Category: reviews (Page 1 of 3)

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 my assistance to all who need it. Let me take what comes with a smile, without loss of courage. Let me be considerate of my country, of my fellow citizens and of my associates in everything I say or do. Let me do right to all, and harm no one.

The Doc Savage Oath

So what does it all mean?

For the historians of pop culture (both professional fan and the kind that gets paid), there’s a mild interest in Doc Savage for all the bastards he’s ever spawned. Every cape

of screen and page is linearly descended from Doc, the “proto-superhero,” via Superman. Every globe-trotting adventurer, like James Bond, Indiana Jones, and especially Johnny Quest, owes his far-flung trips and exotic locales to Doc’s pre-jetsetting prop-wing adventures. Scooby Doo learned to unmask villains at his feet, the Venture Brothers comment on him in their grandfather’s image, even Yankee WWII movies (and all of their spawn) developed out of the squaddie camaderie of the Fabulous Five – right down to the sickly-looking radio man and the rough-and-smooth banter. Paul Atreides is Doc Savage’s son, by way of the Lady Jessica.

But, in this day and age, even Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino are vaguely aware of Doc, but don’t really care.

Pulp aficionados pay respect to the Man of Bronze, though not so much these days as they do The Shadow. The Eighty-Sixth Floor collected curiosities, and a few dozen old men collect Bama-covered reprints. But Doc’s poor showing in the post-pulp world means that the temporary reflag in interest in the 1960s has faded ever since – the more because of the terrible movie adaptation.

no, I’m not posting a picture here. We do not talk about the Doc Savage movie in this house.

Even readers grew tired of him. Doc is very much a product of the Thirties and early Forties. Later adventures such as The Terrible Stork are strange, eerie, pantomime Doc Savage with mechanical characters clanking through uncharacteristic and nonsensical actions. In Stork, Doc does parlor tricks for Renny, yells at him, and suddenly goes into his laboratory to demand “why did I do that?” He struggled during the War, and had no place in the new world born of nuclear ashes and economic superpowers.

But it’s his very Thirties-ness that makes him what he is.

If Superman is a timeless “truth, justice, and the American way,” then Doc veers closer to Captain America – a paragon, a very specific paragon, for a certain era to look up to.

Like Steve Rogers, Doc’s prison of zeitgeist, how closely he’s bound to the era he was created, is what makes him timeless. No one’s successfully taken Doc, his wonderful toys, or the Fabulous Five out of the ice yet – though some have tried. Taking Steve Rogers out of the ice into …well, whatever present day the writers feel like pulling him out in, to comment on the vast difference between their present day and the virtues of “just a kid from Brooklyn”… in fiction is easy. Confronting Doc, hardwired to the Thirties with all its bright mad possibility and looming terrors and misery and heroism, as a modern reader is hard.

That is, after all, what the world looks like now, and it can be hard to look it in the eye like that.

And what of the Thirties? This, to start with: Doc is a scientific marvel, made not from favorable genetics but from training and upbringing, touching the very limits of human physical and mental ability. You can self-help yourself in Doc’s footsteps! Doc is equipped with money and power, and uses it to cross the world “righting wrongs and punishing the wicked” because he and his friends are so addicted to adrenaline they can’t imagine a life without flying bullets. Later generations can snicker at the PTSD victims and laugh at the corny oaths and simplistic villains – Dent laid them out as he, personally, saw them.

Dent’s incredibly personal touch is an aspect of his timelessness, too. Here are masked or disguised villains, motivated by greed or pride, and here is a Man of Bronze and his closest friends to stop them. Here are the terrors of his age – economic depression, rising fascism, wars and rumors of wars, rapacious landlords and greedy bankers – and here is a face under a hood, ready for Doc to punch in and hoist by his own petard. Here are the exercises you, too, can do at home to become “better and better, to the best of my ability, that all my profit by it.” Here’s the oath that sounds a little too earnest to be a cynical marketing gimmick. Here’s increasingly-elaborate Wonderful Toys, handheld superfirers that shoot bullets that don’t kill and have tracer rounds, cars with miniaturized televisions in them, soundproofed airplanes. Wouldn’t those be nice? Here’s a delicate brain operation that makes criminals Better. And here’s Lester Dent, holding his heart on his sleeve, making exactly the paragon of virtue he wanted to see in the world…for good and for ill.

It’s a peculiar thing, but the more you write your own foibles, your own obsessions, your own quirks — from being raised in a hundred-year-old adobe by two loving hippie parents who shout too much, and from reading books that are always twenty years out of date because you got them at the library book sale and from chasing homeschool dreams of da Vinci and Doc Savage and orangutans and Asian philosophy and printing ‘zines and memorizing The Simpsons and Mystery Science Theater — the more timeless and “relatable” (oh that word!) your work becomes. My best stories are the ones where I wear my heart on my sleeve.

And the only author I’ve ever read who puts quite as many fingerprints as Lester Dent on every word of prose was Robert Heinlein.

And finally, Doc’s earnestness shines from everything. As a Millennial, I lived through the hipster era. I asked some friends of mine if they thought I was a hipster, as I was into homebrewing beer, foreign folk songs, swing dance, and retro fashion. “No,” was the immediate answer, “you enjoy everything too earnestly to be a hipster.” Which is why they hung out with me. In an age defined by cynicism, “fake news,” scoffing, affect, and sneers, the earnestness of Dent and of Doc stands out by way of contrast. Stands out? Bestrides like a colossus, more like. There is much every modern reader needs to take Doc to task for, to criticize and doubt him for – the Crime College, the blackface, the casual stereotyping, telling Pat to stay in the kitchen, the whole raft of Dent’s vintage Thirties values as expressed through his heroic paragon who has suddenly become a plaster saint.

And after all the criticisms are rightly levelled and Doc’s superlative goodness is cut down to a more appropriate fit…there is still that earnestness that Doc is a paragon, is what we all could be and could strive for, is ultimately on the side of justice. And it really does stand out by way of contrast from every word written, uttered, moaned, tweeted, or screamed that one imbibes from 2023.

This might be the twilight of Doc Savage. I might be the last one alive to call myself a fan of the Man of Bronze, who has ever tried to copy Doc’s Method of Self-Improvement at home, who can recite the history of how Ham got his name, and Monk’s role in it. Even if the remake gets made (with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or whoever follows him), I doubt it will raise much interest in the books. They’re too much of their time, too idiosyncratic, too influential, and, not in the least, super objectionable to any decent human being living after the Civil Rights movement. There’s a lot of artistic, ethical, and historical distance to overcome.

But it is worth overcoming. For all his myriad bastards, no one is aggressively hopeful, deeply personal, and, in Dwayne Johnson’s words, “FUCKING WEIRDO” as Doc Savage. No globe-trotting spy or kindly alien or superscientist comes with an earnest promise of self-improvement or a sincere belief you can replicate his heroism as home. No other paragon, with the possible exception of Captain America, so completely embodies his zeitgeist or the stamp of his creator, and in embracing them so completely, transcends them. Superman stopped being a New Deal superhero before Doc did.

We have rising fascisms. We have wars and rumors of wars. We have economic depressions, bright mad possibility, and wild-eyed philosophies struggling to break free, no matter who it hurts when they escape. The Thirties came back ninety years later.

We need Doc Savage. His time comes around again, but we need a Doc Savage to fit our times. We need him to be a Doc Savage who’s striven to be better and better these last ninety years, and rights the wrongs he did then and all the wrongs we know are wrong in 2023.

We need Lester Dent to put a face behind the wicked mask, and send Doc, Monk, Renny, Ham, Long Tom, Johnny, and Pat down there to bust trouble, gum up the works, feed the hungry, smash the munitions, right wrongs, and punish evildoers.  Just to show it can be done.

We need to remember it can be done – even if only on pulp paper for 10c a copy.

That’s what it all means.

Doc Savage at 90

Introduction: The Man of Bronze

Fear Cay

The Lost Oasis

The Munitions Master

The Land of Terror

Bonus post: The Doc Savage Method of Personal Development

The Czar of Fear

Doc Savage …at 90

DATELINE – AUGUST 1938 – PARIS/WEST AFRICA – In Paris, Doc Savage, Ham, Monk, and Ham’s pet chimpanzee Chemistry are enjoying a military parade, while a hiliariously sinister Russian, Carloff Traniv, looks on. Yet a man carrying that most suspicious of Parisian goods, a sack of baguettes, is on the move. And then, suddenly, the crème de la crème of the French National Guard have their legs…melted! Not more surprising are the attempts of the gendarmerie to arrest Doc Savage, or of the stricken Parisian crowd calling for his blood! Traniv congratulates himself on framing Doc, as radios blare that the recent shocks in China and the Soviet Union and now Paris are the fault of one man – Doc Savage!

Doc is abducted by two dancers, John and Mary, just as “Doc Savage” comes on the radio for an announcement:

“I, Doc Savage, am going to rule the world!”

obviously the real Doc Savage

He promises another demonstration on an American battleship within a few hours, which he delivers with grisly precision. In Washington, both Johnny and Renny are arrested. Long Tom gets picked up by air. In Paris, Monk and Ham are gassed trying to escape and Doc accidentally bisects a man trying to interrogate him. It was the machinations of Traniv, of course, who exposits to “Pecos” Allbellin, the South American dandy, about his plans for Doc Savage. Doc infiltrates the room, but is turned to ice!

Monk and Ham make good an escape, and follow Doc’s refrigerated body to an “abandoned” airport outside of Paris. Using his eyes as Morse code, Doc fills them in on Traniv, Pecos, and their attempted switcheroo. After Traniv’s plane shoots down six French flyers, they unleash Chemistry on the plane’s crew, following it up with thick hairy fists and the slashing sword-cane of Harvard. Things look bad before Doc springs into action. Traniv mocks him from afar, as Long Tom (now in London) enjoys a rescue from John and Mary (remember them?). They demand Long Tom help them locate Doc, but Long  Tom hesitates – just long enough for the English Grenadier Guards to be cut down as the American battleship, the French, Soviets, and Chinese had been!

Meanwhile, aboard the transport, the three men can’t get the autopilot (or “robot pilot” as Dent calls it) off, and are being flown to the secret base somewhere in Africa. Doc advises his two men “brush up on [their] Yoruba dialect” as some kind of unmanned flying machine guns, “drone” planes if you will, carve their wings clean off! They crash near the “largest, most complete munitions factory in the world,” a “secret one” to “disrupt the peace of the world.”  They are beset upon by things, dressed as soldiers, that remind Ham of nothing more than the Zombi legends of Haiti.

Doc surrenders, and they are led into an ancient stone temple turned modern munitions factory (no doubt to disrupt the peace of the world). Traniv kills his own men to establish his villain credentials, but refrains (for the moment) from his Bond Villain Speech. Doc is separated from Monk and Ham by advanced electrical field, and the two men are ambushed by Pecos Allbellin to test the nefarious belts he believes Traniv is using to cause the killings and destruction. As if in answer, Traniv demonstrates his “murderous radio waves” which take down a South African mail runner while the vast machine works assemble plans, guns, and tanks all around them.

Finally, Traniv reveals his plan – he wishes Doc’s vast surgical expertise, especially his capacity to make “slight operations” to the brains of those under his care. Traniv’s own surgeon makes the Living Dead operations of his soldiers possible, he asks Doc to perform a similar operation on “all the world’s dictators,” to follow his commands alone. When he resists, Doc is taken away to be operated on – “in ten minutes, he will be a living dead man!”

That’s when Long Tom, John, and most important, Mary crash into the place. Mary was once Allbellin’s great love (…this month…) and distracts him long enough for Long Tom to take his chance. Long Tom winds up taken to Cell 3, where Monk and Ham (who were not dead!) catch him up and they escape by mechanically altering their voices, some 60 years before Kevin McAllister was even born. Their escape is cut short by a group of gangsters, the “royal guard,” who are not so easily fooled as the Living Dead.

The operation on Doc goes smoothly, as Mary and John find out when Allbellin reveals he knew the whole time they were British secret agents. John is apparently killed, and Mary led out to meet the new Doc and get her own operation as Allbellin’s toy. John, free and unobserved, goes to the radio room. He manages to get word out, but it does Mary no good. After his sudden death, the interrupted transmission is resumed, with directions for the Arctic. Mary is brought before the revenant that was once Doc Savage, and goes under his knife.

And then Hitler walks in.

No, really.

“The little man,” “the dictator” of a Central European country “with eyes like psychological blowtorches”  shows up with Martin Bohrmann in tow, gives the salute, walks into a room, goes down a trapdoor with a Goofy cry, gets chloroformed. Bohrmann (who looks and talks like Hermann Goering) frets until the “secret radiophone” of Hitler’s  turns on, ordering a surprise attack on “the defenseless Great Britain!” All in the name of self-defense of course.

Traniv turns from the radiophone and observes Doc Savage giving Adolf Hitler a delicate brain operation…

(a rare sentence)

…as tensions mount across the world, supplied by Traniv’s munitions plant.

For a moment, the lights go out in the operating room. In that time, we find out that Doc had never been operated on, had instead operated on the surgeon, Koral, to restore his senses. Maddened with anger (and frankly, wouldn’t you?), Koral is out for blood…while Doc is out to bring the whole works down.

An execution is in order, to Allbellin’s great pleasure – Mary, Monk, Ham, and Long Tom are to be an example to us all. Doc makes for them, as Dr. Koral inspects every uniform in the guardroom. Note that, it’ll be important later. He’s tied up with the rest, muttering “it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter.” Chemistry (remember Chemistry?) goes absolutely apeshit on the execution squad, allowing Mary to escape, but the other four are recaptured, lined up, and shot just as Traniv departs. Mary hails the nearest plane…

…where Hitler is trying desperately to look inconspicuous. He had not been operated on, and was considering the implications. Then some rando shoots him just above the temple.

Seriously, page 109 of the Bantam paperback. Dent just casually ices Hitler in 1938.

Ahhh. The Thirties.

Anyway, back in the execution yard, of course Doc and his men had switched uniforms with the guards. Even Chemistry gets his own uniform! Doc produces some liquid smoke from his vest of many wonders and brings the rains down in Africa.

(Blessing status unknown)

 In London, the men of Downing Street are long-faced, as “a certain unfriendly power” are conducting an aërial assault over their heads. In Siberia, in Manchuria, in South America, bands of soldiers are staging sudden attacks and disappearing. “Hundreds of small, radio-controlled flying machine guns had been dispatched,” in preparation for Traniv’s cadres in every world capital to seize control on behalf of their would-boukoun master.

Doc and his men (and Chemistry) rush into the compound for the radio room, but are trapped and suffocated in the dark. Allbellin goes into investigate, and falls right into their trap. Travin smashes his desk as the message goes out: “This is Doc Savage, the real Doc Savage, speaking.” He gives their latitude and longitude for the combined fleets of the world’s naval powers (England, France, America, Japan, Germany, Russia, and Brazil) to converge on his location, down in Africa. Traniv demands they be belted, so there can be no mistake of killing them this time!

Doc’s aides are re-re-recaptured, Doc escapes across a roof. Doc locks himself in the chemical weapons room, steals a gas mask, and proceeds to do some muthafuckin’ science. He spots Allbellin, the dandy South American ex-dictator, doing himself up in one of the uniforms, feeling the fastenings with girlish glee. Making his escape, he runs into Mary (remember Mary?), loosed for exactly this purpose. When confronted with “surrender or the girl dies!” Doc has no more mettle than Indiana Jones in the same situation, and taken to …the theater of Death!

In a vast auditorium, the soldiers and gangsters watch Doc and his aides and Mary and Chemistry. Behind him, in windowed room, Traniv plays with his mechanisms as Allbellin lights a cigar. Now, now, in his moment of triumph, Traniv unleashes a Bond Villain Speech with a side of ham that would stop Auric Goldfinger cold. The belts now cinched around all their waists are listening devices and instruments of death. These are all on the same wavelength, so a single signal will kill them all. Traniv throws the lever…and is shocked as it is his own legs that melt away in pieces, along with Allbellin and the “royal guard” of gangsters in the auditorium! Too, above the capitols of the world, the “mother ships” controlling the “flying machine guns” sputter and crash, their crews bisected.

Doc, Mary, and his aides are unharmed.

Meeting with the combined admirals, Doc explains the finer points while Monk strikes out with Mary (by no small effort of Ham’s). Involving odorless colorless gasses and strange pastes and radio frequencies, the upshot (as Doc explains to Monk) is that when Koral was released, he doctored the receivers and pasted the belts of Traniv, Allbellin, and his gangsters…leaving Doc and his men’s untouched. We end on a kiss, as Mary decides to give the hairy chemist another chance.

AN EERIE TRILLING SOUND – Doc goes through more quick costume changes here than Taylor Swift. The switcheroo on the operating room table has to be the icing on the cake, though. Half the captures are on purpose (or at least can be turned to good use) and no matter how many changes of costume he has, Doc still has his utility belt.

FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny spends the adventure punching doors in prison.

SUPERAMALGAMATED! – Next to Johnny, who no doubt spends the time catching up on his thesaurus.

“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – Ham opens by siccing Chemistry on Monk for wearing the same outfit as himself and doesn’t let up. He and Monk do share their act of true mateship under fire in the execution yard…before going back to the hijinx.

“YOU MISSING LINK!” – …wait, had Monk even met Mary before the second-to-last chapter? You dog, you, you move fast.

WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Long Tom is also here! Mainly holding out hope for Doc no matter what the odds.

WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – Traniv, you old bastard! Drones! Force-fields! Zombie brain treatments! That weird-ass paste/gas/radio waves killing method! This is stuff Doc never imagined even while hallucinating on peyote way back in ’34!

CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – I have to wonder if Traniv’s Living Dead weren’t commentary on Doc’s Crime College (explored below) and the backlash Dent got over it.

There’s not much to say about the bad guys here, Traniv twirls his mustache like any decent White Russian with a grudge, Allbellin practically wears a black trenchcoat and specs and giggles like a girl when he tortures people. All I’m saying is, if you’re the guys who relegated Adolf fuckin’ Hitler to C-list fodder, you have got to be badder than him. And these boys…ain’t it, chief.

AGED LIKE FINE MILK – Now is a great time to talk about Doc’s Crime College. In the early days, Doc’s “Crime College,” located in upstate New York, was where he sent the unconscious and captured henchmen and lieutenants of his various enemies (as the leaders always died of petard-hoisting on the second-to-last page, as Traniv and Allbellin do here). There, a “delicate brain operation” by surgeons trained by Doc himself left them with no memory of their previous criminal lives, and job and lifestyle training meant each graduate of the Crime College had “a trade and the chance at an honest life.” No graduate of the Crime College ever reverted to criminal ways.

You might say this aged like fine milk, but the backlash was immediate and ongoing. As early as 1934, Dent felt it necessary to spell out that “this was NOT a lobotomy in any way” and by WW2, the Crime College had been quietly retired (but not before spectacularly featuring in John Sunlight’s unprecedented second attack on Doc in Fortress of Solitude). Dent tried to hang onto the concept, as it was clearly one of his fixations, like Doc’s two-hour exercise regime, ultraviolet lanterns, and Monk’s chemical skill, but even he had to knuckle under the public’s clear distaste for actual mind control via brain damage…no matter how well intentioned.

Other than that, any vaguely-serious writer after 1941 would have treated Hitler with more respect for his monstrousness and his capacity to inflict pain and death. The fact that here “the dictator” gets mocked for his stature, given a once-over like Mel Brooks on a bender, and finally casually shot by some rando on page 108 is just…  *chef’s kiss*

BACK MATTER – The Bantam reissues in the 1960s (of which my copy of The Munitions Master is certainly one) dispensed with the cliffhanger endings, the letters, the Doc Savage Method, the oath, and the essays. I, for one, think they are poorer for it…though Bama’s covers certainly count for a lot.

THE VERDICT – They killed Hitler with a shot to the back of the head in 1938 in the middle of Act II. So casual, you know that bitch wasn’t even a player.

As if that weren’t enough for you, DRONES! FORCE FIELDS! SELF-AWARE BRAIN OPERATIONS COMMENTARY! All the tensions of 1938 expressed powerfully through the asides to the world capitals, the touching united front of the combined fleet, and the corking of Adolph Hitler as he leaves the story.

Did I mention he just off-handedly kills Hitler?

Sure, the biggest, baddest guy isn’t even the biggest, baddest guy, Doc’s various switcheroos border on ludicrous, the Fabulous Five have so little to do that two of them sat out, and the killing method is absolutely what Dent was thinking of when he warned of “getting too outlandish”. But what the hell, there’s enough madness to go around, and it’s not the madness of the usual pulp.

The fears and tensions that Dent was speaking to were very real, and it gives The Munitions Master a kind of poignancy your average T-Rex riding cowboy with a superfirer doesn’t quite hit. Dent really wanted the world’s troubles to be caused by a single madman with a munitions plant, so he could send down Doc Savage to hoist the man on his own petard and be done with it. He meant the allied fleet’s message to all nations and he meant the name of the final chapter – “Peace.”

Next week, some authentic T-rex riding pulp from 1933, and the week after, we conclude with my very favorite Doc Savage of all…which addresses fears and tensions of a very different era.

Doc Savage at 90

Introduction – The Man of Bronze

Fear Cay

The Lost Oasis

The Munitions Master

The Land of Terror

Bonus post: The Doc Savage Method of Personal Development

The Czar of Fear

Doc Savage …at 90