Doc Savage Books

After his Calbia escapade Doc learns in London, with the media highly intrigued as to why he is there. He doesn't like paparazzi any more than anyone else. He is soon involved in conflict some distance away by plane, with a gang, some men dressed in many little ugly head suits, and to top it all off, a whole passel of super spitting cobras.

I stumbled across this book in a bookstore and bought it because of my fond memories of the Doc Savage series which I read in the seventies (I wish someone would re-issue them).

I had high hopes for learning quite a bit more about the author of so many of those books, but I ended up somewhat diappointed. Either Dent wasn't nearly as interesting as I anticpated or there's just of lot of information missing here. It may be no fault of the author's, it may well be that there just wasn't that much to write about. Dent did lead what appears to be an interesting life, he apparently was something of an adventurer, but this book is short of details when it comes to those adventures.

And there is absolutely no introspection into what drove this guy, beyond a desire to earn a living. Next to Robert E. Howard, another author who is was somewhat contemporaneous with Dent, Dent is a bore.

It's also kind of a misnomer to label him the creator of Doc Savage. The idea was actually that of the publisher, although he certainly gets credit for bringing that idea to life.

I wish I could recommend this, but as biographies go, its just not very compelling reading.

Doc and the gang head for Trapper Lake, Michigan after a man journeys to New York to hire Doc to solve the mystery of the murder of his neighbor. Carl McBride barely has time to give Doc just enough information to intrigue him before he's shot dead right in Doc's office. Doc and the boys follow the attacker to a strange compound in the woods that seems to be a huge cage of some sort. They rescue railroad magnate Griswold Rock and wind up taking him along to Trapper Lake to investigate the murder of Carl McBride. They also need to run to the rescue for lovely lion tamer Jean Morris, whom the villains have taken hostage. Strange newspaper advertisements have also appeared in cities across the country, warning people to Beware the Monsters, and Doc finds their origin is also in Trapper Lake.

On their first night camping outside of town, the gang is awakened by an attack by something huge that destroys their camp and their plane. Shortly after they hike to town, it is also attacked by huge humanoid monsters, and Renny's plane is shot down when he flies in to join Doc after collecting evidence from the compound in New York. All the while, Doc is searching for missing scientist Pere Teston, who Griswold Rock claims is the mastermind behind the monsters being poised to strike every major city in America. Doc must stop not only the man who developed the technology to create monsters bigger and much stronger than even Doc out of escaped convicts, but the monsters themselves.

Since the author once cranked out a book a month, it's inevitable they not all be classics, and this one feels as if it was written on auto pilot. Worse, Doc often comes off as smug and downright rude. Just about everything that happened here has already been done before by Doc and the gang, too. Even the female interest, Jean Morris, seems to be there simply for the sake of being there, her hair the only remarkable thing about her. The villain wasn't too hard to figure out, either, with extremely obvious "clews" strewn all about. Had this been the first Doc Savage adventure I'd read, I probably would have been intrigued enough to pick up another, but there are certainly better Doc Savage adventures to be enjoyed.

As a fan of Doc Savage, I consider myself fortunate to have collected all of the Bantam Paperback reprints of the original 181 Doc Savage Magazines. Written by Lester Dent, under the pen name of Kenneth Robeson, the pulp magazine was published as a monthly beginning in 1933 to 1949. (For the last few years it was a quarterly.) In 1964, Bantam began their series of paperbacks, which ran for 26 years. As time allows, I will give brief descriptions/reviews of the entire series. In book # 16, "The Spook Legion," Doc continues in the realm of science fiction that began in the previous book, in which a series of mysterious things happen, with no rationale explanations given. Previously, all the phenomena that happened were logically explained at the end of each book, but not here. In this adventure, Doc and only two of his associates (Monk and Ham) take on a group of invisible men. This is also a departure from the series, as for the first time the other three of Doc's cohorts (Renny, Long Tom and Brooks) appear nowhere in the tale. The evil mastermind, working under a skunk farm on Long Island, has found a way to turn men invisible. Their crime wave begins at a New York opera house where the invisibles roam the audience taking precious jewelry and striking terror everywhere. These plotters soon have police and citizens convinced that it is Doc and his gang that are the perpetrators. It is continual, excessively repeated action throughout until Doc and Monk themselves become invisible, infiltrate the gang, and bring about justice. How does Robeson/Savage explain the invisibility? Well as Doc says, "It has something to do with altering the electronic composition of the body, securing an atomic motific status which results in complete diaphaneity." Huh? Not one of the best of the series by a long shot.