“Well, that was a wild ride.” – Bex Kelly, on last week’s review of The Munitions Master
DATELINE – APRIL, 1933 – NEW YORK/VOLCANIC ISLAND OF THE SOUTH SEAS – In New York, renowned chemist Dr. Jerome Coffer gives the usual “who is Doc Savage?” speech to his incredulous co-workers, notes that he’s dining with his former pupil, the Man of Bronze himself, that evening, then steps out of his factory and explodes into a puff of thundercloud leaving only an arm behind. Two sinister men, Squint and an associate, flee the scene.
Doc, sitting in the idling car, is horrified.
He investigates the scene and puts his woodcraft to good use pursuing the two men. He chases down their accelerating car, despite deployed roscoes to dissuade his pursuit. Switching to his own roadster and a disguise of …a tweed cap, Doc follows them down to Riverside Drive. He closes on the five men, and in his anger and rage at losing a second father (after losing his own father so recently in his first adventure, The Man of Bronze) he takes the killer and swings him around like a rag-doll to drive the others into their inexplicable 18th century pirate ship in New York Harbor.
Did I mention the pirate ship? It comes up again. They have a pirate ship.
The old ship had a truculent, sinister appearance. Atop the deck house, a large sign stood. It read:
THE JOLLY ROGER Former Pirate Ship. (Admission Fifty Cents)
Doc straight-up murders a guy, then investigates THE JOLLY ROGER. It’s filled with torture equipment and death traps. Obviously. Doc maims another fellow, and interrogates him as he lay dying of dope-fiend withdrawal. The man confesses that the killing smoke is called the Smoke of Eternity, and that low-level mooks such as himself have no idea what it is. He rasps out the start of a name, “K,” but dies dramatically. Doc dispatches the remaining mooks, leaving only Squint. Doc lets him escape and follows him up Riverside Drive to his mysterious master.
Squint arrives at number ten of a “narrow street which had a long row of houses exactly alike,” and Doc tails him over the roofs. He meets with another four-pack of mook, and calls “Kar,” the mastermind. He’s authorized to spill all the beans, offering each mook a million dollars, using the Smoke of Eternity to dissolve bank vaults, trains, and anyone in their way. They’ve got two jobs to start: a train job, and to kill Doc Savage! Doc surprises them, and does the eerie trilling over the phone, scaring Kar.
Having scared off the mooks and Squint, Doc heads to Coffer’s home. He finds the typewriter ribbon with Coffer’s message to the police, mentioning the names Oliver Wording Bittman and Gabe Yuder…and a mysterious spot known only as Thunder Island. He next pays a visit to this Oliver Wording Bittman, the renowned taxidermist, a skeletal soul with a penknife. Lester Dent would like to remind you of the penknife on his watch chain. Bittman reveals he knew Doc’s sainted father, and that the Savages owe him gratitude and help. Which comes in helpful, as Oliver Wording Bittman, renowned taxidermist, realizes that whoever used the Smoke of Eternity on Jerome will come after him next, for the terrible secret of Thunder Island. Doc decides it’s time to call in the cavalry.
“Monk,” Doc suggested, “could you take on a little trouble right now?”
“I’m on my way!” chuckled Monk. “Where do I find this trouble?”
“Call Renny, Long Tom, Johnny and Ham,” Doc directed. “All of you show up at my place right away. I think I’m mixed up in something that will make us all hump.”
“I’ll get hold of them,” Monk promised.
After ducking a Smoke of Eternity bomb that takes out the George Washington Bridge, Doc meets up with the boys on the eighty-sixth floor. Well, almost all the boys…according to “the prettiest secretary in New York,” Monk has been kidnapped! The bad guys (including Squint) take him to THE JOLLY ROGER, which drops a regular smoke bomb to disguise the seaplane and submarine, the latter of which carries Monk off for Kar to interrogate. The interrogation goes nowhere, thanks to Monk’s nerves of steel, so they jam him out a torpedo hatch in a box and slowly let the sea in.
Long Tom traces the phone wire at the tenth-house address, which Dent describes in loving detail. Johnny, Doc dispatches to locate Thunder Island and tell him something of the rock formations there. They discuss the possible atomic implications of the Smoke of Eternity.
“I am not sure what the Smoke of Eternity is,” Doc explained. “But I have an idea what it could be. When the substance dissolves anything, there is a weird electrical display. This leads me to believe it operates through the disintegration of atoms. In other words, the dissolving is simply a disruption of the atomic structure.”
“I thought it was generally believed there would be a great explosion once the atom was shattered!” Johnny murmured.
“That was largely disproved by recent accomplishments of scientists who have succeeded in cracking the atom,” Doc corrected. “I have experimented extensively along that line myself. There is no explosion., for the very simple reason that it takes as much energy to shatter the atom as is released.”
Renny and Ham are dispatched to Monk’s penthouse place, as Doc heads down to the Hudson to investigate THE JOLLY ROGER. After investigating the ancient ship, he locates the box that Monk was shoved into and rescues the renowned chemist and ape impersonator. They take on the submarine, docked cunningly beneath THE JOLLY ROGER, and successfully round up all the mooks on the poop deck. Attempts to interrogate are interrupted by the usual bullets to silence prisoners forever. Kar escapes but not for lack of trying on Doc and Monk’s part.
Upon return to the eighty-sixth floor, Doc and Monk hear from Long Tom that the phone calls all came from the submarine, and find Oliver Wording Bittman (the renowned taxidermist) waiting! He wants to join them…for safety’s sake. Doc graciously accepts, and sketches the third man of the expedition, Gabe Yuder, from Bittman’s memory. The put out the APB, and no sooner do Ham and Renny eulogize Monk as the chemist delightedly listens in. Then they return in force to THE JOLLY ROGER.
This attack goes rather better than the first two. There is too much over-the-top two-fisted pulp action to summarize here, but suffice to say a bank gets robbed, Doc is cunning, and THE JOLLY ROGER goes up in the Smoke of Eternity, along with half the Hudson and a sizeable chunk of the dock.
A week later, Doc has sent the mooks to his Crime College and given the bank’s money to the finest restaurant in town to hand out free food to the bums, and we are treated to another installment of Doc’s daily exercise regimen, reading Braille while detecting high-frequency sounds. They get word from San Francisco that four of Squint’s crew were seen boarding a tramp liner there, bound for that most sinister and spine-chilling of countries: New Zealand! Doc, the Fabulous Five, and Oliver Wording Bittman (the renowned taxidermist) board one of Doc’s planes to follow at fabulous speeds of 300 miles per hour. They meet the liner, only to find out the four men had met a yacht in international waters and escaped! As they cannot take to the air (the liner not being equipped with the “modern catapults with which some ocean greyhounds are now equipped”), they sail to Auckland, where Kar has murdered all of the native guides who once took Jerome, Bittman, and the mysterious Gabe Yuder to Thunder Island.
There is thus only one choice: they themselves must head to Thunder Island, with Bittman as their guide. They descend into the smoke and mist of the caldera, only to be menaced by a dark shadow in the mists – a prehistoric pterodactyl! “A flying reptile of the Pterosauri order,” according to Johnny. “A gigantic, eerie thing reminiscent of a mangy crocodile clad in a great gray cape,” according to Dent.
Doc’s plane goes down this time due to pterodactyl bite, and the men resort to parachutes. The pterodactyls (plural) continue to bedevil the men, and they in turn continue to fire recklessly on endangered species in their native environment. They survive the attacks, and also the bubbling red-hot mud lake of convection-free magma. They drift to one of the cooler outer edges of the caldera as Dent explains how volcanoes work. But they are scattered, and Doc lands in “a tangle of creepers and low trees which looked like ordinary evergreens.” Out of the mist emerges “as fearful and loathsome a sight as human eyes ever beheld!”
Doc says to look lively. They look lively. In the course of the T-Rex chasing Monk, they find everyone (except for Renny), and discern that the T-Rex hunts in a very peculiar way – no, not by movement, by voice! They glide silently away while Doc decoys the Tyrannosaurus away. As night falls, they scramble up into some tree ferns for safety. The night is filled with “titanic struggles of reptilian monsters” and there is not much sleep to be had. Come morning, they find Renny’s bloodied hat and parachute. In their grief, they are ambushed by a cat-dog-weasel-bear, a creodont.
MEANWHILE, WITH RENNY…
Renny had fallen into the first “terrible monster fight” the evening before, blinding a T-Rex with his parachute and springing onto her enemy – a terrifying triceratops! And spring he does – riding the trike by the horns, each “gallon of knuckles” hand wrapped around her two upper horns and cinched around her lower horn! When she finally goes down, Renny grabs hold of a vine, goes exploring, and explains how evolution works for the reader, before encountering an ordinary giant dire serpent, longer than a freight car – which on closer inspection is the colossal bulk of a brontosaurus! He climbs a tree, only to be assaulted by a miniature pterodactyl. He fires, but the pterodactyl closes its jaws around his parachute. Renny succeeds in choking the pterodactyl with his own two hands and leaves it for a charging, murderous stegosaur, running as it gives chase to him instead. He stumbles and falls into a trench, the roaring stego rushing past him, clawing his way out of the suffocating grave! But “sharp teeth sink into his body!”
MEANWHILE, WITH DOC…
Doc again pulls the sacrifice play, decoying the creodont while the others escape. This time, he takes Monk’s tobacco (Monk rolls his own. Why does that make perfect sense?) and springs on the creodont, stuffing its eyes with R. J. Reynolds’ finest! Monk chirps, “I was thinkin’ about quittin’ anyway!” as the gang are reunited. They philosophize about how this lost world could have survived and maintained itself (with some genuinely interesting musings on the fantastic ecology), and look for Kar.
“We’ve got to count every bullet. Although the weapons are virtually useless against these prehistoric monsters, they will be effective upon Kar.”
“Kar!” Ham clipped. “I had nearly forgotten that devil!”
Ham speaks for us all
They make their way past some certainly-just-scene-dressing geysers to the edge of the convection-free magma, hunting for breakfast. Ham skewers an animal “about the size of a large calf […] spongy looking antlers, two in the usual spot […] the other lower down below the eyes. It had a cloven hoof and looked edible.” This primitive deer they cook the primitive deer in a natural cauldron after taste-testing the cooled water. But Kar may not have been so clever – they spot smoke out in the mist! Not Kar…Renny! The sharp teeth had belonged to a tiny hyena-like thing that he easily dispatched after sacrificing some shoulder skin.
Yet the fires still burn!
Doc scouts ahead, and nearly gets his head shot off. But when he gets back to his men, Oliver Wording Bittman (the renowned taxidermist) has vanished! But he did not make it far before something felled him. Further shots bring Bittman around as the shooter goes down from one of Doc’s shots between the eyes. They rejoin the others and close on the fire. Closer…and closer…
Abandoned! The fire has died down, the men’s equipment scattered about, but no bushwhackers await them. Attempting to trail the missing men avails nothing, so the Fabulous Five, Doc, and Oliver Wording Bittman climb their trees for the night. Their attempts at rest are interrupted by a sinister shuffling below, as of scores of great beasts!
To Doc’s keen ears came the sound of grinding teeth at work on the base of Monk’s fern. Then big incisors began on his own tree!
Capable bronze hands working swiftly, Doc picked off a fragment of his own shirt. He put a flame to it, got it blazing, and dropped it. The burning fragment slithered from side to side as it fell. It left a trail of sparks. But it gave light enough to disclose an alarming scene.
A colony of monster, prehistoric beavers had attacked them!
This right here is why this book places so high in my personal list. I have no words. Dent was mad as a hatter and it is glorious.
Yet they have been sent by Kar, who tied and killed one of them and dragged it to where Doc and his men sleep, to take advantage of the beaver’s well-known and legendary lust for vengeance above all else! Yet they are scared off by a single gunshot, mistaking it for the tail-slap of warning. The only casualty of the dire beaver attack is Bittman’s pen-knife. After breakfasting on ground sloth, Doc lights out alone to trail the two men who had dragged the dead beaver the previous night. Dent treats this as a safari, showcasing Doc’s woodcraft and a variety of strange animals like giant prehistoric skunks, tiny horses, and more pterodactyls. Doc squares off against a T-Rex, which hops kangaroo-like across the land. Then he finds Kar’s two men…what is left of them. They were not as cunning as Doc, and met a grisly fate between the jaws of the terrible thunder lizard!
Worse, Kar has snatched his friends!
Doc follows their trail, nimbly evading each of the Fallout-style traps that Kar has left him (thanks in no small part to some cunning signals on Monk’s part). Finally, he stumbles upon Kar’s plane, and the secret hangar that shields it. He comes upon his Fabulous Five, but they’re in no immediate danger…and Oliver Wording Bittman, renowned taxidermist, has been taken away for fiendish reasons unknown! Doc stumbles over Gabe Yuder’s grave (trampled to death by a hopping tyrannosaurus), and realizes what most of us realized three chapters ago. Two expositing bad guys exposit until Doc emerges from hiding and silently dares them to shoot first, before he caps a couple of punks for raising iron in his direction. This signals the Five to make their escape.
But the plane is launching! Doc hops from rock to rock and goes into a dead sprint to catch up to the departing aircraft, catching it just as it takes to the air. Kar tries to shoot him off the wing like he’s William Shatner, but runs out of bullets before Doc runs out of vengeance. He explains how he always knew Kar was Oliver Wording Bittman, renowned taxidermist, and all Bittman can exclaim is “you won’t kill me!”
He’s right – Doc can’t kill his father’s savior. He allows Bittman to parachute out back into the crater, but casually hurls his suitcase full of Smoke of Eternity after him, narrowly avoiding crashing the plane in a great fireball in the rocky caldera while he’s at it. He watches as Bittman gets bogged down and eaten by a hopping Tyrannosaur which foolishly falls in the magma.
But greater things are afoot – the Smoke of Eternity is eating Thunder Island alive! Doc quickly picks up the Five and they watch, spellbound, as the South Seas Lost World is consumed in the terrible thundercloud of the Smoke of Eternity, every ancient horror and wonder of that choking jungle consumed by the strange stuff! Now the raw materials of the Smoke of Eternity are eternally beyond reach, as Doc nudges the plane and rises out of the steam and into the sun.
AN EERIE TRILLING SOUND – This is Doc’s second adventure, and the last that would hang on “Doc is out to avenge a fatherly figure in his life” motivation. So he straight up murders some dudes, something that would be anathema by the end of this year.
Doc has more of an internal life here, both in mourning the second father in Jerome Coffern (whose death almost in front of Doc’s own eyes clearly shakes him) and in the rising dichotomy between his father’s debt to Oliver Wording Bittman and the increasing evidence that Bittman is the mastermind Kar. One could almost speculate that it was in losing his own father and Jerome in so short a time and the way Bittman was able to manipulate him that Doc becomes the withdrawn, Stoic man of bronze that we all know, trusting only to the Fabulous Five (and later Pat) and even then, only so far.
FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny introduces himself by smashing in Doc’s door on the eighty-sixth floor. He comports himself like a true Great War vet on THE JOLLY ROGER and throws each of those “a gallon of knuckles” left and right. But it’s on Thunder Island where he comes into his own, getting his own chapter dedicated to catching up with his independent adventures (something I’ve never seen done so extensively in any other Doc Savage novel). He RIDES A TRICERATOPS BY THE HORNS!
SUPERAMALGAMATED! – Johnny has not yet discovered that mighty thesaurus, and is introduced bantering with Long Tom in a very Monk-and-Ham manner. He’s on top of getting a hold of the rock samples, one of the early McGuffins, and comes into his own lecturing on geology on the trip to and deep within Thunder Island. Geology, evolutionary theory, paleontology, paleobotany, he’s a walking encyclopedia. He even offers up his monocle for a loupe as both he and Doc examine an outcropping of strange rock that might be the source of the Smoke of Eternity.
“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – Ham’s sword-cane comes in spearing a deer for dinner. He mentions that he similarly captured and cooked a deer in a natural caldera in Yellowstone once. This is never elaborated upon. Mainly, Ham is here to be the straight man, offering the adventurous layman’s opinions and questions…which is interesting, as later that would be Monk’s M.O.
“YOU MISSING LINK!” – Monk drew the short straw and was the designated kidnappee today! He holds up under interrogation and survives in his water coffin long enough for Doc to come, going back-to-back badass with the Man of Bronze against Squint and his gang on THE JOLLY ROGER. His smoking habit (never mentioned again – presumably he succeeded in quitting) also saves all of their lives, after being effectively set up chapters before, disguised as a clue that he was taken from his office by force.
WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Long Tom is also here!
WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – Aside from the soundproof plane, Doc is remarkably low-tech this adventure. Which makes sense – Dent hadn’t invented most of the toys yet. Although Doc’s superfirers are in evidence, they neither moan nor shoot mercy bullets, but very deadly real bullets, being more semiautomatic pistols than anything else. The main attraction here is the villain’s Smoke of Eternity pistols and bombs, but, eh, ya seen one chemist dissolve in a miniature thundercloud leaving only a grisly limb behind, ya seen ‘em all.
CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – Oliver Wording Bittman is a fine example of the early-Doc genre of “character introduced in Chapter 2 who turns out to be the sinister disguised villain on the second to last page.” While a lot of them wore hoods or masks, Bittman-as-Kar worked exclusively over the phone or intercom and disguised his voice instead. In Bittman’s case, it’s perfectly obvious from his early manipulation of Doc, constant attendance on Doc and the Five, and hilariously over-the-top cowardice that the Lion would sneer at that he has to be the bad guy. Dent would tinker with this formula a bit to make it ever so slightly more difficult to discern who the man behind the mask (or phone line) is.
AGED LIKE FINE MILK – The statements about the lack of any explosion when splitting the atom and the hopping kangaroo T-Rexes would seem to be just ordinary pulp technobabble, but Dent was up on his science. Both were indeed the going theories at the time, and Doc is right in that scientists “proved” that splitting the atom was net-neutral in terms of energy in late 1932. Which is why I’m filing it here, under “aged like fine milk,” because the only thing that happened was that science advanced in the past 90 years. As we would hope it would.
Doesn’t make those bits any less snicker-worthy though.
The, uh, South Seas cannibals are rather less defensible. Interspersed with Johnny and Doc both delivering the finest encyclopedia entries on local geology and flora that Dent could find are the “natives” of the atoll surrounding Thunder Island made entirely of stereotypes that Moby Dick harpooned back in 1851. They have a “devil-devil house” with human skulls mounted in front, no knowledge of guns, but are incredibly impressed when Doc addresses them in their own tongue. Fortunately, other than looking menacing, they don’t act on any of those century-old stereotypes and in fact are quite hospitable to the Fabulous Five and Doc (and Bittman).
Still distasteful in a book that’s otherwise remarkably free of authentic 1930s bigotry, though.
BACK MATTER – I have split this week’s Back Matter entry into its own separate post, as this is a special entry requiring much more detail.
THE VERDICT – This is the raw, vigorous early Doc in fine form. Dent still hadn’t nailed everything down yet and was still experimenting (hence Jonny and Renny trying to replicate the Monk/Ham dynamic, Doc relying more on woodcraft and environment than on his wonderful toys, Bittman being the obvious villain by dint of being the only suspect, and Doc’s reckless waste of human lives). Some of it doesn’t work, and some of it really does. We go from a random pirate ship in the Hudson River to a lost world of hopping T-Rexes and dire beavers! Each of the Fabulous Five gets a moment to shine in his own field – even Long Tom! What’s not to love? Even the one scene of odious dirty-30s racism both surprised me with its presence and with its surprisingly light touch.
If the airship sequence from The Lost Oasis was a pinnacle of classic pulp action, and the Lost Oasis itself a pinnacle of pulp weirdness, then Thunder Island is the happy marriage of both into one package. And the New York sequence is nothing to sneeze at either.
Honestly, if you liked Fear Cay, I recommend reading Land of Terror next, “the finest and first” as it were. But next week, we arrive at my very favorite Doc Savage story of all:
The Czar of Fear!
Doc Savage at 90
Introduction – The Man of Bronze
Bonus post: The Doc Savage Method of Personal Development
I need to to thank you for this good read!! I certainly enjoyed every little bit of it. I have got you book-marked to check out new things you postÖ