Doc Savage: Man of Bronze and Lester Dent

[Calenture]

Cover by James Bama

The Sargasso Ogre

First published October 1933 in Doc Savage Magazine; Bantam, July 1967.

There were three or four writers who used the house name 'Kenneth Robeson', but most of the Doc Savage novels were written by Lester Dent. Dent sometimes wrote 18 hours a day, and when he had to go to the toilet, he stopped in the middle of a sentence so that he'd known how to carry on (Philip Jose Farmer's 'biography' of Doc is pretty exhaustive).

The ultimate Doc Savage artist was James Bama, who used Steve Holland as a model. When I first saw the covers I thought there was something different about them; some were photo-realistic, and Doc's shirt was always torn in the same way. There were 181 of the supersagas; only two of them did not bear the name Kenneth Robeson. The first magazine gave the author as Kenneth Roberts, but there was already an author of that name. For The Derelict of Skull Shoal (March, 1944) an editor used Lester Dent's name by mistake, so Dent's dream of getting his name in print finally came true.

Lester Dent

Farmer says that at his best, Dent's writing could be compared favourably to Raymond Chandler (I'm not so sure of that, but he was certainly no slouch). Bama did the first 67 covers for Bantam; later he went into fine art.

Cover by James Bama

The Red Skull was the first Doc Savage adventure I read. It was also the first novel I read intended for adults, and I was suitably impressed by the way Doc decided that his insane enemy was beyond redemption and would have to die. In those novels skycrapers were torn down, men turned to smoke, monsters lurked on desert islands. Doc had a fortress of solitude, like Superman who came later (though after Philip Wylie's splendid novel Gladiator (1930), whose genetically created superman is usually credited with inspiring the comic hero).

Cover by James Bama

Of the books shown here, in The Sargasso Ogre (1933) Doc and his men travel from the ancient, skull-lined catacombs of Alexandria to a fantastic sea of floating primitive life. In The Annihilst (1934) the finger of suspicion points at Doc when hundreds of men are found horribly murdered, victims of the hideous pop-eyed death. A machine of terror, balls of fire streak through the skies leaving death and destruction in their wake in The Secret in the Sky (1935). In The Phantom City (1933), our heroes undergo an incredible ordeal of endurance from the Cavern of the Crying Rock to the Phantom City in the desert, where they fight to the death against the last of a race of white-haired prehistoric beasts. I can think of worse books to give a 10-year-old for his first adult reading experience. ;D

Cover by James Bama

[bradstevens]

I picked up the first DOC SAVAGE novel, THE MAN OF BRONZE, at Zardoz last weekend. I'm in two minds about it. The writing, though often quite compelling, is a little too 'meat and potatoes' for my taste (parts of the book feel like a slightly expanded synopsis), and I have real problems with a narrative centered on such a one-dimensional protagonist. On the plus side, the attitude towards the 'primitive' Mayan tribe in Hidalgo is surprisingly enlightened. The tribe's decision to isolate itself from civilization is actually portrayed as a sensible move: "Doc, reflecting on the turmoil and bloodshed and greed that had racked the rest of the world in the interim, could not but agree that the course these people had taken had its merits". Earlier, when confronted by some seemingly hostile natives, Doc rejects Renny's suggestion that he "unlimber a machine gun", insisting that "we haven't any moral right here. And I'll get out rather than massacre some of them". Those who defend racist/imperialist literature of the past by describing it as "a product of its time" would do well to remember that progressive attitudes such as these were already being expressed in popular American literature as far back as 1933.

The copy I have is Corgi's UK film tie-in edition from the mid 70s. I also have THE THOUSAND-HEADED MAN, number 2 in Corgi's series - though, since Corgi published the books out of sequence, this is actually the 17th DOC SAVAGE novel.

There's a good DOC SAVAGE site (where Tim Lucas, editor of VIDEO WATCHDOG, occasionally contributes intelligent notes on the books) at:

docsavage.org/

[Calenture]

Thanks for this, Brad. It's interesting to read other people's comments on these, particularly as I've only read one in recent years. I've wondered how those books would strike me if I encountered them first today. And thanks for the link.

One day I'll try to work out what sequence my Bantam reprints should have appeared in (I remember trying to do that with the Sphere Conans. )

I liked this review on that site you linked.

Michael Bloom wrote:What a marvelous adventure! Dent hits his stride in this 4th installment of the Doc saga. THE POLAR TREASURE would make an excellent Doc movie. Doc killing a polar bear with his hands is entirely believable, given his physical skills and knowledge of anatomy. Dent pulled it off well. Interestingly, for the 2nd printing and beyond, Bantam zoomed in on the original painting, making the bear and Doc bigger, obscuring more of the logo, and showing less of the treasure.

Of the movie, people seem more accepting of it in recent years than when it first appeared.

Curt has written up a couple of Doc Savage books recently in Beyond the Groovy Age of Horror, one by Dent (which I've read), Fear Cay and one which isn't and I haven't, Merchants of Disaster.

Hope they won't mind me sticking this cover up. First time I've seen one of the magazine covers.