Dr Hermes Reviews - DOC SAVAGE
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1933

It was an unfortunate time for Doc to be away at the Fortress of Solitude.....

THE MAN OF BRONZE

(Oct 13, 2005)

Whew, finally. After four years of pleasant labor, I've gotten through all 181 original Doc Savage stories (counting THE RED SPIDER) and here we are with the very first novel, from the March 1933 issue. This started the saga of the pulp's greatest adventure hero, which ran for sixteen years and (beginning in 1964) was eventually completely reprinted by Bantam Books.

The story itself is well enough known that I think we only need a brief summary. Clark Savage Senior has died of a mysterious ailment called the Red Death and his son Clark Jr (Doc) has returned to New York to summon his five best friends to both investigate the father's death and to begin their lifelong crusade to travel the world, helping those in need and punishing those who deserve it. The six men end up in the Valley of the Vanished, in the Central American country of Hidalgo. Here a lost city of purebred Mayans still survives, guarding a legacy of an immense treasure of gold which Doc must earn to finance his life mission. During the course of the story, of course, there are plenty of spills and thrills, close calls and pitched battles, which will be Doc's lifestyle until the last time we see him in 1949.

Lester Dent does a fine job setting up the series without making it seem crowded or awkward. His style is already distinctive, but it doesn't have the occasional whacky touches which will give the series some of its screwball charm. At times, Dent gets a wee bit TOO purple, and his writing is choppier than it will become, with many! exclamation! points! and one-sentence paragraphs. Still, a totally enjoyable read and a great start (although I think Dent and Doc both hit their peak in 1934).

The Doc Savage series was worked out in meetings between Dent, editor John Nanovic and publisher Henry Ralston. It's amazing how many details are here right in the first few pages that will continue until the end of the series. The appearance, personalties and mannerisms of all five aides are dead on target; Johnny doesn't have his annoying habit of unreasonably obscure words yet, Monk and Ham are not as slapstick as they will become, yet all five are recognizable from the start.

Doc's strange upbringing and wide range of skills, his trilling, the mysterious Fortress of Solitude, the daily two-hour exercises, the Mayan gold with King Chaac and Princess Monja on hand, the headquarters on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building... all are right here. Some important things will be added in the next year or so. Pat Savage, the Crime College, the code against killing and the mercy bullets, the Hidalgo Trading Company, Habeas Corpus. All these will enrich the series immensely, of course, but the first story gets underway fine without them.

There's also the first of many masked super-villains, Kukulcan the Feathered Serpent. This is an outsider wearing a snake hood and outfit made from an actual boa constrictor (its tail dragging behind him) who gives the Mayan warrior sect their orders, and who is behind the hideous Red Death.

Let's check out a few annotations for the record. Doc is introduced in a wonderful piece of writing. A lurking assassin in another skyscraper sees what looks like a masterful bust of a handsome man carved in hard bronze. Then, "the bronze masterpiece opened its mouth, yawned - for it was no statue but a living man!" We get the familiar mantra that "the big bronze man is so well put together that the impression was not of size, but of power."

Doc is described as being six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds (impressive enough for a guy in 1933). Yet this is immediately contradicted. Renny is said to be four inches over six feet tall, and when Doc stands next to him, he's clearly taller and heavier. ("It was only then that one realized what a big man Doc was. Alongside Renny, Doc was like dynamite alongside gunpowder.")

Ham is mentioned as having "a distinguished shock of prematurely grey hair." (Will Murray used this and few ambiguous remarks in the series to describe Ham as white-haired.) In nearly every description, though, our fighting lawyer is said to have jet-black hair, "straight as an Indian's" and I can only conclude that Theodore Marley Brooks is not above liberal use of dye to look younger. The shameless old rogue! It's also stated that not only did Monk frame his pal for stealing hams back in the war, but he was court-martialed and convicted. I always thought Ham managed an acquittal and it's odd to think an officer could be convicted of stealing Army property and retain his rank... maybe it was during a tough period in the war where his services were considered so needed that the charges were somehow dismissed?

Doc himself is much more relaxed and open with his feelings than the poker-faced stoic Mr Spock he will soon become. He grins, chuckles and tells his friends "Dry up, you gorillas!" then assigns Monk to join Ham since "You two love each other so." The bronze man also has no compunction about taking life when necessary ("He did it - chopped a blow with the edge of his hand that snapped the Mayan's neck instantly.") Doc isn't pulling his punches at this stage, and his fights leave as many enemy stone cold dead as they do stunned. (Ham also skewers a few foes with his sword cane, the anesthetic coating still in the future.)

And if you had reservations about the way the bronze man killed a polar bear with his bare hands in THE POLAR TREASURE, check this out:

"His left arm flipped with electric speed around the head of the thing, securing what a wrestler would call a stranglehold. Doc's legs kicked powerfully. For a fractional moment he was able to lift the shark's head out of the water. In that interval his free right fist found the one spot where his vast knowledge told him it was possible to stun the man-eater."

Yes. Doc Savage punches out a shark. If it wasn't right there on the page in black and white, I don't know if I'd believe it either.

The bronze man has a remarkably fair-minded comment (for 1933) when his friends suggest that he owns the Valley legally and can just take it by force. "It's a lousy trick for a government to take some poor savage's land away from him and give it to a white man to exploit. Our own American Indians got that kind of a deal, you know." (From Missouri, Lester Dent always showed respect and sympathy for Indians and almost always used individuals in his stories who were educated and shrewd.)

There is also a brief comment that gives support to those who like to think Doc retired after 1949 to go live in the Valley of the Vanished permanently with Princess Monja as his wife. "It was with genuine unwillingness that he had resolved to depart at once. This Valley of the Vanished was an idyllic spot in which to tarry. One could not desire more comforts than it offered." He tells King Chaac, "I would like to remain here - always." But his life's work has just begun and we, who would otherwise have been slaughtered by all the monsters, masterminds and mad scientists Doc defeated, should be grateful he decided so.

I have always thought that Clark Savage Sr and his brother Alex brought back Mayan brides from their time in the valley, and this explained the distinctive bronze color of both Doc and Pat. (Growing up in Canada, Pat certainly wasn't exposed to a "thousand tropical suns.") If Doc was half-Mayan, it would explain why King Chaac would be so agreeable to supplying him with the tribe's wealth and trusting him to defend the Mayans when needed.

And it's a pleasant thought that, nearing fifty and finally wearying of his mission, Doc returned to his spiritual homeland to find Monja still there and still unattached; and that somewhere in the Valley of the Vanished, the bronze man died a natural death at an advanced age and is buried peacefully beside his princess.

THE LAND OF TERROR Oct 6, 2004) From April 1933, this was the second in the Doc Savage series, and in many ways it's a false start (but a very entertaining one). Lester Dent's writing style is much more florid and overstated, melodramatic in the best sense, than it will soon become. Doc and his five friends take on the first of their many criminal mastermind opponents, the diabolical Kar. This guy's gimmick is a substance called the Smoke of Eternity, an unknown compound which causes matter to disintegrate in an impressive grey cloud of smoke and electrical sparks. Using this weapon to commit murders and melt away bank vault doors, Kar and his mob begin a reign of terror that our heroes battle grimly. But then, after the first two-thirds of the book are taken up with this, Doc pursues Kar to the remote location near New Zealand where the basis of the Smoke of Eternity is found; this is Thunder Island, which just happens to be a mist-hidden Lost World absolutely packed with prehistoric animals, including dinosaurs ( yay! Who doesn't love dinosaurs?!). There's enough fast-paced action in this book to satisfy any fan of pulp adventure. All five aides are on board, and get their share of attention. Renny even gets a chapter to himself, in which he gets to ride a triceratops (how many of us can say that?). For once, the Monk and Ham Show is actually amusing when Monk tells the natives of a South Sea atoll they must hide their pigs or this stranger will steal them. Ham saves the lives of all five aides when he thinks quick and suspects a trap. Unfortunately, we don't get to see much of Johnny's reaction to being on an island full of Pterodactyls and Stegosaurs or even long extinct plant life... the pace of the story just doesn't allow for much reflection. Although Doc Savage is invariably described as being at the peak of human ability, frankly he sometimes seems to go over the upper limits. A gangster in a getaway car racing away looks back to see how their pursuer is doing and almost chokes. "... a bronze, flashing human form was not only maintaining the pace, but gaining." Then there's the moment when Doc walks up to an eight foot high metal fence and casually does a standing high jump over it. "Yet Doc went over it with far more ease than an average man would take a knee-high obstacle. The very facility with which he did it showed he was capable of a far higher jump than that." Of course, he was wearing a business suit and dress shoes at the time; if he had been in shorts and sneakers, he probably could have done a back flip over the fence... The aspect of THE LAND OF TERROR which stuns most Doc Savage fans is what a bloodthirsty killing machine the bronze man becomes. This is before the anesthetic gas balls or mercy slugs or paralyzing neck pinches; Doc and his team use real lead in their superfirer machine pistols and they're not aiming to wound. Doc himself personally murders well over a dozen thugs in this story and not exactly in self-defense as they are mostly trying hysterically to get away from him. The man of bronze breaks the necks of two gangsters with a sharp twist, yanks another one by the neck and throws him out a window to screeching death on Riverside Drive, flings a long steel pike into a thug's head and hurls a cutlass right through another one, then shoves a table across a room so hard that it crushes a man against a wall and smashes the table! Man. It's as if the Spider were given super-strength. This is not even counting the other gangsters that Doc simply shoots through the head, including a group of thugs he mows down with a machine gun ("Dying men toppled over the hatch rim, to fall into the hold like ripe fruit"). Is this any way for a world famous surgeon to behave? Well, to be fair, Doc has good reason to go on this berserker rampage. Just a few weeks earlier, Clark Savage Sr had been killed ("The death of his father was still a fresh hurt. This had occurred only recently. The elder Savage had been murdered. It had done little to assuage the pain when Doc himself took up the trail of the murderer, a trail that led to Central America, and ended in a stroke of cold justice for the killer.") While he is still dealing with this loss (and remember Doc never knew his mother0, his close friend Jerome Coffern is murdered by the Smoke of Eternity almost in plain sight of the bronze man, leaving only a hand and forearm to identify the remains. Coffern had been one of the team of scientists who had trained Doc since infancy, but the elderly chemist was more than just an instructor. Doc is meeting Coffern to have dinner together, and he spends a good deal of time with the man since he can notice how items in the chemist's apartment have been slightly moved. Since the senior Savage was mostly an absentee parent, it's seems obvious that Jerome Coffern was one of the surrogate father figures that Doc loved deeply; his murder, coming right after the killing of his real father, pushes Doc over the edge. After this epic, the bronze man gets a hold of himself and cuts down on the carnage. He will still kill a few opponents in upcoming stories like QUEST OF THE SPIDER and PIRATE OF THE PACIFIC but he soon starts introducing his non-lethal techniques and begins to insist his friends use them as well. I don't know if it was the editor or Lester Dent himself who changed the characterization, but it is a vast improvement. Doc after all IS a genuine medical doctor, he has taken the Hippocratic Oath and if he continues as a murderous vigilante, he couldn't enter an operating room without feeling a complete hypocrite. The Crime College is first mentioned here (using psychiatry rather than brain surgery to reform crooks) and it's a step in the right direction that will make the man of bronze the noble role model his fans admire. (There's plenty of other fast-shooting two-gun vigilantes in the pulps dealing out rough justice, but there was only one Doc savage.) A long running element of the series is that Doc will immediately determine who the mastermind or his accomplice is, and then will pretend he doesn't know, allowing the villain to tag along so he can keep an eye on him and minimize the damage the mastermind can do. Doc learns the hard way how to do this, as in THE LAND OF TERROR he is completely fooled by Kar and hoodwinked by the evil genius until nearly the very end of the story. Feeling betrayed and manipulated by the man he trusted implicitly, Doc after this will be deeply suspicious of all the people he meets on his adventures and treat them all as suspects. It's a painful lesson. Most of the book is taken up with Doc's posse chasing Kar's gang back and forth across Manhattan, mostly ending up at a tourist attraction, a rigged-up old pirate ship called the Jolly Roger. The third half (errr the final third), when they all race to Thunder Island for the big showdown, is where things get really wild. A volcanic cone concealed by perpetual mist and cloud cover, this is one of those Lands That Time Forget where evolution has slacked off and dinosaurs are still exactly as they were sixty million years ago. There is no use getting into analysis of why this wouldn't have worked, or how more modern mammals like Eohippus and creodonts ended up there; in stories like this, you just smile and keep reading. What struck me is how nightmarish the whole situation is presented as it really is a 'Land of Terror'. Doc and his team haven't brought any grenades or gas bombs or heavy weapons at all, just their machine pistols and limited ammo so the dinosaurs are a very real threat. Recent movies and Discovery channel specials have emphasized dinosaurs as being wonderful, awesome creatures, part of the beauty of nature and all that. Here, Lester Dent portrays them as terrifying, demonic brutes that would give the average human a stroke just to encounter. Even the non-predators are dangerous to be near - after all, modern rhinos, bulls and hippos are all vegetarians, too, but you need to careful around them today. (I do love the way Tyrannosaurs are shown as hopping like multi-ton kangaroos; never mind the teeth, just hope one doesn't land on you.) It seems out of character for Doc at the end to use the remaining supply of the Smoke of Eternity to break open the volcanic rim and destroy all the prehistoric life under a flow of boiling mud. You would think Johnny would never talk to him again. Possibly Doc underestimated the extent of the damage the explosion would do and was thinking at the moment of the necessity of exterminating the fleeing Kar, as well as disposing of the supply of the disintegration compound. If the story were written even a few months later, it would likely show our boy trying to preserve Thunder Island and keep it secret for later scientific investigation. Even more tragic, it was about a year later that Skull Island (probably not too far from there) would sink and take its own eclectic mixture of prehistoric creatures to the bottom of the sea Ah well, there's still Maple White Land back in South America. Oh, and of course there were Pellucidar and the Savage Land down in the Antarctic as well, so it's not a total loss.

QUEST OF THE SPIDER (May 28, 2001)   From May 1933, it's clear that Lester Dent and his editors were still developing and exploring the characterizations of Doc and the Five. Doc is a bit more flippant than he later becomes, chuckling and making a few light-hearted remarks. After crawling around the swamp in disguise, he refers to himself as "Doc 'Alligator' Savage"! It's also admirable that he apologizes for letting his friends think he has been killed, saying he had no choice (that seeming death tactic always seemed a pretty heartless plot device). On the other hand (despite what Philip Jose Farmer says in his biography), our hero is not above killing two thugs who attack him. He breaks the neck of one with one twist, and when a swamp man tries to stab him, Doc slams the man's arm back to drive the knife into the guy's heart. That's it, though, he certainly doesn't go on a rampage like he did in the previous story THE LAND OF TERROR. (When villains destroy themselves with their own death traps, that's different from the hero actually slaying them). Also, this is before the introduction of mercy bullets and the superfirer guns are really deadly little machines. A man caught by one seems to 'melt'. There is a lot of full scale combat in this story, and Doc's aides assemble into a fighting squad that reminds them of their experiences in World War One. The main villain is a mastermind called the Gray Spider, hidden in robes and a mask, with a gray tarantula crawling around on his hand. He's the leader of the Cult of the Moccasin (named after the snake, not the shoe). This is a group of hundreds of semi-barbaric degenerates living in the swamps not far from New Orleans. The descendants of escaped convicts, speaking a sort of creole, they're also devotees to the sinister side of voodoo. Dancing around fires to the pounding of the drums, human sacrifice...it may not be historically accurate but it's a real scary background. An outsider and not a swamp man, the Gray Spider is plundering the big lumber companies of the southeast for millions of dollars. The owner of one of these companies and his gorgeous daughter go to Doc for help and the action starts, never really stopping until the last page. I noticed a few things about the writing style itself that seems a bit stiff, more like the melodramatic prose of silent movies captions. Compare this to Dent's writing on the later taut thrillers in the series and you see how much he changed and learned during his career. Both styles and both types of stories have their good points. There is one bit that just triggered my "Oh,come on" response. I find it hard to believe that even Doc can disguise himself in an alligator skin and crawl around in plain view of people who grew up in the swamps without being instantly detected. On the other hand, there is a moment I love and which would be great in a Doc movie. Two gunmen are stationed outside a house to shoot Doc if he escapes the swamp men who went in to kill him. A second later, two of the assassins are thrown through the closed windows out into the street and the watching gunmen quickly decide to take off. That image made me smile. Finally, the cover of the Bantam reprint was by Fred Pfeiffer, his first in the series, and I hate to keep criticizing the man's work but it is just drab, unexciting and unappealing. The big spider hanging in the black background looks like a stuffed prop from a 1950s sci-fi drive-in movie. The main character is recognizably Doc, but rendered without detail or definition. I can't help but wonder if dropping sales on the reprints had something to do with the change in artists. (Although the original pulp cover was odd itself, showing Doc applying make-up to Johnny for an infiltration into the Cult).

THE POLAR TREASURE (Aug 31, 2001) From June 1933, this was the fourth issue. It's great fun. Dent's writing style is very melodramatic and dime-novel influenced, full of unnecessary exclamation marks and flowery descriptions but it also crackles with energy, creative details and enthusiasm. I can see how a new reader picking up this novel either in the original pulp or the Bantam reprint would be hooked and want to find some more Doc stories. The story has a suspenseful submarine voyage to the Arctic, an ice-covered ocean liner abandoned for fifteen years (with a room full of murdered passengers, perfecly preserved by the cold) and a puzzling mystery about millions of dollars in gold and diamonds-- the clue to the treasure's location is somehow concealed on the back of a blind violinist (!). But probably what most readers remember best is Doc's barehanded fight with a polar bear. It's one of those wildly improbable heroic feats that you just have to accept and enjoy, like Tarzan killing a lion with a knife. The bear on the cover of the Bantam paperback is just enormous; his head alone is bigger than Doc's body. Not only does the Man of Bronze kill this beast without any weapons, he doesn't even get scratched. Then he hauls the carcass to concealment and comes back later to rip frozen meat from the body with his bare fingers and eat it raw. At the start of the same story, we see Doc in formal evening wear at a concert where a violinist has performed a piece which Doc wrote. Our hero is at home anywhere. One startling thing about the first few stories is how inexperienced and unprepared Doc is. With all his training and equipment, he still is teaching himself strategy. More than once in this story, he blunders badly. He scatters the anesthetic globes about but doesn't go back to recover them, and sure enough the crooks use the gadgets to capture him. Despite the fact he had two weeks to do so while working on the submarine Helldiver, he doesn't have Ham investigate the captain, who turns out to be a career pirate (In fact, Doc unwittingly finances the villain's attempt to journey to the north after the treasure. Geez, Doc.) And he and his men are saved from what he admits is a certain doom on the Arctic ice by outside intervention. To his credit, Doc admits his mistakes and keeps learning. Novel by novel, we see him developing the techniques he would use for the next decade and a half. Also, Doc has not yet assumed his poker faced expression. He openly laughs, chuckles and shows alarm. He growls, "the rats!" about the crooks. Our boy is much more free in his speech, using slang and affectionately calling his aides, "brothers", "you birds", and "a bunch of bums." In the next few stories, he learns not to give away what he's thinking and he becomes much more formal and stiff in his manner. This is actually a believable progression; it shows a rookie hero figuring out how to survive the dangerous life he's chosen. Finally, the bronze man doesn't actually take a life in this story, but he does manuever a group of goons into a situation where they trap themselves fatally. Doc is at his physical peak here, at the upper limits of human strength and speed, and he is exceedingly rough on crooks. In the first fight we see him get into, he yanks arms out of sockets, breaks ribs and jaws with stunning violence and sends his opponents tumbling away in all directions. Despite the fact that he has those little bronze thimbles with the sedative needles in the tips, and the anesthetic gas bombs, Doc has no problem with the use of mayhem. All five aides appear in the story, each contributing a bit with their specialized skills. Sometimes this seems a bit forced in the stories, but details like Renny navigating and making maps, Long Tom manning the sonar and radio, or Monk developing the ice-melting chemical that frees the trapped sub make them seem useful aside from their fighting ability. I love the remark that Johnny is writing a book about Mayan culture! You can be sure some experts thought this book was poorly researched and Johnny couldn't explain how he knew so much about the Mayans. And Monk plays one of his tricks that is actually amusing. Aboard the Helldiver submarine for weeks, he starts waking Ham up at midnight, claiming it's noon of the next day, and the lawyer can't figure out why he's so groggy all the time. A favorite scene shows Doc facing the walrus-like Captain McCluskey, a 300-lb tough guy who earlier had beaten Monk and then Renny is a fistfight (it was close and he took a lot of damage but he did beat them.) In a tense moment, he confronts Doc and throws a mighty punch, which the bronze man catches with one hand and squeezes. "The hard paw crushed like so much dough. Big blisters of blood popped out on the fingertips and burst with fine sprays of crimson." Then the bronze man draws back his other fist and knocks the pirate out with a single blow. Shortly before doing this, our boy had operated on and given sight to a man who had been blind from birth.Talk about versatile. Go, Doc!

PIRATE OF THE PACIFIC (5/29/2001) Here's an early gem, from July 1933. There's no mysterious gimmick or weird menace, just a straightforward warlord bent on conquest. Tom Too, a Chinese gangster, is ready to overthrow the Luzon (that is, the Philippines under a fictional name) government. He has infiltrated the police and armed services thoroughly, and in the islands around the country wait his followers, who number in the thousands. Opposing them at the request of the President of the republic are Doc and his five colleagues. The action starts right off and keeps going until the end, with no sagging in the middle or long digressions. Tom Too and his pirates are both vicious and clever, and the battle swings back and forth. This has got to be one of the most violent Doc Savage books in the series. Doc is at his most superhuman here. He does use his weapons and gadgets, but mostly, he is in constant combat...leaping, diving, escaping death traps, snapping handcuffs, taking on the enemy in clusters. (At one point, he walks up to two guards and knocks them both senseless at the same time, punching with both fists simultaneously. Go, Doc!) He's pretty rough with the pirates, breaking jaws and chasing them back with regular grenades. The mercy bullets have not been introduced, and when all five of the aides line up with the superfirers loaded with bullets...well, they're not kidding around. Doc does take a few lives in the fighting, (Farmer's biography notwithstanding). He hurls a Mongol back onto the sword of a man behind him. It could be argued that this is not deliberate killing but soon after Doc catches a knife thrown at him and hurls it back into the man's chest. That's pretty unequivocal. In addition to being a bit violent at this point, Doc is also still using slang and grinning once in a while. Untying his men, he chuckles, "Hold still, you tramps!" There's real peril here, too. Doc's plan involves infiltrating the pirates as one of them and he appears unarmed in an army of killers. "Malays, Mongols, Japs, Chinese, white men, blacks..even turbanned Hindus" have been gathered together from all over the East. These are real butchers too, who keep body parts as souvenirs and leave their own dead where they fall. The racial tags and descriptions are a little startling to read today. Even taking into account the changes in attitude in the seventy years since this was published, we might noticed that villains are described in unflattering terms no matter where they come from. Hundreds of American thugs are referred to as rats, vermin, apes, scum... you name it. Since the adventures took place all over the world, every nationality had its chance to produce some villains. A list of how many countries are visited and cleaned up by Doc and the boys would interesting to read. Finally,the Bantam cover. It's an outstanding work by James Bama. The color scheme is red and pink. Doc is on a small skiff, poling toward a group of Chinese junks not far off- and little flashes indicate they're firing cannon in his direction. Some clouds balance the water under the boats in a nice layout. (And the book sold for fifty cents back in 1967. Be nice if I'd picked up a few extra copies and tucked them away)