads... “The Shadow, Doc Savage, And The Art Of The Street & Smith Universe.” Yeah, that’s right, there’s a hideous comma before the word ‘and’. Further rage was felt when I discovered that this wrongness... I’ll say it once, you never put a comma before the word AND under any circumstances, unless you are a complete idiot... has now been perpetrated upon an unsuspecting public more than once, under the guise of a completely nonsensical creation called ‘the Oxford comma’. And this is why Oxford should always be destined to lose their boat race every year because, frankly, the King’s English shouldn’t be abused in this manner. 

Further insult to injury continues in the interior passages of this book where the writer (or perhaps it’s a wrong headed editor) has failed to realise that the full stop always comes after a passage in parenthesis and not, by any means, before. If you use it before, that means the sentence has been finished and there’s no need to put the following text in brackets. Got it? So... you know... stop teaching young children and troubled, impressionable adults to get it wrong please.

That aside, what a great book Pulp Power is! I’ve been reading 1930s and 40s pulp novels (in paperback reprint form, I’m not well paid enough to be able to buy first editions) since the release in cinemas of the Doc Savage movie in 1975 (reviewed here) and I’ve always admired the no nonsense and efficient manner these great, fast paced stories, which enthrall the reader at every twist and turn, are written. Not so much The Shadow, written by Maxwell Grant (mostly by Walter Gibson under that Street and Smith pen name) but most assuredly the sheer economical energy found in the Doc Savage tales written by Kenneth Robeson (the majority penned by Lester Dent under that house pseudonym). So a book celebrating the artwork on those 1930s/40s pulp covers was definitely something I was looking forward to cracking open in this nice, coffee-table sized wonder.

But, it turns out, this book is so much more and, while it is filled with many beautiful pages of the cover artwork, not to mention the less familiar interior, monochrome illustrations for the original pulp editions... there’s also a fair amount of text which deals with not only those two mighty heroes mentioned above but also with the origins of publishing house Street and Smith from its 19th Century birth, under founders Francis Street and Francis Smith, before passing to one of their heirs and then to its later acquisition by Conde-Naste. Following a suitably humble forward by the great Frank Miller, this companionable compendium is split into six chapters and breaks down thusly...

Section 1. The Shadow
Although named after one of their more famous heroes and certainly covering some interesting facts and figures that I was unaware of about the character, this chapter is where the bulk of the text is laid down and also deals with the company and the people who worked for it... as well, of course, as featuring lots of artwork from the interiors and exteriors of the 30s and 40s editions of The Shadow, not to mention some rare artefacts from the extensive collection of one of the many Shadow collectors in this world. It covers the birth of the character on the radio and highlights what that character was as opposed to what he became when, by demand a year later, the first Shadow pulps were launched... and a very brief glance at a couple of films and theatrical serials based on the character, although the two 1950s attempts at a TV show are not mentioned. What I did find interesting was that Walter Gibson was very quickly established as being so prolific with the character on his typewriter (and you would have to be, at a penny a word) that Smith-Corona produced a standee, endorsement of him as his pen name Maxwell Grant, as a reciprocal promotional gimmick. It also tells of the eventual cancellation of both The Shadow and Doc Savage magazines in favour of a new, glossy breed of magazine venture which became known as the slicks, in direct contrast to the pulps (also named after the quality of the paper used)... specifically a teenage girls magazine called Mademoiselle at the end of the 1940s (which was still running until sometime in the last decade).

Section 2 - Doc Savage, tells a little of the story of Lester Dent’s tales although, I have to say, that the text in this section is not as illuminating or as detailed as the first section. Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of the cover paintings and interior illustrations rendered beautifully on the page. These pages also include lots of big pull quotes from Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, presumably from around the time that he was in the running to play the character in a new film series (what the heck happened to that, please?).

Section 3 - The Super Crew looks at the other heroes created for both the Street and Smith pulps and some of their comic counterparts... dealing with The Whisperer, The Skipper (aka Captain Fury), The Avenger (along with his team, Justice Inc) and the first metatextual comic book character, Supersnipe. It also deals with the original and later, very different incarnations of a character who I saw highlighted on book shops shelves a lot during the 1970s and 1980s... namely, Nick Carter. I didn’t realise just how different the various revised versions of this character were or, just how prolific the writers were... surpassing even the extremely lengthy runs of The Shadow and Doc Savage novels (both numbering in their hundreds) by many hundreds more.

Section 4 - Paperback Revolution looks at the era of the characters I know best, especially in terms of James Bama’s dynamic 1960s and 70s Doc Savage paperback reprint covers (who I’ve mentioned many times before in articles for this web site, was modelled on Steve Holland, who played Flash Gordon in a dire TV incarnation of the character in the 1950s). There are some nice paperback covers of The Shadow included too, by comic book legend Jim Steranko.

Section 5 - Comics Evolution looks at, not just the 1930s and 1940s incarnations of these characters in their comic book equivalents but also looks at their presence in comic books over the years, especially from stables like DC and Marvel. Indeed, there’s even an interview with the great comic artist Bill Sienkiewicz about his run on The Shadow. I did notice, however, that the truly excellent Doc Savage covers for the comic books put out by Millennium Press are strangely absent from the mix... hmm... perhaps there was some politicking going on.

Section 6 - A New Future is devoted to the continued life of some of these characters. I was surprised as a big follower of Doc Savage that, not only were writers such as Philip Jose Farmer and Will Murray, who have penned some great entries in the series in modern times, curiously absent here... but also that modern popular novelist James Patterson has already released a novel apiece for both The Shadow and Doc Savage. How that got by me without any kind of publicity is beyond my understanding and they’re definitely something I’m going to have to read but, I have to say, the blurb on Amazon for the Doc Savage story is pretty dire and off the point, it seems to me. I guess I’ll have to tread carefully when I’m reading this one. DC already tried modernising him in the comics in the 1980s and, frankly, it didn't work.

And that’s that. All the way through, the writer keeps reminding the audience of something they should probably already know... that characters like The Batman and Superman certainly owe more than just a passing debt to The Shadow and Doc Savage, repeatedly emphasising the easiest ‘borrowings’ to identify their common traits and stressing that these superhero characters would never have come into existence without the groundwork laid by these specific pulps. However, despite this and a few glaring omissions (why show things like the membership badge for the 1930s Shadow Fan Club without showing the similarly charming Doc Savage Club equivalent?), I’d have to say that Pulp Power is a wonderfully illuminating and terrific tome and highly recommended as both an object of beauty and as an education, especially to those readers unfamiliar with some of the stories. The fact that I learned a lot from it and am very familiar with the characters anyway, in various incarnations (most specifically Doc Savage) says a lot, I think. A really nice book and an absolute pleasure to spend some time between the pages with, I must say.

Doc Savage (Gold Key)

Bronzed Gold

Doc Savage
Gold Key USA 1966

Back in 1966, movie history was almost about to be made…

If things had gone to plan, a certain pulp character favourite of mine may well have been a lot better known internationally than he is these days. The film was Doc Savage and it was to star TV western actor Chuck Connors in the title role and to be based on Lester Dent’s Doc Savage novel, The Thousand Headed Man. Alas, an error about certain kinds of rights residing with Dent’s widow and not solely by the company who thought they owned them meant that the producers couldn’t start shooting the film, which was already scripted, on the date they wanted. So, at the eleventh hour, they retained the cast and crew and instead rushed out a western, Ride Beyond Vengeance, instead. Looking over the cast that they ported over into this other production, you can kinda see who some of the actors might have been intended to play in the Doc Savage movie and, I have to say, there are some good facial ‘types’ that showed that the people doing the casting were actually taking their job very seriously.

Chuck Connors, for example, was a good match in looks for the James Bama version of Doc Savage. Bama was the artist who had recently been doing all those wonderful cover paintings for the 1960s Bantam reprints of the novels which were very popular at the time. Although the style of Savage’s look via Bama was very different to that of the paintings which had appeared on the original pulp printings of the novels in the Doc Savage magazine of the 1930s and 40s, they’ve pretty much defined the look of the character ever since and are still imitated in books and comics to this day. Bama’s original model for his covers was Steve Holland, who played Flash Gordon on a dreadful German/American coproduction on TV in the 1950s show of Alex Raymond's much loved character so, if you want to see what the ‘real’ Doc Savage from this period was supposed to look like, take a look at an episode of that. Connors, though, had the same kind of weathered look to him and would have been a good version, physically at least. One can also deduce from the cast that made it into the western that Claude Akins would have been, again at least in terms of facial recognition, a perfect match for Monk Mayfair (one of Doc’s five aides) and, likewise, Michael Rennie would have been a solid choice for Ham Brooks, the lawyer (someone who the film company could have used in real life if they’d wanted a quick legal fix to their problem).

Alas the movie was never made and we shall never know if it would have been a better, more well loved fit to the original material than the George Pal produced Doc Savage movie of 1975 (which I reviewed here) and how much recognition it might have brought the character. What we do have left for us though, is the Gold Key comic from the same year which was almost certainly adapted from the script of that movie (different kinds of rights issues for comics than for movies) and which may or may not have strayed from the script. Certainly it would have been a fairly condensed version of the script to fit into one tiny comic and it really isn’t a thoroughly good job of adapting the novel, for sure. But what is it like as a comic?

Well, I finally bit the bullet on this thing a few years ago on eBay when I found an issue in not bad condition for a, relatively, reasonable price. I’d always wanted to read it and, well, now I have.

The cover is magnificent, being a blown up detail of Bama’s Doc fighting a large snake lifted from the cover of the Bantam reprint of Doc Savage - The Thousand Headed Man… which is, please note, a completely different cover than was used on the UK Corgi edition of the story, where a doctored reprint of a James Bama cover painting from an entirely different Doc Savage novel in the series was used, for reasons completely unknown to me. However, whoever was responsible for the writing of the adaptation and the interior art is completely unknown. It looks to me like Gold Key, even at that time, were not crediting the writers and artists like DC and Marvel were.

What I can tell you about the interior art, however, is that it doesn't really look like the actors from the ‘movie that never was’ and more like the renditions that Bama used to characterise Doc and his crew on the back covers of those Bantam reprints. This makes sense. Many comics are made from film adaptations and usually all the writers and artists have to go on is the working script and a few stills of the characters. Think back to the original Marvel comics adaptation of the first Star Wars film for example… there were loads of scenes in that which didn’t make it into the movie and, decades later in the era of ‘extras’ like deleted scenes, it became apparent that the majority of those sequences were shot but had not made it into the final cut of the film. These things happen but at least the likenesses of the characters, in some cases, looked as they appear in the film (Don’t get me started on Jabba, okay?) so there’s that. Alas, when it came to the Doc Savage movie, the team at Gold Key obviously didn't have any stills to work with so I’m guessing that production went ahead after they knew the film project was cancelled and the rights holders, by now Conde Naste, wanted to recoup some money by letting the comic go ahead. That’s what I suspect, anyway.

And… it’s not a brilliant comic in terms of action, it has to be said. And the writing is not all that dramatic either.. For example, comic  book shorthand to introduce the characters is used and so Ham is much maligned by being referred to as ‘the toff’. Worse still, given that Clark Savage Jr, The Man Of Bronze himself is not exactly noted for an abundance of verbal commentary and, given this is a comic book and even more of a purely visual art form than a film would be, it’s amazing how verbose he is in this. Talking to himself often and using phrases completely out of character for him such as ‘I’ll bet my shirt…’. Sure, that kind of outburst might be fine coming from a few of Doc’s crew but not the man himself, I would say. I think they might have been better using descriptive boxes more on the case of the scenes where Savage is ‘flying solo’, so to speak, rather than put explanations in his mouth when he famously never explains his actions to those around him.

In addition to this, the drama is fairly flat and, though I last read the original novel back in 1975, I remember the mystery of the thing and the unusual keys that drive the story being fairly suspenseful… in other words, fairly standard brilliance that you would expect from Lester Dent writing under the house name of Kenneth Robeson. Here it’s virtually non existent and, while I concur that the whole story in just 32 four colour pages is a pretty tall order, everything here just seems a bit rushed and really doesn’t allow for any of the characters to shine through, least of all Doc, who almost seems like a guest star in his own comic at times.

The art is, fairly nice but there’s nothing too experimental or wildly interesting here. I’d say it’s pretty competent but there purely to illustrate the text, rather then enhance it. The same can be said of the design of the panels too. There’s a pretty rigid layout of mostly five panels per page (asides from the ones I’ve pictured above, obviously). The majority of pages consist of a basic, vertical two by three panel page but with one panel of each page extended either vertically or horizontally to try and break it up just a little. Looking at some other Gold Key comics from the time and others from about eight years later, this is fairly common for the company at the time and they would later on get a little more dynamic with their layouts by the time they were putting out titles like The Occult Files Of Doctor Spektor.

And… that’s about all I have to say about the Gold Key, Doc Savage one-shot based on Doc Savage - The Thousand Headed Man other than to say that, if the film had happened with that script, there’s a good chance it wouldn’t have set cinema screens ablaze but, frankly, we’ll never know how closely it would have followed that script and just how much better it may have been on screen. Still, despite the comic not being all that special, I am really pleased to finally own a copy and, it has to be said, I did learn that Croydon used to have an airport, so there’s that (although, by the time this comic was published, there hadn’t been one there for a while but, still, it’s a 1930s period piece so that’s not really an issue). This one is probably not going to appeal to casual readers, for sure but, for long standing Doc Savage readers like myself, this is pure gold and, dull as this adaptation is, it’s a little piece of both comic book and movie history regarding this character and it’s an essential piece of ephemera, as far as I’m concerned. One for the ages.

Doc Savage - Mr. Calamity/Valley Of Eternity

Repel Without A Cause

Doc Savage - 
Mr. Calamity/Valley Of Eternity
by Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson
Altus Press ISBN: 978-1618273185

So in the latest, quite hefty, volume of The Wild Adventures Of Doc Savage, with Will Murray once again writing as ‘the new Kenneth Robeson’, we have not one but two new tales of the bronze giant and his companions. I was kinda puzzled as to why the company did not just put this out as two separate novels of, roughly, 400 pages and 200 pages apiece as people would surely have paid for these as separate novels. 

I can only assume the answer to that is that this book must be, in some ways, an homage to the old Bantam reprints of the original Doc Savage pulps, when they were printing some of the stories from when the magazine started cutting down the cost and going with tales which were slightly shorter than what might qualify as a ‘full length’ novel. What they used to do was to put two issues into one novel to make up an impressive and highly collectable range of two-in-one stories (although they’re quite expensive now, I think... I have only one or two of the original ‘double reprints’). What was so interesting about these was that the original cover art on those old reprints was a straight vertical split between two entirely different paintings, each illustrating a different story. Now, since it’s apparent from a black and white illustration opening the second novel in this tome that cover paintings were produced for both titles, I kinda wish the publishers had made good on this analogy (if, indeed, that was their idea) and gone for an old style, two-in-one, split painting to give it a feel for those. This avid reader would certainly have appreciated the nod. 

The other way this volume differs from those old reprints is that, like pretty much most of Murray’s tales of Clark Savage Jr, it’s quite a huge page count compared to those old stories. Indeed, this one runs to around 600 pages and, in the first story featured here, Mr. Calamity, Doc doesn’t even enter the story until around 100 pages into it. Also, both the stories in this volume are, in some ways, sequels to some of the original Doc Savage stories. Mr. Calamity is a sequel in terms of the strange force which is causing people to fly into the air to their deaths, which turns out to be the element Repel, first discovered by the man of bronze and his team in the 1937 novel Repel (sometimes known as The Deadly Dwarf). This is not Murray’s first sequel to Repel, as others of his novels have featured a specific character from that story too. The second novel here, Valley Of Eternity, is in some ways, a sequel of sorts to both the first Doc Savage adventure, The Man Of Bronze and also two others, if memory serves, where Doc Savage returned to the Ancient Mayan civilisation which affords him his wealth to do his life’s work and which features Princess Monja (played in the 1975 movie by Pamela Hensley, who would go on to play Buck Rogers' nemesis Princess Ardala a few years later). Valley Of Eternity is also a partial sequel to Murray’s own Doc Savage adventure The Secret Of Satan’s Spine (which I reviewed here) as well as mentioning a huge cast of one off characters from various Doc Savage adventures over the decades... which he thankfully verifies and clarifies in footnotes at the bottom of the appropriate pages. 

Mr. Calamity is set in the hills of Wyoming and is expertly written by Murray, as the majority of his Robeson tomes are. I especially like the way he no longer tries to fool his readers when his characters are in disguise in this one... at least I don’t think he’s trying to do that. For instance, in Mr. Calamity, you know straight away when a woman travelling through Wyoming sees a man swimming for his life in the sky that she’s none other than Doc’s cousin Patricia Savage in disguise, even though Murray doesn’t actually reveal that for a few chapters... I’m pretty sure he’s not trying to hide the fact from his readers. Ditto when Doc Savage is ‘killed’ later in the book and a new 'giant sized' character turns up without mentioning that he’s really Doc for a good many chapters. I’m glad he’s not trying to pull the wool over his readers eyes like he does with his other characters in this as it can sometimes be irritating when you think he’s deliberately holding back on you. 

There’s a nice moment in Mr. Calamity when Doc survives an experience which nearly does take his life and finds himself stranded on top of the summit of The Devils Tower in Wyoming, where Murray goes into the history of the monument and reveals, among other things, its original name. Readers might remember The Devils Tower as the very prominent plot device used by Steven Spielberg in his movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. The book reads, in some ways, very much like an old Western serial and it’s not a globe hopping adventure, as many of the others have been. This story is refreshing in that it features Pat, Long Tom, Renny and Johnny but doesn’t, for once, include the two of Doc’s most popular companions, Monk and Ham... although they were back for the second story here (although none of the companions, aside from Pat Savage, have a prominent role in Valley Of Eternity). It’s a nice pulpy adventure yarn though and up to Murray’s usually excellent standard. 

Valley Of Eternity is an adventure of a very different sort, with a letter received from Doc’s long dead father which forces Doc to go seeking the ultimate adventure, something which he has never cared to dabble in before and which could well be his undoing... matrimony. Yes, Doc Savage is charged with producing an heir to carry on his deeds for future generations and the majority of this story is definitely played for laughs... which is fine, as it happens. Mr. Calamity ends with a sentence which actually made me laugh out loud and he manages, in Valley Of Eternity, to walk a fine line between humour and ‘the Doc Savage brand of adventure’ which few have dared and certainly never succeeded as much as Murray does here. The story is an eye opener, very funny and somehow simultaneously threatening to throw everything about Doc’s adventurous lifestyle out the window and put the future of him and his companions in jeopardy. Now I’m not going to tell you what happens here but I will say that, by the end of the story, Mr. Murray does contradict, quite significantly, the current, additional Doc Savage timeline as established in comics over the years. I can't really tell you how without ruining the ending of this one but I wonder how people feel about this milestone.

One thing I will say though... and this is something I've gotten used to in the last few years, is that Murray confidently adds to the existing mythology in a respectful and, almost as importantly, highly entertaining manner which doesn't detract from the original tales. One thing I appreciate is when he adds something into little details of a long established character to help make them more plausible while similarly pushing their particular traits to the forefront. For example, we've always known that Renny has huge hands, almost bigger than his head and that his favourite trick is to punch out oak panels from doors with his strong fists but, here this is further enhanced by showing that Renny has a specially custom built candlestick style telephone to allow for his large fingers. This is nice stuff and much appreciated by this reader, for sure.

And that's me done with the new Kenneth Robeson's latest Doc Savage adventures, Mr. Calamity and Valley Of Eternity. Both are immensely entertaining and fit right in with the spirit of the original novels. My only worry now is that, with Murray seemingly concentrating on new 'Wild Adventures' of such characters as Tarzan and The Spider, that this may be the last Doc Savage adventure we see for a while. I hope not but only time will tell. In the meantime, I think regular readers of this much loved pulp adventure hero would do well to pick this one up.

Doc Savage - Empire of Doom

Bronze Shadows

Doc Savage - Empire of Doom
by Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson
Altus Press ISBN: 978-1618272850

Empire Of Doom is the 20th of the new Doc Savage novels written by Will Murray, under the original name that Lester Dent used when he wrote the bulk of the series in the 1930s and 40s - Kenneth Robeson. This one is also the second literary work (unless you count other media such as various comic books over the years) to feature both Dent’s Man Of Bronze and another famous pulp character, Walter Gibson’s The Shadow (who was written by him and various others under the name of Maxwell Grant).

Now, for the most part I love Murray’s forays into the mind of Dent in these novels and, as it happens, this one is no exception... however, I read the last one where he tried to team up these two characters (who are as tonally different as night and day) in his tale Doc Savage - The Sinister Shadow (which I reviewed here) and I was somewhat disappointed. I think that disappointment stemmed from the writer being closer to Gibson’s prose in that one than he was to Dent’s and, frankly, I never found Gibson’s The Shadow novels to be anything near as readable as Dent’s Doc Savage tales. So it was well done to Murray for effectively evoking the style of The Shadow in that but, yeah, it didn’t find it nearly as entertaining as the majority of his other Doc Savage works.

That being said, I have to say that Empire Of Doom reads like a full on ‘Kenneth Robeson does Doc Savage’ tale and... yeah, it’s excellent. The Shadow fits right in here and I got a lot of enjoyment out of it. The book starts off strongly with the theft of a Navy Destroyer during the Second World War by The Shadow’s arch enemy, Shiwan Khan (who was the villain of choice opposite Alec Baldwin’s version of The Shadow in the 1994 movie). He immediately uses it to launch two missiles into the skyscraper where he knows The Shadow’s Inner Sanctum to be. Midst all the confusion, as the local fire service try to combat the resultant blaze, some of Khan’s minions infiltrate The Shadow’s lair disguised as firefighters and make off with all of the terrible, fantastical weapons the dark avenger has confiscated from criminals over the years.

While Doc Savage tries to track down the stolen destroyer, one of his five companions, Long Tom, is taken over by Khan’s mind control and kidnapped, The Shadow also tries to track Khan’s progress and, inevitably, the two heroes join forces in an uneasy alliance against the army of darkness that this evil nemesis is recruiting.

And that’s about all I’m going to say regarding the specific content of the novel but, if the plot hook sounds a little familiar to longtime Doc Savage readers, it’s pretty much lifted from the 1938 Doc Savage novel, Fortress Of Solitude. That’s the one where Doc’s one and only arch enemy Johnny Sunlight, who would return for his second and final appearance in The Devil’s Ghenghis, manages to infiltrate Doc’s secret lair and abscond with all the weapons which are ‘too dangerous to remain in the hands of mankind’. So some readers should feel right at home with the opening of Empire Of Doom.

It’s a romp and a half and, though not all of Doc’s ‘Amazing Five’ are present (Johnny is off somewhere on an archaeological dig), it manages to pack in the rest of them quite credibly and it even has a very brief cameo, of sorts, by Doc’s famous cousin Pat Savage, although I would have liked to have seen more of her in here. It also has the ‘other’ Lamont Cranston and this book is helpful to those of us who are not big readers of The Shadow and who are somewhat hazy as to the nature of his secret identity. Is The Shadow Lamont Cranston or Kent Allard or both... or neither? Hard to say because the point seems to be that The Shadow can impersonate them whenever he wants to and, of course, he and ‘the real Lamont Cranston’ use this trick to confound and confuse Doc and his companions as the book goes on.

Other than that, the novel is pretty much business as usual... Murray knows how to spin a good, globe hopping yarn and this one is another real humdinger containing mind control, buckets of severed fingers, brain washed warriors with almost impervious armour and electrocution fingers, wingless planes, a black ray that brings a darkness over everything it touches and which kills electrical power and... oh yeah... there’s even a giant, mechanical robot that can crush you if you let it get near you. The book is full of the usual thrilling escapes, treachery and scenes of combat that are a hallmark of the Doc Savage adventures.

Also, a nice touch in this one, is that Murray finds a way to turn the weird trilling sound that Doc unconsciously makes in times of intense, penny dropping thought into a useful plot point towards the end of the novel. I won’t say too much about that but it comes in very useful when it seems that all the chips are down for our two heroes and death is creeping nearer.

Another thing which was interesting to me and which I didn’t realise before was that The Shadow has a couple of islands where he tries to rehabilitate certain criminals that he captures and it’s obviously a ‘common ground’ between him and Clark Savage Jr, who also has his own methods for the ‘cure’ and rehabilitation of the villains he captures. Now I believe Doc’s ‘Crime College’ was infiltrated on at least one occasion in the past (I think it might well have been the Doc novel The Annhilist from 1934) but this time it’s the turn of The Shadow to have his ‘rehabilitation scheme’ invaded and his subjects converted into loyal followers of his arch nemesis. It’s all good stuff and I appreciated the way Doc and The Shadow interacted with each other here, with Doc never really trusting the invisible avenger or Cranston completely through the tale. It’s even uncertain as to what Doc is going to do with The Shadow at the end of the book, once the super villain’s account has been settled. Although, of course, there’s the obvious ‘incident’ which takes place at the end of the novel which makes any speculation with regards to the fate of Cranston's sometime alias redundant.

Anyway, that’s me caught up for a bit in terms of Murray’s new and, hopefully, continuing adventures of the Man of Bronze. I’m hoping he’ll be releasing at least another one of these sometime this year but I’ve got no idea if or when that will be happening. I would also like to see him write the second of his solo Pat Savage adventures too, after his first one, Six Scarlet Scorpions, was so well handled (reviewed by me here). In the meantime I will have to content myself in saying that, if you’re a Doc Savage fan, then Empire Of Doom is another of Murray’s better entries into the series and you should definitely take a crack at this one. It’s a pretty exciting tale that Murray/Robeson spins here.

Wordsworth Classics Guest Blog

Will The Real Protagonist Please Stand Up?

My look at the two main archetypes of heroes in literature and film can be found here as a guest blog at Wordsworth Editions.

Pat Savage - Six Scarlet Scorpions

Bronze Veneris

Pat Savage - Six Scarlet Scorpions
by Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson
Altus Press ISBN: 978-1618272744

Will Murray is back, writing under the old Street and Smith Kenneth Robeson pen name to create another epic tale in the Doc Savage series, except Doc isn’t actually in this one and, I’m happy to say, doesn’t get too many mentions in it either (I’ll explain while I’m kinda happy about that a little later). Pat Savage - Six Scarlet Scorpions is the first of Murray’s ‘solo’ adventures detailing the stand alone exploits of Doc’s, almost fearless, cousin Patricia Savage... known by many as The Woman Of Bronze or, if you go by the very enthusiastic back cover blurb here, “the golden-eyed Girl of Bronze”.

Pat Savage was always one of my favourite characters in the pantheon of Doc’s wonderful ‘brothers’ in arms although, he really never liked her getting involved in any of his adventures for fear for her safety. She only appeared in 39 of Kenneth Robeson’s 181 published (in his lifetime) Doc Savage novels but she was always a stand up character in my book, starting off in her first adventure in the Doc Savage tale Brand Of The Werewolf and sporadically after that... whenever she found an opportunity to horn in on the action. Over the last 20 or so years, Will Murray has been writing new Doc Savage tales, many of them reviewed here, and he’s seen fit to include Pat in a fair number of them. Well, I guess she must be a popular character because he’s now written Six Scarlet Scorpions which is her first official stand alone adventure. At least in prose form... I believe Millennium Press released a one-shot Pat Savage comic in the 1990s, an issue which has continued to elude me to this day as I wait for that strange mix of art and magic phenomenon which I like to call... the right price.

Now, let me define what solo adventure means here. In the case of Pat Savage, it doesn’t mean that she’s going it alone for this one, it just means Doc Savage himself is never in the picture and, although I was expecting him to turn up towards the end of the story, he doesn’t actually do that and I think that’s right and proper for the first time Pat goes it alone. I’d welcome guest appearances from her cousin in future novels in this new range (I’m assuming there are going to be some because this one rips all the roars and roars at all the rips) but she needs to fly under her own wings the first time out, I reckon..., so I’m pleased that Murray made that decision.

That being said, she does have the companionship, throughout the story, of Doc Savage’s most regular assistant from The Amazing Five, Monk (aka Andrew Blodget Mayfair), the chemist who is more known for his apish looks and physical strength than he is for his unquestionable excellence in his chosen field of science. There’s also a couple of appearances from his lawyer friend, Ham, but the majority of the action in this one is covered by Pat and Monk working as a team.

And it’s a pretty good team.

Murray start things off with a plane crash in the desert in Oklahoma and the whole story is set in the relatively near vicinity of a few towns and a mountain range. Anything within a short plane ride away, in fact. The story involves the ‘vinegarroon’ scorpions of which there are more than six... although the title of the story makes for a nice alliterative attraction... and a chemical substance which causes either heavy disease or death. Of course, with a chemist in tow, Pat should be able to solve this one easily so the writer throws Monk’s portable chemistry lab out with the bathwater and we have a story based on a mystery disease which can’t suddenly be solved and cured within a couple of hours. Especially since Pat and Monk soon find themselves fugitives from the law and its harsh brand of Oklahoman justice. So the two have a lot on their plate as they try and stay away from the police and investigate the strange mystery of the head of a bunch of criminally ambitious indians, lead by a character ripped almost from the silver screen’s theatrical serials and known as the masked mastermind, The Standing Scorpion. And it’s exactly the identity behind this mysterious villain which takes a lot of our two main protagonists collective brain power to  find out, just like it always used to do in those old 1930s - 1950s serials.

The book is loaded with cliffhanger action, as you’d expect from something which is trying to emulate the pulps. One of the initial qualms I had when I started reading this was that, without the curious quirks of the Doc Savage character to describe and work into the main narrative, this felt less than a Doc Savage novel and more like something else. Which, of course, it is. Monk and Ham comply to their character traits and it’s just something that I had to accepts. Pat is not Doc and the experience is never going to be quite the same as reading one of those Man Of Bronze adventures... and nor should it.

All in all, this is a pretty strong opener for the first of the stand alone Pat Savage tales and I really have to slap Murray on the back here and say that he’s done a grand job with the lady. There were, of course, a couple of things I didn’t like about the novel (isn’t there always?).

My first problem with it was the way in which Pat and Monk treated an aircraft pilot to steal his plane. Seems to me this is not the best way forward and it seems unnecessary and pretty out of character for any of Doc Savage’s associates to behave the way they do here. No comments are made to redress the balance about what happens to the fellow later and how he can be compensated. This just seemed a bit off kilter in terms of the way the characters would conduct themselves and I would have liked a bit of an explanation for it.

The other thing which bothered me was something which happens at the end of the novel. The stories usually take place at some point in the existing Doc Savage timeline from the early 1930s to the late 1940s and it’s often pinpointed exactly where the adventure fits in with all the others in the chronology. This one, from some things which are said, I take to be set somewhere in the mid to late 1930s. However, without giving anything away, in as much as you know that Pat, Monk, Ham and Monk’s pet pig Habeas Corpus will have to survive the adventure due to their later, published exploits... something happens which forces the three two legged adventurers into a month of quarantine. Now I can’t say myself that any of these three characters were out of action for a month in the original books or not but, if they were, I’d like to know about it and find out which two Doc Savage yarns this story fits itself between.

However, when all is said and done, these are really minor grumbles here and, as usual, Will Murray does an outstanding job of carrying on the Kenneth Robeson name. I’m hoping this tale is as popular with other readers and as fun to write for Murray as it was for me to read it because I’m really hoping these ‘new adventures’ of Pat Savage will be a regularly scheduled literary event every year. Whether they are or not, though, fans of Doc Savage and his merry colleagues could do a lot worse than picking up Pat Savage - Six Scarlet Scorpions and giving it a good reading. I’m glad I did.

Doc Savage - Glare of the Gorgon

Stone With The Wind

Doc Savage - Glare of the Gorgon
by Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray)
ISBN: 978-1618272386

When a man goes to the 86th Floor of Doc Savage’s skyscraper to enlist the help of the man of bronze, he suddenly shows signs of distress and collapses dead. His brain has been turned to stone and an icon of the Gorgon is found, burned onto the corridor’s wall in green.

So begins another of Will Murray’s more-hit-than-miss adventures of Doc Savage, writing under the old Street and Smith house name Kenneth Robeson, once more. This one, it has to be said, is absolutely dynamite but I may be reacting to this particular humdinger of a tale in this way because it’s dealing with my favourite period of Lester Dent’s* writing of the character. Specifically, his early career. It’s set not long after the events of the December 1934 tale The Annihilist and it reminded me a lot of those very early Doc Savage novels I read whenever I could find them. Thus adding fuel to my flame that, as I’ve stated in past reviews of Murray’s work with this character, the author changes his writing style subtly to make it fit in with how the original writer might have written it at that point in his career.

Doc was a lot more of a simpler character then, of course, but even at this point of his career, specifically in the aforementioned tale The Annihilist (if I’m remembering correctly), certain moral issues of his special Crime Clinic, the secret place where Doc cures his enemies of their evil nature by performing brain surgery to take away their memories before rehabilitating them and sending them back into the world as honest citizens, were already being called into question. Murray picks up on this an reiterates it in certain parts of this cracking adventure yarn, even bringing back a policeman who is ‘in the know’ from that earlier Dent novel, here.

It’s interesting the way he uses the dialogue in this story to place it this early in Doc’s career. Such as his utterance “Come brothers, let us explore”... the term ‘brothers’ not being a turn of phrase I remember the character keeping for long in the originals. The characterisations of various characters in this book are very rich too... perhaps more fitting to the longer novels of Docs early career as opposed to the shorter novellas, due to page cuts in the original pulp magazines, after a certain point in the character’s life. Like he has time to imbue everyone with their own small personality sketch rather than just hit the action without consequence. For example, a couple of crooked henchmen in the early stages of the novel called Blackie and Blue are almost a 1930s equivalent of Ian Fleming’s Wint and Kidd hit men from his novel Diamonds Are Forever and Murray’s command of the prose used to describe these two was so strong that I assumed they would be around for the whole book when, in fact, their criminal career as far as Doc Savage and his aides are concerned, is finished very quickly.

Those early 30s novels could also be quite brutal and dark when they wanted to be and, even though Doc himself didn’t believe in killing, this didn’t exclude the addition of a very dark thread that could be pulled when things got rough and Murray has some of this darkness injected into this novel at various points... most pointedly when a regular character actually commits suicide over certain facts of the case and then the real criminals use this death to muddy the waters and point the finger of suspicion elsewhere. I can genuinely say i didn’t expect something that happens to one of the characters in this and so, as far as I’m concerned, if you can catch me off guard then you’re doing something right.

One again, the current Savage chronicler is having a lot of fun with the characters and, I think I mentioned in an earlier review of his books that he has now become extremely poetic when finding new ways to describe the unconscious trilling sound that Doc makes when he’s figured something out or found something to be genuinely puzzling. In this one Murray describes it thusly: “A searching wind slipping serpentine over shifting sand dunes could conceivably produce such a susurration.” This is getting nicely surreal now but certainly entertaining, it has to be said.

My one real question about the novel is in the fact that two of Doc’s aids, Renny the engineer and Johnny the archaeologist, are absent from the shenanigans here. Now I know Dent used to regularly strip down the crew in the novels, presumably because there were too many people to have to try and include in the dynamics of the story, but I didn’t think Dent started doing this until much later in the day in terms of the decades he was writing these things. However, I could be wrong and, even if I’m not, it doesn’t really matter. A cracking yarn is a cracking yarn and not much else matters as long as it all makes sense and the continuity is good.

Murray even manages to get in an element to the story that I had forgotten was sometimes an ingredient of some of those very early days of the character. Namely, being hounded by the police who mistakenly believe that either him or one of his aides are to blame for whatever villainy is afoot. In this one, Doc Savage is being hunted for the last quarter or so of the book by the Chicago police, who believe he might have something to do with the death of the various gangland characters who are having their brains turned to stone by the mysterious gorgon of the title. I don’t seem to remember any of Murray’s earlier Doc Savage novels including this kind of ‘police VS Doc’ element so I’m really pleased he resurrected it for this novel, taking place at a time in the bronze adventurer’s career of ‘righting wrongs’ when it would still be a credible incident.

And there you have it. A short review for Glare Of The Gorgon, another near perfect Doc Savage adventure from the creative mind that is the new Kenneth Robeson, Will Murray. I know he’s started writing new Tarzan books now but he does such a good job with Lester Dent’s creation that I hope he still finds his way to writing more Doc adventures. In the meantime, he’s written the first stand alone (in a novel format, at least) adventure of Doc’s cousin, Pat Savage. So, yeah, you can expect a review forthcoming on that one sometime in the New Year, for sure.


*Who wrote the majority of the 181 original Doc Savage novels under the Kenneth Robeson byline.

Doc Savage - The Secret of Satan’s Spine

Bad Days With Black Rock

Doc Savage
The Secret of Satan’s Spine
by Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray)
Altus Press ISBN: 978-1618272164

So once again we have the amazing Will Murray taking on the mantle of the old Street and Smith pen name, Kenneth Robeson, to continue the good work of Doc Savage, long after original scribe Lester Dent’s death. I think it says a lot about Murray’s enthusiasm and attention to detail that this tome feels exactly like it’s been written in the period of Dent’s work when this particular story is set.

The Secret of Satan’s Spine is a Doc Savage adventure which takes place in the 1940s, during the Second World War. The back story of Doc Savage and the Amazing Five was that they met while serving in the First World War, although the full story was never divulged until many decades later when Philip Jose Farmer wrote a Doc ‘origin story’, Escape From Loki. Doc and what was left of his crew only managed to survive another four years in literary form after the Second World War before the pulp magazine in which the novels resided was cancelled. Obviously, over the years, and this has much to do with the Bantam reprints, the Doc stories have found a new lease of life and so, here we are with another of Murray’s incredibly well cobbled together tales... taken from an original Lester Dent idea which was rejected by the publishers at the time.

Something dark and strange happened to Doc Savage in the 1940s. He became much less reliant on the scientific gadgets that were always, until that point, a large part of his literary personae. The fashions of the time had presumably made it more popular for ‘science detectives’ to solve their problems with their brains (and possibly fists) rather than reach for, in Doc Savage’s case, a whole arsenal of curiously ‘ahead of their time’ gadgets which were, more often than not, easy to conceal on one’s person. Another strange thing which happened was that Doc’s five famous aides slowly found their roles diminishing until, by a certain point, Doc was only ever accompanied by the two who were, presumably, the most popular with the readers... Monk and Ham.

Something else which I seem to remember happening, although my memory may be playing tricks on me here and I’m unable to confirm this at present, is that Doc’s Crime College, where he operated on their brains to remove captured criminal’s memories of their past before teaching them how to become upstanding citizens, either slowly disappeared or may have just been consciously dropped by Doc at some point. By then, I suspect, Dent had maybe realised that the decision to change someone into a less criminal person without any choice in the matter, and in total secret, was a bit of a moral blind spot and so it was dropped, or at least pushed into the background significantly, during this time. It’s an interesting dilemma which various post-Dent comics and stories have used as a dramatic springboard in later years but I think it’s probably something Dent realised himself at some point. It’s definitely something Anthony Burgess must have figured out when he explored a less subtle variant of the same dilemma in A Clockwork Orange.

Anyway, all these little changes to the character means that, for me, the stories written and set in the 1940s, while still good, are not usually among my absolute favourite Doc Savage adventures.

Will Murray addresses these points and the style of the 1940s Doc head on and, in doing so, makes him much more readable and more interesting than I remembered him from being during that period. He talks about Doc consciously leaving his gadgets at home in order to not rely on them so much but... at the same time... it’s also true that for large chunks of the book, Doc is wearing what is the 1940s ‘science magic’ equivalent of Harry Potter’s cloak of invisibility. So Murray kind of straddles a line between ‘to gadget or not to gadget’ and does it pretty convincingly, it has to be said, without really examining too closely why Doc would ever want to make life harder on himself and do such a thing in the first place.

The story starts off with Monk and Ham arguing, as usual, before Monk gets pulled into a scheme by being duped by a pretty face... a plot which will soon involve Doc and Ham too, as they take passage aboard a military ship to try and figure out just what kind of deadly commotion is about to erupt. However, that’s as far as it goes in terms of regulars of the series... it’s just Doc, Monk and Ham in this one and that would certainly fit in with the time period Murray has chosen to write about here. To counter that somewhat, he brings in a group of four friends who appeared together in one original Doc adventure by Dent and reunites them with what’s left of Doc and his crew... although they don’t do a whole lot over the course of the narrative, if truth be told.

As for that Crime College? Well, at one point near the end, Monk informs one of the captured criminals that he can look forward to a spell in Leavenworth, which is a far cry from Doc taking him back to a secret location and performing a special kind of acupuncture surgery on his brain. No explanation is given as to this passing comment by Monk and I’m guessing that people who are only aware of the 1930s Doc Savage adventures might raise and eyebrow over this line in the book. It does, I’m sure, make sense though.

The plot and pace in this one is not reminiscent of the globetrotting variety of adventures, even though a lot of the world, in terms of distance, is technically covered here. Unlike a lot of the Doc narratives, which can often be similar to a 1930s film serial in terms of people going here, there and everywhere, repeatedly, over a number of weeks... the structure of this one is fairly simple. We have a small part of the story at the start which is set in New York and a small part at the end on a small island which houses The Secret Of Satan’s Spine. Everything in between is set on the ship which has started its journey with a healthy number of disguised villains as well as the ultimate cure for all kinds of villainy everywhere... namely Doc, Monk and Ham.

The action isn’t choc-a-block and full-on in this one either, it has to be said. That doesn’t matter, though, because Murray has a way of grinding out his pulp prose in a fashion that moves the reader on at a fair lick without necessarily needing to constantly read about fist fights or other such matters... although there is still certainly enough action in here when called for... it’s just not one action set piece after another, which is not necessarily a bad thing and, especially I suspect, if you’re writing a specifically 1940s period Doc tale. Murray knows his stuff and he does his job well here.

I actually, despite the era of the Bronze Man’s adventures in which this fits, really enjoyed this one, after the initial set up was out of the way. The Secret Of Satan's Spine is a much better volume than Murray’s Doc book prior to this, The Sinister Shadow (reviewed here) and once I’d gotten over my disappointment at the 1940s setting, I really got into the swing of it. One slight criticism may be that the author seems less willing to spend time on a more believable pseudo-scientific explanation for some of the more fantastical things on display in this novel but I was happy to overlook this because of the sheer entertainment value that these inventions and archaeological artefacts bring to the story. Not nearly one of the best of Murray’s yarn spinners but certainly nowhere near the bottom end of the spectrum either. If you’re a Doc Savage fan then you should have no problem with this addition to your bronze library so... yeah... all in all, another big triumph for Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson. Looking forward to the next one.

Justice Inc

Avenger's Ensemble

Justice Inc
Dynamite comics Trade Paperback reprint
ISBN: 1606906623

So here we have another modern comic strip "mash up" of 1930s pulp characters, this time teaming up Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Avenger. Now I read a DC series called First Wave a few years ago which teamed up these characters but, as I recall, I found it so awful a rendition of the original source material, being nothing near these fictional people in either spirit or tone, that I just flat out refused to bother to review it. This one is a little better but... it's still not great and, especially in terms of Clark Savage Jr, still not what I would call a credible portrayal of the character.

The Avenger was a relatively short lived character created by the Smith and Street magazine as another one to try and rival their two aforementioned heroes in popularity but, despite having a radio series too, the magazine folded after a few years. The published pseudonym for the writer of the series was Kenneth Robeson and the publishers promoted it as being written by the creator of the Doc Savage tales but, honestly, I don’t think Lester Dent, the main Doc storywriter and creative force behind the property, ever wrote any of The Avenger stories. The initial novel, Justice Inc, told of how the hero Richard Benson loses his wife and daughter in a villainous plot involving a plane crash. He survives death but the shock of his ordeal causes his skin to go grey and harden like clay. This means he can resculpt his features to resemble anyone and this master of disguise, along with his aides, sets up Justice Inc to avenge the victims of crime. That's pretty much all I can remember of that initial pulp story, to be honest, as it's been over twenty years since I read it.

This first story hit the newsstands in 1939 and it's in this year that the bulk of this new comic book is set. Starting off with their new, present day incarnation of The Man Of Bronze, a time travel element is introduced into the story to allow Doc to travel back to 1939 to meet himself before returning to the present, leaving us readers back in 1939 to continue the story. A story which, as it happens, is almost a retelling of the original Justice Inc version of The Avenger, but interpenetrated with Doc Savage and The Shadow, intersecting the timeline and with Doc's miraculous science being responsible for the clay faced resurrection of Richard Benson as The Avenger. After both Doc and The Shadow train Benson in how to take care of himself, the three go on to work together to try to foil the dastardly plans of The Shadow's villain The Voodoo Master, Doc Savage's two-time nemesis Johnny Sunlight and a mysterious third villain who is another variant on the Lamont Cranston personae... who is neither The Shadow nor, in this version and more in keeping with the later novels, a dupe identity for The Shadow.

And there you have it.

Except the writing isn't brilliant to be honest. I can't speak for The Avenger because I've only ever read the first novel but Doc is engaging in far too much chit chat here and even displaying a
sense of humour and self awareness that just wasn't part and parcel of Doc's almost emotionless, inpenetrable character. Similarly, The Shadow seems way too verbally aggressive and disrespectful of people for me to take him seriously as a credible version of the character. So this didn't sit well with me.

A good point about the comic is the artwork, which gives it a nice, painted, 1930s style pulp sensibility throughout... but the plot is fairly choppy (if this was a movie I'd say it was badly edited) and is a distraction to comprehension at certain points, I found. Furthermore, the geeky fanboy nods to the actual identities of the writers of the original books, like having characters with names like Ernst, Grant and Robeson, felt clumsily done and less enjoyable than a more sly, subtle set of references.

Another element which didn't sit well with me was the lack of the original companions of the characters. Sure, Monk Mayfair and Margo Lane are in there briefly but they don't seem too much like their original, pulp counterparts and, especially in the case of the Doc Savage novels, they were very much ensemble pieces with all of the subsidiary characters carrying a lot of weight and bearing on the feel of the stories. Here, they're pretty much ignored, it has to be said.

Adding insult to injury, they've included Doc's cousin Pat Savage, The Woman Of Bronze, in the story but she's hardly in it. The pretext that Margo Lane uses to recruit her into the escapades sets up a plot development which seems to me, unless I somehow missed it, to be completely superfluous to the main storyline and a complete loose end, not picked up later on in the narrative. Which is a) not so great writing and b) completely pointless and a waste of a great character who has always had a lot of potential. Even Lester Dent himself uses the character a little too sparingly and she only appeared in a small fraction of the more than 180 original Doc Savage novels, as if Dent himself failed to exploit the richness of the character. Modern Doc scribe Will Murray, who writes the latest incarnations of the novels, has probably done more to make use of Pat's personality for dramatic purposes... perhaps even more so than Dent did. Here, though, writer Michael Uslan kinda drops the ball with the character as far as I can see. Of course, on the plus side, with Pat hardly being in this volume, at least she isn't as badly presented as Doc is here. So that's something.

So could I recommend this volume to fans of the characters and of comics in general? Well certainly I would tell Doc fans to steer clear. It's not great, to be sure, although it's a hell of a lot more entertaining than DC’s First Wave interpretation of the character, it has to be said. If you’re a fan of comics in general... well the story is fairly simplistic, as you would expect it to be when dealing with 1930s pulp characters, but if you’re into rip roaring adventures with plenty of action then you might find this one an okay addition to your library. For anyone else, however, I'd say go back to 1970s Marvel for a better comics fix of Doc Savage and 1970s DC for a better comic book version of The Shadow. Much better versions, to be sure, and ultimately more satisfying... especially the black and white Marvel magazine style comic of Doc Savage... that run was an absolute masterpiece of a series.

Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze

Righting Ron

Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze
USA 1975 Directed by Michael Anderson
Produced by George Pal
Warner Brothers iTunes on iPhone6

The Arctic Circle, 1936. An American flag glides along the horizon and, eventually, a snow vehicle ridden by Ron Ely as Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze, comes into view. We know he’s Doc Savage because the name is emblazoned on this and, indeed, on every vehicle that Clark Savage Jr owns in this movie.

Lower Edmonton, UK, 1975. A young boy of only seven years old is watching Chris Kelly’s movie programme Clapperboard on TV and the film, which he’s never heard of until now, is reviewed. He and his mother are watching as a clip is shown where Savage attempts to ward off certain death in the form of flying snakes, composed of green light, who reform themselves back into shape after being blasted with a shotgun shell. It’s pretty exciting stuff and both the boy and his mother urge the father that night to take them into Enfield at the weekend, to see the film at the Savoy cinema. By a strange twist of fate featuring two colliding cars which mount the pavement to wreak havoc on soft bodies just a year later, the family will soon move house to a location less than five minutes walk from that very same cinema.

Of course, the little boy was me and all the family were absolutely enthralled the night of that cinema trip. Doc Savage was, and to this day still remains, one of the greatest movies we’d ever seen. Now, a lot of Doc Savage fans didn’t like the camp humour of the film, which was lost on me at that time in much the same way that the Adam West Batman TV show is also serious business when you are a youngster... but we all thought it was brilliant. We loved the cheering on the soundtrack whenever a blow for justice was dealt. We loved the applause when Doc reminded his aides, The Amazing Five, of their honourable and heroic code. And most of all, we loved the 1930s knockabout theatrical serial atmosphere to the movie, which was perfect for Doc and which fit right in with another amazing thing I’d discovered on BBC TV about a year before this, the original Flash Gordon serials starring Buster Crabbe.

I recently found myself with a ‘good friend’ in London and she hadn’t seen the movie before. Due to a lack of options and the fact that I had no DVD player on me, nor my US Region locked disc of the movie, I downloaded it from UK iTunes and we watched it on my phone. It’s a movie I’ve seen dozens of times over the years and all I will say is... it still holds up.

The film was directed by Michael Anderson, who’d directed one of my favourite spy films, The Quiller Memorandum (reviewed here), and who would go on to direct another pre-Star Wars sci-fi classic the year after the release of this film, Logan’s Run. This movie plays up the ridiculousness of the situations found in many of the Doc Savage books without, I feel, poking too much fun at the characters. This was ‘wonder producer’ George Pal’s last movie and, despite reports of a sequel being half filmed while this movie was in production, the box office was so poor on this the second movie never came to be. Which is a shame because, in the days before the internet, news like aborted movie projects never came to light much and me and my father were waiting for the sequel to this to be released for years after.

The film follows, pretty faithfully (despite reports to the contrary), the first of Kenneth Robeson’s Doc Savage tales, at least for the first half of the book. The stuff about the green, floating snakes is added for the movie and perhaps, for the medium of film at least, gives a more exciting ingredient than seeing Doc running around trying to cure an Ancient Mayan tribe of a man made plague. The characterisations of Doc and his crew, played by Ron Ely (Doc), Michael Miller (Monk), Darrell Zwerling (Ham), William Lucking (Renny), Eldon Quick (Johnny) and Paul Gleason (Long Tom) are pretty much spot on. Even Monk’s porcine companion Habeus Corpus is along for the adventure, just as he was in a lot of the books.

The pacing is terrific and I remember we were all fooled for a few seconds, the first time we saw it, when Doc’s plane is shot down and destroyed with, seemingly, him and his crew in it... before a clever and less than subtle reveal gives the audience the truth behind that incident. We also marvelled at the refractive glass moving everything in Doc’s Empire State Building headquarters exactly 6 inches to the left, thus defeating a sniper’s bullet before it is even fired. And the wonderful fight scene between Doc and the prime antagonist of the movie, Captain Seas (played by Paul Wexler), where different fighting styles such as Sumo and Gung Fu come up on subtitles as the styles are played up, before plain old fisticuffs settles things, is a nice humourous touch used to lift the sometimes dull nature of such action sequences (in other movies) onto another level.

Frank DeVol’s original score for the film is pretty serviceable but everyone will remember it for his adaptations of John Philip SoUSA marches, which give Doc and his crew a strong musical identity during the action sequences. And anyone who says lyricist Don Black’s greatest song is Diamonds Are Forever (reviewed here) doesn’t know what they’re talking about, as far as I’m concerned. His lyrics for the Doc Savage song, which comes into the movie a few times, is easily his greatest work.

The epilogue to the film sets up the cliff hanger, sadly unrealised, for the next Doc Savage adventure, The Arch Enemy Of The World... and I so wish that the box office could have been better for this movie. I had a new idol and the film started me on the path of reading as many of the Bantam reprints of the 180 plus Kenneth Robeson (aka Lester Dent) novels as I could find... not to mention the eight issues of the Marvel comics which adapted four of those novels (such as Brand Of The Werewolf, featuring Doc’s cousin, Pat Savage) and the eight issues of the black and white Marvel magazine of original stories, which had excellent artwork in the style of their similarly produced Savage Sword Of Conan magazine. Some truly phenomenal stuff.

As the years pass, kickstarted by this film, I continue to read Doc Savage publications and buy what merchandise I can... which is not much, alas. I still have my bronze figurine of Ron Ely in the role on my bookshelf and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Shane Black can do with a Doc Savage project, which is currently being developed with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson in the role... who looks very much like those old James Bama painted covers (which were modelled, incidentallly, by TVs Flash Gordon, Steve Holland) for the Bantam reprints. I regularly review Will Murray’s new Doc Savage publications, still written under the old Street and Smith house name of Kenneth Robeson, and if you go to the book section of the index here, you will find a fair few of those covered.

Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze is, today, what it’s always been. A really fun slice of Boy’s Own adventure with never a dull moment. Heck, it even has Pamela Hensley, who went on to play Princess Ardala in the TV version of Buck Rogers In The 25th Century, only four years later. Not to mention that it’s the debut movie of iconic character actor Michael Berryman, who is still working at the time of writing this review. If you haven’t already guessed it, the original Doc Savage movie gets a big recommendation from me to anyone who has a pulse and is breathing. One of the great adventure movies and with lines like... “Have no fear, Doc Savage is here!”... it’s always guaranteed to bring a smile to the face.

Doc Savage - The Sinister Shadow

Lurks In The Hearts Of Bronze

Doc Savage - The Sinister Shadow
by Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray)
ISBN: 978-1618271983

Warning: Very marginal spoilers here.

Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? 
The Shadow Knows!

Okay, so I’ve been a big admirer of both the original Doc Savage novels (since I started reading them in 1975, when the movie came out) and also Will Murray’s continuation novels, including his new batch under the collective term “The Wild Adventures Of Doc Savage”. All of the Wild Adventures are being reviewed here in the order of their release and, if you look them up in the Index By Title at the top right of this page (the book section is at the start of the index), you’ll see there are only a few of Murray’s magnificent tomes that I found wanting. Unfortunately, this is one of them but I don’t think that’s necessarily Murray’s fault in this case... it’s more my reaction to the literary style of Maxwell Grant. I’ll explain that a little more in a minute.

The Shadow started life as a radio show character to promote Street And Smith’s pulp magazines in 1930. He became more and more his own thing and it wasn’t long before people were asking the news stand sellers for magazines of pulps specifically based on the character. Eager to feed that market, the publishers commissioned Walter Gibson to start writing his literary adventures in The Shadow magazine and I understand he wrote the bulk of them, under the Street And Smith pen name of Maxwell Grant. Orson Welles played him on the radio, the magazine sales were astonishing and several films and serials, not to mention comics, were sold of the adventures of... The Shadow. In the UK he’s not so well known as a character but in the US he was a really big phenomenon in the 1930s. Characters like Batman may never have been invented if it wasn’t for The Shadow. I have a wonderful Batman comic somewhere from the seventies used as a reintroduction to the character, to usher in DCs revival of The Shadow in his own comic, which pretty much underscores that fact.

While not directly influenced stylistically by The Shadow, when a young Lester Dent was asked by Street And Smith to have a go at writing for the character, it was more as an audition for another character the publishers were thinking of bringing to life and, in terms of the newer character, Dent was given the job... three years after The Shadow had debuted on the radio and about two years after the character’s pulps commenced publication. That character was, of course, Doc Savage and Dent wrote the majority of the Doc Savage novels under the Street And Smith house name of Kenneth Robeson (although I don’t think he wrote any of The Avenger novels also written under that same publisher pen name... I may be wrong). Doc Savage was extremely popular, too, but he was always somewhat eclipsed by the popularity of The Shadow, I feel. There were no serials or even a movie about Doc until 1975 (although writer/director Shane Black is apparently trying hard to get a new version to the screen at some point, it would appear).

This novel is, as far as I know, the first full length novel to ‘team up’ the two characters... although the idea of Doc Savage and The Shadow getting together is not a new thing, of course. Various comic book companies over the years have tried it and... well the results are never that good and I’d have to say the same here, to a certain extent, although Murray certainly does a good job with The Shadow. Which is possibly why I didn’t like this one so much.

One of the major problems with crossing over these two characters is that they are so different in tone. The Shadow is the ‘ninja of noir’, lurking in the shadows, secreting himself and his investigations and ultimately dealing out leaden death to his enemies. Doc Savage on the other hand, while still possessing some hefty secrets, goes about his work openly as a global adventurer and he would never, knowingly, take away anyone’s life. Even the special guns he invented for his five aides are loaded with drums of ‘mercy bullets’, which explode on impact and just knock the person on the receiving end unconscious. So we have a very clear light versus dark tone on any stories that try to match up the heroes and... well that difference rarely comes across without one or the other of the characters being somewhat compromised, it seems to me and, in the case of Doc Savage’s side of the story, that’s exactly what happens in this novel, to some extent.

While I quite like the idea of The Shadow and loved some of his comics, film serials and radio shows, I’ve never really gotten on with his literary incarnation. And that’s not just because I can never pin a handle on who his real alter ego is... such as Kent Allard, Lamont Cranston or possibly, in this one, George Clarendon... in fact I believe the real identity of The Shadow became more obscured and involved over the decades. The real reason I’ve never gotten along with the character in the pulps is because he just seems so much less engaging and because he always seems so less well written than my constant literary companion, Doc Savage. The books just seem a bit ‘deadly dull’ in the way the action is expressed and... well, all I can say about that is that Murray must be doing a fine job here because... he’s really caught that deadly dull style and used it throughout the novel.

The majority of the action in The Sinister Shadow involves both The Shadow and his network of operatives. Doc Savage and co seem to have much less to do in this one and, consequently, the writing style for much of the novel, including many of the scenes involving Doc and his crew, seems to be very much in the style of the fictional Maxwell Grant than of the fictional Kenneth Robeson.

I don’t know enough about The Shadow to be able to really judge just how great a job Murray has done on him here but it did feel like it was very much in keeping with the few volumes I’ve read. There is a certain, overwrought sense of poetry to the prose as the writer finds ways to express The Shadow as he slips from sight and becomes ‘a living shadow’, so to speak. I do, however, think of myself a fair judge of Doc Savage and there are a few things I think were somewhat overlooked in this tome, regarding Doc and his crew, due to the bulk of the story feeling tailored to get as much time spent with The Shadow and his operators as possible.

For instance, early in the book, Doc and Monk accept a ‘lift’ from the police, rather than ride to the scene of the crime in something faster and more independent. I’m sure Doc wouldn’t have taken that offer in a normal situation without a hidden agenda because it leaves him somewhere where he’s possibly going to get involved with trouble, without any means of giving chase. So it seemed somehow wrong.

Secondly, the two heroes penetrate each other’s secrets, to a certain extent. The Shadow learns the location and existence of both the Hidalgo Trading Company vehicle hanger that Doc has set up and, even more damagingly, his Crime College, where he secretly cures criminals of their bad deeds, removes their memories, and teaches them an honest trade. For his part, Doc discovers and invades The Shadow’s Inner Sanctum but, frankly, there’s no way Doc would have let The Shadow escape him or fall into an unlikely alliance with him for the last act of the book. Doc would have never let him go, I’m sure. He would have chased him down to the ends of the earth to rehabilitate him, rather than tolerate a vigilante dealing out death in his city. So none of that really felt ‘true’ to me.

Lastly, Doc’s aide Ham is kidnapped early on in the book (along with Lamont Cranston) and is absent for quite a lot of it. Monk, however, doesn’t seem that unduly upset about this turn of developments through most of the adventure. Which seems kinda odd. The Monk Mayfair I know would have been going frantic throughout the whole of the story, I’m sure. Here it seems like it’s just business as usual for the apish chemist... so, again, it just didn’t ring true to the characters for me.

Other than this, though, the book is entertaining enough and full of action. It just seemed a little less interesting to me. Well done to Murray, though, for finally fooling me for a minute or two when Doc disguises himself as... ahem... a prominent character in the story. I usually spot these things a mile off and this is such an obvious thing to have happen here that I was amazed that I didn’t see that one coming. So that was good although, by the time in the novel this actually happens, I was kinda counting the pages until the end.

All in all, then, a remarkable facsimile in style and content to the original pulps of The Shadow and I think fans of the character will love this one. As a Doc Savage fan, however, I was less enamoured of Doc Savage - The Sinister Shadow, than I thought I would be... which is a shame but 'them’s the breaks', I guess. Still... looking forward to the wonderful Will Murray’s next Doc Savage adventure... which I already have sitting in the ‘to read’ pile.

Doc Savage - The Ice Genius

The Ice Is Right

Doc Savage - The Ice Genius
by Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray)
Altus Press
ISBN: 978-1618271723

Warning: Some slight spoilers.

Will Murray certainly has become the Kenneth Robeson of the 21st Century, tapping into the writing style of Lester Dent, the original Robeson, pretty well and, although the recent rush of adventures aren’t all perfect, certainly more than filling his shoes when it comes to continuing the yarns of Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze just lately. Having said that, of all the recent written Doc Savage novels of the last few years, this one is definitely not the humour filled romp you might come to expect from these current adventures. The stakes are high in this one and, as you read the novel, you will feel a sense of urgency and doom which is sometimes missing from some of the other exploits of Savage and his Amazing Five.

The story starts this time with Doc’s aid William Harper Littlejohn (aka Johnny), the bony archeologist with a penchant for using long words who, while warding off an attack to his current dig by a mongol horde, accidentally unearths the tomb of Tamerlaine, an evil conqueror who makes Ghengis Khan look like polite company by comparison. The aforementioned figure is frozen in a cave of ice with an inscription reading “If I still lived, mankind would tremble”. Of course, when the Mongol hordes get there it’s up to Doc and his friends to try and stop the ice from thawing because... yeah you know what’s going to happen next right?

No sooner does the ice thaw than it turns out that the cold temperature has somehow kept Tamerlaine in a state of suspended animation for the last 500 years and he is ready to lead his new army in the conquest of China. This is obviously good science right here, I reckon. After all... it must be otherwise they’d never put it into books right? Doc Savage is all about pushing the science and in hindsight this may be a little tough to take right now but... if you actually had been reading this in the 1940s, it may well have seemed more plausible. I’m okay with it.

For a lot of the time, Tamerlaine and his gang prove almost a match for Doc and his crew. Matters are not improved when a former enemy of Doc, thought half cured in his Institute for rehabilitating criminal minds, stows away on their plane and joins them in their adventures, quickly remembering just who he is and causing a whole mess of trouble of his own.

The story is gripping. It’s not particularly epic in scope in terms of travelling the length and breadth of the globe like many of Doc’s adventures are but it certainly makes up for it in terms of action, fast paced thrills, narrow escapes and a number of grim reminders of the bloodlust that villains like Tamerlaine and his crew were capable of. The book is not particularly well suited for children, it has to be said, with various tortures described and, for a Doc Savage novel, an almost uncharacteristic amount of limbs and heads lopped off in the process of the adventure.

Uncharacteristic, yes... but the novel and writing style still contains the spiritual essence of the famous adventurer’s exploits of days gone by and there have been some grim goings on in Doc Savage pulps over the decades. Especially in the early tales when the formula wasn’t quite etched in stone yet (or perhaps that should be etched in bronze). Some were even grimmer than this volume, truth be told, so it’s not really a problem for me when it comes to the tone of the story Murray has chosen to tell.

The historical backdrop of this particular adventure is pretty interesting too, with the Japanese destruction at Pearl Harbour happening around about half way through the book. This leaves Doc and his crew defeated and knee deep in a bloody exploit, having to try and find a way to seeing the current adventure through to a more palatable ending, even though they have been ordered home by the American Government to join in with the war effort. A dilemma for them because, if Tamerlaine is left unchecked, it’s pretty clear the world may well tremble in his wake after the trouble he gives Doc.

Mostly it’s a truly great Doc Savage adventure but there were a couple of things I took issue with in this one. For instance, Doc’s trick disguises really aren’t likely to fool the reading public anymore, I reckon. The insistence of trying it on twice by having the reader listening to the wrong conclusions jumped to by trusted characters is in no way fooling anyone, anymore. Also, the fact that Johnny actually disobeys Doc’s instructions a number of times, intent on setting the events that he unwittingly unleashed right at any cost, did seem a little out of character for him. I can understand Monk or even Renny engaging in such shenanigans but not Johnny. Of course, the good side to this is that the tension is ratcheted up even further than usual and I thought, for a minute that Will Murray was going to use the story to explain something which made some of the regular characters very scarce towards the end run of the original series of tales. I’m kinda relieved he didn’t do what I think he was going to do but, now I’m thinking it wouldn’t be a bad idea for ‘the modern Kenneth Robeson’ to address some of these issues at some point. If somebody is going to do it with a certain amount of style and plausibility then Murray is definitely the person to sort that out.

One thing which really did irk me, though, was the contradictory choice of words in a certain passage in the book. Tamerlaine and his blood thirsty warriors are trying to stop a train and, since they lack the tools to properly rip up the rails, we are told that they find rocks and boulders to put on the track. However, around about a page later, when the train arrives, it pushes its way through the heaped up debris because, we are told, these “rocks were no boulders”. Say what? I’m sorry but we were just told that the Mongols were, in fact, specifically including boulders in their train stopping tools of choice. That statement totally threw me off track and popped me out of the story in a hurry, I can tell you. I found that slip up a bit problematic to say the least.

This really isn’t anything more than nitpicking in the face of what turns out to be a slightly different but ultimately compelling Doc Savage tale, however. Fans of the bronzed super science detective will love this tale of bloodthirsty bandits falling en masse to the bullfiddle roar of our heroes emptying anaesthetic ‘mercy bullets’ from their rapid firers in the middle of battle and some of them will surely appreciate that relying on various tricks of his scientific arsenal like this aren’t always going to be enough to get the results Doc desires. It’s a very hard slog, this one, for Doc and the gang and by the end of what I can only call a bizarrely bloodthirsty slaughter of a novel, things end up pretty grim for at least one of the characters and things don’t necessarily go quite the way that The Man Of Bronze would have best liked.

Pat Savage fans will be disappointed to know that The Woman Of Bronze only turns up in the final chapter of the novel but, when I tell you that final chapter is called Aftermath, I guess you can probably tell that this one is well worth a read and that you will be rushing towards the end to find out what happens next. Not the best of the recent Doc Savage revival novels but certainly a heck of a memorable one, at the very least. Once again, Doc Savage - The Ice Genius comes in as highly recommended by me. If Savage fans don’t like this one, I’ll be superamalgamated!