Doc Savage and His Circle
Recently it had occurred to Doc Savage he might be turning into too much of a machine—becoming, in fact, as superhuman as many persons thought he was. He did not like that idea. He had always been apprehensive lest something of the kind occur. The scientists who had trained him during his childhood had been afraid of his losing human qualities; they had guarded him against this as much as possible. When a man's entire life is fantastic, he must guard against his own personality becoming strange.
—Kenneth Robeson, The Dagger In The Sky
You never know what sort of monument you'll get or what you'll be remembered for. Lester Dent had hoped to have a chance to write what he felt were first rate books and stories, the kind of thing that shows up on slick paper and best seller lists. Instead he got hired to write the Doc Savage series and he spent nearly two decades hidden behind the penname Kenneth Robeson. The current Bantam paperback revivals of the old Doc Savage novels have now sold over twelve million copies and so Dent has become, some ten years after his death, one of the best selling authors of the century.
The official version of the inception of Doc Savage is that the entire concept was originated by Henry W. Ralston of Street & Smith. More probably, the character developed out of the numerous conferences on new titles which followed the unexpected success of The Shadow. "The Shadow was going so good, it fooled hell out of everybody," recalls Walter Gibson. "Ralston wanted to start another adventure magazine, but for a long time he didn't even have a title." John Nanovic, who edited both The Shadow and the new Doc Savage magazines, was also in on the planning of the new series. Basically the Doc Savage format—that of a strong and brilliant hero and his coterie of gifted and whimsical sidekicks—is Frank Merriwell and his chums updated. And there were numerous other successful gangs of fictional do-gooders around in the 1920's and '30's that might have served as inspiration, especially Edgar Wallace's Four Just Men. Street & Smith might even have noticed a series one of their own authors was doing over at Fiction House. A year before the debut of Doc, Theodore Tinsley was writing novelets about a manhunter named Major Lacy, who had his headquarters in "the towering pinnacle of the Cloud building" and was aided by a variously gifted quartet of his ex-Marine buddies. Clark Gable influenced the development of Doc, too. When artist Walter Baumhofer was called in to paint the cover for the first issue of Doc Savage Magazine he was handed this description of the character: "A Man of Bronze—known as Doc, who looks very much like Clark Gable. He is so well built that the impression is not of size, but of power." Baumhofer ignored this and made Doc look like the model he was using at the moment. In the stories, of course, Doc's full name is Clark Savage.
When he took on the Doc Savage job in 1933, Lester Dent was in his early thirties and already a prolific writer of pulp stories. A contemporary describes him as being then "a huge, red-headed man, six feet three and weighing around two hundred pounds." Dent grew up on his family's farm in La Plata, Missouri and despite his later wanderings he continued to refer to himself as "just a Missouri hillbilly." In...
(This entire section contains 3024 words.)
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the mid 1930's, writing about himself in the third person for a publicity release, Dent depicted his early years this way:
As a small boy, Lester Dent was taken across Wyoming in a covered wagon. Six weeks were required for a trip which can be made by automobile. today in three hours.
Dent lived as a youth on a Wyoming cow ranch. Also lived on a farm near La Plata, Mo.
Dent was nineteen years old before his hair was ever cut by a barber.
Dent has only a High School education, but he attended Chillicothe Business College, learned to telegraph, and went to work for $45.00 a month.
Dent studied law nights.
While working a night telegraph job—from mid-night until eight in the morning—Dent turned his hand to writing adventure stories. His first thirteen stories, nobody would buy. The fourteenth story sold for $250.00.
A few months later, a large New York publishing house, after reading the first story Dent sent them, telegraphed him to the effect that, "If you make less than a hundred dollars a week on your present job, advise you to quit; come to New York and be taken under our wing, with a five-hundred-dollar-a-month drawing account."
After telegraphing friends in New York to inquire around about the publisher's sanity, Dent went to New York. That was in 1931.
The publisher who called Dent away from his Associated Press job in Tulsa was Dell. He wrote stories for their War Aces, War Birds, All Western, Western Romances and All Detective. He eventually wrote for many of the other pulp outfits and had sold to Street & Smith's Popular and Top Notch before taking up the Savage assignment. Though much of the pulp writing Dent did sounds like the work of a man who is enjoying himself, he often privately referred to it as "crud." Asked to explain Doc Savage to a reporter, Dent said, "He has the clue-following ability of Sherlock Holmes, the muscular tree-swinging ability of Tarzan, the scientific sleuthing of Craig Kennedy and the morals of Jesus Christ."
The first issue of Doc Savage Magazine was dated March, 1933, and sold for ten cents. The Baumhofer cover showed a slightly tattered Doc standing in front of a piece of Mayan ruin that had several sinister natives lurking behind it. Baumhofer, who did every cover of the magazine for the next several years, has yet to read a Doc Savage novel. He usually based his cover paintings on a short synopsis provided by one of the art editors. He got seventy-five dollars per oil painting. The interior illustrations were drawn by Paul Orban. Orban followed directions and so inside the new magazine Doc did indeed look like Clark Gable for awhile. "I actually read all the stories," Orban told me. "The editors never interfered or suggested what to draw. The artists were on their own.… The going price was fifteen dollars a drawing and thirty dollars for a double page spread." Unlike Baumhofer, who never encountered Lester Dent, Orban did meet him once, though briefly.
The maiden Doc Savage adventure was titled The Man Of Bronze. This inaugural novel about Clark Savage, Jr. and his group is written in a breathless turgid prose that is not characteristic of Dent and probably indicates some editorial committee work. It begins, "There was death afoot in the darkness," and ends, "The giant bronze man and his five friends would confront undreamed perils as the very depths of hell itself crashed upon their heads. And through all that, the work of Savage would go on!" In between the reader is introduced to Doc, who possesses "an unusually high forehead, a mobile and muscular, but not too-full mouth, lean cheeks." He looks like a statue sculptured in bronze, is what he looks like, and "most marvelous of all were his eyes. They glistened like pools of flake gold." He also has nice teeth. "This man was Clark Savage, Jr. Doc Savage! The man whose name was becoming a byword in the odd corners of the world!" This exclamatory novel also introduces Doc's crew of five. Here they are, walking into Doc's headquarters atop one of the tallest buildings in New York:
The first of the five men was a giant who towered four inches over six feet. He weighed fully two fifty. His face was severe, his mouth thin and grim.… This was "Renny" or Colonel John Renwick.… He was known throughout the world for his engineering accomplishments.
Behind Renny came William Harper Littlejohn, very tall, very gaunt.… He was probably one of the greatest living experts on geology and archaeology.
Next was Major Thomas J. Roberts, dubbed "Long Tom." Long Tom was the physical weakling of the crowd.… He was a wizard with electricity.
"Ham" trailed Long Tom. "Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks," Ham was designated on formal occasions. Slender, waspy, quick-moving … and possibly the most astute lawyer Harvard ever turned out.
Last came the most remarkable character of all. Only a few inches over five feet tall, he weighed better than two hundred and sixty pounds. He had the build of a gorilla … "Monk!" No other name could fit him!
Besides looking like an ape, Monk is a chemical wizard.
The rest of the first novel details Doc's avenging the recent death of his father, exploring Mayan ruins in the Central American republic of Hidalgo, unmasking a villain known as the Feathered Serpent and finding enough gold to finance the remaining years of his pulp career.
In the issue after this came a lost world novel, The Land Of Terror, and next a Southern swamp adventure, Quest Of The Spider. As the series progressed a distinct Dent type of book developed. The dime novel aura which was present in the first stories faded and both the plots and the prose dropped much of their melodrama. Dent's sense of humor moved closer to the surface and by the mid 1930's the Doc Savage adventures had some resemblance to the screwball movies of the period. He was more and more mixing adventure and detective elements with wackiness and producing a sort of pulpwood equivalent of films like The Thin Man, Gunga Din and China Seas. These movies, despite different locales and themes, shared a fooling-around quality that was current then in a good many Hollywood pictures. In his Doc Savage novels Dent pushed the usual pulp adventure and science fiction plots often quite close to parody, whether he was dealing with infernal machines, plagues, master thieves, pixies or ogres. While quite a few of his competitors can now be read for their unconscious humor, all of the laughs in Dent are intentional. He excelled in devising villains who were both bizarre and baggy-pantsed. For instance:
Off to one side was a child's crib. It was an elaborate thing, with carvings and gilt inlays, and here and there rows of pearl studding.… The crib was about four feet long. The man who occupied it had plenty of room.… He was a little gem of a man.
His face had that utter handsomeness which pen-and-ink artists give their heroes in the love story magazines. He wore little bathing trunks and a little bathrobe, smoked a little cigar in a little holder, and a toy glass on a rack at the side held a toy drink in which leaned a toy swizzle stick.
Dent was also partial to slender, salty tomboy heroines and they appear in most of the novels.
The big eyes were blue, a nice shade. There was more about her that was nice, too. Her nose, the shape of her mouth. Long Tom had a weakness for slender girls, and this one was certainly slender. She wore stout leather boots, shorts, a khaki blouse and a khaki pith helmet.
"Don't stand there staring!" she snapped. "I want a witness! Somebody to prove I saw it."
She was a redhead. In height, she would have topped Doc's shoulder a bit.… Altogether her features could hardly have been improved upon. She wore an amazing costume—a loose, brocaded Russian blouse, drawn in at the waist with a belt fashioned of parallel lines of gold coins. From this dangled a slender, jewelled sword which Doc was certain dated back at least four centuries. There was also an efficent, spike-nosed, very modern automatic pistol.
Dent's action was often presented in choppy, quick-cut movie style. As in this assault from the novel, Red Snow:
Doc Savage put on speed. He came in sight of the basement window just in time to see the golf-hosed legs of his quarry disappearing inside. Then, in the basement, a man saw Doc and bellowed profanely. What might have been a thick-walled steel pipe of small diameter jutted out of the window. Its tip acquired a flickering red spear-point of flame. The weapon was an automatic rifle of military calibre and its roar volleyed through the compound.
Doc Savage had rolled behind a palm, which, after the fashion of palms when stunted, was extremely wide at the base. The tree shuddered, and dead leaves loosened and fluttered in the wind. A cupro-nickel-jacketed slug came entirely through the bole. More followed. The bole began to split. The racket was terrific.
He also worked out a distinctive and personal way of starting a story. These were often abrupt and unlike the usual slow and moody Street & Smith openings so much favored by writers like Walter Gibson. For example:
When Ethel's Mama blew up, she shook the earth in more ways than one.
When the plane landed on a farmer's oat-stubble field in the Mississippi bottoms near St. Louis, the time was around ten in the morning.
The farmer had turned his cattle on to the stubble field to graze, and among the animals was a rogue bull which was a horned devil with strangers.
The bull charged the aviator.
The flier killed the bull with a spear.
The street should be very clean. The long-faced man had been sweeping it since daylight.
Never completely reverent of Doc, Dent extemporized abilities for him that went beyond the wildest talents of your average everyday super-hero. In one novel, for instance, Doc Savage displays not only a remarkable knack for fashion designing but an exceptional skill for leading a dance band.
Doc Savage Magazine proved to be another best-selling title for Street & Smith and it stayed on the stands for sixteen years all told. The periodical remained monthly until after the war and then declined down through bi-monthly and finally quarterly publication. There were 181 separate novels devoted to Doc Savage, all credited to Kenneth Robeson. Of these Dent seems to have written all but about two dozen. The official Street & Smith records, now looked after by Conde Nast Publications, show nine Doc Savage novels are the work of the ubiquitous Norman Daniels, four are by Alan Hathway and three by William Bogart. All three men were S&S hacks in the '30's and '40's. Laurence Donovan, another undistinguished workhorse, is also sometimes mentioned as having contributed to the corpus. The major period of ghosting was in 1936 and 1937. According to Frank Gruber, "along about 1936 Lester Dent began to tire of Doc Savage. He thought the stories too juvenile and he thought that he should be trying to write more adult fiction." During these same years Dent acquired the forty-foot Albatross, which he referred to as his "treasure hunt schooner," and he was spending a good deal of time aboard it. Besides the ghost writers who made the official list at Street & Smith, Dent hired a few others on the side. Ryerson Johnson, an affable little pulp writer, remembers doing at least three Doc Savages in 1935. "I did Land Of Always-Night," he told me. "Another one, and something about the Galapagos Islands and giant turtles." Dent made $750 per novel and he paid Johnson $500 out of that. Johnson remembers being handed $500 in cash on a street corner in Manhattan after doing the giant turtles book.
As a merchandising property Doc Savage didn't equal The Shadow. There were no movies, no serials. There was a radio show, but it ran only in the East during one wartime summer. The Doc Savage comic book never did well either. A number of cartoonists drew the feature, including William A. Smith, later a Saturday Evening Post illustrator and currently a gallery painter. As with many of their later characters, Street & Smith's timing was off. They didn't think of using him as a comic book hero until 1940 and by then there was Superman. It's obvious Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster had recognized Doc Savage's potential much earlier. Dedicated pulp readers, the two young Cleveland boys borrowed considerably from Dent's character for their own super-hero. It isn't because of coincidence that Superman's name is Clark Kent and that he was initially billed as the Man of Steel. In the pulp magazines themselves there were a number of imitation Docs. None of them, such as Captain Hazard, survived beyond the '30's. Street & Smith tried, too, most notably with a sea-faring adventurer named Cap Fury. The captain and his crew had their own magazine for awhile. It was called The Skipper and the busy Norman Daniels ghosted the novels.
Lester Dent died just ten years after his character had folded. That was in 1959 while he was, once more, on a treasure hunting cruise. A year prior to that Dent, who never substantially realized his ambition to progress to slicks and bestsellers, was asked to reminisce about his pulp days. He had by then written hundreds of short stories and nearly two hundred novels, earning as much as $4,000 a month. All he spoke well of out of all that material were the two short stories he'd done for Black Mask in the 1930's. He sold the stories, both of which dealt with a lean Florida detective named Sail, to editor Joseph Shaw. He admired Shaw for being "gentle with his writers. You went into Black Mask and talked with him, you felt you were doing fiction that was powerful, you had feelings of stature." In 1936 Shaw was fired from the magazine. This, Lester Dent felt, "is what kept me from becoming a fine writer. Had I been exposed to the man's cunning hand for another year or two, I couldn't have missed.… Instead I wrote reams of saleable crap which became my pattern, and gradually there slipped away the bit of power Shaw had started awakening in me."
