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 - 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 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 Man Of Bronze

Savage Patch

Doc Savage - The Man Of Bronze 1-8 + 2014 Annual
by Chris Roberson
Dynamite Publishing
ISBN: 978-1606905838


Regular readers of this site will know of my absolute devotion to Doc Savage - a character I first stumbled upon back in 1975 via the release of the George Pal produced movie Doc Savage: The Man Of Bronze... starring Ron Ely, the guy I used to watch as Tarzan on TV, in the titular role. A lot of people didn't like the movie, for some reason... possibly because the old style, tongue-in-cheek bow to the cliffhanger serials of days gone by were not that popular at the time. Fans of the original 182 stories were particularly outspoken in terms of the attitudes explored in the film but, really, there's a big difference between being gently playful with a genre while still showing respect to the things that make it work... and out and out ridicule.... and it was very clear to me that the movie was actually put together with a lot of love for the character.

As for myself, I loved the film and, because of it, I started reading through as many of the Kenneth Robeson novels as I could possibly find. Since they are so hard to get hold of, and since he wrote one a month for a 16 year period, I am getting to the age now where I have to come to terms with the fact that it's probably an endeavour I'll never get to finish before I die. There were also new novels written over the years by Philip Jose Farmer and Will Murray and I've tried to read each of these within a year of publication. If you look in the book section of the index, you'll find a fair few of the Murray ones have been reviewed by me here.

And then there were the comics. Various companies have tried doing Doc Savage over the years and I've usually been there to read them. Very recently I acquired, through ebay, one of my Doc Savage grails, the one off comic that Gold Key put out in 1966 based on an ultimately unfilmed screenplay which was supposed to star Chuck Connors as Doc. Marvel put out two very impressive runs in the early to mid seventies and these are probably my favourites. It's sad that both runs only lasted eight issues a piece. There was the full colour run which adapted four of the original Robeson novels, two issues a piece, and then there was a truly amazing set of magazine sized, black and white stories of brand new adventures, following the trend set by Marvel with similar "magazines" such as Savage Sword Of Conan - the stories were an appropriate combination of the fantastical and the scientific and the artwork was, frankly, some of the best I’ve seen in comic books.

Lots of other comic companies have had a crack at Doc and his crew over the years. DC had a go in the 1980s where they tried to do something different with the character but the results were ultimately not great. Millennium did a great run of miniseries which were pretty cool. DC tried again, teaming up Doc with other of his contemporaries, including Batman, a couple of years ago. I read that one while
on holiday last year and the results were so bad I just couldn't bring myself to write a review of the disaster - I was pretty upset.

This latest eight issue miniseries from Dynamite is one I missed out on but which I discovered reprinted in this trade paperback, along with the ‘annual’ issue. After the recent disaster from DC, I have to admit I was expecting the worst. Now there are good things and bad things about this series but, ultimately, it's certainly not terrible and at least remains true to the spirit of the idea behind the central character. There are, perhaps, one or two mistakes but I've seen other writers make them too and I'll go into one of those in a little more detail later.

Over the years, a number of comic book writers have attempted to contemporise the Man of Bronze, taking him out of his true home in the 1930s and 1940s and bringing him up to date for the time the comic is written. It's definitely a mistake and I believe the character certainly needs his particular period of history to be able to function in the same way. To their credit, various writers usually find a way to physically displace Doc in time somehow... and it often involves the loss of his companions, The Amazing Five, somewhere along the line as a sacrifice to this updating process.

Another common tactic is to find a potential weak point in the character's past and pitch it into modern times and criticise it on the values of our age... and it's usually Doc's "crime college"' where he operates on the brains of captured criminals, erases their memories, rehabilitates them and gives them an honest trade which is the bone of contention picked out by modern writers. The moral dilemma, which is easy to identify from a contemporary viewpoint, is usually used to exploit the drama of Doc having to cope with the attitudes found in a brave new world.

This new version makes use of both of these strategies but, where other writers have failed to maintain the vitality and integrity of the central character, this series just about... only just... manages to make it work to some extent. Narrated from our time by a character we don't actually meet until near the end of the run, each issue takes place in a different time zone... starting off from the first issue set in the early 1930s and continuing in a different decade until we are brought bang up to date. It's a slow burn strategy which introduces the challenges faced by Doc over the advancing decades and it's an interesting spin on the character which, to be fair, humanises Doc a little more than usual but certainly does so in a way that seems appropriate to the obstacles in each new decade that Doc has to react to. However, it's not without emotional consequences for the die hard Doc Savage fan...

In this story, the writer uses the device of having a substance that can prolong life for everybody. Unfortunately... and as it would have to be in a fictional plot of this nature... the substance is lost in a scheme which I won't spoil by retelling here, but not before Doc and his cousin Pat Savage have imbibed themselves. Hence, Doc and Pat barely age throughout the series but, alas, The Amazing Five are not so fortunate and, consequently, only last a couple of issues before they are replaced by an ever expanding crew of helpers which sees Savage become, pretty much, a global corporation. This is a huge loss, of course, to fans of the original characters (as I am) but, fortunately, the credibility of the way in which the pressures to Doc are handled and come together as an almost single story arc spanning the eight decades, are enough to just about distract from and temper that loss.

There are a couple of things that I wasn't so admiring of. One of these is that certain elements of the plot seem almost ripped right out of the recent Kingsman - The Secret Service movie (reviewed here) - itself based on a comic book, although I haven't read that one myself so don't know if the things I'm thinking of are in the original source comic or not. I'm not saying either this version of Doc Savage or Kingsman stole some of their central ideas from each other, I believe it was probably just a coincidence... but the similarities are quite strong and definitely there.

The one thing I do find hard to forgive is a mistake based on either the writers not being familiar with the history of the character or, also a possibility, being something Chris Roberson chose to ignore for the sake of convenience... which is also something I didn't appreciate. In the first issue, set in 1933, presumably just before or after the very first Doc Savage story, and also compounded by Shannon Eric Denton in the annual, set three years even before that, Doc and his crew are seen using the famous mercy bullets designed to merely pierce the skin and leave the recipient unconscious from the drug that invades the bloodstream. However, as far as I remember, Doc's writer Lester Dent (working under the Street & Smith house name of Kenneth Robeson) didn't introduce that element into the series until he had a few stories under his belt. So Doc didn't invent the supermachine pistol with it’s famous bull-fiddle roar... or at least the mercy shells... until a little later. Now a case could be made, I suppose, that Chris Roberson is specifically trying to place this part of the story as being the first time the firearms were used but... there's absolutely no way we can excuse Denton's use of them in a story set in 1930. So I was a bit annoyed about that... to be honest.

These are, though, mild criticisms of this short run of comics and I'm pretty sure most fans of Clark Savage Jr will be able to jump on board with this series and appreciate the slightly darker shades of the character which were rarely touched upon in the original stories. The artwork is more than serviceable and the colours used throughout are subtle, sedate and keeping in tone with the ideas of the bronze adventurer and his journey through the years. There's also a nice reference to the Maxwell Grant character, The Shadow, at one point that brought a smile to my face. Not the best comic book version of the character we've seen over the decades but certainly not the worst of the “four colour incarnations” either and, as I said earlier, it doesn't stray too far from the spirit of the source and it explores areas you just couldn't easily work into the setting if it was still mired in the 1930s... although, personally, I would have preferred a tale set in the times of the original stories. Still, really not a bad crack at Doc and worth taking a look at if you are a fan of the originals. Have no fear... the man of bronze is still here.

Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace

Bronzed Off

Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace
by Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray)
Altus Press 
ISBN: 978-1618271327

Warning: I’m sorry but, in order for me to talk about what I feel is a little “off” with this novel, it means I’m going to have to set loose some spoilers in here...

Hmmm. I’m going to level with you right from the start of this review and tell you straight up that, as far as Will Murray’s modern Doc Savage novels go, this one is so far the most distressing in terms of its departure from the tried and tested formula which has worked for the character since his inception.

Now I’ve always been a big fan of Murray, ever since he started writing new, additional stories in the 1990s which could be slotted in between various of the original 181 stories in The Man Of Bronze's long, initial 16 year career spanning the years from 1933 to 1949. I was sad when those new 1990s novels finished their run because, frankly, they were great Doc Savage stories and perfectly fit in with the originals written by Lester Dent (using the Street and Smith publications “house name” Kenneth Robeson).

As the new “Kenneth Robeson”, Murray started yet another batch of a projected eight further novels a few years ago and I’ve been reading them as soon as I’ve discovered each one has been released. However, the first of this new batch of releases, The Desert Demons, has kind of a crimp in it for me because the extraterrestrial origin of one of the elements of the story kinda knocked one of the guiding principals of the Doc Savage series... that everything could be explained away by science. Speculative science, perhaps, but Dent was very much a gadget man so when he talked about stuff ahead of his time (like microwaves) then he was pretty sure that it would come into being.

In other words... apart from the very last of Dent’s original stories, and I believe there were good reasons for that particular exception at the time... the endings of the Doc Savage stories always had what I would nowadays call a Scooby Doo ending. The real villain would be unmasked, that is to say, discovered and revealed, and the frankly often outrageous plot mechanisms would all be explained away by Doc, quite rationally and convincingly, with the aid of known scientific knowledge. There were no arguments because Dent rarely strayed too far from the realms of the possible or “almost possible” of his time.

And that’s the big problem with this new Doc Savage adventure too.

The plot deals with a house which perpetually vanishes in one plot line, a plot line which follows Doc and his crew, and with a group of murderous mind readers in another story, with a different bunch of characters... the action cross cutting from one set of characters to another in alternate chapters. This in itself is quite rare in the writing style of the Doc Savage novels. Rarely would an entire half of a story be following a group of previously unknown characters and, although the inevitable happens and the two groups of characters come to together as the two stories interpenetrate and mesh for the finale... it’s not really what I believe Lester Dent would have done structurally with this tale. I’m not knocking it in terms of entertaining and riveting writing... this is another great read by Murray... but I do think it’s lacking in terms of following the formula.

So, as I was saying, we have a vanishing house and a bunch of mind reading criminals posing as a bunch of religious workers. The house, it turns out, can go back in time and then return to the present day of the novel (sometime in the mid to late 30s) and that would explain why the murderous crew of mind reading antagonists are after the original Christopher Columbus. And that’s the set up...

Now, I was kinda worried as I was reading this one because, frankly, Murray was spinning the yarn with seemingly no room for the intervention of the kind of scientific invention needed to explain what was really going on here and, as it turns out, I was right to be worried.

The problem with this story, narrative structure aside, is that the house “really can” go back in time and the crew of murderous thugs “really can” read people’s minds... with the aid of their powers of extra sensory perception. Frankly, this sucks.

It’s not what I expect, or want, from a Doc Savage adventure. He was, after all, a “science detective”. Now I know there was some trepidation on the part of the author, or at least the publishers, on how Murray’s portrayal of the Doc Savage character would be perceived in the previous published adventure, the King Kong VS Doc Savage story Skull Island (reviewed here) but, frankly, I had no problem with that one. In the terms of the chronology of the development of the character, the things Doc did in that particular story made a lot of sense. The Miracle Menace, however, unsettled me far more and got me kinda outraged at the liberties which had been taken with the character. But, if that’s what the writer wants to do then that’s his call. I’ll moan about it once, here, and move on.

Asides from those two sticking points, though, being the scientific impossibility and the narrative structure, I have to say that Murray has done it again in delivering to us a full blooded, entertaining as heck, Doc Savage adventure... with Doc and his aides, asides from being in a scientifically confounding situation, all staying true to their characters and Murray’s even laid on some nice surprise guest appearances for people who are familiar with certain of the original stories. Fast paced, vivid action laced with colourful metaphors and pulse pounding suspense which will have you turning the pages faster than your fingers thought they knew how. If you’re a lover of this kind of pulp entertainment, and you don’t mind the odd liberty or two being taken with the tried and true Doc Savage formula, then The Miracle Menace would be a good one to put on your reading list. If you’re an absolute “Doc purist” however, you might be better off abstaining from this particular entry in the series.

Doc Savage: Skull Island

The Kongest Day

Doc Savage: Skull Island
by Will Murray
Altus Press 
ISBN: 78-1618271136

2013 marks the 80th anniversary of two iconic fictional characters... Doc Savage and King Kong. To mark the occasion the current Kenneth Robeson, Will Murray, has written Doc Savage: Skull Island, which gives us a full-on collision between these two fantastical titans. However, this is a little bit different from any Doc Savage novel you’ve ever read and the first signs of this are right there on the front cover before you even open the book because, for the first time, Will Murray is credited as the writer of this novel, rather than masquerading under the old Street And Smith pen name Kenneth Robeson (under which both the Doc Savage and The Avenger stories were originally published).

Now this is a very interesting phenomena in itself because, the only time I can remember a Doc Savage novel being published under any name other than that of Robeson is when famous science fiction writer Philip José Farmer wrote Doc Savage: Escape From Loki back in 1991, which I think is one of the very early volumes in the series of post-Lester Dent additional novels which started off Will Murray on his Doc Savage trajectory.

Now then, the basic story of Escape From Loki was the back story, mentioned in the novels numerous times but never told in detail, of Doc’s exploits in the First World War and how he came to meet his five aids who would go on to assist him in his career of writing wrongs in the 1930s and onwards. It was, therefore, a slightly different version of Doc Savage in that novel and, perhaps it’s because Will Murray has also chosen to cover Doc’s pre-1933 life in this one too, that the cover of this volume features his name only.

And indeed, it’s a very different Clark Savage Jr who we find running around in these pages. The novel is bookended by Doc telling three of his five aids the story of the time when he met the giant ape King Kong. 

Now it’s never been absolutely, specifically spelled out in the original novels but, it doesn’t take much research to figure out that the only building in New York that could have housed Doc Savage’s 86th floor headquarters at the time the tales were first written is the Empire State Building. The mooring mast atop the building also fairly clinches that, from what I can recall from other people’s research over the years. And so this tale starts off in 1933, a few hours after Kong has been killed by the aircraft that took him down in the movie. Doc arrives on the scene at the bottom of his building and immediately takes charge on how to remove the body and get it out of New York... he also feels obligated to do so since the giant ape had saved his life once, and vice versa. This leads us into the story set not very long after the end of the First World War and we see Clark Savage teaming up with his dad (who dies just before the start of the very first Doc adventure, The Man Of Bronze, and springboards that first ever published mystery) on a mission to find his long lost grandfather, Stormalong Savage. And off we go...

And, like I said, it’s a very different Doc and I guess Murray must have been somewhat nervous as to how this book was going to be received by the many Doc Savage fans around the world but, frankly, if you’re going to set the novel in this time period then... yes... Doc really is going to be a different character. And that’s really okay.

What Murray does here is a real labour of love and I have to say that you will probably only appreciate this particular novel if you are quite familiar with the Doc Savage character in general. This isn’t one you would want to just jump into as a first read... you will get totally the wrong impression of Doc. And Murray is a lot more subtle and simultaneously bold in his approach to the growing character.

Here’s an example...

The thing is, Doc Savage never kills. We all know that. He never takes a human life and will save from death even the lousiest villain to be re-educated at his crime college rather than let them perish. The fact that they do often perish is usually due to one of his assistants, Monk, getting a little too overenthusiastic or, more commonly, an accidental death due to being in a less than controlled environment (things erupting, falling or exploding etc). Here though, in (and on) Skull Island, Doc is a death dealing machine who will lop off limbs and hack off heads in an efficiently coordinated attack on his enemies... without hesitation. He will even, once rendering them unconscious, finish them off so they don’t cause more trouble later on. Now this might seem a pretty big leap for some fans of the character but it’s really not... Murray uses this opportunity to observe the man that became Doc Savage and shows you him at a time when he is still working things out.

For instance, the rapid super-firer pistols which fire mercy bullets, a soft bullet which breaks on contact with the skin and renders a man unconscious for several hours, is something which he invents for his aides to use throughout the near 200 novels. He is dedicated to never taking a life but, here, we can see the origins of his thought processes on this matter as we see him start developing an annihilator, super-firing machine gun in his spare time on the long journey which eventually brings him to Skull Island. Its a weapon of war but, the principal of the mechanical workings at least are there. This is reenforced later in the yarn when he develops a multi-barreled blow pipe contraction (which presumably looks very much like a set of pan pipes) to fire poison darts. These two contraptions are obviously the origin of his super-firer, anaesthetic pistols.

Another example would be the fact that his father, Clark Savage Sr, is surrounded by Mayan man-servants and can talk this ancient language. Any fan of the books and even the 1975 movie will know exactly what that is all about... and it’s little echoes like these, never spelled out but left for the old timer Doc Savage fans to figure out, that make this book great.

This is, of course, coupled with lots of little celluloid landmarks for the topography of Skull Island as we recognise it from the 1933 King Kong movie and the way Murray rubs the characters and situations together is an absolute joy to read. You get a real sense of how the character we are so familiar with was formed before that very first Doc Savage story, The Man Of Bronze. 

My only real criticisms of this one, and they’re only criticisms if pushed, are that the book maybe rushes the epilogue, where we return back to the 1933 time frame and also the fact that, while on Skull Island, we never got to see the creatures in the pit which were so terrifying to the original preview audiences of King Kong that the footage was immediately excised and has never been found to this day. I would have liked to have seen some reference made to this lost sequence... with Doc fighting a giant spider or something (although I believe the actual spider’s web makes it into this novel as an aside at one point, if I read it right).

I can see how this story will ruffle some Doc fans’ feathers a little but, I really think the things Murray has done here are absolutely wonderful and they do help give a little depth to a character who is, to be fair, an emotional cypher throughout pretty much all of the Robeson tagged novels. We see the man of bronze before the bronze has quite finished coating the personality and little chinks in his amber armour like Doc and his father's tendency to quote and be inspired by cheap, popular genre fiction (Nick Carter, Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan etc... all of whom are specifically named in the text) give a possible insight into the forging of the heart of this mighty, bronze behemoth. If you are a longtime fan of Doc then I can only strongly recommend you to give this book a go. It’s not quite the Doc you know but it’s certainly the Doc who will become that character you know and it’s a really well written novel... still written within the style parameter’s of Lester Dent, who was the original Kenneth Robeson, and certainly a page turner you’ll not want to put down for long.

Have no fear... the man of bronze is here.

Doc Savage: The Infernal Buddha

Buddha Keen, A Contender

Doc Savage The Infernal Buddha
by Will Murray 
writing as Kenneth Robeson
Altus Press 
ISBN: 978-1618270597

Warning: There are some spoilers in this review. Sorry.

So here we have the third of Will Murray’s second batch of Doc Savage novels (also reviewed here and here), following on from the batch he wrote in the early 1990s. Once again it’s a tale of high adventure using some of the characters we’re all familiar with from the original Lester Dent stories of the 1930s and onwards and, as usual with this guys work on the series, it’s got a lot going for it and Murray proves himself a more than worthy successor to the legacy of Street and Smith Publications' house name Kenneth Robeson.

This novel is a bit of a curious one in what you are actually getting, in terms of maybe a little more deviation from the formula than you might be comfortable with... although I think in this case, when respectfully done, it refreshes and updates, in the most positive way, the franchise for a new generation of readers (much like what Russel T. Davies did with Doctor Who a few years back). Different from the usual formula in that, while it all locks together as a single story, the structure of this one is such that it’s almost like it’s split into two different mini adventures. If I were any kind of football fan I might say it’s definitely a novel of two halves... but I’m not so I’ll try to make myself a little clearer.

The story involves a bunch of pirates headed by the first main villain of the piece, who comes into possession of an artefact called the Buddha’s Toe... which is about as dangerous a weapon as you’re going to get. Something happens when you open the box that houses the Buddha’s Toe, in that everything from the area in front of the box is dried up and made devoid of moisture, including people who quickly mummify up and die in seconds if they’re not beating a very hasty retreat. Doc Savage becomes embroiled in the affair and he obviously makes it his business to get the toe out of the hands of the murdering pirates who would possess it for themselves and unleash a deadly force which could destroy the world without even knowing what they are doing... and this he achieves in the first half of the book... the lead pirate mummifying to death in the power struggle which takes place, for the most part, on an island. Then things get more complicated as the Buddha’s Toe is merely a fragment of another artefact with the same properties, only much larger and more threatening.

The second half of the story follows Doc as he poses as a pirate in an attempt to wrest control of the more powerful artefact form the obsessive Japanese destroying Chinese cutthroats who would unleash it’s power in a similarly ignorant attempt to control a force that would be best left outside of their grasp. Things get a bit dicey for Doc and the gang but it all works out in the end... as you can probably guess.

An interesting and, for me, disappointing thing about this novel was that not all of The Amazing Five, Doc’s gang of aides, are present in the story. This is nothing new for the Doc Savage stories, and as the original thrillers used to be absent a number of the five towards the end of the run in 1949, you can’t fault Murray for jettisoning a few characters that he thought might have either been clogging up the action or providing too much of a deux ex machina in their collaboration in this story. So this one just features Monk, Ham and Rennie as Doc’s invaluable aides. I was distraught that Patricia Savage didn’t make the cut in this one either... I always like the stories where Doc’s cousin Pat is present, bronzed amazon adventuress that she is.

What you do get in this one is a more vulnerable Doc who does often find himself in situations which he doesn’t quite know how to handle. Now don’t panic, I know how that’s going to sound to any Savage fan, but you needn’t worry because the character in the original stories did used to have occasional brushes with uncertainty every now and again too. Let’s face it, although people lionise their heroes because of their superhuman, less flawed characteristics... that can sometimes make for a dull story. Instead, Murray gives us a version of Doc who has to rely on his wits just a little more than usual but, like I said, it’s not a bad call and, as long as he doesn’t start doing this in every novel, I personally think it’s acceptable once in a while. Not that he’s writing these for me, of course.

An especially great touch is when Doc loses his metal skull cap. It wasn’t mentioned too much in the original tales, as far as I recall, but it was certainly a part of the character which has always been there right from the beginning. Doc Savage’s fine hair is actually a facsimile of the same hair which sits underneath a metal skullcap, used to deflect bullets if Doc has to go diving head first into a brawl... it’s a stupid but brilliant invention and it's typical of the 1930s culture that spawned it. Like I said, it’s always there but rarely referred to this pointedly in the original series... and here, Murray spotlights it in one scene and uses it to make the hero even more vulnerable in a tight position. Using this stuff as a dramatic device is a good call and it works really well here because long term fans of the series will get another hit of “Savage nostalgia” while it also serves to put the key characters under more pressure. Bravo, Mr. Murray.

My one big complaint, and its a similar one I had when I was reading the denouement of his earlier novel Doc Savage: The Desert Demons (reviewed here), is that although the less than understandable destructive power of the Infernal Buddha is explained away in typical, for the series, scientific manner... the origin of the artefact in question is less explainable and relies on the reader swallowing a possible extraterrestrial origin. I personally think this is less than acceptable in a series that only once (to my knowledge), in its original incarnation, presented the “object of mystery”, as something genuinely unexplainable for Doc... which is something which was saved for his very last adventure, Up From Earth’s Centre, when the pulp magazine was cancelled. So, yeah, I would have preferred a lot more down to earth explanation for the title’s artefact in this story, methinks, but ultimately it didn’t detract too much from a solid adventure yarn, on the whole.

Also, while the cover artwork is another triumph of fantastic painting, I thought the subject matter was a little less in keeping with the spirit of the covers that have come before it over the last 80 years and it also spoils one of the possible surprises in one of the chapters... instead of letting realisation slowly dawn as to the identity of a new character arrival, we just have to remember the front cover illustration. So that could possibly have tipped novice Doc Savage readers off... seasoned readers will have jumped on it anyway as soon as the character appears.

All in all, though, I have to say that I really enjoyed this one and am especially looking forward to the March 80th anniversary story where Doc Savage crosses paths with another famous 1930s icon, King Kong. Can’t wait for that one. The Infernal Buddha is definitely a delight to read, however, and gets a hefty recommendation from me for any fans of the character who are still willing to go along for the ride. Good stuff!

Doc Savage: Horror In Gold

Bronzed Gold

Doc Savage: Horror In Gold

by Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson

Altus Press ISBN: 1618270230

Earlier in the year I reviewed the first in a new series of Will Murray’s second stint of following in the footsteps of the late, great Lester Dent (Kenneth Robeson). The first of these new Doc Savage novels was reviewed by me here and I also went into a little detail about just what the character had come to mean to me over the years and why Murray’s return to the series is such a special treat. I also had some misgivings about the pacing on that one but didn’t let it spoil things for me too much... and all in all I gave that novel a pretty good review.

All I can say about this follow up novel, Doc Savage: Horror In Gold is.. wow!

Well, no. Okay. That’d be a bit silly of me to write this review if all I could say is wow. That’d be pretty limiting to my vocabulary, don’t you think?

But the spirit of my review is definitely one of impressed stupefication, because this one is absolutely tremendous and doesn’t suffer from the same, slightly pendulous pacing which I raised objections to in the first. This novel, once again, shows that Murray is a real artist at work and, I’d have to say, if this was just packaged up like an old 60s or 70s Bantam reprint edition of one of the good Clark Savage Jr’s adventures and I didn’t know that this was Murray’s work, I would be none the wiser that it wasn’t an original “Robeson” I suspect.

Even before I got to the table of contents on this one, I was hooked by something I saw which, rather cheekily, was presented as a dedication but which tells you a whole lot more. Plus it included an “old timey” photo of the guy the dedication is made to. It reads as follows...

“For John L. Nanovic, who rejected this premise back in 1935, so that it could become a reality in the 21st century!”

How cool is that?

Dent had obviously, back in 1935, submitted a proposal for this novel and the powers that be in Conde Naste (presumably?) decided against it. I don’t know why it was rejected exactly but, if the nature of the mysterious deaths was already sketched out, I suspect it might have been felt that this was a little more stronger meat than the regular Doc Savage readers were used too. Or at least, would have become used to as the series progressed.

It’s pretty dark stuff too... with peoples heads suddenly half blowing off or exploding for no apparent reason and severed fingers suddenly turning up. There’s even a sequences where, due to the mysterious and highly scientificified* (hey, it’s Doc Savage after all) source of the mysterious death, Doc and his crew are attacked with unwilling human targets who explode against their will and leave a shower of red and gunky innards in their wake. Now while some people today may find this kind of excruciatingly gory death a little bit too much for a Doc Savage adventure, I’d like to point out that there were far more gruesome things appearing from time to time within the pages of the original Doc Savage pulp magazines than this. I remember one particularly dark torture scene once involving the application of splinters of wood set alight that fair made my hair stand on end when I was a lot younger than I am now.

So, frankly, any criticism of the way in which people in this novel meet their gruesome end is something that I think you can throw safely out the window. Horror In Gold is a very respectful romp through a typical Doc Savage adventure and the pacing on this one is beyond blistering and keeps the right tone all the way through. The amazing elements of the adventure are done in an intelligent and knowing manner and I never once lose faith in any of the characters... in fact, Murray had me trusting him on this one so much that when he has fan favourite Monk Mayfair do something which is very (well, fairly) uncharacteristic to Ham, it doesn’t grate or stand out. I just accepted it that this is what that character would do when subjected to this particular kind of stress. 

What’s more important, though, is that the novel is completely entertaining and, dare I say it in this day and age, thrilling. Also, it’s shot through with a great sense of humour which is in no way disrespectful to any of the characters and even has them identifying and joining in the fun. There’s a great running gag throughout the course of the story, for example, where all of the vehicles Doc and his crew use - land, air or sea - are systematically either stolen by the bad guys or completely destroyed by them... often leaving our heroes stranded before they can give chase. It’s a very welcome little gimmick which doesn’t outstay that welcome and Murray has done the right thing here and totally melded his own writing style with the “Dent/Robeson” style and, well, it really pays off.

If you’re already a Doc Savage fan then you need look no further than this fantastic homage to Doc and his crew. A brilliant and welcome edition to the original novels and the additions by both Philip Jose Farmer and Murray himself, over the years. If you’re not a regular reader of the character then, believe me, you could do a lot worse than use this one as a jumping on point... if you can’t get ahold of any of the original pulps or novels to devour first. A great read and well done to Will Murray. Looking forward to reading the next two in the series, which are both on my Christmas list!

*No, that's fine, it's my blog. I can make up words like that if I want to. You know what I mean anyway.

Doc Savage - The Desert Demons

Savage Pulps!

Doc Savage - The Desert Demons

2011. By Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray)

Altus Press. ISBN: 9781618270016

Warning: No real spoilers... but this does get kind of rambly

while I place Doc Savage in context with the rest of my life!

1975 was a really great year for me in terms of movies.

My film education was slowly coming along and getting more focussed the older I got. I was barely one year old when my parents took me to see Hello Dolly at the cinema back in 1969 (these were the dark days before home video remember). I apparently slept through the majority of it but loved it when I saw it again, less than a decade later. I'm told I liked Dumbo a lot better, which I believe I saw at around the same age.

After that my diet of young teeny kid movies relied on Fred Astaire and John Wayne movies on TV, followed by James Bond re-release double bills at the cinema, mixed with the odd fantasy film like Battle For The Planet Of The Apes or The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad (my first exposure as a five year old to Caroline Munro on screen, although I’d often noticed her photograph on the Lambs Navy Rum posters which littered the tube stations I was already travelling through, often, from the age of around 18 months onwards - possibly a lot earlier... but that’s another story).

Then another thing happened which increased my craving for fantasy films... in 1973, or possibly 1974, the BBC showed the entire Flash Gordon (1934) serial on a Saturday or Sunday sliced into two big parts, sandwiching a screening of a Hoppalong Cassidy film... I think this was the first time that the BBC had showed the “Buster” Crabbe starring serial in any form and it most certainly wouldn’t be the last... over the years the three Flash Gordon serials and the Buck Rogers serial would be shown fairly regularly in their proper episodic format and would be a staple of early evening or early morning holiday time viewing in our household. I just ate those things up. Here, there really was a fast moving sci-fi adventure yarn which mirrored, in many ways, the old DC comics which had taught me how to read and get ahead of other kids way before I ever got to Nursery School. Yes, they were simplistic but then, so were the comics I was reading and the Flash Gordon serials blew me away. From that moment on, my love of film and the moving image really took off but... in 1975... there was one more thing that really cemented the deal for me and made sure that I payed no attention to anything else but movies, comics, books and TV shows for the rest of my life.

One afternoon, I was watching a lightweight film review programme presented by Chris Kelly called Clapperboard. On it they showed a clip from a new movie in which a blond haired man, who I instantly recognised as Ron Ely from the Tarzan TV show which aired on Saturday mornings, was doing battle in his study with what looked liked luminous green snakes made up out of laser light (I didn’t know they were green right then as we only had a black and white telly... for years I’d assumed Thunderbird 2 was red!). The green light-snakes had attacked him and were impervious to his wasted shotgun blast... they just reformed themselves before my amazed eyes. I was hooked... and begged my parents to take me to see it as a special family outing (knowing full well the cinema was a long trip for a carless family... all the way over to Enfield by bus or train... which is where I eventually made my home in later years... but again, that’s another story). I desperately needed to see this movie, which Chris Kelly had identified as Doc Savage: The Man Of Bronze.

It was a good call... Doc Savage was my hero from that day on. I didn’t know, or indeed care, that the movie was actually not taking itself very seriously and shot through with a rich vein of camp humour... I thought it was deadly serious (as deadly serious as I took those Adam West Batman shows on TV) and, frankly, the cliffhanger serial-style escapes and homages to the pulp adventure yarns which had inspired it was enough to sell me on that kind of movie for life. I’ll always love the “Doc Savages” of this world and, as it turned out, it was a really good choice for a family cinema trip because my mum and dad absolutely loved it too (yeah, we still watch it once in a while... possibly one of the most fun movies ever made).

Of course Star Wars was only just around the corner... which would leave it’s own rich, postmodernistic, eclectic legacy burned into my retina but, while I waited for “The Joy Of SFX” to whip me up in its droid-like arms and ride me off into the twin sunset, the biggest things in my life were Doc Savage... and the Marvel comics adaptation of Logan’s Run (a movie I wouldn’t have been allowed in a cinema to see at the time).

So naturally I gravitated to the source novels for the movie I’d just been to. I’d seen them around as a kid with all the John Carter and Conan collections in places like the dedicated sci-fi novel and comic shop Dark They Were And Golden Eyed (my favourite shop which closed in the late 70s/early 80s and one which seems to have left a memorable mark on a lot of kids my age at the time). The UK Corgi editions of just three of the novels in the series, The Man Of Bronze, The Thousand Headed Man and Meteor Menace were what I started on first (they were expensive items at 35p each in the mid seventies)... before I discovered that Lester Dent (writing under the house pen name of Kenneth Robeson) had written almost all of around 180 of them in the 30s and 40s which had been slowly bleeding out in reprint form from Bantam in the US since the 60s. In those days, these things were just starting to get quite hard to find but you could often discover hidden treasure in the odd second hand bookshop and, to this day, I still occasionally find one peeking out at me from a dusty wall... although they are extremely hard to come by now. I’ve put together a little library of between 80 or 90 of them so far I think... always on the lookout.

Last year, and I didn’t find out about this until a couple of months ago, there was a brand new written Doc Savage novel by longtime fan and professional writer Will Murray.. again writing under the series’ pseudonym Kenneth Robeson. As soon as I found that little gem out, I immediately leapt into action and asked someone to get it for me as a Christmas present (hey... who wants socks?). I was pretty sure this would be a pretty good homage to the original pulps as Murray had written a small series of seven Doc Savage novels (again, under the original author’s pseudonym Kenneth Robeson) in the 90s and I remember thinking just how good they were and almost indistinguishable in style from the original novels.

So when Christmas came and I found the said literary tome was delivered up to my eager hands, I knew it was going to be the second book I read this holiday (after the latest Patricia Cornwell masterpiece of course). So, after a gap of almost two decades since he’d penned the last one, the question I was asking myself was... would Will Murray be able to fashion a genuinely Robeson-like Doc Savage experience as he had done in the early 90s or not?

Well, I have to say that the answer to that is... yes and no.

There’s no doubt that the language and general flavour of this particular Doc Savage adventure is pitch perfect... it IS a Doc Savage adventure and definitely belongs alongside anything the late Lester Dent created. It’s not particularly philosophical writing. It’s clever in its use of both sticking with while occasionally pulling a surprise out of the standard, adventuresome formula of the original works... but it doesn’t necessarily let on in any way that it’s actually self aware of that... if you understand what I mean. It’s clear that Murray is an absolute expert on the Doc Savage franchise and the writing style... the kind of words Doc and his crew would use, the general language of the time it is set in and the deceptively simpler attitudes to their times that the various characters express are all woven from the exact same cloth as those original pulp magazines from the 30s and 40s.

Above all, the story is high on action and adventure and very strong on the mystery element to keep the reader enthralled at every page turn. Of course, if you’ve read as many of the Doc Savage novels as I have then there will certainly be less surprises in this for you as the cookie-cutter plot and details are all sketched-in exactly as you would expect them to be... but for this kind of nvoel that’s a compliment and is not to its detriment. And it has the same “based-on-science”, “Scooby Doo” revelatory ending as all the earlier novels in the series (although I was a little uncomfortable as to the leap of faith I had to make concerning the geographical origins of the books titular characters, it should be pointed out). However, having said all that, there are some things about it which made me like it a lot less than Murray’s earlier efforts.

It’s too long for starters. Now that would normally not be anything to complain about but, it seems to me, that Murray has packed all the action of a genuine Doc Savage plotline into a much longer page count... which means that, although by modern standards of writing, it’s a blisteringly paced action adventure... the pacing is a little more luxurious than in an original Doc Savage adventure. Stupefying cliffhangers or startling (and, honestly, some not so startling) revelations are there at the end of each and every chapter... but in the old days the chapters were only the equivalent length of a few of these pages long, while here they are 9 to 10 pages long... which slows them down a little in comparison. It’s almost like reading a Doc Savage adventure which was written for a slightly slower venue, like a movie or a TV show... and then transcribed into a novel. That’s just the one and only very weak criticism I have with the writing though... so I’m not getting, in any way, bent out of shape on that one.

My other criticisms are reserved for the marketing on this one. The logotype of the words Doc Savage is not what I wanted to see on a Doc Savage novel. It’s not the original pulp cover logo... although to be fair to the designers on this one, you can see how it could certainly be interpreted as a modernisation or variation on those original logos if you wanted to be kind. Nor is it the more well known logo which was used on the Bantam novel reprints and the movie version of the character... which is really what I needed to be seeing on the front of “a Doc Savage novel”. This new logo really annoyed me.

It didn’t annoy me half as much as the new series’ tag line, however. Apparently, this is the first novel in the series of “THE ALL-NEW WILD ADVENTURES OF...” Doc Savage... and frankly that’s a copy line which betrays absolutely no knowledge or familiarity of the character and his long history at all. In fact, the last thing Clerk Savage Jr is... and I’m sure his cousin Pat, who returns in this novel also, would agree with me... is wild. In fact, he’s one of the least feral or “savage” characters I’ve ever read. Don’t get me wrong... the books are all damn good fun to read... but Doc is not really that fun a person in terms of his boy scout personality. He doesn’t need to be, though. He has his five aids around to supply the comic relief when it’s called for and... yes... long time Doc readers will be pleased to hear that Monk and Ham are arguing incessantly all the way through the novel. Good show, Murray!

So, yeah... didn’t like the design or marketing tag line on the front of this novel one little bit. What I did love though, is the style of the cover painting which perfectly evokes one of those old James Bama covers from the Bantam reprints. It’s funny how those original cover images seem to have been chasing me my whole life since 1975. I remember when I finally managed to get hold of some of those West German/French/American co-produced 1950s TV shows of Flash Gordon (the ones which look way cheaper than the 1930s serials and were genuinely not that great?), I got the strongest feeling like I really recognised Steve Holland, the actor playing Flash Gordon in these shows, from somewhere before, but I couldn’t remember where from. Then the revelation I had a decade or so ago, when the penny dropped and I found out that Steve Holland went on to become James Bama’s model for the cover paintings to those Doc Savage paperbacks and, sure enough, when I looked at my books... there was a painted Flash Gordon dressed as Doc Savage looking back at me... funny old world. While artist Joe DeVito’s cover painting doesn’t look anything like Steve Holland, to be sure, it still manages to retain the essence of those classic covers... and so I’m really pleased about that.

Another thing I’m really pleased about is Will Murray’s foreshadowing the next adventure in his novel just like Lester Dent used to do in the pulps. Here’s an example lifted from the last page of The Desert Demons...

“Little did they dream that awaiting them back in New York was a new challenge just as baffling and deadly as the deadly desert demons had been.

Two men would be strolling down Seventh Avenue, unknown to one another: one of high station, the other a lowly tramp. As they passed, not many feet apart, weird death would strike them down.

Thus would begin Horror In Gold!”

Now this little teaser worked into somewhere on the last page of the story would more often than not be edited out on the original Bantam paperback reprints because, for reasons unknown to me, the reprints were not released in the original order of their first publication... nothing like, in fact. That Will Murray now continues this tradition started by Lester Dent, the original Kenneth Robeson, pleases me no end. He’s really got a handle on this.

All in all I’d have to say that, asides from my slight gripes, I’m really pleased that the Doc Savage series is starting up again (at least in book terms... when can we have a proper 1930s set movie version of Death In Silver or Brand Of The Werewolf please?) and there’s nobody I’d want writing these things other than Will Murray... because he’s one of those writers who doesn’t mind bending his style to fit in with the person he’s evoking and he plain just “gets it”. If you were ever a fan of Doc Savage then you can rest assured that this series is in very good hands. Can’t wait to get the “just published” next Doc Savage adventure - Horror In Gold - so I can put it on the pile marked up for summer holiday reading...

If you like pulps... buy this book and support this character before he disappears again!

NUTS4R2s THRIZZLING TRIVIA TREATS..

Doc Savage and his band of trusty assistants, The Amazing Five, had an oath that I have tried my best to abide by over the years. This is how it goes...

“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.”