Doc Savage: The Miracle Menace

Just finished the trade paperback of Will Murray's Doc Savage novel, "The Miracle Menace". The story definitely lives up to the blurb of "the weird adventures of Doc Savage". Most of the science fiction oriented Doc stories have one fantastic or inexplicable element outside of Doc's gadgets: invisibility, dinosaurs, a lost race of unique humans. This one has several, to the point that the book has footnotes explaining that Doc has come across something similar before. That alone is something the original books did not make much use of, referencing previous adventures when Doc and crew encountered something similar such as invisible crooks.

The structure of the novel is that of what could easily be two novels, but made to overlap and told in a parallel structure. Doc and his crew come to Missouri to investigate the reports of a Victorian era house in the middle of nowhere that disappears when approached, just leaving a concrete foundation behind.

Meanwhile, down-on-his-luck magician Gulliver Greene is working in a gas station in town nearby, waiting for news of a comeback gig. Instead, he finds himself embroiled in a mystery, framed for murder over a telegram that says Christopher Columbus is alive and well in the 20th Century and which seems to involve a group of tent evangelists of a sorts who claim to read minds, one of whom is a beautiful woman named Saint Pete. Luckily he has the inveterate liar Spook Davis, his assistant in better days, to help him out. When he's not panicking when he sees the sign of a gun.

The dual nature helps the story move quickly from event to event and mysteries getting more mysterious and the danger and efficiency of the villains growing as the story progresses. Gulliver Greene and Spook Davis feel like some of Dent's early non-Doc heroes, though the magic tricks echo some other pulp heroes and writers.

The Monsters/The Whisker of Hercules: From there I moved on to two recent reprints of the original pulps. I picked up this double in part because of the interview with James Bama talking about the bantam covers as well as a look at the 1940s comicbook Doc Savage. Because of them being still under copyright, information on characters from Street & Smith's comics can be a little difficult to come by. As these "reprints" include chapters that were edited out of the original stories, I decided to read them again.

I've read "The Monsters" paperback a couple of times. It was also adapted by Marvel Comics back in the 1970s. The menace of the monsters, the deadly efficiency of the bad guys, it all makes an exciting story. The female character is woefully under-utilized. She is interestingly described as having steel colored hair and eyes, serving as a counterpoint to Doc's own unique metallic looks. She is also a lion tamer and speaks an obscure language. As a character, I always thought she'd be an interesting one to have as a recurring character.

"The Whisker of Hercules" does a better job with the female character of Lee Mayland. She's characterized as nervy and a genius growing up in the town the action takes place and the bad guys seem to have a certain respect for her as well. At some point she made the acquaintance of Monk Mayfair, so when her brother is involved in some kind of criminal plot involving the myth of Hercules, she thinks of calling in Doc Savage. This has Doc and crew coming across villains who seem to have the ability to toss Renny fifteen feet into the air, pull a Superman, wreck their car by hand, and out maneuver Doc and steal a corpse out from under his nose. In this case, the person under-utilized is the probable bad guy Marvin Western. Designed along the lines of Charles Atlas, he keeps an estate built to glorify his physical perfection with sculptures and keeps hanger ons devoted to his ideas of physical culture. His cultish organization sounds like something that would pop up in the pages of The Shadow. Like Lee, there are some comparisons to Doc.Much is made of the power of his voice and his hair is described as silver. It ends there, as the man is full of his self importance contrasted with Doc's humility and he proves to be an abject coward. We never see how he would fare against Doc or even Renny or Monk. It is interesting to note that the surviving bad guys go to jail, not Doc's crime college. It is an enjoyable read, I enjoyed it more than when I first read it years ago.

Doc vs Kong and other stories

One of the problems waiting for the Altus volumes of new Doc Savage novels to arrive at my local comic store is that it takes a while. Usually, I'm almost at the point of possibly just ordering it direct when it finally shows up. My joy was increased at a recent stop as not only did the latest Will Murray penned novel show up but the latest Sanctum volume, I had neither stories! I tackled the reprints first.

The Invisible Box Murders (November, 1941) is one of those Doc stories that concerns a mysterious, impossible murder. In this, deaths from an unknown source with a mysterious transparent box that later disappears from police custody. What's enjoyable in this story is Doc finds himself arrested and jailed, thus this becomes one of the few stories that we see Ham actually utilized for his legal knowledge. However, Dent's shortcoming in this area is also evident in that Ham doesn't really do anything that proves his reputation. One of the things often annoying in the Doc novels is how the other aides are often assigned tasks that one would expect to be assigned to Ham such as contacting foreign legal/diplomatic agencies. With Doc jailed, the aides get to show some individual action and initiative. The inclusion of a police officer to shadow them is not only a nice twist, but an interesting character in his own right and would be worthy to become a supporting character or another aide himself... if he's not the bad guy in his own right. Because, in a Doc story the bad guy is usually one of the people accompanying the crew. In this case, it's often difficult to really decide where the cop's allegiances truly align. An exciting story, though the resolution is not of the "box" and murders is a bit difficult to swallow in that even for that time, one would expect scientists/doctors examining the body would have quickly figured out a large part of how the people died.

Target for Death (January, 1947) is a post-War Doc by William Bogart and not Dent. Bogart actually wrote the second Doc Savage adventure I read, the first that I bought for myself: The Flying Goblin. As much as I enjoy Dent's writing, I credit with Bogart as being the writer that actually cemented my enjoyment of the Doc Savage novels. As a post-War Doc, the story is more mundane and realistic than fantastic. It concerns a young woman who is in Hawaii and on her way back to the States. She's given a letter from an Uncle to deliver and finds herself and her family embroiled in a mystery as people are after the letter. When opened, the letter is largely innocuous and certainly nothing obvious to kill over. Interesting that Bogart wrote this while Dent was off writing his novels, and there's a certain similarity in story styles between this and Dent's non-Doc novels of this time.Of particular interest that the first part of the novel focuses heavily on Pat and Renny and both get largely written out for the second half to focus on Doc, Monk and Ham. The solution is one that probably seemed a bit novel in the mid to late 1940s and young readers as opposed to readers today that will have it figured out early on. The fun part is watching the characters and story reach to the same conclusion.

Skull Island by Will Murray. I confess, I was not really looking forward to Skull Island. To be brutally honest, these new Doc novels are ok, but lacking on several fronts. As shown above, one of the strengths of the Doc novels is the sheer variety they allow. With his aides, the stories can be military thrillers, crime novels, mysterious but normal crimes, and science fiction adventures. Murray's focus on unused plots and fragments of Lester Dent makes the novels feel like pastiche, focusing largely on a certain type and style of story as opposed to the wider possibilities. Unfortunately, the lengths of the new format are also too long for the stories, they feel more bloated than epic. I realized with The Infernal Buddha which felt like two novels made into one, that the larger books allowed extra possibilities. Instead of one long story, two or three shorter ones, short stories featuring solo adventures by the aides are possible or even preferable.  That's the problem with doing pastiche, it's about style and subject already explored. Instead of treating Doc as pastiche, treat him as a real character, do stories that Dent couldn't have done, such as short stories focusing on just one aide, or novels with different aide combinations, without Monk and Ham taking center stage. Or stories focusing on different types of villains that wouldn't have been thought of such as a slightly more realistic serial killer stalking New York or working to prove the innocence of a victim (or one of the aides framed for a murder, imagine a running subplot through the story being Ham defending Monk in a Court of Law). However, because Murray is trying to ape Lester Dent/Kenneth Robeson, the stories ultimately come across as somewhat bloated, luke-warm wannabes. They are ok, but at best equal to the mediocre stories of the past. This announcement comes across as moving from pastiche to the realm of fan-fiction, the type of story that fans love to speculate on, but is rarely successfully pulled off.

And, I was surprised. Because Skull Island proved to be what I was really looking for from Murray. Writing a story that Dent never could have written and freed from that constraint, Murray delivers a fun, hard to put down story that treats Doc and characters as characters and not character types. The danger to fall into fan-fiction is always there, especially as it is a continuity/archaeological story in that it explores in depth the untold history and background of Doc. Murray manages to pull it off, to go in directions not expected but fit what we know without ever feeling like it's just name-dropping or showing off his knowledge (such as every writer that delivers a Green Hornet story feels obligated to show that he knows that the Lone Ranger is related).

The plot concerns Doc and his crew coming home, early in their career, and finding the body of King Kong on their door-step. Doc reveals he has seen the creature before, that he has been on his island. The rest of the story is Doc relating the story, of how after WWI, he meets up with his father to go on a mission to follow up on clues to the location of Doc's grandfather. What follows is a great adventure story along the lines of Burroughs as they dodge and confront dinosaurs, head hunters and ultimately King Kong himself.

Murray uses the novel to explore various themes and father-son relationships and how they shape who the characters are. He gets mileage out of showing how they repeat themselves, that much of the conflict between Doc and his father are like that between his father and grandfather and just how much alike they really are.

Murray also takes delight in exploring the literary forebears of Doc and to the dismay Wold Newtonians, he establishes them as being just that, literary: Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Nick Carter. Instead of coming across as simply name dropping, it's in the context of the relationships and history of the characters: the reading material the father would like his son to read vs the type of stuff he really liked to read and how that shaped him. And, then the father showing his own awareness of the material. I know I was surprised when I discovered as an adult my parents read the Phantom when young or had read part of "The Lord of the Rings" to make sure it was suitable. So, the scenes came across as being authentic.

Readers accustomed to the default "high adventure" Doc Savage might find the novel a little shocking. The first few Doc Savage novels are before Doc developed his non-killing rule and this story would pre-date even that. This is Doc right after World War I and before he finished medical school. Doc kills here. A lot. And, there's his trying to improve the machine gun. He is a young man, prone to brash actions, seeking to prove himself to his father, and possibly over confident in his own abilities and point of view.

And, despite being a continuity story, Murray doesn't get so caught up that he tries to explain or reconcile the discrepancies between the dinosaurs here that follow modern theory vs those he'd discover later. One would think that he might at least try to later lead Johnny to figuring out that some dinosaurs had feathers!

Other writers could take a few pointers from how Murray handles the team-up aspect. While the story reveals hidden or unknown information and speculates on what kind of creature Kong is, he delivers a story that doesn't outright contradict the characters or the stories this is taken from. What makes it work is the sense of fidelity to the source material. The changes are additive, not subtractive; not saying that the movie or the pulps got things wrong, but rejoices what they got right.

It'd be nice to see Murray follow this up with more stories of this type. Not team-ups and crossovers, but treating the characters as believable characters, fleshing them out and taking them into new types of stories, relationships and territory. And, to move away from the "sad" endings. More and more, the stories seem unable to give Doc clear cut victories, but end on serious and depressing notes.

Other stuff
When not reading pulps, I tend to gravitate to fantasy novels and period mysteries. Recently discovered the books of Imogen Robertson, mystery novels set in England in the time of the American Revolution. As the "Forgotten Realms" novels have slowed to a trickle, I saw a "Pathfinder" novel by Richard Lee Byers, author of a series I enjoyed for FR.

Called To Darkness is a much more linear story than his Brotherhood of the Griffin series and with a smaller cast. It concerns Kagur, a woman in the tundra regions. Eovath is a frost giant that had been captured as a young boy years earlier by her father and the two were raised much as brother and sister. However, she discovers at a night of celebration that he seems to have gone insane and poisoned and hacked to death the members of her tribe and almost kill her. She embarks on a quest of vengeance along with a near blind shaman.

The story becomes a bit more on topic when they find an entrance to caverns that he took and start a trek under the earth that echoes a bit of Verne as they encounter various dangers and hostile environment with stone and tunnels pressing around. Then, into true Edgar Rice Burroughs when they come into an interior world that not only has orcs, but also tribes of stone-age men and familiar dinosaurs. And, in true David Innes, John Carter, Flash Gordon mode, Kagur finds she must unite disparate tribes and people to confront the villain that menaces them all.

It is somewhat disappointing that Byers doesn't do as Murray and modernize the concept of the dinosaurs any. However, Byers does a fine job in the action scenes and acknowledging the hypocrisies of the characters' points of view. Kagur has trouble in seeing how her wanting to take vengeance on Eovath is not that different than Eovath taking vengeance on the people that killed his family and took him into slavery. Instead of focusing on romance of a handsome adventurous man needing to rescue a beautiful princess, the princess is the hero of the story but one that has some growing to do, to come to terms how her life and world has changed and how to deal with that.

The parallels to Burroughs is intentional to boot. I recognized the vibe as reading the novel, and then at the end on the "About the Author" page, he acknowledges this was him trying to do just that. Interesting to read two action stories of people fighting dinosaurs, and both do them exceedingly well.

Doc Savage: The Desert Demons

I try to support my old comic shop haunts as much as possible. Mainly because he does order pulp stuff and I'd stand a good chance to never see many of the pulp reprints if not for him. However, some books like this one take some time to hit his solicitations and find it's way into my pull list. (Incidentally, the "it's" is not a typo. I think it's high time to call an end to this foolish spelling that trips people up. Use the apostrophe for both contraction and possessive form. Context is more than enough to show which it's for. So, I'll it's crusade here.)

This is Doc Savage scholar Will Murray writing as Kenneth Robeson. Sadly, the last Doc book written before this was an adaptation of a non-Doc work by Lester Dent and thus did not feature his aides. Here, Will rectifies that by including all five aides, Pat Savage and even the two pets. There's no explanation as to the source of the story this go round, so while it's acknowledged this too is based on something written down by Dent, the extent of what is Murray and what is Dent is not clear. The names and types of the various suspects and secondary characters sound like Dent, but that could be Murray at his Dent impersonating best.

The basic plot is Doc and crew end up in Hollywood exploring two mysteries. One, a mysterious red cloud that descends from the sky and reduces everything to crumbly powder. Two, a woman named Doris Duff has disappeared, possible victim of the cloud and is obviously really Doc's cousin Pat Savage. Involved is a would-be movie mogul who shoots Westerns, his partner who is trying to strike it rich via oil wells, a weatherman scientist, and two galoots named Happy and Harry.

It didn't help my reading of this that I was in the middle of an Avenger story, "The Glass Mountain" that likewise involves oil wells and a mysterious cloud (this one's green) that comes out of clear skies, and seemingly pursues and kills with intent, though by lightning. Both have Native American shamans that seem able to summon the killer clouds as well.

While pulp writers are notoriously known for their purple prose because they were being paid by word, Murray's Doc books are significantly longer than any of the Kenneth Robesons before him. This one feels it as it tries to include all of the aides plus Pat and give them meaningful tasks. There's the oil wells, the Hollywood location as well as a ghost-town in the Florida Everglades, the Native American shaman and a trap with alligators, as well as the mysterious menace, and strange actions from a scientist that ultimately goes nowhere. There's enough material and ideas to fill three separate Doc novels. This all bogs the novel down as it seems that it cannot decide in what direction it really wants to go.

The story is also hampered by the fact that while the strange death clouds are baffling and effective, the human crime element is sorely lacking in that regard. While there is a culprit behind the deaths, that at one point almost border the death rate in a Norvell Page Spider novel, there is no deadly efficient gang to pit physical challenges against Doc and his men. The ultimate plan of the bad guy when it stands revealed... well, when characters in your story even recognize the stupidity of the plan and just write the guy off as being crazy, it might be a sign that his motivation needs retooling. The climactic scene with the culprit behind it all, is anti-climactic as the larger threat is already explained and neutralized and he is more pathetic at this point.

This is not to say it's a bad book or a bad Doc Savage novel. It is better than some. Worse than others. It's crime seems to be one of trying to do and include too much as if it might be the last hurrah and as much as possible needed including. The various elements don't mesh together as well as intended. Simple refining such as leaving out a couple of the aides and the pets and even Pat Savage which would have allowed populating the book with more secondary characters to flesh out the world they were navigating and maybe bring the various elements together into a more cohesive whole. Thus, when the cloud starts killing wholesale, some of them are characters we already know and maybe even care about (or suspected as being behind it). But, it's good to have Doc back and, as always, I'm looking forward to the next one.

Doc Savage: Satan Black

The bronze man finally found a piece of rope. He had a worse time locating one than he had expected and toward the last he searched with a haste that was near frenzy.

The rope was three-quarter-inch stuff about fifteen feet long, and it smelled of the anti-rust off the tools and the pipe. He found it on the fourth pipe-truck which he searched, although he had supposed there would be rope on every truck. Rope and chain were necessities on the big multi-ton pipe-trucks, one would think.

He clutched the rope, and he ran for the loaded pipe-truck that had broken an axle that afternoon. He ran desperately.

Early summer darkness lay over Arkansas, warm and amiable, and there was enough breeze to bring a slight odor, but not an unpleasant one, of the slough to the south.

The river was farther east. One couldn't say the river was a sound, but it was distinctly a presence and a fierce power. It wasn't a fierce-looking river. It was referred to more often as a ribbon of mud. Yet it was no ribbon, because a ribbon is something soft, something for a lady. This river was something for garfish that tasted of carrion, mud-cats, water-dogs; it was a repelling river, unlovely to look at and heart-breaking to deal with. It was a nasty, muddy, sulking presence in the eastern darkness.

The bronze man with his rope reached the pipe-truck with the snapped axle. He crawled under it. He knew exactly the spot he wanted, not under the truck itself, but under the pipe-trailer, beneath the mighty lengths of twenty-four-inch oil pipeline river-casing.

The bronze man made himself a sling under the pipe. A hammock, a tight, smug little place to lie supported by the rope he'd been in such a wild haste to find. When he was done, and hauled up snug in the sling-hammock, one could look under the truck and not see him.

But if one happened to crawl under the truck, even partly under it, and poke around with a flashlight beam, he was sure to be seen. And once found, for a moment or two he would be helpless there. It was a good place to hide, but it wasn't a good place to be caught hiding. Not if one took into consideration the kind of a thing that was happening.

The bronze man lay very still. He coiled the end of the rope on his stomach. He wouldn't, he thought, care for more than half an hour of hanging like this. But it shouldn't take that long.

He listened to the night sounds, the crickets and the frogs and the owls, the rumbling of trucks in the distance, the heavy iron animal noises of bulldozers, the grinding of tripod-winches. The noises that go with the laying of a twenty-four-inch petroleum pipeline.

The noises sounded sharp and hearty enough. There was nothing sick-sounding about them, nothing at all.

There should have been.
----------------------------------------

This is the opening pages of the 1944 Doc Savage novel Satan Black. I think it encapsulates why of the many pulp heroes Doc Savage not only ran as long as it did, but until recently was really the only successful series to be reprinted. None of the Doc Savage imitators of the time were successful. The Shadow by dint of his radio show and catch phrases is more ingrained in pop culture, but Doc's stories survived and still thrived.

The secret ingredient is Lester Dent's writing. As noted, it's late 1944 when this was published. The Doc novels were less fantastic, less science-fiction. When people think of Doc Savage it's generally the earlier novels they look at with rose-colored glasses. However, by this point in time, Dent was not only a seasoned writer, his style had evolved and matured. The plots and characterizations may be a little dated and hokey by today's standards. But Dent's prose is slick and as thoroughly evocative of the American landscape and experience as any poet's. There's no reason for there to be the little excursion on the nature of the river and comparing/contrasting it to a ribbon for a woman's hair other to give the story a sense of place. His populating his opening paragraphs with little wry ironies of life draws you in, sets the story into a real location. Whatever fantastic thing that follows, the reader is hooked, convinced of the reality of the story.

When and whatever Dent wrote, there is that feeling of authenticity to it, that it's all drawn from real experiences and observations. It may be why that despite Doc living and head-quartered in New York City, many of his stories took place in smaller towns and wide-open expanses of nature that still resisted modern man's push. And while Doc and his men were larger than life with grandiose jobs and military ranks, the stories are peopled with individuals with smaller lives and every-day concerns. Just like the little ironies and contrasts that Dent peppered his stories with.

Despite the little details that seem extraneous, Dent's writing has moved past the purple prose of earlier pulps. His stories don't seem to be padded, action often seem filled with frantic activity and immediate urgency.  He knows when to be descriptive and when to deliver sentences in short quick frequency. The compression and decompression of the storytelling undulates fluidly, keeping you turning the pages.

Great stuff. Fun reading.

Doc Savage Returns!

Just got word that come July, Altus Press will release New Doc Savage novels written by pulp historian and writer Will Murray! The first book will be titled "Desert Demons" and include Doc's full crew as well as Pat Savage.

With DC's First Wave comics coming to an end and their mishandling of the various pulp characters, it's good news to hear that new books will be coming out. Murray has written several Doc novels under the old Kenneth Robeson byline. Making use of un-used Lester Dent outlines and plots, he penned novels that were longer than the old pulp novels but easily fitting in stylistically with the various ghosts Dent employed to toil under the Kenneth Robeson bylines. He achieved something almost impossible with the novels. He managed to tell stories that fit in stylistically and spiritually with the original stories and keep the characters in character and on model without actually coming off as parody or pastiche of another man's characters and style.

Murray's White Eyes stands out as a master crook organizes an underworld army and storms Doc's 86th Floor headquarters hoping to take out the hero and his crew. His Forgotten Realm is a wonderful lost race novel that has Doc investigating a mysterious man called X-Man. The story is a bit reminiscent of Kuttner's much shorter Thunder Jim Wade adventure "Waters of Death".


DeVito will be the cover artist making use of photos of the late Steve Holland, model for Bama's and Larkin's Doc Savage covers for Bantam. Holland was also used as model for the Spider, Avenger, and many other paperback covers. He also starred as Flash Gordon in a short-lived tv series in the 1950s.

Several of the older Murray Doc novels are being released as audio books for those that like to listen vs reading.

Also on the docket, least last I heard, is a reprint of Marvel's excellent b/w Doc Savage comic series. Now, if someone could do a comic series in the spirit of that magazine, that managed to meet the demands of comics and visual storytelling with the spirit and characterization of the original characters and making each immediately recognizable from the pulp descriptions (in fact, that series is how I usually picture the characters when reading the comics).

Lester Dent's Lee Nace, the Blond Adder

Altus Press has recently published a nice paperback "reprinting" five of Lester Dent's Lee Nace aka the Blond Adder short-stories. Certain creators become associated with certain archetype characters. Johnston McCully of Zorro fame created many outlaw or rogue heroes along the lines of Frank Packard's Grey Seal character and others. Golden age comic artist Fred Guardineer would be known for his many magician heroes patterned mostly after Lee Falk's Mandrake. Will Everett will forever be linked to the underwater characters. For Lester Dent, it's gadget heroes, the ultimate example being Doc Savage.

Nace has a lot in common with Doc. While he is a private detective, he holds various degrees including Law and Medicine. He's famous for recently having consulted with Scotland Yard. Doesn't carry a gun but is a crack shot. He carries on his person various hidden gadgets and devices but is quick to make do with whatever's at hand. He's Doc's crew rolled into one. He is unusually tall , somewhat shaggy hair (to disguise a notched ear), fair complexion, described as being physically fit but thin and bony or knobby, and extremely capable in a fight. And, he's quick to notice the ladies and pursue them. He is set apart by the fact that he has a scar on his forehead in the shape of a coiled snake about to strike, a souvenir given to him by a Chinaman who threw a knife at him with a handle shaped in that fashion which struck him thus.

The Lee Nace stories appeared in Ten Detective Aces in 1933, during Doc Savage's first year of adventures at Street & Smith. This is important because Dent did not create Doc Savage from scratch, the basic outlines of the characters presented to him. In Nace, one can see Dent exploring similar themes and storytelling tricks that he'd use on Doc, showing exactly how much of his style and ideas ended up in the Doc Savage characters. Nace had some darts concealed in buttons and a single shot gun built into the heel of one of his shoes that he had practiced with until he was a crack shot. More familiar is Nace's habit of wearing a bullet-proof skull cap outfitted with a copy of his own somewhat shaggy hair. Then, there's his not carrying a gun, for the psychological reason that a man who carries one will become dependent on it and be helpless when it's taken from him. Nace also meets his extremely capable and beautiful female cousin Julia. Unlike Doc in this case, he takes her on as an assistant and makes capable use of her abilities.

The Lee Nace stories are interesting in another regard. A few years later, Dent would write a few stories for Black Mask, where he would refine his writing style that had grown a bit purple writing the Doc novels. In his Oscar Sail stories, he wrote very deliberate and plain sentences handed out with a staccato delivery.

“Sail”

The fish shook its head as the knife cut off its head.  Red ran out of the two parts and the fluid spread enough to cover the wet red mark where two human hands had failed to hold to the dock edge.

Oscar Sail wet the palms of his own left hand in the puddle.

The small policeman kept coming out on the dock, tramping in the rear edge of glare from his flashlight.

Sail split the fish belly, shook it over the edge of the yacht dock, and there were some splashes below in the water.  The stuff from the fish made the red stain in the water a little larger.

When the small policeman reached Sail, he stopped and gave his cap a cock, he looked down at Sail’s feet and up at Sail’s head

The cop said, “Damned if you ain’t a long drink of water."

Sail said nothing.

The cop asked, “That you give that yell a minute ago?”

Sail showed plenty of teeth so that his grin would be seen in the moonlight. He picked up the fishhook and held it close to his red-wetted left palm.

“Little accident,” he said.

(by Lester Dent; published in Black Mask in 1936)

Compare that with: 

She was tall, blonde, streamlined. The roadster was long, cream-colored, and also streamlined.

She was making motions at powdering her nose, using a pancake compact with a mirror fully four inches across She held it braced against the steering wheel.

Utter concentration rode her long, beautiful face. The big, flat powder puff dabbed the compact with strangely erratic frequency. It slapped only the mirror - never the powder cake.

Oklahoma sunlight, white and hot, sprayed blonde and roadster. To the right, it cooked evergreen stucco buildings of the Tulsa Municipal Airport. To the left, it toasted flat classroom and barrack structures of a school of aeronautics.

In spasms, the sun leaped from the blonde's compact mirror. Her powder puff whipping systematically, was dividing the beam into dots and dashes.

On hands and knees beside the airport waiting room, Lee Nace crawled. He was very long, bony, blue-eyed. He was gathering together the wind-scattered sheets of a letter.

(The Tank of Terror - Ten Detective Aces 1933)

Nace is also more of a hard-boiled hero. He speaks in similar short, curt sentences, direct with everyone he meets. He's prone to anger and excitement, bringing out his scar in lurid detail. He carries and smokes a pipe and is constantly replacing the stems as he's prone to chewing or biting through them in quick succession. While the gadget-detective/adventurer seems a bit rooted in juvenile fiction, the style and humor here is more understated than the Doc novels, easily presaging his work at Black Mask and later suspense novels Lady Afraid and Dead at the Takeoff.

The stories are deemed of the "weird menace" variety of pulps. Meaning that there was a habit of corpses being found in strange positions or killed in bizarre but ultimately plausible ways. Only one story really veers into Doc Savage science-fiction territory and even then barely so. Of the lot, only one has a truly memorable villain though. In The Tank of Terror, we meet Robin Hood Lloyd, a bad guy with his own code of honor who is tied to the mystery in some way. Lloyd is based on gangster Pretty Boy Floyd (there's also a veiled reference to Al Capone). He comes across as an interesting character in his own right as he is quick on the draw and seems to have a favorite past-time in killing those he doesn't like. However, he has that code of honor that only allows him to shoot someone in a fair fight, if they have a gun. He desperately wants to kill Nace and makes many threats, if he could only catch him carrying a gun.

It's a nice looking paperback, and the first from Altus Press that I've received. As I was thinking about ordering another one of their books, it's good to get one to verify that it's slickly and professionally done. There's some cool added features such as Dent's notes describing the character of Lee Nace and a sample of the rough draft of one of the stories with notations of changes by Dent.

One thing that strikes me odd is that the five stories have passed into public domain, but all five have been re-copyrighted as of 2010 to the Estate of Norma Dent. While Altus is within their rights to copyright their book, the original stories themselves cannot be copyrighted again. Derivative works does allow for something that's been remastered or heavily re-edited to exist under a new copyright (hence Ted Turner is able to copyright colorized versions of public domain movies, companies cleaning up and re-presenting old b/w movies and old-time radio shows, and golden-age comic book reprints that have undergone re-coloring processes, all can be copyrighted under a new copyright). The foreword does state that four of the stories have been re-edited per notes left behind by Lester Dent, making these sort of a "Director's Cut" edition. By that standard, FOUR of the stories could be re-copyrighted, but according to the copyright notice, all FIVE of them have been. I find that strange if there's no other reasoning behind it.

It's just me, but I also want to know just in what form the re-editing took place. I like annotated books that explain some of the process. But, it's possible that difference between Dent's notes and the final published version could be nothing more than further changes he willingly and deliberately made when typing the final version, thus what we're getting here would be older drafts in places and not what he intended as the final story. Plus, I like comparing different versions, sometimes the writer's original vision is better, sometimes the editor's. Bladerunner is a better movie with the voice-over narration, it nails the film-noir atmosphere of the sci-fi story.

Doc Savage - The Stone Man

Published date - October 1939.
Featured aides - Monk, Ham, Long Tom, Renny. Missing - Johnny, mentioned as investigating claims concerning claims of origins of man.

This is almost a perfect followup to reading Kuttner's Doc Savage-lite Thunder Jim Wade in "Waters of Death" and the Secret Agent "X" novel "Death's Frozen Formula" in that it shows a bit of the untapped potential in the concepts from both novels.

The novel starts off in typical Doc Savage fashion, in the middle of action and verbally painting memorable characters. In this case it's Spad Ames and Waldo Berlitz, two cold-hearted killers fleeing the Law in an aerial pursuit. Eluding their pursuers, they crash in the canyons of the Arizona Badlands and shortly stumble upon a secret that costs Berlitz his life in the form of being turned into a "stone man".

When we next see Ames, he's white-haired and trying to get together a crew to kidnap a pair of strange siblings and get back to Arizona to get the secrets of a land beyond the mists.
This isn't one of the best of the lost races of the Doc Savage novels nor the best of the incredible menaces. It takes a little long to get to the hidden land and build the tension. A lot of stuff seems set up that really goes nowhere. Spad Ames and his partner Mr. Locatella and their mutual distrust though they are both intriguingly characterized. The hidden land/lost race are only described in the most broad strokes and only a little part of the actual novel. The climactic action comes all too quick and speedily and conveniently wraps everything up. If ever a story needed an extra ten to twenty pages...

But, it does show off what the Doc novels did so well. The secret of the mysterious menace isn't all that mysterious other than it's sci-fi angle, at least not to the adult 21st Century me. However, to a kid from 1939, it would probably be fairly fantastical especially when done in connection with a hidden land of mysterious people in the American West. The main bad guys were interesting, the interaction between Ham and the other aides (he had played a practical joke on Monk and Renny) and Doc is fun and well-done, like visiting old friends. The action and locations are varied from New York to the Badlands and to the land beyond the mists. The supporting characters have conflicting goals and concerns, putting the lie to the idea that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" being automatically true.

It shows how even a mediocre Doc novel is often more readable and fun than the better ones of other series.