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 - The Ice Genius

The Ice Is Right

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

Warning: Some slight spoilers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.