Dr Hermes Reviews - DOC SAVAGE 1935

Back to 1934

"Where did all these beer bottles come from? I'm going to have to have a talk with Aput!"

THE MYSTIC MULLAH (June 6, 2001) From January 1935, this is still one of my favorites in the series and a great example of classic Doc Savage. There's a weird menace and mysterious murders on a foggy rainy night in New York City...and then, in a medieval fortress city near Tibet, there's more action and intrigue, culminating in a full scale uprising If you wanted to introduce a fan of high adventure fiction to Doc Savage, THE MYSTIC MULLAH would be a good choice. Of the dozen or so great villains Lester Dent came up with, I'd include the Mystic Mullah on the list. Here's a supernatural creature that has existed for a million years, appearing as a luminous green face floating in mid-air. The souls of his many victims become his green slaves...drifting, nebulous snake-like things that burn people cruelly with their touch and which can kill by making a person's neck snap suddenly. (A cheap cartoon version of these creepy things was used in the George Pal movie.) A tense moment occurs when Doc first sees the green soul slaves and peers at them so inquisitively that he doesn't see them surround him. Nothing he tries helps evade them and he knows their touch is fatal. "The bronze man was breathing heavily now. It was one of the few times in his life that he had been trapped with no avenue of escape at hand." Dent does a good job here presenting the puzzle of who is really behind the Mystic Mullah. Joan Lyndell, wealthy European who owns much of the city Tanan? The grim warlord Khan Nadir Shar? Oscar Gibson, a insolent Texan working for the Soviet governmrent? Mihafi, the bald commander of the rebellious army? The narrative is really careful here and suspicion falls plausibly on each one. The gadgets are varied this time. Doc has time bombs which spray tiny bits of his anesthetic in crystal form, a dazzling magnesium flare powder in his heel, and a thermite compound in the lining of his tie (harmless unless mixed with the buttons of his coat). He also has an armored speedboat with "so much engine that it seemed on the point of sinking whenever it was not in motion." While Monk and Ham dominate the action, the other aides get some attention. We meet Johnny in the lab on the 86th floor, wearing a rubber apron and gloves as he is assembling the vertebrae of a small dinosaur. Renny takes part in much of the action and is hardboiled enough to keep going after a bullet makes "a rather gory mess of his left ear." (Luckily he has a frend who is the world's best plastic surgeon, eh?) Long Tom doesn't get to do much fighting, but it's interesting that he understands one of Johnny's sentences and sourly gives the gist of it to Renny. The second part of the story takes place in Tanan, a walled city near Tibet with a very barbaric population. The men all wear swords and seem to live on bandit raids into the hill tribes. The Mystic Mullah has half the population under his control, including most of the army,and the violent overthrow of the Khan Nadir Shar seems imminent. Dent provides a convincing atmosphere of suspense as Doc and his team arrive. The city is ready to explode into mass slaughter. One gruesome touch is that the Mystic Mullah has ordered the bodies of his victims left in the streets on piles of rock, to demoralize and intimidate the people. Actually, this wan't an unknown practice in an era when heads were stuck on poles at city gates. After reading some of the later novels, which portray Doc as having nervous moments and periods of cold sweat, it's interesting to note that here in 1935, at his most invincible, he's still a human being and not a fearless fighting machine. I mentione the scene where he's caught by the soul slaves. And when the bronze man is surrounded and captured by a group of heavily armed bandits, but has no signs of fear on his calm face, one of the Tananese says that a wise man knows when to be frightened. Doc replies (in their own language) "There can be fear without shaking and wailing." I'm finding several references in the early adventures to the effect that Doc is brave but not without normal prudence. It's been mentioned many times from 1933 to 1949 that Doc gets as big a kick out of the danger and mayhem as his friends do (although he doesn't like to admit it). If he really had unlimited nerve and wasn't affected by the perils, he wouldn't enjoy them. Natural adrenalin is his addiction. Finally, the Bantam cover by James Bama, in a lovely two tones of green, shows a beautifully rendered floating head of the wizened Mullah himself, glaring down at Doc. Our boy has grenades in both hands and is ready to throw one at the scowling face (he's obviously not intimidated). This was one of the first Bantam covers Bama did,and he shows Doc in the loose robes of Tanan, with a curved short sword across his waist. Later, of course, the Man of Bronze was invariably shown in the torn shirt, riding pants and boots, whether appropriate or not. It was his superhero costume in that sense, as easy to recognize on the bookstand as a blue shirt with a big red S. It may have made sense to have portrayed Doc in the outfits he was wearing in the stories but that vivid Bama image caught the eyes of many readers for decades and kept the reprints coming.

LAND OF ALWAYS-NIGHT (Jan 7, 2005) SPOILERS AHEAD Just so you know. (Pssst... also, the TITANIC sinks at the end of the movie.) From March 1935, this was written by W. Ryerson Johnson (who had stories in ADVENTURE and ARGOSY and was known for his Westerns, and who also turned out THE FANTASTIC ISLAND and THE MOTION MENACE), with reportedly little tinkering from Lester Dent. I thought this book had several promising ideas which were never developed to good effect. Still, this is a favorite of many Doc fans (I see it on quite a few Top Ten Lists), and it was chosen early by Bantam for their reprints, being the thirteenth. So, I may be going against majority opinion here when I say I found it okay but not near my choice of best entries. LAND OF ALWAYS-NIGHT (great title!) gets off to a fine start, with a creepy character called Ool threatening a man on a NYC side street. Ool has almost colorless watery eyes, white skin with blue veins showing, a patch of golden down on his head like mouse fur. He speaks in an emotionless monotone and seems almost lifeless except for his right hand - which flutters in a sinister butterfly motion. Ool does not make a good first impression. Right off the bat, this unsavory geek kills the man without touching him, apparently by just wiggling his hand at him in Bela Lugosi-type motions. Ool has snuffed the guy to recover a strange pair of thick goggles with opaque black lenses. He then goes to hook up with a typical pulp gangster called Watches Bowen and they start their insidious scheme. They need a dirigible for an Arctic expedition and naturally, what crook seeking to obtain a dirigible wouldn't immediately think of trying to get the one owned by Doc Savage? (Talk about asking for trouble!) In the classic two-part structure of the early tales, there is first a good deal of running back and forth in Manhattan with the bad guys and Doc's crew shooting at each other, setting deathtraps and escaping from them, the usual hooliganism. Halfway through the book, the action shifts to a long air voyage way north where we find a particularly weird Lost Civilization for the rest of the action to take place in. I like this formula, it usually builds suspense as we get all kinds of hints and suggestions as to what is going on, and then we see everything explained with some major mayhem in some exotic location. Ryerson Johnson writes well enough, in terms of basic wordsmith skills (and maybe his Westerns are terrific, but that's not a genre I've explored yet). LAND OF ALWAYS-NIGHT is brisk, never sluggish or confusing. It's a fun read and I plowed through it with enjoyment. On the other hand, Johnson doesn't really capture the essence of an early Doc Savage adventure. The love of inventive gadgets for their own sake, the barely possible physical feats Doc casually performs, even the quirky little throwaway bits with the five aides, are only here in small touches. All five of Doc's friends are present and go along for the ride, but they don't really get to do any individual heroics and their areas of special expertise aren't called on. They might as well be a handful of mercenaries Doc hired to accompany him. Doc himself is competent and clever, but from a 1935 novel, I was expecting the nearly superhuman man of bronze who had an array of skills the combined staff of the FBI and Harvard couldn't match, who pulled an surprising rabbit out of his hat at the last second in every chapter. The Doc presented here just doesn't seem to be on top of things enough. He reacts to events rather than steering them to his own ends, and he falls short too often. (Doc does spy on the gang in a disguise which from the start is so transparent that I doubt Johnson was trying to surprise the readers.) Actually, the man of bronze comes across in this story as just an equal to the five aides rather than their incomparable chief. The crooks are an interesting assortment, not nearly as murderous as the usual vermin who are destined for the Crime College. (I do wonder about one tough gunman whose nickname is "Honey....") As bizarre and memorable a figure as Ool presents, he ultimately turns out to be a disappointing galoot and his backstory is a let-down. The secret of his wiggling fingers of death is also unimpressive. Watches Bowen, though, has a very neat gimmick in the way he carries a dozen rigged watches with him. One is weighted and on a cord so he can swing it like a weapon, another is filled with lead and can be thrown hard enough to crash through a wooden chair, and he has a special trick watch he's saving for a particularly tight spot. The gimmicked watches are a distinctive touch... this guy was a Batman villain before there was a Batman. Then there's Ham-Hock Piney, an enormously fat Black gangster who seems to be Bowen's second-in-command. He leads the gang on a raid and snaps out orders to them without getting any backtalk. Okay, Piney does speak with an exaggerated Southern accent ("De way dem fellers move dem hands of their'n makes dis baby t'ink of dem ol' cottonmouth snakes dot used to go fo' mah bare feet when Ah was a boy down in Gawgia.") What the heck, if you read the Doc series (or most any pulp stories from the era) you will come across many Italian, Irish, German and Japanese accents just as extreme and rendered phonetically. It's a practice that has long gone out of style, but it was accepted then and (like the references to dirigibles and newsboys on the corner and running boards) has to be taken in context of the times. (Actually, dialect used to be much more indecipherable in fiction before the pulps. There are some stories by Poe and Conan Doyle where you'd swear ethnic characters were speaking Etruscan.) Remember the SPOILER alert. Eventually both Doc's crew and Watches' gang end up in the lost civilization from which Ool emigrated. These are a bunch of pale folk living in enormous caverns beneath the surface, and they use for light a floating powder in the air which fluoresces only when viewed through a pair of those opaque goggles Ool was so anxious about. (Personally, I think there might be health problems with living your life in air thick with drifting powder). These people live on a diet of some fish but mostly giant mushrooms (you with the Grateful Dead T-shirt, calm down). Mushrooms do live without sunlight but they need fertilizer and I hesitate to guess how these cavern people nourish their 'shrooms but probably sewage disposal is not a problem for them. As you might expect, there is soon much misunderstanding due to the careless use of Tommy guns by Watches' goons, and our heroes have to both fight off the crooks and win the trust of the suspicious subterraneans. As lost societies go, these undergrounders are not well developed or convincing. For one thing, Doc never makes any progress learning their language until the carnage is over, and this reduces interaction with these people to just running and hiding. We never even learn the culture's name, they're just referred to as "the cavern people". Their dictator Anos (typos would be disastrous with this guy) makes little impression other than his willingness to order executions of strangers. I can't accurately say his daughter Sona isn't developed well either, because of the descriptions of her curves in that diaphanous gown, but although she takes a fancy to this big bronze stud, she never succeeds in helping him or his friends, either. Pocahantas she's not. One final note for lovers of pop culture trivia. At one point, Doc is in hot pursuit of the gang's car, and "At their terrific speed, telephone poles were almost like pickets in a fence." Does anyone remember "Hot Rod Lincoln" by Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen?

RED SNOW (Aug 5, 2001) From February 1935, this is pretty good but not one of the very best. For one thing, it takes place entirely in Miami and the surrounding area with no visits to the 86th floor or journeys to the exotic places we expect from the first few years of the series. Monk and Ham are the only aides present; Pat only appears in a brief phone conversation, and the story would have benefitted from her or the other aides pitching in. Doc himself is not quite at his peak here. He seems to take too long investigating the menace, doesn't escape from one horrifying death trap and gets out of another by a not quite believable use of hypnosis. The main mastermind is grotesque but not memorable, a tiny genius with a big hairless head. Like several other Doc villains (the Midas Man, Cadwiller Olden), the Baron Lang Ark is no physical match for the Man of Bronze and relies on cunning and a squad of gunmen to even the odds. Ark himself carries a pistol which fires explosive shells, giving Doc's bulletproof vest a real test. Doc stories fall usually in one of several categories: the postwar Murder Mystery, the Lost Race, the Fake Monster. This is an example of the Mad Science genre and the Red Snow itself is the best thing about this novel. As a threat, it's one of the most ominous-- up there with the eye-popping death of the Crime Annhilist or the mind-destroying Blue Meteor. From out of a clear sky appears a cloud two hundred feet above the ground, and from this fall flakes of strange red snow. Wherever this lands, everything is destroyed. People are found stiff and lifeless, and as soon as they are touched, the bodies fall apart into fine dust. Police cars, houses, planes -- the Red Snow leaves nothing but ash behind. When you see it starting to fall, all you can do is run. The most exciting moment comes when (after we have already seen the destructive effects of this gimmick), Doc abruptly finds himself flying into a cloud of the Red Snow. It's odd that the criminal gang disguise themselves with black greasepaint for the entire story. Maybe this would have prevented police from getting accurate descriptions, but wouldn't there be problems in 1935 Florida with a bunch of black men driving around at high speeds (not to mention the machine guns and automatics)? You might think the cops would be more inclinced to pull these guys over on sight. There are a few references to events which were then recent but are now almost completely forgotten: the Florida land boom of the late 1920s and a big hurricane which was still fresh in people's minds. And a young reader picking up pulp novels today might not get the idea that, before televsion, newspapers had more than one edition a day and would often put out special Extras when big news broke. Ah, them days are gone forever. The cover to the original pulp magazine shows no trace of Red Snow. As was so often the practice, it focusses on a minor but dramatic moment from the story. Doc is lunging up out of the water, overturning a small boat. Our hero shows a startling amount of definition in his upper body, one of the rare times in the original series that he was depicted as the muscular marvel of the descriptions. The cover to the Bantam reprint is odd, just showing a close-up of Doc with a rather dazed expression, against a very simple two-tone background. Actually, I would have preferred to see the cover to HE COULD STOP THE WORLD used here. It would fit better.

THE SPOOK LEGION (May 5, 2001) From April 1935, this is both better and much different than what I expected. At first, there's a good deal of shady characters running around, guns floating in mid-air, parachutes descending with no one in the harness, while Doc , Monk and Ham (the other three don't appear) slowly catch on to what's happening. All a bit predictable. But abruptly, about sixty pages in, the invisible men rob an opera, snatching jewels and money, and the story kicks into gear. There are an awful lot of the invisible men (who are toughened crooks) all over the city... spying in police headquarters, setting traps and brutalizing people. Manhattan is thrown into a full scale panic as people barricade their homes and businesses set up wire screens over doors and windows. At the end of the first day,the lieutenant of the Legion tells his assembled thugs that they have looted an estimated twenty million dollars (back when money had much higher relative value than it does today) and they're just getting started. Doc and Monk do go through the invisibility process, a painful series of stinging chemical baths and radiation, and they stay that way the rest of the story. Lester Dent does not attempt to give an explanation of invisibility, tossing in a bit about 'the atomic motif status' and Doc is unconscious during some of the process, so he himself has only a vague theory on how it works. (Say, do you think Lamont Cranston would like to get the secret in his own hands?) As exciting as the onslaught of the invisible gang is, I found the real highlight of the story involves Doc, naked and invisible, making his way through Manhattan to get to his headquarters. The police are out in full force and the public is really jumpy, so our hero has to use a lot of ingenuity to enter the Empire State Building, gather some supplies and escape. It's a bit of a spoiler, but at one point he throws a grapple across a side street and swings hand over hand from one building to the other, high above the pavement. A bit of trivia is that Doc has offices in the 85th floor, where a secret ladder behind a filing cabinet leads up to his laboratory. Dent remains a very inventive writer. Carrying a package through the crowds, the invisible Doc holds it next to an unsuspecting man so that it seems the man has got it. There's also one of his bizarre crooks, a man named Telegraph because he has a system of finger gestures and movements which his gang uses to communicate. Another writer would have gotten a whole story out of this bit. There are few bits of genuinely amusing comic relief. Doc and his colleagues are at the opera on the trail and they manage to get Habeas in with them. The pig ENJOYS the opera, "perched on the rail in plain view of the audience, ears distended" to listen, You have to smile at that image. I was a bit surprised that Doc does not try to use his ultra-violet goggles or infra-red light to try and see the villains but perhaps he has figured out that it wouldn't work. At first, he has a hard time fighting the invisible men, taking quite a beating and admitting that his usual methods aren't effective here. Once he understands the situation clearly, though, he quickly is able to adapt and go at them full blast. He's as quick thinking as ever, tricking one invisible man after another into giving themselve away.