Dr Hermes Reviews – DOC SAVAGE 1936

Back to 1935

"Yep, the Autogyro works fine now. Of course, Doc had to raise the rotors about eight inches to keep from lopping the top of his fool head off...."

MURDER MIRAGE (Sep 24, 2001) From January 1936, this is a dreadful, confused mess. Written by Laurence Donovan, it has all the ingredients to make a fine Doc novel but the actual writing is sluggish, clumsy and misses many potentially good scenes. Donovan does not have the instincts of a natural storyteller-- writers like Lester Dent or Arthur Conan Doyle or Rex Stout have prose that pulls the reader into the story and smoothly leads from one event to the next. Donovan's style has no flow or momentum. It's like people you know who can't tell a joke to save their lives. MURDER MIRAGE does has some wonderful, vivid images. At the very start, New York City is having a snow storm on the evening of the Fourth of July. At the same time a woman who is desperately trying to reach Doc Savage suddenly falls victim to an eerie, green-glowing sphere that obliterates her and leaves only her silhouette burned into the glass of a storefront window. Then there's the sight of Doc and his men rushing through the dark foggy night in their silent car, headlights off and using the infra-red goggles. The idea of startled motorists suddenly seeing an unlit car hurtling past in complete silence, with a huge man standing on the running board, is somehow haunting. It sounds like a 1930s Urban Legend. But the startling images are not put to good use. The characters never quite come to life and their dialogue doesn't ring true in the mind's ear. Villains and secondary characters appear and drop out of the narrative, and when they pop up again, they've already been forgotten. The gangster Whitey Jano is given the irritating identifying tag of constantly crunching on popcorn but he has no personality and no clear agenda. The most interesting villain is a fierce warrior who used to be a slave to a sheik. Described as a jet-black Nubian descended from a mystic sect, Hadith swings his scimitar with lethal results whenever he shows up but he also somehow never quite gels as a believable person. (After he's been running around the story a bit, Hadith abruptly is described as having had his ears recently cut off and this is not mentioned again.) It doesn't help that it's never made clear how the warring gangs of Bedouins and metropolitan mobsters relate to each other and what they're after. The lost city of Tasunan deep in the wastes of Syria is so sketchily conceived and presented that it hardly makes an impression; compare it to the Phantom City from 1933 or even Ryerson Johnson's Fantastc Island of the previous issue and you can see how lukewarm this story is. The five aides sleepwalk through the story and their characterizations are also not quite captured correctly. None of them really show any initiative or love of adventure. Doc himself seems to be basically an automaton carrying out his mission. Pat Savage is along for the ride, gets kidnapped three or four times, and generally drops out of sight for long stretches of the story. As in other Donovan-written stories, she packs a small automatic instead of her classic six-shooter. Her best moment is when she is in a gaster's car and detonates the blinding explosive hidden in the heel of one of her shoes. She limps up to her cousin on a scorched foot and complains about the "torpedo" in her heel. Doc smiles slightly and says she wasn't supposed to set it off with the shoe still on. One of the most entertaining typos has Doc's trilling described as an "erotic sound." I would guess "exotic" was intended but you never know. Donovan also tells us that Doc has whimsically given his dirigible a signal whistle that sounds like the trilling. The cover to the original pulp publication is eerie and thought-provoking. It shows Doc and one of his aides removing the cut-out black silhouette of a murdered woman from a store window. Unsettling as that already is, the image is also reminiscent of the stories told about people killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki who were vaporized with their outlines left uncharred on blackened walls-- a kind of negative shadow. In contrast, the art for the Bantam reprint is one of Fred Pfeiffer's misfires. Characteristically murky and indistinct, it shows a vague figure of Doc with an even vaguer sinister figure behind him. The villain is carrying a glowing green ball by a handle. Wouldn't it seem natural to show the 'murder mirage' of the title to arouse some curious readers to pick up this book? Between that cover and Donovan's poor storytelling, I hate to think how many potential fans struggled through this and never tried another Doc Savage story.

MYSTERY UNDER THE SEA (July 1, 2001) From February 1936, this adventure really hit the spot. It's actually sort of low key for an epic from this period but that makes it more convincing. The amount of time spent discovering the Mad Science gimmick and how to use it is fascinating by itself. This book has the most gruesome opening I can recall in a Doc novel. To convey a terrifying warning, some villains burn out a sailor's mouth with acid (so he can't talk) and cut the tendons in his wrists (so he can't write). As if that wasn't enough, they give him a case of 'the bends' in a pressure chamber. Suffering and dying, the man manages to make it to the one place where he can perhaps be saved and if not, at least avenged-- the 86th floor of the Empire State Building. A strange group of seamen are after something called 'Taz'. The thugs are led by a flamboyant guy named Captain Flamingo (wearing a rainbow-colored outfit which includes a red-and-blue coat, plum colored pants, yellow shirt and shoes, green tie and hat) Aside from his questionable fashion taste, he's a brutal pirate. Mixed up in this mess are a guy named Seaworthy, a timid marine biologist named Stanley Watchford Topping, and an impudent woman called Diamond Eve Post. Post is not quite an adventurer and not quite an innocent bystander. Financing an attempt to find Taz, pursued by Flamingo's gang, she doesn't co-operate with anyone. But she's not a real crook either, just motivated by self-interest. Diamond Eve Post and Captain Flamingo are both sort of sketchy, not fully developed characters. The action trots along briskly enough for the first half of the story. There's a minor puzzle over how Captain Flamingo and his men can survive being underwater with no gear, and there is a brief but exciting moment when our heroes are trapped in a room filled knee-high with water and in which huge, vicious moray eels are loose. But the real kicker comes when Doc and his team discover the secret Flamingo has found of how to survive without breathing. THOROUGH SPOILERS AHEAD Okay, it's not until the last twenty pages that we find out what "TAZ" is, the mysterious goal of all the various characters running back and forth. Taz is a sunken city just under the surface not far from Nassau. It is very refreshing that the city is completely empty, and for once there are no water-breathing members of a Lost Race to deal with. Doc and his team (Monk, Ham and Renny) have a struggle with a crew of treasure hunting pirates that is compelling enough. Apparently, Taz is a remnant of an ancient civilization that combined aspects of both Mayan and Egyptian cultures in its architecture and language. In a huge circular building are over a hundred coffin-sized containers filled with black metal plates--and on these plates are inscribed the incredible super-scientific secrets of the lost civilization. The one plate Doc begins to decipher explains how telepathy works. The one secret that Flamingo has managed to figure out from this treasure of lost wisdom is the substance that provides a substitute for oxygen. Consuming it in food or drink, people do not have to breathe for an extended period. So the crooks and our heroes spend hours swimming around underwater with no equipment at all. (Did Doc have his 'oxygen tablets' before this story or is this where he learned the formula for them? Any Bronze scholars out there know?) Almost inevitably, this tantalizing library is destroyed, buried under tons of rock in an explosion. Doc and Renny spend over a month trying to excavate it, with no results. But knowing Doc, it seems certain that at some later date he would finance an expedition to uncover the records of forbidden knowledge. (Hey, Will Murray, here's one more book for you to write. If I ever win the lottery, I'll buy Conde Nast and authorize these new adventures myself!) In THE RED TERRORS published over two years later, Monk refers to this adventure. (After the first year, it's rare to find any references to earlier stories in most of the Doc novels.) The people of that undersea settlement also spoke a form of Egyptian, and Monk wonders if the two groups were related. Come to think of it, what about the super-minds descended from an exiled Pharaoh in THE MENTAL WIZARD? Has anyone worked out a chart on how the Lost Races are related?

THE METAL MASTER (May 22, 2001) From March 1936, THE METAL MASTER starts off at a fast clip and runs straight through to the end, with no long journeys or digressions to drag down the pace. As soon as we meet Doc in the first few page, he revives a girl who has been poisoned with cyanide and immediately finds a strange sight-- a car which has been melted into a huge blob, without any signs of heat. And someone had been inside... There is a mysterious mad scientist behind all this, as well as warring gangs of thugs and suspects with names like Tops'l Hertz, Punning Parker, Gorham Gage Gettian, and Napoleon Murphy Decitez. And of course a gorgeous young woman who may know more than she says she does. (Do any homely gals ever mixed up in these adventures?) Lester Dent is confident and in good form, throwing out one plot twist after another. I always enjoy the casual way he mentions startling facts about Doc and his aides. It's particularly intriguing that Renny is in Havana investigating a drug smuggling ring, and his engineering project is just a cover. The implication is that many times, the Five are really doing undercover work for Doc instead of all that dambuilding, electrical research and archaeological digs they claim to be working on.

I would like to add the cover to the Bantam paperback is disappointing. Fred Pfeiffer depicts Doc as looking rather furtive, as if sneaking away after doing something improper. Like many fans, I much prefer Bama's rendition, and it is odd that Doc's deltoids and biceps are much larger than his head. Behind our hero is an array of tubes and gizmos that looks much like the inside of an old radio. If you weren't already a Doc Savage fan, it's difficult to see how this cover could stir your interest.

THE MEN WHO SMILED NO MORE (Sep 12, 2001) From April 1936, this is mighty poor stuff. Written by Laurence Donovan, it has sluggish pacing (once the story gets to that infernal duck pond*, it seems to stop dead for the longest stretch), awkward dialogue ("They're like them! What is it Doc? I seem to feel a menace in these hills! Something unknown! But I guess I only imagine it!"), and a real lack of believable personalities or motivations. In one scene, Doc yanks a knife out of Renny's arm that had hit the bone. He gives his friend a coagulant, and although there's no immediate danger, offhandedly says, "I'll fix that up a little later." (Glad my doctor doesn't work like that.) One problem with Donovan is that important actions are never clearly stated and have to be inferred from reactions in following sentences. He doesn't build the chapters to a significant revelation or cliffhanger, and it's easy to lose track of who's doing what and why. Having to backtrack and figure out how characters got somewhere is fatal to any momentum. Slogging through this adventure takes actual effort, as compared to other stories where you can't turn the pages fast enough. Also, the characterizations are consistently off. Now, we're not dealing with Eugene O'Neill here, this is pulp adventure. Our heroes are usually portrayed with vivid, exaggerated personalities, so that the main attention can stay on the action. (A story dealing in depth with Doc reflecting on his friendship with Long Tom or Pat explaining why she has trouble trusting other women would be interesting to read, but in general that's not what these stories are about.) Doc is unlikely to mutter long sentences to himself explaining the plot or to announce "the truth seemed incredible! Doctor Madren was an intellectual scoundrel, but it took the blood of a pig to betray him!" (I would bet money that particular sentence has never appeared in print in any other fiction.) There are three or four flashes that indicate this book could have been fine in other hands. The basic premise is as serviceable as many other Doc plots. The secret of making artificial diamonds and a drug which turns people into emotionless zombies has a lot of potential. One problem here is that Donovan never presents the 'automaton' effect with any clarity. It seems to sometimes make people moronic or susceptible, but it is described as removing all emotion from its victims. Actually, the effect seems more to decrease people's awareness of consequence (someone will kill a person without thinking it notable) but it also causes its victims to fix on an irrelevant tangent (in one case, the man becomes obssessed with planning a vacation trip to China, while bodies litter his room). The presentation is confused and poorly presented. The best scene in the entire book could have been hilarious if Dent or Harold Davis had handled it. Trying to act innocent in someone's mansion, worried about Ham having murdered someone, Pat Savage drops his bloody sword cane in front of a group of witnesses. As she reaches for it and tries to laugh nonchalantly, her coat falls open and everyone sees "under one arm the holstered superfirer pistol with its clumsy magazine drum of bullets was fully exposed." Whoops! There is also a very revealing moment (about the writer) when Donovan notes that "Doc Savage had been fortunate in never knowing the feeling of depression." The cover to the original pulp magazine is not particularly well-done either. It shows Doc (shirtless as he so often was) being crushed in the giant compression chamber. With him is a singularly unappealing rendition of Pat, with wire-thin eyebrows and pointed nose, not to mention features which seem off-kilter. The cover to the Bantam reprint is so much better, with its muted colors and black background making the white logo stand out vividly. We see Doc carrying two one-hundred pound sacks on one shoulder. Behind and to Doc's right is a rare appearance of Monk. Behind to Doc's left is Ham (having to lug one of the sacks on his hip, supporting it with both hands) and to his left is none other than artist James Bama himself. (To see a portrait of Bama, try this link: http://store.yahoo.net/framingfox/noname14.html _______________ *The jungles of Cambodia? The coral cays off Florida? Snow-covered mountains of Nepal? Nahh... this story goes to a duck pond in Shinnecock, Long Island.