The Complete Adventures of Señorita Scorpion Volume 1

On A Sting And A Prairie

The Complete Adventures 
of Señorita Scorpion Volume 1
By Les Savage Jr.
Altus Press
ISBN: 9781453645376

Her kiss was flame, Her gun was doom!

In his foreword to the Altus Press compendium of tales, The Complete Adventures of Señorita Scorpion Volume 1, modern pulp writer Will Murray (who I best know for his modern takes on Doc Savage and The Shadow) talks about the writer of these tales, Les Savage Jr... which is handy because I knew nothing about him or his Señorita Scorpion yarns before now. He was apparently born in 1922 and died young at around 36 years of age but, though young, I can tell you he certainly has all the skills of a good pulp wordsmith. Perhaps he’s not quite as eloquent as Lester Dent’s Kenneth Robeson alter ego but, certainly head and shoulders above Walter Gibson’s Maxwell Grant, in my opinion. 

These first four yarns were published in the Spring, Summer and Winter 1944 issues of Action Stories and the Spring issue of the same magazine of the following year. They were apparently quite popular and, according to the intro, might well have even been an influence on various Hollywood contrivances such as the serial Zorro’s Black Whip (reviewed by me here).

Señorita Scorpion is the secret identity of Elgera Douglas, a woman whose family was trapped for generations in a secret area by a mountain and who, now the family has found a way out of the valley in which they were once trapped, operates out of this secret location... where no person alive who does not know her could find the secret entrance to. Yeah... actually, this really is Republic Pictures serial material, for sure. 

Enter Chisos Owens, the cool hunk of a man who is the only one who, by the end of the first tale after tracking her down, working initially for a man who did him wrong... can win her heart. Adventures ensue. Most of them involving the titular lady’s secret ranch and threat to its ownership from various parties. More regular characters get added to the roster, including a sheriff who is caught in a triangle with Owens for her affections. 

And it’s pretty good stuff. The lead in to the tales often seems to be approached by some other character (sometimes Chisos Owens and sometimes someone else like a villain) and while the lady is a formidable adversary, she’s not above being rescued in damsel in distress mode at various points in the narrative... although she does a fair amount of rescuing of people herself, to tell the truth.

The tales are quite addictive and also very descriptive of landscapes and situations. Being Western tales, some fight is often started at the drop of a hat and there are many metaphorical hats plummeting to the ground in these tales. One thing Savage Jr seems to have a neat gift for is the prose of the various gunfights and especially the fist fights that pepper his tales at regular intervals. Heck, one fistfight in the third story here, between the two characters vying for the affections of Douglas (before they all become friends, naturally), seems to go on for several pages with no let up. They are often quite violent too... one man gets a pick axe through his face in one story, for example... but don’t really dwell too much on the gory aftermath (the same chap comes back a little later with a bandage on his face with no real description of his wounds). 

Another specialty of the writer seems to be in making me reach for a dictionary every five minutes. Because the narrative deals with a lot of Western terms and iconography related to Texas and Mexico that I have just not come across before. So Vaqueros, Viejos and Wickiups were briefly on my radar, as were various native American plants and other terms for things which I’d never come across previously, mainly because I don’t think I’ve read any ‘wild west’ fiction before. 

Plus, I’d assumed the writer had made a mistake when an imposter posing as the reincarnated Montezuma, who is mind controlling various ‘good guys’ with peyote to help raise an army to wipe out the white man in America... fires four shots at an enemy with his derringer. However, there were indeed some four barrelled derringers around at the time. Something which I must have just plain forgot, since Sabata uses one in a number of his films. 

There is a slight continuity error, it seems to me, going through the stories, which are all set a little time after the previous adventure. The four tales are called Señorita Scorpion, The Brand Of Senorita Scorpion, Secret of Santiago and The Curse of Montezuma but, at the end of the third tale, after finding a hidden, secret gold mine with large bars of gold stored there, Elgera Douglas and her friends are rich. Why then, when her ranch is destroyed at the start of the fourth tale, does this leave her bankrupt... it kinda makes no sense, to tell the truth but, yeah, I liked these stories so much I’ll let that one slide. 

And I think that about does me with The Complete Adventures of Señorita Scorpion Volume 1, certainly enough to know that I’ll be buying both the second volume at some point soon plus another collection of stories from modern writers continuing her tales. If you are into the fast paced, rip roaring pulp fiction of the 1940s then you will probably have as much of a blast with this one as I did. This one may well be worth rounding up for your book case. 

The Complete Adventures Of The Domino Lady

Blonde Heat

The Complete Adventures
Of The Domino Lady
by Lars Anderson
Altus Press
ISBN 9781618273581

“Adventure was her meat and danger her dessert.”
Black Legion - Saucy Romantic Adventures

There seems to be some divergence of opinion as to the identity and, indeed, the existence of a writer named Lars Anderson. Wikipedia reports that it’s a publishers house name (just like Kenneth Robeson was a Street And Smith house name for the Doc Savage and The Avenger stories... although the primary writer behind the Doc Savage stories was really Lester Dent) but, according to Tom Johnson’s afterword in this very tome, he says that Will Murray (who wrote a lot of the modern Doc Savage adventures I’ve been reviewing on this site... again under the house name Kenneth Robeson) has verified that Lars Anderson was an actual person.

I’d like to know more but, whichever is the case, this collection from Altus Press, The Complete Adventures Of The Domino Lady, reprints the six stories he (or perhaps they) wrote for two publications in 1936. The first five of these stories, published that year, comprising The Domino Lady Collects, The Domino Lady Doubles Back, The Domino Lady’s Handicap, Emeralds Abroad and Black Legion all appeared in issues of that year’s Saucy Romantic Adventures while the sixth and final story, The Domino Lady’s Double, appeared in Mystery Adventure Magazine.

Now, after reading pulps by Lester Dent, who I think is a much better writer than Maxwell Grant (house name for Walter B. GIbson, who wrote The Shadow stories), I think I was somewhat spoiled by the former’s brilliant writing style because, I’ll be honest, it took me a few stories in of this collection to get into the character or, more specifically, the way she is written.

Nothing wrong as a character per se... to avenge the murder of her Irish politician father, wealthy socialite Ellen Patrick dons the guise of The Domino Lady, which includes a black domino mask, a completely superfluous cloak and her automatic pistol... basically becoming a Robin Hood style figure, stealing from rich, corrupt politicians and mobsters to give to needy charities, getting people out of blackmail threats and the like, wanted by both the police and the underworld. But she’s written... and this may well have been a publisher’s stipulation, since she was appearing in Saucy Romantic Adventures, after all... like she’s almost in a soft porn parody. I mean, how many times do I have to read about her ‘kissable shoulders’ and her shapely, somewhat peripatetic bosoms as a description of her character in every tale?

Having said that, I did eventually get used to the sex hugging style of the descriptions and did find the stories interesting, especially for the reason that they are almost a microcosm for exactly the sorts of stories you would get in various 1930s or 1940s feature film runs of characters thrown up on the silver screen. So, in six short stories you get the blackmail photographs plot, the ‘withdraw your winner of a racehorse from the race if you know what’s good for you’ plot, the heist on a luxury sea cruise plot, the corrupt politicians and power mongers syndicate plot and even a ‘framed for murder by a Domino Lady double’ plot. And these are exactly the kinds of tales you would see on a long run of films about such characters as The Saint or The Falcon or, well, take your pick.

But, they are peppered throughout with such succulent but cringeworthy bits of purple prose like “Ellen was breathing fast, her glorious bosom tossing beneath the scanty bodice of her gown.” or “The tall sleuth’s masterful arms went around her palpitant figure and his seeking lips found the damp grotto of her warm mouth.” which, okay, had me chuckling quite a lot in places. Having said that, though, I did warm to both the character and the writing style by the end of this short run and it’s a shame there were only six short stories about the character. Or so I thought...

In another classic case of opening a can of worms, it seems that this character I’d never heard of until I read The Complete Adventures Of The Domino Lady is now more popular than ever and lots of new short stories (where she teams up with the likes of Sherlock Holmes and The Phantom) and various comics are now published contemporaneously about the character. So, yeah, I think I’m going to have to take a punt sometime next year and buy up a couple of tomes of her new stories and see what’s been done with the character in recent times, I think. I  can only hope that phrases referencing her kissable curves and throbbing bosom are as prevalent in the new writings as they were in the originals.

Something More Than Night

Pratt Falls
And Big Sleeps

Something More
Than Night
by Kim Newman
Titan Books
ISBN: 9781789097719

Well this one is utterly brilliant too.

Allow me a brief shout out of a review for the latest mystery thriller from Kim Newman, one of my writing heroes. Well I say that, I’ve only read four of his fictional works and a smattering of his film criticism books but, yeah, still very much a literary hero.

It was in the very early 1990s that I first knowingly came across Mr. Newman’s name, when a friend of mine (please contact me sometime if you’re somehow reading this Rob!) leant me his first edition of Anno Dracula. Well, first paperback edition at any rate... not sure if it made it into a hardback at that time. I was absolutely enthralled with the tome and the absolutely brilliant nods to other cultural characters from myriad sources in abundance, all pulled together and, in the modern parlance,’mashed up’ to weave an alternate version of literary history in which Dracula was successful in his visitation to England (contrary to the ending of Mr. Bram Stoker’s account in Dracula), set up shop with Queen Victoria and paved the way to where various vampires and humans were living together in the same society. That level of post-modernistic melange was new to me then and there weren’t that many people doing it at the time... certainly not as successfully and entertainingly as Mr. Newman and, though I could find no edition for sale in any new book store, a couple of years later I managed to pick up my own copy of the same edition in a second hand bookshop.

Nowadays, of course, the practice of taking various literary characters from different stories is much more common. For example, every year I read the ‘second from latest’ collection of a series of anthologies of new stories called Tales From The Shadowmen from Black Coat Press, which make this cross-fiction character mixing almost the criterion for inclusion (indeed, Mr. Newman has certainly contributed to some of these tomes in previous years) .

Now, remember, there was no internet in those days to find out what, if anything, was going on in the world. CEEFAX was our closest equivalent and, if you’re old enough to remember that, then you know just how useless a dispenser of information that was, back in the day. So I was absolutely thrilled when I found a hardback copy of a sequel to Anno Dracula entitled The Bloody Red Baron (and now set during World War I) which is, from memory, equally as brilliant. And a similar experience happened to me again, a few years later in one of those ‘brand new but remaindered’ style bookshops when I was on holiday in Llandudno... this time a brand new hardback of the third (and at that point final) in the series, Dracula Cha Cha Cha. Now, the books seem to be much more successful currently than they were in the 1990s and Mr. Newman has not only reissued these in expanded versions which I need to pick up and re-read... but also published a whole load more sequels over the last decade. So, yes, I keep promising myself I will get onto those at some point and, yeah, maybe this is the year.

Of course, I’ve seen Mr. Newman in person a fair few times now because he does seem to turn up to a lot of the same kinds of events I go to (not to mention appearing on a lot of DVD and Blu Ray ‘expert interviews’) although I’ve mostly only been in the same room as him rather than actually met him (unless you count that one time where I saw him on his own rushing to a FrightFest and stopped him, really only for 30 seconds or so, to tell him how much his writing meant to me).

And here I am reading his latest, Something More Than Night. The premise is as follows... the majority of the book is set in 1939 and it details the fictional adventures of one William Henry Pratt, better known to the world as Boris Karloff of course... and his friend, the equally famous writer Raymond Chandler (Karloff went to the same Grammar School in Enfield that I, myself, attended in the 1970s and early 1980s and they never once publicised it, which I always thought was a bit of a missed opportunity). The two characters in this iteration of them have had some ‘history’ together from their school days and now their detective friend is found hideously murdered. It’s up to the two of them to take up the reins of the mystery they were embroiled in, slightly earlier in their lives, joining the dots and... oh no, I’m stopping right there with the story content. It’s an incredible book and I’m certainly not going to be wrecking it for people who want to read it.

What I can, I think, say is that it’s certainly not a conventional mystery and it involves... well let’s just say it has some strong ‘weird science’ elements to the tale. Some people might also think it tiptoes from one side of the thin line which sometimes separates mystery tales from horror yarns... to the other but, yeah, that’s not an argument I want to get involved in, for sure.

The book is hugely entertaining and fans of Raymond Chandler’s works will especially love this one because the majority of the tale (apart from a few chapters of third person yarn spinning, where it was obviously necessary to switch to a third person viewpoint) is told by the voice of Chandler himself, Newman adopting the author’s writing style in as credible a manner as I’ve seen done. Well, okay, it’s been a few decades since I last read anything by Chandler but this certainly hit the mark as far as I was concerned. Mr. Newman also does wonders with his descriptions of Karloff and I really could remember certain moments from various films where the mannerisms, gestures and character traits that the writer imbues in him here are gloriously manifest.

The novel is split up into six sections, themselves split irregularly into a number of chapters, including a wonderfully titled, single chapter section called The Man In Chapter 30. And yes, there are a lot of characters from real life history mentioned but also as many made up, parody versions and stereotypes working for, for example, a fake ‘poverty row’ style Hollywoodland studio called Pyramid Pictures. And, yes, it’s full of wonderful appearances including one of the cast of Tod Browning’s Freaks and a nice reference to Margaret Brundage (I reviewed a book about her here). And, honestly, Frankenstein fans will love lines such as... “Cats love Billy. As do women. And small children he hasn’t drowned.” There’s even a nice bit of business where two of the characters get into a discussion about who would win in a fight between Flash Gordon and The Lone Ranger. And fans of Karloff would appreciate, perhaps, one of my favourite jokes in the book, when a mutual friend of Karloff and Chandler gives them the nicknames “Invisible Ray’ and ‘Visible Ray’. Yes, the book is a hoot and well worth the time of anyone who loves the movies and pulps from this particular era.

Now, there were two things that irked me just a little but, since they’re just part of the baggage that I, as a reader, brought along with me to Mr, Newman’s perfect literary venue, these mild criticisms really are my problem alone... but I’ll mention them anyway. One of them lays in Newman’s eliminating a pretty important (to me), real life character and replacing him with an entirely fictional one. Specifically, Kenneth Strickfadden, who invented all those old, sparky machines you see turning up time and time again in Universal monster movies and Flash Gordon serials (I reviewed his biography here...), has been eliminated from the fictional world portrayed here and replaced by someone else fairly important to the plot. Which is kind of a shame but these things happen.

The other thing I was bizarrely upset with, purely because I was expecting him to make an appearance and, during one sequence at the centre of the book, I thought he did... before a character was revealed as someone else.... was the fact that, not once (unless I missed a veiled reference) does Rondo Hatton turn up as a character in this one. Which is a shame but, yeah, that was just my personal wish and expectation of the book and so, boo hoo, I guess I’ll live.

All said and done, Mr. Newman has once more thrilled me with a book like no other, turned to perfection with a well researched look at the milieu of the people he’s writing about and nicely phrased to make the various characters and credibility stretching situations in which they find themselves, dance to life on the page and lodge in your brain in a way which you know will make you miss them later, when the book is done. So, yeah, Something More Than Night is yet another great work by Kim Newman and, yes, I really do have to revisit and explore the Anno Dracula series again sometime soon (not to mention some other compelling novels I’ve seen listed over the last few years which also carry his name). In other words... another great read. Go get this one.

The Crime Spectacularist

Fade To Black

The Crime Spectacularist
by Lester Dent
Fiction House Press
No ISBN marked.

It was after I’d finished reading The Complete Stories Of Doctor Satan recently (reviewed here) that I checked out the publishing house, Fiction House Press, finding they had one volume of stories by Lester Dent. Lester Dent is one of my favourite writers in that he wrote, under the Street And Smith house pen name Kenneth Robeson, almost all of the initial run of 180 plus Doc Savage novels published in the Doc Savage magazine from 1933 until 1949 (I believe he didn’t write any of The Avenger novels, also accredited to Kenneth Robeson). Sometime in his second year on the magazine, he also found time to write three stories of an original character called Foster Fade, The Crime Spectacularist but, I guess once the Doc Savage magazine proved immensely popular and was giving his nearest pulp rival, The Shadow, more than a run for his money, he didn’t bother developing the character any more past these three, initial short stories which were published in All Detectives Magazine.

And I couldn’t find any useful information about the creation and conception of this character at all, so I figured the only way to do so was to find out for myself. Alas, even this jewel of a tome contains absolutely no introduction or preface to shed light on Fade... it just reprints the stories straight and unaccompanied... so I’m afraid I can’t furnish you with any real background to the character (although I believe another book by another publisher quite recently published an anthology of newly written Foster Fade stories... so maybe if I can hunt that one down relatively cheaply I can get some insight from that).

I can tell you briefly about these stories though, which certainly seem to have some of Dent’s interests scattered throughout. The three stories collected here are Hell In Boxes (from the February 1934 issue of All Detective Magazine), White Hot Corpses (March 1934) and Murder By Circles (May 1934). And in these we are introduced to Foster Fade, who is employed by a disreputable tabloid, Planet, as their special private detective known as The Crime Spectacularist. In that he goes after the more sensational cases so that his crime companion, the platinum blonde Dinamenta Stevens (mostly known as Din) can write them up in her lurid style. The two are both paid handsomely, which is just as well because, although he seems a little rough around the edges, especially in the first tale, Fade exhibits the same personality trait that was a big part of Dent’s personae and also, of course, of his more famous ‘science detective’ Doc Savage...

Being that Fade uses a whole host of new, scientific gadgets to help him fight crime, such as a periscope set up so he can see who is outside his office door from a screen on his desk or photographing the entire area around the Empire State Buiding with an infrared camera so that, when the film is developed, he can pinpoint the location of the missing Din from the tell tale ‘glare’ from the special infra-red headlights he installed in her car. He also wears a fine steel mesh undergarment so, like Doc Savage who wears something similar, he can stop any bullets coming his way if necessary.

The character is not very likeable in the first tale but he gets less ‘wise-ass’ and more interesting in the other two. It’s clear Dent is still developing the character as, in the first tale Fade is partial to cigars and, in the second one, we are told he never smokes (indeed, he does have a cigarette in his mouth in that same story but only because he expects trouble and it has a tear gas pellet inside which he is able to bang against a wall with his mouth when his hands are tied).

Like the Doc Savage novels, Dent uses opening hooks which lead to the revelation of something truly startling happening to various murder victims (in the case of these stories) but which are all explained as the consequences of ‘something scientific’ at the conclusion of each tale. So the White Hot Death is a result of exposure to liquid oxygen and the Murder By Circles is the venom contained in the bite of certain bugs or spiders when thrown at the victim. In the first story, he kind of fudges it where it’s made clear that the ‘murders by aroma’ are some kind of un-named scientific gadget.

The Crime Spectacularist stories are entertaining enough (although the first one is not great) but although Dent’s tell-tale signature is built into the stories, I’d have to say that these still don’t hold a candle to his wonderful Doc Savage stories, by any stretch of the imagination. However, I certainly enjoyed reading them and, if you are a fan of the pulps, you’ll probably have a good enough time with them too.

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.

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.

Flesh And Blood

Bullet Time

Flesh And Blood
by Patricia Cornwell
Harper Collins ISBN: 978-0007552429

Dr. Kay Scarpetta...

One of the most popular names in modern literary crime fiction. A pulp hero of almost superhuman prowess for the late 20th and early 21st Century.

One of the greats.

I’ve been reading her exploits, courtesy of her writer Patricia Cornwell, for around 20 years now. Ever since a long departed colleague lent me a copy of The Body Farm, her fifth Scarpetta novel. I quickly brought myself up to speed on the prior novels, once I’d read that one, and have been buying or, as of the last 15 years or so... receiving as gifts, each year’s new Patricia Cornwell novel, the majority of which have been focussed on Scarpetta and her surrounding family of characters Marino, Benton and, another one of the great heroes of what I like to think of as modern day pulp fiction, Lucy Farinelli.

Regular readers of this blog, and this yearly post, will know by now that it’s been my Christmas ritual for at least a decade, probably more, to read the first chapter or two of the new Scarpetta novel after receiving it as a gift every 25th December. Preferably washed down with a glass of Baileys or, depending on the time of day, a good old cup o’ tea. It’s always the first Christmas book I read and, due to the amount of rushing around I usually have to do at this time of year, it’s usually the last book I finish in any given year.

This year was no exception and, as I have for the last few years, I’m able to read the results of a writer who I now follow on Twitter and can see where the research she tweets about comes into the book I read at year’s end. So I was wondering, right the way through this book, how scuba diving would find its way into this one. And I’m also pleased to see that she’s continued to embrace Twitter, a social media I once wouldn’t have a kind word for if it wasn’t for the wonderful people I’ve connected with on there over the years, by making certain factors in Scarpetta’s latest case Twitter related. This is good, if somewhat scary, stuff.

The novel is, as you would expect from an author of Cornwell’s high calibre, an absolutely enthralling, page turning, thriller which will keep you guessing until the end. The style is matter of fact but not without the character’s/writer’s joyous personality informing the reader and letting the audience see past the facts and into the heart of the matter... be that good or, as it usually is when death is the order of the day, tragic. It’s all in here and up to the usual high standard of Cornwell’s best work and fans of Scarpetta will, I’m sure, love this one.

Like a lot of her later works, the book tends to compress a small time scale into a lot of pages but, in this case, it takes three small periods of time so, it’s true to say that this one shows a longer period of time taken to solve the case or, in this case, reach a logical conclusion. I really don’t want to give too much away on this but I will say that “long time fans” of the characters in this story will be more than happy with the identity of this year’s trouble maker. So I’ll keep fairly tight lipped (tight fingered?) on that particular facet of this red hot thriller.

Now there was a time when Cornwell was, almost, quite blasé with the final fates of her characters and, in her early works, people you had grown to love would get killed off. She tried this again a number of years ago but, after a couple of books, a certain character she’d killed off made a return to the pages, with a justification which, to be fair, fits right into the dark and shadowy world that some of these characters have to inhabit sometimes but, to be honest, would probably be seen as a bit of a push if you weren’t that familiar with the way she weaves her stories. Like most people, I suspect, at least the ones who read the books in order (an absolute must as the characters change, adapt and grow from tome to tome), I’d got kind of comfortable with the tight knit group she places around her lead character and I wasn’t expecting any fatalities this time around. Was I right to be lulled into that trap?

Well, I wish I could tell you but, honestly, without saying too much about the ending and then the epilogue/wrap up to the novel (something she usually includes, where things are explained/clarified and usually made right again)... all I can say is... I don’t know. Truly, don’t know. Cornwell is a master (or mistress?) of her craft and her writing style is often considerably clinical although, frankly, she does turn a phrase like some of the best poets when the style suits the situation and, in Flesh And Blood, she does something which I can’t recall her quite doing before... well maybe once but certainly not in the way she handles it here.

I said that she is a master of her craft and the ending of this book and the way the reader will react to it hinges on one word. It’s a certain kind of word in the English language and it even has a name... but I’m not going to tell you what that name is because that may give the game away... to the extent that the game could be given away... which is pretty much not giving anything away to be honest. However, what I’m trying to say here is this...

With one word.

Just one word.

The very last word of the novel, in fact... she changes the game and leaves the reader in a very bad place. Bad because... we need the next book in the series to find out what the heck just happened. Which means waiting another year, at least, for the next one to come out. I don’t expect the action to take up from where we leave it here... Cornwell tends to move the time along between books. I suspect we’ll find out what happened as a flashback reference a chapter or two into the next one. But lives are on the line here... I think...

I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’ll have to wait and see.

All I can honestly say I know is... Flesh And Blood is another brilliant piece of crime fiction from the razor sharp, dissecting mind of Patricia Cornwell and fans, old and new, should have a blast with it. And now I’m in something of a quandary because, frankly, I need to wait until next year’s Christmas ritual to find out what just happened. I’m hoping to still be around to read and write about it and, hopefully, so will some of the regular readers of this blog... I just hope you don’t leave it until next Christmas before returning to my reviews. Have a good read.

Doc Savage: Phantom Lagoon

Savage Creatures

Doc Savage: 
Phantom Lagoon
by Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson
Altus Press
ISBN: 978-1618271341

You know, it must be really hard to, not only write a continuation of the exploits of an already famous literary character, but to write it in the style and spirit of the original author. It’s a neat trick if you can pull it off and, while I found a few of the latest batch of modern Doc Savage novels to be a little out of kilter with their 20th Century counterparts, I have to hand it to Murray and say that they are definitely more hit than miss and, even on the occasions when they do miss the mark a little in terms of authenticity of the characters and styles of situations in comparison to the original versions, they are nearly always entertaining.

One thing Murray definitely pulls off in his Doc Savage novels is the breakneck pacing which was often an obvious stylistic flourish of the pulps, especially within the work of Lester Dent (the original Kenneth Robeson) and his Doc Savage tales. However, I have to further congratulate Murray in that, with Phantom Lagoon, he also manages to not only get all the ingredients of a classic Doc Savage novel just about absolutely right, he also manages to push the edges a little bit in terms of some of the events which happen in this one (I don’t want to get too spoilery here) and you know that Dent would surely have approved of these exciting dramatic decisions. They are absolutely in the style of what Dent would have done... and he did sometimes stretch his own formula himself, on occasion, just to shake things up.

The events I am talking about in this particular volume are those kinds of incidents which threaten to somehow change the status quo of the tried and true formula of any future Doc Savage novels. They rarely do have any permanent after effects which last them for longer than the opening set up of the next novel, after the events have occurred in the previous story, but they are quite drastic alterations for the duration of the tale. Of course, with a character like Doc Savage, who has an unlimited reserve of money he can call on to fund his work at any time, it’s rare for anything really groundshaking to be irreparable, but certain “big things” often are written in such a way that they certainly seem like massive events at the time... again, without giving away spoilers here, it’s hard to go into.

Suffice it so say that there are some scenes of destruction and devastation which have an effect on the possible future of the narrative and also, of course, add to the dramatic impact and gravitas of the latest caper that Doc and his crew end up investigating. Now, it’s possible Murray may have decided to do what he’s done here to tie into a drop off in certain ingredients in the later World War 2 and post World War Doc Savage tales. I can’t quite remember (or find online now, either) specifics of just where Doc was at with various locations and equipment at certain stages of his crime fighting career, but I trust Murray enough to know that he wouldn’t be one to threaten the continuity of the chronological setting where this novel gets tucked into the original stories. And, like I said, the events portrayed in this novel are, as far as I’m concerned, things Lester Dent would have approved of himself.

For instance, the original Doc Savage story Fortress Of Solitude tale features an outrageous attack on Doc’s arctic retreat which would seem to have long reaching effects on the series (Murray even picks up some threads from this story himself in at least one of his previous Doc novels) but, ultimately, equilibrium is restored. Similarly, when people break out from Doc’s famous Crime College or the Mayans are embroiled in a plot, or even when various devastating attacks on Doc’s skyscraper headquarters have taken place in the past, they are really examples of Dent just having his cake and eating it at the same time. Big, dramatic events that are a threat to the easy, continued lifestyle of Doc and his crew are ultimately reversed and swept under the carpet with a quick sleight of hand... and it always works and makes sense within the realms of the fictional character because, after all... money talks.

So no worries on some of the incidents in this particular novel that might seem a tad overcooked or sensational to some readers. As far as I’m concerned, these are all valid approaches to the drama. No complaints here.

As for the rest of the novel?

Well, it’s a real humdinger of a tale, for sure. Starting out by almost immediately putting Doc and his crew in a reactive stance rather than being in an investigation they have chosen to take part in from the outset. It deals with watery backdrops and sea creatures who won’t rub up any of the traditional Doc Savage fans the wrong way... this novel sticks to the formula of always having a hard, scientific reason for the initial hook of the weird phenomenom that Doc encounters in his adventures. As with all of the writing I’ve read by Will Murray, it moves at a mile a minute, is stupendously well written and, like the majority of his other efforts under the Kenneth Robeson “brand name”... hugely entertaining.

If i had one criticism to make on this one, it’s the transparency of the misdirection Murray uses in a certain scene. A character drops into the narrative about a third of the way into the novel and my initial thoughts were, since I know both Murray and Dent’s plotting fairly well, that a very specific character was adopting a disguise. Then, to muddy the waters, Murray has one of the villains of the piece already wise to these kinds of shenanigans and clearly naming one of The Amazing Five as the person adopting the disguise. This would have maybe thrown first time readers off the track a little but, pretty much any fan of the exploits of Clark Savage Jr would be pretty sure of the real identity of the character in question, I would imagine. It’s not really a problem though... just a personal reaction to what I see as an obvious red herring for the reader.

Doc Savage: Phantom Lagoon is a pretty solid entry into the series of additional “Wild Adventures Of Doc Savage” and the sophisticated degree to which Murray is able to effectively “do a Robeson” never ceases to amaze me. Added to this we have “the war in Europe” which sets up slightly different rules that Doc and his crew can operate under... also an interesting addition to the atmosphere on this one. This is a definite good read for all fans of The Man Of Bronze and I would definitely urge those who have been sitting on the fence with the latest batch of novels to go out and grab a couple... and you could certainly use this one as a jumping on point. Although two of Doc’s crew are missing, you have the counter balance of his cousin Pat added into the mix so that’s a good bonus and, if I remember rightly, Doc’s aides did start slowly disappearing as the novels progressed towards the end of the series, with characters being whittled down until it was just Monk and Ham in on the adventures as the characters came towards the end of their original run... so once again, Murray’s adds another shot of authenticity into his work, by making sure the ingredients he puts into his verbose concoction are more specific to where this one fits into the chronology of the original pulps. Looking forward to catching up to the next two in the series as soon as I can. Hopefully over Christmas if Santa brings the next new volume in his sack.