Dr Hermes Reviews - DOC SAVAGE 1940

Back to 1939

THE OTHER WORLD (Aug 12, 2001) SOME SPOILERS AHEAD... From January 1940, this is an enjoyable if slightly more far-fetched than usual Doc adventure. This time, he and all five aides encounter a bizarre subterranean Lost World, complete with dinosaurs, sabretooths, warring tribes of Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal, as well as civilized goons with guns. I wondered at first if Lester Dent was influenced by the movie ONE MILLION B.C., which has many of the elements but since that was a 1940 film and this story was in the January issue of that year, it seems impossible. I keep seeing hints in the Doc Savage books that Dent came home excited after seeing movies like THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME, ISLAND OF LOST SOULS or GUNGA DIN and jumped to the typewriter, thinking, "Now what would Doc do in a situation like that?" This book has a very intriguing first scene when an aviator lands in a farmer's field. A bull charges and the airman kills the beast...with a spear. A pair of unpleasant opportunists named Fancife and Two Wink get mixed up with the appearance of unknown, gorgeous furs which would be worth a fortune. (If you want a hint of how different 1940 was, check out the paragraph where Dent mentions the lucrative market for wolf pelts from the Rockies.There was also the story where Monk is helping a whaling company get better results in rendering whale oil.) Also mixed up in the usual running back and forth, shooting and shouting that goes on in the preliminaries of these stories is a likeable young guy named 'Chris' Columbus, one of the surrogate heroes Dent liked to throw into the mix to stir things up. Doc and the aides eventually find themselves in a slightly more plausible version of Edgar Rice Burrough's Pellucidar...here it's a vast underground cavern lit and heated by incandescant volcanic gases. We meet some pterodactyls, a T-Rex, a sabretooth and, most intimidating, a horde of two-foot-long bloodthirsty prehistoric weasels (they're the varmints on the cover of the Bantam reprint). These big, aggressive weasels give Doc some of his tensest moments. He's been stripped down to his underwear (AGAIN...the Man of Bronze seems to be a repressed nudist), and a pack of forty of these mean creatures are in full pursuit. As he takes to the trees, he finds that they start to climb up as soon as he slows down. Whew! Doc also has an all-out hand-to-hand fight with a huge Neanderthal bully to gain control of the tribe. To begin, the cave man makes loud roaring noises and violent jumping moves. Doc trumps him with 'whistles, howls and several Bronx cheers for effect.' Unfortunately, he stops because he's embarassed at the thought of how silly this would look to an outsider; then the punching starts. The presentation of the prehistoric life is flawed by details which were thought accurate then but which are considered wrong by today's knowledge. (Of course, in sixty years, what's considered accurate today is also likely to be hooted at.) The dinosaurs are portrayed as slow-thinking, simple-minded creatures, as is the sabretooth. Where the idea came from that a huge predatory cat would be slow or dim-witted is hard to fathom. And, as in THE LAND OF TERROR a few years earlier, Dent describes the Tyrannosaur as hopping like a giant kangaroo. Quite an image. Think of how deep those footprints would be. It is SO refereshing to find a Lost World with dinosaurs that does not get destroyed at the end of the story! Thank you, Lester Dent. Doc even makes a wonderful speech about this place being 'an incredible gift' which he wants to keep a complete secret to prevent its inevitable exploitation. (He mentions that the buffalo "were slaughtered until now there are hardly more than a few zoo specimens.") I'm sure that if he retired from active adventuring after 1949, this is one of his discoveries that Doc would have gone back to research, as would Johnny.

THE ANGY GHOST (Sep 9, 2001) From February 1940, this is a rather bland, lifeless story that makes no lasting impression. Written by William Bogart and rejected by the editor, this book was salvaged by an extensive reworking by Lester Dent; it shows neither author to adventage. The book is not hopelessly awful (like STRANGE FISH or MURDER MELODY) but it is uninspired. Doc and his crew tackle a Weird Science menace which is destroying defense installations - Anti-aircraft guns, bridges, forts and the like- but there is never a feeling of genuine menace or urgency. The reader doesn't get the impression that human lives are threatened or that there is any race against time to stop this menace. The fact that war is not imminent doesn't help make the situation more credible, and the idea that these attacks are designed to pressure the United States into loaning another nation money...well, it doesn't ring true. Calling this weapon the 'Angry Ghost' seems singularly inappropriate. It doesn't help that the action takes place entirely on the East Coast, mostly around Long Island and Washington D.C. Much of the flavor of a Doc Savage book comes from the way that, halfway through, the story shifts from New York City to Brazil or Death Valley or Shanghai. This shift keeps the action varied and usually marks when the real mayhem is about to start. The five aides are mostly in character, but their personalities seem muted and tired. Monk is unusually rude to a homely woman who tags along for the case. The humour in the ugly chemist being repelled by the equally unatttractive Nanny Hanks is forced and distasteful. Monk is invariably tactless and blunt from the first book on, and it's not actually wrong for him to act this way, but it is a side of his personality that does not appeal. Doc himself is very subdued and unenergetic this time. There's nothing actually WRONG with his presentation-- he doesn't mow down a mob with a pair of automatics or tell corny jokes while fighting-- but he seems to be going through the motions as if sleepwalking. There are no dramatic deductions or startling physical feats. Except for the occassional disguise, this could easily be a case any number of secret agents or detectives could have handled. The best item is a brief mention of the real purpose of the dirigible mooring mast on top of the Empire State Building. Doc climbs a narrow stairway up one hundred feet inside the mast. Here the bronze man has installed "a battery of aircraft-defense listener-locators", complete with sensitive parabolic microphones. This has the ring of a Dent invention and is a very cool detail to throw in. The cover to the Bantam reprint is by Boris Vallejo, showing an anxious-looking Doc making his way through dust-filled rubble. Technically, the painting is very skilled in a glossy version of Frazetta's style. The rendering of Doc is solid and stands out well against the haze. Personally though, I don't find Boris' interpretation to have a feeling of authenticity.

THE SPOTTED MEN (Nov 12, 2001)         From March 1940, this is a mild but readable story, written by William Bogart in his straightforward, blunt manner. In the postwar Doc novels, he did some fine, tense thrillers but his writing skills did not seem fully developed at this time. Bogart is clear and orderly, but there is little exitement in his style and he has no flair for the creative gadgets or bizarre twists that were such an essential part of the classic Doc Savage stories.             THE SPOTTED MEN is a minor adventure (well, minor by Doc's standards; you or I would likely be nervous wrecks after going through it). There are mysterious shenanigans at a steel plant near Lake Erie, where workers in increasing numbers are starting to go insane after breaking out in unsightly red boils. They have fatal accidents or die from the efffects of the strange affliction and there is tension as keeping their jobs is weighed against keeping their lives. To make matters worse (and slightly confusing), some outside thugs are painting themselves with spots and posing as infected workers to stir things up even more. Then Pat Savage turns up, is promptly kidnapped (again) and spends most of the book on the shelf*.           The villain is pretty mediocre, not even having one of those cool code names like the Gray Spider or the Camphor Wraith. Flying a black plane at times, cloaked and hooded in black, he's a mastermind with no flair or style. To make things worse, as soon as he's introduced out of disguise, he's such an unlikely suspect, that the reader practically has no choice but to accept that this wretch is the bad guy. And any supercriminal who wears a mask but doesn't remove a large, distinctive ring obviously has a subconscious desire to be caught. Doc and his usual sidekicks Monk and Ham are joined late in the story by Renny, the logical choice to call into a steel mill mystery. In a way, Renny is as versatile as Doc. The big-fisted engineer seems to be skilled at every sort of project-- bridges, dams, tunnels, roads. In CARGO UNKNOWN, he mentions that he's also designed submarines, something a bit out of his field. One of the most unlikely red herrings in the series is dragged across our trail as a clue supposedly proving Renny has been killed: a strangely-shaped diamond from a ring he wears. Our rough, plain-dressing Colonel Renwick would not be likely to wear a diamond ring (Ham might, though, and Monk would probably have a gaudy pinky ring), but it would be interesting to try one of his rings on and try to get two fingers in it.         There is a scene that suggests Bogart had no idea how truth serum works. A man given a dose talks freely and lucidly, almost volunteering information. We also learn about the salt tablets the steel workers take to compensate for their excessive, constant sweating. Is this practice still in use? With all the salt contained in processed foods, it seems likely the average American is saturated with much more salt than the body needs and would be better off drinking fresh water.         Possibly the most noteworthy moment is when Doc Savage deliberately takes a human life. As a crook is about to release tons of white-hot molten steel on a crowd, the bronze man has only one way to stop him, throwing a piece of metal that knocks the villain into the metal himself. "Doc paused only a moment" before doing this. The bronze man has not taken an absolute oath against killing, especially when it's necessary to protect innocent lives, he's simply dedicated to preventing needless deaths. Doc is moral and humane, but he's also pragmatic in dire situations.