Doc Savage

[ZachWZ]

I am interesting about duscussing the Doc Savage pulps and reprint novels by Kenneth Robertson which was the pen name of Lester Dent.

I am not talking about that awful movie.

I am talking about the novels. The Roar Devil, The King maker, The man who was scared, Whisker of Heracles among many others.

ZachWZ

 

[warstarcerberus]

doc was the idea for superman

have alot of old pulp mags of doc they keep saying that gov arnold will be doc always liked the shadow more {THE WEED OF CRIME BEARS BITTER FRUIT CRIME DOES NOT PAY THE SHADOW KNOWSHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA creepy laugh

 

[BAYLOR]

My Favorite one The Land of always Night

Ive read a few of the books, They are what are but they are fun books to read.

Over the years there have ben numerous attempts to get a new film done but all have come to naught, so far.

In 1991 writer Jose Phillip Farmer wrote an excellent Doc Savage Pastiche Escape From Loki which was a prequel dealing with how Doc and his amazing 5 met .

 

[willwallace]

I read many of the Doc Savage books when I was a teen, just loved them. The one movie made was terrible.
I have a couple of the original pulp magazines, very entertaining.

 

[J Riff]

I read about a hundred of them, years back. Musta liked them. )

 

[j d worthington]

Dear old Doc... and Monk, and Ham, and Renny, and Long Tom, and Johnny... and, of course, Pat....

Granted, they are pulp (and not always the best of pulp, either -- The Yellow Cloud, for instance), but I still love these things. I'm aware of their faults, but they are old friends, and have been for nearly half a century (since about 1971). And at times there are passages of genuine beauty in them, too, as well as some simply magnificent ideas and superb imagery. I've got the entire set of the Bantam reprints (plus the one original which was intended for the magazine but not published, The Red Spider -- or, in its originally intended title, In Hell, Madonna... Shakespeare, no less. And, if one reads them in the order they were published (with that one inserted in its proper place in the original run of the magazine), one can definitely see the writing go from simply pulp to a much higher grade of popular writing, as the writers (not Dent alone, there were several others) became able to flex their muscles under the influence of the rise of the hardboiled detective novels and the like. And some of the titles: According to Plan of a One-Eyed Mystic, The Man Who Shook the Earth, Death in Silver, The Men Who Smiled No More, I Died Yesterday, Resurrection Day, The Sea Angel, The Dagger in the Sky, The Devil's Playground, Terror and the Lonely Widow, Three Times a Corpse, Death in Little Houses, No Light to Die By, Return from Cormoral....

 

[hardsciencefanagain]

Three Times a Corpse, Death in Little Houses, No Light to Die By

Tarnation,those are GOOD titles.They get better each time i look at them.I don't know Dent,but I think there was a piece by him in The Hardboiled Dicks.

 

[j d worthington]

Tarnation,those are GOOD titles.They get better each time i look at them.I don't know Dent,but I think there was a piece by him in The Hardboiled Dicks.

Quite likely. He was a genuine "pulphound" sort of writer, like Walter Gibson, who could fill entire magazines on his own, and still have material for others. He also wrote a wide array of stuff, including Westerns, hardboiled, etc. (In fact, Phil Farmer mentions that one of his final stories was a Western with an extremely sympathetic view of the Native Americans; not surprising from a man who, even in writing a story with an "Oriental menace" part of which takes place in Chinatown, defends the majority of the denizens of the district as law-abiding citizens. He fell prey to the stereotypes so common in his day (the "Negro patois" in Brand of the Werewolf tends to grate today, though even there the general portrait of Wilkie is very sympathetic and doesn't belittle the man; even one of his black criminals, "Ham-Hock" Piney, though essentially used for comic relief, comes across as one of the very few of the opposing side that one might enjoy sitting down to drink a beer with), but generally speaking he showed few signs of ethnic prejudice; certainly less than many better-known writers (including, sadly, Bob Howard and HPL).

 

[dask]

Were the Bantam reprints in chronological order? Would Bantam Doc #1 contain his origin? (How'd he get that way anyway, was his condition congenital? Or did he fall into a vat of chemicals like the Joker?)

 

[Vince W]

Loved Doc Savage as a teen and I've got a couple of reprints kicking around still. I may have to dig them out and give them a reread.

 

[Fishbowl Helmet]

By chance I just showed my daughter '90s Shadow movie and dug out my Shadow and Doc Savage pulps to read again. Great stuff, if you can ignore the more troubling bits for a modern audience.

 

[BAYLOR]

The same publisher also published the Shadow books?

 

[j d worthington]

Were the Bantam reprints in chronological order? Would Bantam Doc #1 contain his origin? (How'd he get that way anyway, was his condition congenital? Or did he fall into a vat of chemicals like the Joker?)

That's a question with a lengthy answer, at least to answer it fully. No, they are far from being in chronological order (some of those in the '20s in the Bantam edition, for instance, belong close to the end of the run of the magazine, and there were 181 -- 182 if one includes The Red Spider -- of the original stories). If you are interested, let me know, and I'll send you a list of the stories in order of original publication. But yes, Doc's "origin", if you will, is certainly dealt with in The Man of Bronze (the first of the series in both instances), though it is covered in brief throughout the majority of the series as well, for the benefit of those coming to it through later stories. It also provides the set-up for some of the stories, such as The Land of Terror (the second of the original set, #8 of the Bantam reprints) and, to some degree, Fortress of Solitude (and yes, this is likely where the creators of Superman got the idea, if memory serves).

The same publisher also published the Shadow books?

To some extent. Bantam did a reprint of several of the Shadow stories, including the first (The Living Shadow) and one of my personal favorites, The Eyes of the Shadow, which has a particularly eerie storyline. Paperback Library tried to revive the series in the 1980s, with a much longer run, but even that scarcely touched the full run of the magazine, as you can see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Shadow_stories

There have been other attempts to reprint the series, but I don't know of any which have managed the entire set. However, I'd certainly love to be proven wrong on this....

 

[J Riff]

Really a good study for writers, you can look at his descriptions, character descriptions in particular. In every book he brings in Monk, Ham, Renny, Doc... and you get these capsule descriptions worked into the story early on. Even though you may have read fifty in a row, each time the characters are all introduced, slightly differently each time, and the adventure procedes.

 

[j d worthington]

Really a good study for writers, you can look at his descriptions, character descriptions in particular. In every book he brings in Monk, Ham, Renny, Doc... and you get these capsule descriptions worked into the story early on. Even though you may have read fifty in a row, each time the characters are all introduced, slightly differently each time, and the adventure procedes.

These can become rather repetitive if read too close together, but you're right, he does vary these each time. There is also the fact that, when read in sequence, one sees a great deal of development of these characters as well. Dent was, in all, a very talented writer constrained by the needs of the medium, but even so he stood above a fair number of his colleagues.

 

[dask]

That's a question with a lengthy answer, at least to answer it fully. No, they are far from being in chronological order (some of those in the '20s in the Bantam edition, for instance, belong close to the end of the run of the magazine, and there were 181 -- 182 if one includes The Red Spider -- of the original stories). If you are interested, let me know, and I'll send you a list of the stories in order of original publication.

Sounds like a lot of work J.D., I'd feel guilty putting you through it. Besides, I'm not sure how many more Doc's are in my future. The two I read, Brand Of The Werewolf and The Polar Treasure, while enjoyable enough, hardly left me panting for more. I do have the first Bantam somewhere and intend to read it if I can find it. 182! Man, must be some sort of record.

 

[j d worthington]

Sounds like a lot of work J.D., I'd feel guilty putting you through it. Besides, I'm not sure how many more Doc's are in my future. The two I read, Brand Of The Werewolf and The Polar Treasure, while enjoyable enough, hardly left me panting for more. I do have the first Bantam somewhere and intend to read it if I can find it. 182! Man, must be some sort of record.

Actually, it wouldn't be all that much work -- a little time-consuming, perhaps, but I have a list to hand; all I'd need to do is transcribe it. As for the two you mentioned... while certainly entertaining, I would hardly classify either of these as anywhere near the best of the series. Try Merchants of Disaster, or The Majii, or The Green Death, for instance. While the two you mention were both from the first year's run of the magazine, if memory serves, Dent & Co. didn't really hit their stride as writers until a little later. Then they came up with some truly impressively weird conceptions and very effective ways to convey them, making them very memorable indeed. I'm not ever likely to forget some of the passages in Mad Eyes, for instance, or Dagger in the Sky, or The Mental Wizard, or The Vanisher, or even the flawed The Annihilist (certainly one of the most gruesome of the Savage canon). Or, for that matter, The Giggling Ghosts. Several of these stories left images which have stuck with me for more than 40 years... longer and more powerfully than a number of other things of perhaps greater literary value. So I would urge you not to write these off just because you picked some which were, while fairly good, nowhere near what the series attained at its best....

Oh, and you might want to look up Phil Farmer's Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life and give it a read. I think you might enjoy that a great deal....

 

[dask]

Okay, I think you sold me. Some of those sound pretty darn interesting. But only if you really have the spare time to do it. Many thanks in advance.

 

[J Riff]

The begiinning of Man of Bronze -
THERE was death afoot in the darkness.
It crept furtively along a steel girder...
Death was a man.
From time to time, he spat strange, clucking words. A gibberish of hate!

I'm hooked again.

 

[BAYLOR]

The begiinning of Man of Bronze -
THERE was death afoot in the darkness.
It crept furtively along a steel girder...
Death was a man.
From time to time, he spat strange, clucking words. A gibberish of hate!

I'm hooked again.

It's pure pulp classic.