DATELINE – SEPTEMBER 1934 – NEW YORK CITY/THE CARRIBBEAN – Doc Savage, walking down the street, is ambushed by the old “wallet with a hidden hypodermic needle of mickey left lying in the street” gag! How many times have we seen that old hat? Abducted by two sinister shysters, the fat Hallet and the sweaty Leakey, Doc is transported to their law offices for interrogation. Doc springs into action, having foreseen the old “wallet with a hidden hypodermic needle of mickey left lying in the street” gag, by moving his thumb just so. He out-and-out mindfucks both men, applying a variant of the Ginger Beer Trick seventy years before Sam Vimes, and discovers that they’re working for Fountain of Youth, Inc., and they kidnapped him to keep a particular sample of the species of heroine in these stories from getting to him – Kel Avery. Proactive villains, these boys are. He calls up some of his men, but Leakey and Hallet escape.
They raid the offices of Fountain of Youth, despite the best efforts of a mustachio with a red silk sash across his chest named Santini and his gang of ruffians. Doc also unearths an invisible note that Kel Avery is out in Flushing, at an address on Fish Lane. On their way out, Pat Savage makes her entrance, to the delight of Monk and Ham in particular, and Doc makes pro forma protests against her insistence on joining the adventure and defending their car from Santini and his men.
Doc, the Five, and Pat head out for Fish Lane in Flushing, an unpaved lane in a bog, the address a shack barely worthy of being called a chicken coop. Kel Avery isn’t there – but someone is. An old man hanging from a noose in the rafters introduces himself as John Thunden, 131 years young, draws two blue-steel revolvers, jumps down, accuses them of working for Santini, and beats the tar out of the boys – including both fighting Doc to a standstill and escaping when Santini’s crew show up. After a brief shootout where Pat saves all their lives (but especially Monk’s), they return to the eighty-sixth floor to use highly advanced telephone party lines to contact some of Fountain of Youth’s clients.
One of them, an incredibly rich banker that Monk wants to bash in the face of because he’s an asshole rich banker in the Great Depression, swears he can’t reveal anything…except that what’s on offer is apparently the secret of eternal life at a price of one million 1933 dollars a pop. Then the man is shot by Fountain of Youth operatives.
And nothing of value was lost.
Discovering that Kel Avery is arriving by plane that night, Pat disguises herself in Ham’s best topcoat, dons a pair of Doc’s glasses, and arranges her hair to become totally unrecognizable at the airport. And a damn good thing, too – the boys are waylaid by a bunch of randos paid off by Fountain of Youth to shout “I’m Kel Avery!” like they’re Spartacus and start a fight. But Fountain of Youth just goes ahead and kidnaps both Pat and Kel Avery (secretly the movie starlet Maureen Doreen). The boys meet up with her bodyguard, the overbuilt da Clima, and take him along for poorly-articulated reasons.
They find Kel Avery by the side of the road, and it all comes spilling out: her great-grandfather, Dan Thunden, sent her a mysterious package and when Santini entered the picture, she decided to hunt down Doc Savage for help. She and Pat were kidnapped, but Pat stepped up to the plate and insisted she was Spartacus Kel Avery so Santini kicked the real Kel to the curb. She mailed the package to Doc, and could use the help. They return to the eighty-sixth floor where Doc casually manipulates Kel, da Clima, Monk, Santini, and the US Postal Service for reasons to be explained later.
Johnny, disguised as a hack cabby, follows Santini retreating with the package, all the way out to the most fetid, rank, decaying, villainous spot within driving distance – the Jersey shore! He sneaks up on the seaside cabin where Santini, Leakey, Hallet, and his men regularly keep their hostage(s) and loudly discuss their double-cross of Dan Thunden. The man himself appears just in time for Santini to realize that, like disappointed college kids thirty years later, all they had in the package was oregano. A brawl ensues, with Thunden felled after killing three men, Johnny shot, and Pat at one point temporarily in control of the situation while bound and gagged with a gun in her hands. But Johnny wore his bulletproof vest, and while the bad guys take off in their plane to Fear Cay with Pat, he overhears everything, and when Monk shows up, passes out.
Johnny awakes in one of Doc’s own planes, en route to Fear Cay following Santini and his men, with a few cracked ribs for all his trouble. They are able to land on the forgotten yet strangely verdant coral islet unmolested, but not for long. After discovering a fully-dressed skeleton, Dan Thunden leads them on a merry chase to a shootout with Santini’s men at his plane, and they discover some of Thunden’s history. After washing ashore on the island in the 1830s, Dan Thunden settled in for a 90-year Caribbean vacation, taking up wholesome hobbies like hunting, fishing, and constructing fiendish death-traps in the conveniently provided cave complex beneath the surface of Fear Cay (despite the water line being almost above ground). Various parties are captured, escaped, rescued, recaptured, and always the “sound of frying fat” presaging death that leaves only a fully-dressed skeleton behind. Petards are hoisted by each of the bad guys in turn as all their secrets come out. It is all as over-the-top pulp as it sounds, but I won’t spoil it.
Maybe one thing.
At the end, triumphantly, Johnny and Doc jointly announce the cause of all the trouble:
AN EERIE TRILLING SOUNDED – Doc is in top form here, even getting unusually playful for a man usually a grave-faced cipher and Very Serious Tom-of-Finland model. His top-tier bullshit of the adventure has to be untying the knots he’s tied in at the base of his ribs behind his back with his toes, after removing his boots and socks with them. It’s so over-the-top you have to laugh.
FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny: 1. Doors: 0. He throws those fists around with a “Holy Cow!” or two, but Renny is somewhat out-of-focus for this adventure. He mostly pals around with Johnny and swings some fists to take out Santini’s mooks.
SUPERAMALGAMATED! – Johnny gets almost more play here than in any other book in the series. The gaunt archaeologist/geologist is the one to infiltrate the cabin on the Jersey shore, taking the brunt of Dan Thunden’s damage and visibly suffering for it, making two attempts to rescue Pat, and pressing through his broken ribs all over Fear Cay. Doc, as always, plays the invincible Schwartzenegger action hero, but today, Johnny shines as the John McClane-style action survivor straight outta the Harrison Ford school of action acting. He’ll be superamalgamated, indeed.
“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – The sword-cane gets a little use, and Ham’s banter with Monk is even more homoerotic than usual (although not to the level it would reach in a later book where they were both absent from the adventure because they were in their upstate private New York cabin for the week to go fishing). Ham’s topcoat being cut like a woman’s suit-top was pretty funny though.
“YOU MISSING LINK!” – Monk’s bashful in the presence of Kel Avery the movie starlet, and, frankly, why wouldn’t he be? He also gets his once-a-book going absolutely apeshit (pardon the pun), though this time he doesn’t kill anybody for Doc to admonish him over later. I get the impression Doc kind of misses it.
WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Long Tom is also here! …I’m gonna be saying that a lot, Lester Dent kind of ran out of ideas for the electrical wizard early on. At least in this adventure, he actually gets to put his wizardry to good use, rigging up radios and triangulating Fear Cay.
STAY IN THE SALON! – This is Pat Savage’s second adventure, back by popular demand, and though she spends most of it captured, it’s because she volunteered for the job to shield the real Kel Avery from harm. Because, hey, it’s not like Pat isn’t a trained professional at being a hostage. She leaps at adventure and although Doc puts up a token protest that she should Go Back in the Salon, It’s Too Dangerous for a Girl, even he gives up in the face of her cheerful insistence of going in harm’s way. She even pops off a few rounds from Granddad’s Colt .45, although she uncharacteristically misses her target because the plot needs Santini to get away.
WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – Doc’s plane is SOUNDPROOFED! So you can have a conversation at NORMAL VOLUME INSIDE! Can you even imagine?
All of Doc’s standard toys are firmly in play here, and by now, Dent is perfectly comfortable with them. The superfirers with their semi-automatic firing of “mercy bullets” that can leave cuts and bruises and deploy a soporific on contact but never kill, with their “bull fiddle moan” and their “ram’s horns” cartridges, get special ammo today of rounds that leave traces, “tracer rounds” if you will, to assist in aiming. Doc’s glass marbles (that never break in his pocket, no matter how many punches and bruises he takes to the chest) with their soporific gas that last for exactly one minute (so you can hold your breath!) get use against Doc and his friends, and cunningly, too. Even his high-tech vests that have been proofed against bullets get plenty of action!
CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – Leakey, Hallet, and Santini are some of the best broad-strokes villains of the series – everyone who’s read Fear Cay can remember them if you jog their memory a little. They each have their tags and their traits, their two-note personalities, they twirl their mustaches and tie people to train tracks entertainingly.
But today’s Crime College valedictorian is absolutely Dan Thunden. The 131-year-old boy-man with his white whiskers and baby face is one of exactly two villains to fight Doc to a standstill in hand-to-hand combat, and the other is Doc’s evil twin! Thunden is cunning, crafty, almost kills Doc twice, talks like a weird Southerner, and effortlessly runs rings around the Fabulous Five and Pat, whether for or again’ ‘em. The only downside is that his petard-hoisting death is relatively underplayed and pro forma, compared to the vitality of his live performance. He’s one of the handful of villains any fan of Doc’s can absolutely name without prompting, and for damn good reason.
AGED LIKE FINE MILK – Boy oh boy are Santini and da Clima excellent case studies of anti-Italian bigotry in the Fascist era. Da Clima is a blowhard miles gloriosus that Monk correctly identifies as “all talk, no steak” who gets tagged as “over-muscled” and “muscle-bound,” unable to fit through doors even Doc’s six-foot-from-shoulder-to-shoulder frame can navigate with eas. Santini is a faux-aristocrat with radio mustaches and a red sash for no damn reason across his chest except to make him an easier target for Pat’s Colt .45. Both backstab their respective allies at the first opportunity, and both get hoisted on their own petards for it. It’s a wonder neither of them pulls out a rosary or mutters an Ave Maria to work in some good, old-fashioned Know Nothing anti-Catholicism while they’re here.
Hallet’s weight and bulk are aging increasingly poorly, especially as they form his tag and the only note to his character except his cowardice. I give it another five to ten years before he’s a liability for the discerning reader.
All in all though, this book has aged really well for a series that also sports Danger Lies East, The Infernal Buddha, and Land of Long Juju. No one does blackface, no shifty Chinese show up to predictably betray the upstanding white characters at the dumbest possible time, Kel Avery and Pat both have agency and dynamism. This is one of the most approachable of the books for a reader in 2023, and that is much to its advantage.
BACK MATTER – After Pat’s first appearance, a 10-year-old fan wrote in to say that he hates when “girl characters” show up in his adventure pulps, because they’re always weak, simpering dead weights for the boys to fight over and rescue. “But if Pat Savage ever wants to come back, that’s A-OK with me!” That 10-year-old boy is the reason Pat comes back here, and for her handful of future appearances.
And he wasn’t the only reader that thought so. Dent (and his editors) downright encouraged girls to read Doc Savage too, remarkable in the sea of boy adventurers and men’s adventures that composed the (non-Romance) pulps in those days. This essay, “Are Only Men Men?”, from the back of December 1933’s The Phantom City, well spells out their opinion of girl readers who saw something of themselves in Pat Savage when the likes of Dale Arden or Pauline had left them cold.
THE VERDICT – What can be said that hasn’t been said? Fear Cay is the consensus favorite of all 181 adventures, like “City on the Edge of Forever” for Star Trek: The Original Series. Even if it’s not your favorite (and it’s not mine), you nod in understanding when it comes in first on everyone’s list. It’s got creative action, adventure, cleverness, some of it unbelievable and over-the-top just the way we want it, most of it just believable enough to pass (like Johnny’s cracked ribs dogging him the whole second half the book).
This book is also one of the two traditional gateway drugs to the series (along with the first book, The Man of Bronze). And it benefits from how well it aged like fine milk. The main brunt of Dent’s bigotry are the Italians, suspect in the 30s, but like the québécois, no longer suffering the brunt of prosecution today. Hallet the fat lawyer may make this book increasingly unpalatable, but it has nothing on the paternalistic treatment of Latin Americans, especially indigenous Latin Americans (there are six million Mayans alive today, Les, and they’re not all lost tribes in lost valleys either) in The Man of Bronze. And yet it has the vigor and virility and breezy language of Dent at his best, the things that right-wingers like to decry the loss of when you strip out the racism and misogyny.
It’s not my favorite, but I do love Fear Cay, for the uniqueness of the New York half (Doc gets captured! The bad guys are the ones to hunt him down! There’s no milksop victim! Doc viciously mindfucks motherfuckers!), for the creative action bits, and for Pat having something to do and getting to be proactive.
A top-shelf Doc Savage adventure, and the best place to start for fans new and old of the Man of Bronze.
Doc Savage at 90
Introduction – The Man of Bronze
Bonus post: The Doc Savage Method of Personal Development
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