Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Variety Detective Magazine, August 1938

VARIETY DETECTIVE MAGAZINE was a short-lived detective pulp from Ace that changed its name to LONE WOLF DETECTIVE MAGAZINE and ran for several more years. This is the first issue under the VARIETY DETECTIVE name and sports a Norman Saunders cover, always a good selling point. Inside were assorted house-name reprints from TEN DETECTIVE ACES, DETECTIVE-DRAGNET MAGAZINE, and SECRET AGENT X, along with stories by Lester Dent and Paul Chadwick, certainly the only authors in this issue you've ever heard of, at least that we know about. There's no telling who was hiding behind those house-names. This is probably more of an interesting oddity than anything else, but Dent and Chadwick are always worth reading. In fact, if you want to check it out, the entire issue can be found here.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Crime Busters, October 1938

Western pulps weren't the only ones that favored a red and yellow color scheme. Here's an example of one on CRIME BUSTERS, a detective pulp that often featured photo covers but not this time. It also specialized in series characters, and the line-up in this issue is full of heavyweight authors. There's a Click Rush story by Lester Dent, a Carrie Cashin story by Theodore Tinsley, a Clay Holt story by Carroll John Daly, a Red Drake story by W.T. Ballard, and a Doc Trouble story by Robert C. Blackmon. I've heard of Click Rush and Carrie Cashin, but I'll admit, the others are new ones on me. Daly's Clay Holt appeared in six stories, the first four in DIME DETECTIVE, this one in CRIME BUSTERS, and a final yarn in BLACK MASK. I'm guessing Ballard's Red Drake was probably a private eye. He appeared in more than two dozen stories in BLACK MASK, CRIME BUSTERS, and STREET & SMITH'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. Blackmon's Doc Trouble appeared in 18 stories in CRIME BUSTERS and STREET & SMITH'S MYSTERY MAGAZINE. I'll bet these are all good characters and good stories, and if any of you are familiar with them, please feel free to tell us about them in the comments.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Crime Busters, June 1938

The cover's not bad on this issue of CRIME BUSTERS (I don't know the artist), but man, look at the authors and series inside: Lester Dent with a Click Rush story, Walter B. Gibson (as Maxwell Grant) with a Norgil the Magician story, Norvell Page with a story featuring Angus Saint Cloud, the Death Angel (don't know this series, but what a great name!), Theodore Tinsley with a Carrie Cashin story, plus yarns by Frank Gruber, Wyatt Blassingame, and Arthur J. Burks. This looks like an absolutely great issue.

Forgotten Books: Up From Earth's Center - Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent)

Art by George Rozen

All things have to come to an end. A little more than 55 years ago, in the fall of 1964, I plucked a copy of a paperback called METEOR MENACE from the spinner rack at Tompkins’ Drugstore. I’d never heard of the character featured in it, Doc Savage, but the cover caught my eye and the back cover copy promised all sorts of thrills and excitement and danger. So I figured it was worth risking 45 cents.

I really enjoyed the book, and a week or so later I found a copy of another Doc Savage novel, THE THOUSAND-HEADED MAN, at Trammell’s Pak-a-Bag Grocery. I bought that one, and on the next Sunday afternoon, I sat down in my favorite reading chair after church and read the whole thing from start to finish. I was a lifelong Doc Savage fan after that, and I was soon reading THE MAN OF BRONZE (actually the first book in the series). Bantam Books had reprinted those three to launch the series, and they were successful enough that for decades after that, every month they reprinted another book from the original pulp . . . and I was there, at Tompkins’ or Trammell’s or Lester’s Pharmacy to buy them. Many of them I picked up at at Mott’s Five-and-Ten Store, which had a rack of just Bantam paperbacks. (I bought a lot of Louis L’Amour novels there, too.)

Eventually Bantam reprinted the entire series, including one book that was written but never published in the DOC SAVAGE pulp. I had them all, but there were a few I never got around to reading, and after a while I deliberately didn’t read them because I kind of liked the idea that I still had Doc Savages to read. Now, though, I’m getting to be old enough that I figured if I was ever going to finish off the series, I ought to go ahead and do it. So I’ve been reading that final handful, and now we come to the last of them, the last Doc Savage novel from the original pulp, UP FROM EARTH’S CENTER, published in the Summer 1949 issue of DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE.

This one starts off with a man who’s stranded on a rocky island off the coast of Maine being rescued by a passing yacht. The man acts strangely, and when the yacht gets back to a fishing village not far from the rescued man’s home, one of his rescuers—who happens to be acquainted with Colonel John “Renny” Renwick, and who happens to know that Renny is in the area and Doc Savage might be, too—decides to dump the whole affair in Doc’s lap. Doc, Monk, and Ham are indeed in the area and are intrigued enough to investigate how the man got stranded on the island and why he now seems to be terrified. (Renny is mentioned but doesn’t appear in this novel, and there’s no sign of Johnny and Long Tom, Doc’s other two associates.)

The situation is complicated by the arrival of a strange little guy calling himself Mr. Wail. He’s capable of doing things that normal human beings shouldn’t be. So far, until a little past the halfway point in the story, this seems like just another oddball late entry in the Doc Savage series, more like the earlier stories from the late Forties rather than the deliberately throwback yarns, THE GREEN MASTER and RETURN FROM CORMORAL, in the previous two issues.

Then Doc and the others decide to explore a deep cave near the estate belonging to the man who was rescued from the island, and once they get underground, things take a wacky, even surreal, tone. I don’t think it’s revealing too much to say that the cave may—or may not—be an entrance to Hell, and the mysterious Mr. Wail may—or may not—be an actual demon. A minor flunkey of a demon, though, not the big guy himself. And if that’s true, then it’s his job to cover up the discovery of this back door to Hades.

The ending is a bit ambiguous, and it’s an odd note on which to end the entire series, no doubt about that. And yet it kind of works, too, as if Lester Dent saved the weirdest for the last, whether it was intentional or not. Dent’s writing is in top form in this book, fast and funny and definitely with a screwball slant. I was halfway expecting not to like UP FROM EARTH’S CENTER because I knew what it was about and the plot has always struck me as a little stupid, but danged if Dent didn’t make it work. I enjoyed this story, although I’m more than a little sad to say that now I’ve read all of the original Doc Savage novels. The end of an era in my life, that’s for sure.

But not completely, because now I plan to go on and read the Doc Savage novels by Will Murray that I haven’t gotten around to (there are more of them than I realized at first) and then, although I have a general rule about not rereading books, I’m going to set that aside and read again some of my favorites from all those years ago, which will probably wind up being most of them from the first five or six years of the series. I’m looking forward to it.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Crime Busters, February 1938

I'm not too fond of the photo covers on CRIME BUSTERS, but man, look at that line-up of authors! The Lester Dent story is part of his Click Rush, the Gadget Man, series, while Walter B. Gibson, writing as Maxwell Grant, contributes a Norgil the Magician yarn. Ted Tinsley's story features his female private eye, Carrie Cashin. The others are all series stories, too, although, while I certainly know the authors, I'm not familiar with the characters: Steve Fisher (Big Red Brennan), Norvell Page (Dick Barrett), Frank Gruber (Jim Strong), and Norman A. Daniels (Boxcar Reilly). Photo cover or not, I'd sure read this one if I had a copy of it.

Forgotten Books: Return from Cormoral - Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent)

The Spring 1949 issue of DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE was the second to feature a classic-style Doc novel in the old familiar pulp size that had been restored with the previous issue. “Return From Cormoral” features an excellent George Rozen cover that’s really evocative of Walter Baumhofer’s great covers during the series’ supersaga era. This tale starts out in intriguing fashion, as well: four scientists return to civilization in Miami after having been marooned for six months on a really remote island (the Cormoral of the title) when the scientific foundation that was sponsoring their expedition went belly-up and couldn’t retrieve them. As if that’s not intriguing enough, one of the scientists is the heir to a half-billion dollar fortune . . . and he’s returned with the ability to predict the future.

However, this ability isn’t one that the scientist particularly wants—in fact, it scares him to death—so he decides to contact Doc Savage to get to the bottom of it. This leads to a couple of attempts on Doc’s life in New York, which just makes him more curious and determined to get to the bottom of things (the crooks never seem to learn not to do that), and before you know it Doc is off to Miami to investigate while his aids, the ever-lovable Monk and Ham, try to track down some leads in New York.

There are more attempts on Doc’s life, some colorful chasing around Miami, and then some globetrotting adventure as Doc, the scientist with the dilemma, and the guy’s spunky girlfriend take off for the Great White North. (Some of you are probably humming an old Rush song right now. I know I am.)

In the end, the secret behind the whole thing is a little on the mundane side, as often happens not only in other Doc Savage novels, but in yarns featuring The Shadow and other pulp heroes as well. But usually, the fun is in the getting there, and with Lester Dent’s taut, fast-paced prose sprinkled with action and humor, “Return From Cormoral” is quite a bit of fun indeed. By 1949, too much time had probably passed for the series to ever quite recapture its former glories, but this one makes a valiant try and I really enjoyed it.

Which leaves me with just one more Doc Savage novel from the original series before I’ve read them all. I’ll be getting to it soon.

Forgotten Books: The Green Master - Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent)

With the Winter 1949 issue, DOC SAVAGE returned to its pulp roots, going back to the traditional pulp size after several years as a digest magazine. The covers by George Rozen also attempted to recapture the adventurous dynamic of the classic Walter Baumhofer covers from the magazine’s early years. The first novel in this attempted revitalization of the lagging publication was “The Green Master”, and it’s the next one up in my continuing project to read all the Doc Savage novels I’ve never read.

This yarn begins with Monk Mayfair, one of Doc’s aides, being trailed in New York City by a beautiful blond woman and then a couple of blond men, all of whom seem very unfamiliar with being in a city, as if they came from somewhere far away from civilization, like maybe, oh, a lost city. Sarcasm aside, it turns out that these strange folks have incredible powers of persuasion that are like super-hypnotism, but when Ham Brooks, another of Doc’s aides, and then Doc himself become involved in the affair, it becomes obvious that what’s going on isn’t hypnotism but something much more astounding. Then people start trying to kill Doc, his men, and the blond strangers.

Globe-trotting adventure was always one of the hallmarks of the Doc Savage series, and this novel delivers when the action shifts to South America. I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that, yep, there’s a lost city, and it’s a good one. Doc, Monk, and Ham wind up being in on plenty of action. (Doc’s other aides aren’t even mentioned this time around.)

The ultimate explanation for everything is a little unsatisfying, as if author Lester Dent didn’t have room to develop the plot as much as it should have been. THE GREEN MASTER probably isn’t more than 30,000 words long. But Dent’s writing is so sharp and funny that the book is still very enjoyable. It may not be a true return to greatness, but it’s a good stab at it.

Forgotten Books: Terror Wears No Shoes -- Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent)

Getting back to reading all the Doc Savage novels I haven’t already read, I recently tackled TERROR WEARS NO SHOES, originally published in the May/June 1948 issue of the magazine DOC SAVAGE, SCIENCE DETECTIVE and reprinted in the final Doc Savage omnibus published by Bantam in 1990, as well as by Nostalgia Ventures in 2008. Like most of Lester Dent’s Doc Savage novels after World War II, this is a hardboiled espionage yarn that discards most of the familiar trappings from earlier in the series and could have worked just about as well with characters other than Doc, Monk, Ham, and Long Tom. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it.

This one could almost be called DOC SAVAGE MEETS THE DRAGON LADY, as Doc finds himself in Shanghai tangling with a mysterious but beautiful female crime lord. He’s in disguise, searching for his aide Long Tom Roberts who disappeared while investigating a deadly plot by the Soviets, who are the villains in many of these novels late in the series. Monk and Ham are on hand, too, but mainly to get captured by the bad guys and serve as hostages. The young woman who holds the key to everything may be a criminal, but she’s not all bad and winds up working with Doc to stop a terrible threat steaming toward the United States on an ocean liner.

Dent springs a late surprise that had me slapping my forehead and saying, “D’oh!” because I should have seen it coming but absolutely didn’t. By this time in the series, his terse writing style is polished diamond-hard and is a joy to read. While the early books with their sweeping plots and swashbuckling sense of adventure will always be my favorites, I’ve come to appreciate these little gems from late in the series, as well. I had a great time reading this one. (By the way, the title has absolutely nothing to do with the story, as far as I could tell.)

Forgotten Books: The Derelict of Skull Shoal - Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent)

During a recent discussion on Facebook, I mentioned that I’d never read the final Doc Savage novel by Lester Dent, UP FROM EARTH’S CENTER. Well, that got me looking at my copy of DOC SAVAGE OMNIBUS #13, the Bantam paperback that includes that novel, and I realized I hadn’t read any of the five novels in that collection. So I decided it was time to do that, and when I’m finished with them, I’m going to read the Doc Savage novels by Will Murray that I haven’t read yet (there are still a few of them), and then maybe I’ll go back and reread some of my favorites from Dent’s first few years on the series, from 1933 to 1937 or ’38, the era I consider the high point of the series. This will take a year or more, because I usually don’t read books from the same series back to back. So you can expect to see quite a few Doc Savage posts for a while.

To start out with, I read one of the most infamous of all of Dent’s Doc Savages: THE DERELICT OF SKULL SHOAL, originally published in the March 1944 issue of the magazine, which was being published as a digest by this time. A couple of things set this one apart. First of all, it’s the only one in the series that was published in its original appearance under Lester Dent’s real name instead of the Kenneth Robeson house-name, because someone at Street & Smith made a mistake and forgot to put the right by-line on the story. Let me digress for a moment and mention that the very first Doc Savage novel, THE MAN OF BRONZE, appeared in the pulp under the pseudonym Kenneth Roberts, but someone at S&S quickly realized there was a currently popular historical novelist actually named Kenneth Roberts, the fellow who wrote NORTHWEST PASSAGE, ARUNDEL, and many other historical sagas. After that S&S always used the Kenneth Robeson name on the Doc Savages, except for THE DERELICT OF SKULL SHOAL. And when that novel was reprinted, the Bantam paperback collection had the Robeson name on it, too.

To get to the actual novel, the other thing that makes this one notorious is that it’s the story where Doc Savage suffers a serious head injury early on in the action, resulting in a concussion or perhaps even a fractured skull. Fans of the series have noted that Doc’s personality changes somewhat after this story and have theorized that the change was a result of the head injury. That makes sense to me. Whether Lester Dent intended it that way or not, we’ll probably never know for sure.

As Dent often does, he drops us down right in the middle of the action to start the book. Doc and his aides Monk, Ham, and Renny are in disguise, serving as crewmen on the ocean liner Farland, which has been taken over by the U.S. Navy and pressed into service as a military vessel during World War II. The Farland is steaming across the South Atlantic when it’s torpedoed and the order to abandon ship is given. Doc was warned that something was going to happen, and that’s why he and his aides are there, but he doesn’t know what sort of villainy is in the works.

It’s during this chaos that something strikes Doc in the head and renders him unconscious. When he comes to, he finds that he and his friends are still aboard the abandoned ship, but not everything is as it seems, and they’re not alone, either. There’s also a beautiful blonde on hand, Theresa Ruth “Trigger” Riggert, a tough, hardboiled dame of the same sort who often figures in these Doc Savage yarns. (Dent’s female characters always remind me of the female characters in movies directed by Howard Hawks.) If that’s not enough, there are also some guys who want to kill them, of course, and then Ham and Renny disappear under mysterious circumstances, and a submarine shows up, as well as a sinister yacht, and we’re off and galloping again.

This adventure takes Doc and his friends farther south in the Atlantic and winds up at Skull Shoal, a truly eerie setting where the action-packed and satisfying conclusion takes place. While the overall plot struck me as being a little too small in scale (I prefer the early, so-called “supersagas”), Lester Dent’s writing is really top-notch in this novel, with plenty of good dialogue, vivid descriptions, and hardboiled action. The early scenes aboard the Farland, after the attack, reminded me of some of Alistair Maclean’s nautical adventures such as H.M.S. ULYSSES and made me think it’s a shame Dent never wrote an actual war novel. It would have been a good one.

Overall, I really enjoyed this yarn, and reading it makes me look forward to this Doc Savage project on which I’m embarking.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Crime Busters, July 1938

Another great cover by Norman Saunders on this issue of CRIME BUSTERS, and look at the line-up of authors: Walter B. Gibson (writing as Maxwell Grant) with a Norgil the Magician story; Lester Dent (a Click Rush, Gadget Man story); Theodore Tinsley (a Carrie Cashin story); Steve Fisher (a Big Red Brennan story); Frank Gruber (a Jim Strong story); Alan Hathway (a Colby Lyman story); and George Allan Moffatt (a Duncan Dean story). Now, I'm not familiar with all those series characters, but I know the authors and know they could be counted on to produce entertaining yarns. And any pulp with Dent, Gibson, Gruber, Tinsley, and Fisher has got to be good reading!

Forgotten Books: Terror, Inc. - Lester Dent

I’ve been a fan of Lester Dent’s work for more than 50 years, ever since I picked up the Bantam Books reprint of his Doc Savage novel METEOR MENACE from the paperback spinner rack in Tompkins’ Drugstore and plunked down my 45 cents for it. Since then I’ve read nearly all of the Doc Savages (I’m still saving a few for the proverbial rainy day) and a lot of Dent’s other work.

This collection, from the always excellent Black Dog Books, features six non-series novellas by Dent that were published in the pulps DETECTIVE-DRAGNET and TEN DETECTIVE ACES (a retitling of the same magazine) in 1932 and ’33, just before and after he started writing the Doc Savage series. Weird Menace stories were just becoming a sub-genre about that time, so these aren’t quite Weird Menace, but they’re in the same neighborhood. One of the main differences, as Will Murray points out in his introduction, is that the protagonists are two-fisted professional detectives, rather than the civilians who take the lead in Weird Menace stories. But the atmosphere in these yarns often borders on the sinister and creepy.

Such as the opening of the title story, “Terror, Inc.”, from the May 1932 issue of DETECTIVE-DRAGNET, in which Kerrigan, a private eye from New York who has been summoned to Los Angeles for a job, opens the door of a car where he’s supposed to meet his mysterious client, and a skeleton topples out, with a lightning bolt mark on the skull that’s the trademark of the killer who calls himself The Spark. Now, if you can read an opening like that and not want to keep going, you’re definitely made of different stuff than me.

The second story, “The Devil’s Cargo” (DETECTIVE-DRAGNET, July 1932), doesn’t have any of the macabre stuff, but it’s still a good detective action yarn, with private eye Steve Harden negotiating his way through a maze of violence involving three rival groups who are after some sort of secret. Each of the groups believes that Harden is working for one of the others, and Harden has no idea what’s going on and just wants to find out the truth and stay alive. This one moves like a rocket until the end, which admittedly isn’t quite as compelling as I hoped it would be.

“The Invisible Horde” (DETECTIVE-DRAGNET, September 1932) seems like a dry run of sorts for THE SPOOK LEGION, a Doc Savage novel Dent wrote a few years later. The plots aren’t really similar, but both involve a gang of crooks who discover the secret of invisibility. The protagonist of this one is a scientist who happens to be a former Secret Service agent. Not the most believable of characters, maybe, but there’s plenty of wild action, as you’d expect, so in this case I don’t really care.

 “The Whistling Death”, from the March 1933 issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES, like so many of Dent’s Doc Savage novels, revolves around a mysterious, grisly murder method that causes its victims to sweat blood. New York private eye Cleve Dane is summoned to Tampa for a case involving a shady financier who disappeared with five million dollars worth of gold certificates. The case turns into a wild chase through a rainy night after an embalmed corpse that keeps getting stolen. Dent really packs both action and plot into this one; it’s like a condensed novel. And maybe it’s the Florida setting and the fact that Dane seems to be two or three steps ahead of everybody else, but this story really reminded me of a Mike Shayne yarn. Which is a good thing indeed.

“The Cavern of Heads” (TEN DETECTIVE ACES, April 1933) has a great title and a headlong plot that kicks off with a box containing what appears to be a human head to the detective agency where Dave Lacy works. It’s not actually a head (not really a spoiler, since that’s established almost right away), but rest assured, heads will roll before this yarn is over. Lacy is described more like Monk Mayfair, almost as wide as he is tall, and at one point he takes off his shoes and climbs a wall using fingers and toes like Doc Savage. Dent was writing these stories at the same time as he was getting Doc’s series off the ground, and it’s fun to spot these cross-pollinations. There’s a beautiful platinum blonde, a beautiful redhead, a mysterious anthropologist who collects, yes, human heads, and a seemingly impossible murder method. The thing that’s behind it all has a Doc Savage connection, but I’ll remain mum on that since it might give too much away. This story is atmospheric and creepy as well as action-packed, and it’s just a whole lot of fun.

The book wraps up with “Murder Street”, from the May/June 1933 issue of TEN DETECTIVE ACES, and Dent’s love of both gadgets and bizarre murder methods shows up strong in this one. Detective Wes Kaine needs the gadgets to do his job and survive, because he’s undersized (although he can handle himself in a fight). He reminded me a little of Donald Lam as he investigates a case of bodies buried under recently repaired streets. Of course, there’s a connection between the murder victims which leads Kaine into a case where he finds himself in deadly danger more than once.

All six of these stories are great fun, with “The Cavern of Heads” being my favorite of the bunch. Nobody did headlong action better than Dent. This would be a decent introduction to his work if you haven’t read it before, although there are probably other things that would be better for that. But if you’re already a Dent fan, I guarantee you’ll have a good time with TERROR, INC.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Argosy, December 4, 1937

What a great era for ARGOSY this was. A Thibaut Corday yarn by Theodore Roscoe, serial installments by Lester Dent, Borden Chase, and Allan Vaughan Elston, plus stories by William Chamberlain and Richard Wormser. The readers back then definitely got their dime's worth of great adventure fiction.

Six Scarlet Scorpions - Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray and Lester Dent)

As I've mentioned before, nothing makes me feel more like I'm back in junior high or high school than reading one of Will Murray's new Doc Savage novels. They perfectly recreate the experience of whipping through one of those Bantam paperbacks, right down to the way publisher and designer Matt Moring of Altus Press makes the pages look. SIX SCARLET SCORPIONS is not a Doc Savage novel, but it features Doc's beautiful cousin Pat Savage, along with able assistance from Monk Mayfair and cameo appearances by Monk's long-time friend and adversary Ham Brooks and Monk's pet pig Habeas Corpus. I've liked Pat ever since her introduction in the novel BRAND OF THE WEREWOLF, so it's no surprise that I found this to be an excellent book.

As it opens, Pat and Monk are in Oklahoma, looking to make some quick money by trading in oil leases. As you might expect, they run into trouble right away and then get even deeper into a mess involving a young man almost completely drained of blood who's barely alive, a mysterious Indian tribe that shouldn't exist, a sinister murder method that makes a red mark in the shape of a scorpion appear on its victims' faces, a newspaper publisher who may or may not be mixed up with a criminal gang, the publisher's beautiful blond fiancee, and a robed and hooded mastermind who calls himself Chief Standing Scorpion, war chief of the Vinegarroon tribe. All this leads to a series of deadly traps and hair's-breadth escapes (as they used to say on the back covers of the Bantam paperbacks), including a great scene on some abandoned oil derricks in the Arkansas River and a thrilling climax in a castle carved into a cliff in the Ozark Mountains.

For a long-time fan of the Doc Savage series (I read my first one, METEOR MENACE, more than 50 years ago), this is a wonderful throwback to a better time. Murray captures Lester Dent's style perfectly in both the prose and the plotting. I raced through this novel and had a great time doing so. Murray's a busy writer, but I hope he's able to give us more fine yarns starring Pat Savage. In the meantime, SIX SCARLET SCORPIONS gets a very high recommendation from me.

The Secret of Satan's Spine - Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray and Lester Dent)

All of Will Murray's Doc Savage novels have made me feel like I was back in high school, reading one of the Bantam paperbacks that I bought the first Tuesday of every month at Mott's Five-and-Ten Cent Store. (I doubt if anything in there was actually five cents or ten cents, but what the hey.) Murray's most recent Doc novel, THE SECRET OF SATAN'S SPINE, evidently based on an unused outline by series creator Lester Dent, really captured that feeling for me. I might as well have been back in that World War II-era army barracks my high school used as the study hall.

I realize I'm wallowing too much in nostalgia, but it's hard not to with these books. I mean, look at that great Bama-like cover by Joe DeVito. Kudos, too, to Matt Moring, who makes the layout of the pages look like those iconic Bantam editions.

But what about the story, you ask? Well, it's classic Doc Savage, as you'd expect from Will Murray. Monk Mayfair falls for a beautiful blonde who winds up being kidnapped. It's all a ruse to keep him from sailing to England to do some important war work for the Allies (this one is set in 1943). Doc, Monk, and Ham Brooks wind up on the ship that Monk planned to take anyway, but there are a bunch of villains on board, as well as some unexpected friends from one of the original novels by Lester Dent. There's a mysterious, sinister island in the Caribbean called Satan's Cay, and of course that's where you'd expect to find Satan's Spine, the secret of which is creepy, awe-inspiring, and also connected to some of the previous adventures of Doc and his crew. On top of all that, our heroes have to deal with a monster of a hurricane that's looming through most of the book before it finally strikes.

Add all that up and you've got pure pulp adventure of the sort that I love. As I've probably said before, when I bought the paperback of METEOR MENACE (my first Doc Savage novel), I never dreamed I'd still be reading new stories about him more than fifty years later. But I'm very glad that I am, and THE SECRET OF SATAN'S SPINE is great reading for any Doc fan.

The Argosy Library from Altus Press

Altus Press Announces The Argosy Library

The First Series of Releases Features Popular Authors Such as Lester Dent, Otis Adelbert Kline, W.C. Tuttle, and George F. Worts

March 18, 2015: Altus Press today announced the premiere of its new line of books: The Argosy Library series.

Founded at the end of the Nineteenth Century by publishing tycoon Frank A. Munsey, Argosy Magazine quickly became one of the most popular—and prestigious—fiction magazines of its day and spawned a publishing revolution.

Known as one of the most literate pulp magazines, Argosy published thousands of short stories and novels, many of which features some of the most influential series characters in popular fiction.

With the inauguration of The Argosy Library, Altus Press plans to bring back into print the best of the Frank A. Munsey Company, sourced from its suite of sibling titles such as Argosy, The All-Story, and Flynn’s Detective Fiction Weekly, among others.

The Argosy Library expects to showcase the varied mix of genres that made Argosy one of the most popular pulps of all time, and Series 1 does just that by showcasing adventure, mystery, western, science fiction, fantasy, and crime stories by some of Munsey’s most popular authors such as Lester Dent, W. Wirt, Otis Adelbert Kline, W.C. Tuttle, George F. Worts, and Theodore Roscoe, among others.

The Argosy Library will be released in series of ten books at a time—in matching trade dress—and will be available in softcover, hardcover, and ebook editions. In addition to being available separately, each series of releases can be purchased as a single, heavily-discounted set.

Series 1 of The Argosy Library is expected to be released in May.

For more information, please visit Altus Press.com.

Titles in Series 1 of The Argosy Library:

Genius Jones

by Lester Dent, introduction by Will Murray

The gold-dusted saga of a red-bearded young giant, raised in the Arctic on seal-meat and encyclopedias, who descends on civilization with a loud and solid crash. In his search for wisdom and adventure, the man Jones doesn’t have Aladdin’s lamp—but he doesn’t really need it…. Never before reprinted, it’s the longest novel Lester Dent ever published, and one of the most famous. This edition restores text cut from its original publication. Part of The Argosy Library of classics.

271 pages / $19.95 softcover / $29.95 hardcover

When Tigers Are Hunting: The Complete Adventures of Cordie, Soldier of Fortune, Volume 1

by W. Wirt

The sagas of Jimmie Cordie and his crew were among Argosy’s most popular series when it was brought to that magazine during its early ’30s renaissance. Quite clearly an inspiration for the creation of Doc Savage, this edition collects his first nine adventures. Part of The Argosy Library of classics.

240 pages / $19.95 softcover / $29.95 hardcover

The Swordsman of Mars

by Otis Adelbert Kline

Harry Thorne, explorer and swordsman, had scarcely more than heard of the Red Planet, Mars—when an amazing thing happened…. Otis Adelbert Kline is well-known as one of the best fantasy/adventure contemporaries of Edgar Rice Burroughs. This edition is sourced from the original magazine text and includes all of the original illustrations. Part of The Argosy Library of classics.

237 pages / $19.95 softcover / $29.95 hardcover

The Sherlock of Sageland: The Complete Tales of Sheriff Henry, Volume 1

by W.C. Tuttle, introduction by Sai Shankar

Once voted Adventure Magazine’s most popular author, W.C. Tuttle introduced the world to one of his longest-running, and most popular series characters, Henry Harrison Conroy, in the pages of Argosy. Collected here are the first four stories. Part of The Argosy Library of classics.

269 pages / $19.95 softcover / $29.95 hardcover

Gone North

by Charles Alden Seltzer

When Jim Fallon started for the Hudson Bay country, he wasn’t sure whether he was on a man-hunt or a wild goose chase—but he found his quest was fraught with real enough peril. Among the best novels ever written by one of Argosy’s most popular authors. Part of The Argosy Library of classics.

220 pages / $19.95 softcover / $29.95 hardcover

The Masked Master Mind

by George F. Worts

One of Argosy’s most popular authors pens this never-before reprinted novel of a trail of crime that ran from sleepy Maple Hollow to Steel City. Part of The Argosy Library of classics.

265 pages / $19.95 softcover / $29.95 hardcover

Balata

by Fred MacIsaac

Trees of living gold in the Amazon jungles, guarded by alligators, poisoned darts and rival hunters—such was the lodestone that drew an American expedition, and the unwilling Pete Holcomb…. Part of The Argosy Library of classics.

216 pages / $19.95 softcover / $29.95 hardcover

Bretwalda

by Philip Ketchum

’Twas the mightiest weapon the eyes of man had ever beheld; its mystic name meant “Ruler of Briton.” And from over the Northern Sea came a Viking’s thrall—the only man in the world who could wield that fearsome steel—to save good King Alfred and the homeland he scarce remembered. Collecting—for the first time—all 12 stories of the Bretwalda saga. Part of The Argosy Library of classics.

479 pages / $29.95 softcover / $39.95 hardcover

Draft of Eternity

by Victor Rousseau

A groundbreaking science fiction, post-apocalyptic & time travel classic from the early days of The All-Story by an underrated writer. Part of The Argosy Library of classics.

183 pages / $17.95 softcover / $29.95 hardcover

Four Corners, Volume 1

by Theodore Roscoe

Mystery runs rampant in the quiet, upstate New York town of Four Corners…. Easily one of Roscoe’s best-written series, Volume 1 collects the first half of this lost masterpiece of the pulps. Part of The Argosy Library of classics.

201 pages / $19.95 softcover / $29.95 hardcover

(Needless to say, I'm really looking forward to these. It's a great time to be a pulp fan!)

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All Detective Magazine, February 1934

An early Norman Saunders cover that's certainly striking, plus stories by Lester Dent (a Foster Fade yarn), Erle Stanley Gardner, Hugh B. Cave, and Norman A. Daniels. That strikes me as a pretty darned good detective pulp.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Crime Busters, July 1939

That racy cover by Graves Gladney looks more like it ought to be on a Spicy pulp rather than one from Street & Smith. But hey, I like it. And inside are stories by Lester Dent, Walter B. Gibson, Paul Ernst, and Theodore Tinsley, four titans of the pulp business, along with Robert C. Blackmon and George Allen Moffatt. I don't think I've ever read an issue of CRIME BUSTERS. I'm pretty sure I don't own any. I would have bought this one if I'd been around in 1939, though.

The Ice Genius - Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray and Lester Dent)

It's hard to believe that I've been reading and enjoying Doc Savage novels for more than 50 years, but it was September 1964 when Bantam published the first three volumes in the reprint series, THE MAN OF BRONZE, THE THOUSAND-HEADED MAN, and METEOR MENACE, which was the one I found first, on the spinner rack in Tompkins' Drugstore. I was hooked right away.

So I'm glad that Will Murray is writing new Doc Savage adventures all these years later and doing such a spectacularly fine job of it. His latest, THE ICE GENIUS, is one of the longest and most epic in the series, concerning as it does a worldwide war and possibly the fate of all mankind.

It opens, simply enough, with an archeological dig headed up by the eminent William Harper Littlejohn, one of Doc's associates, but as archeological digs usually do in books and movies, something goes wrong and Johnny winds up uncovering the frozen corpse of one of history's most brutal warlords and conquerors, Tamerlane. But is Tamerlane really dead, or could he be revived from his icy sleep?

I think you know the answer to that.

Naturally enough, with Tamerlane threatening to put together an army and conquer China along with who knows what else, Doc and the rest of his crew arrive on the scene. While they're trying to corral the warlord, the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, and our heroes find themselves in the middle of a war. As usual, Doc and his friends are up to their necks in action as they attempt to set things right, but this time all they may be able to do is keep a bad situation from getting worse...

This book also features the return of a villain from previous books, a very colorful character who's one of my favorites. What happens to him turns out to be very surprising.

Will Murray continues to capture Lester Dent's style perfectly, while at the same time expanding the scope of the series. THE ICE GENIUS is one of the best books I've read this year, and if you're a Doc Savage fan (even if you haven't been reading them for 50 years or more), you definitely should check it out. Highly recommended. 

Phantom Lagoon - Kenneth Robeson (Will Murray and Lester Dent)

No new books take me back to the reading pleasures of my youth more than the Doc Savage novels by Will Murray. The latest one, PHANTOM LAGOON, is no exception. It follows the classic Doc Savage opening: someone in trouble shows up in New York looking for Doc, thinking that he's the only one who can right this particular wrong. The bad guys, fearing Doc's involvement, try to prevent that person from reaching him in his skyscraper headquarters. Violent chaos ensues, and we're off to the races.

In this case, the person seeking Doc's help is beautiful blond adventuress Hornetta Hale, who is rescued from an island in the Caribbean where she's been stranded by the villains. Knowing that Doc has his own private submarine, she wants to hire it, but she won't explain why. This would be too much of a mystery for the Man of Bronze to ignore, even if the bad guys hadn't come in and practically destroyed his headquarters and the Hidalgo Trading Company warehouse where he keeps his planes, autogyro, and submersible. With help from his loyal aides, the bickering Monk and Ham, and the unwanted interference of his gorgeous cousin Pat Savage, Doc sets out to track down Hornetta Hale, whose trail which leads to tropical islands, yet another beautiful blonde, a race of sinister mermen who live under the sea, and an evil plot that could change the course of history for the entire world.

As usual, Murray's prose perfectly captures the style of Lester Dent, the original author of the Doc Savage series. His books are longer and the plots more complex than was common in the pulp era, but there's nothing wrong with that. PHANTOM LAGOON speeds along to a climax that's particularly satisfying. I didn't know how Murray was going to resolve everything, but as it turns out, he couldn't have done any better. It's a perfect Doc Savage ending.

I got 'way behind on this series. I've read all three of the books that came out in 2013, but there are still several earlier volumes I need to get to. That's good in a way, because every time I read one, I feel like I'm sitting on my parents' front porch again with a Bantam paperback I picked up off the spinner rack at Lester's Pharmacy or Motts' Five-and-Ten. These days, that feeling is worth a whole lot to me.

You can click on the image below to buy PHANTOM LAGOON at Amazon.

Forgotten Books: The Crime Spectacularist - Lester Dent

There are quite a few collections of Lester Dent’s pulp stories available now, and I’ll eventually get to all of them, trust me. Dent is one of my all-time favorite authors and has been ever since that day in 1964 when I plunked down a quarter, two dimes, and two pennies (sales tax, you know) for a brand-spanking new copy of the Doc Savage novel METEOR MENACE off the paperback spinner rack in Tompkins’ Drugstore.


THE CRIME SPECTACULARIST is a collection that originally came out in 2006, but it’s still in print and available from Pulpville Press. It includes two novelettes and a novella starring Foster Fade, a private detective who works exclusively for a New York tabloid called The Planet. His job is to root out spectacular crimes and solve them, well, spectacularly, thereby increasing The Planet’s circulation when the paper runs exclusive stories about these exploits. Fade supposedly writes these stories, but since he’s a detective and adventurer, not a scribbler, the yarns are actually ghosted by his sidekick, a beautiful platinum blonde named Din Stevens who carries an automatic in her purse and is not averse to using it.


If that bit of background doesn’t catch your interest, you might as well stop reading this post. As for me . . . boy, I love this stuff. The three stories in THE CRIME SPECTACULARIST originally appeared in the pulp ALL DETECTIVE in 1934, which was also the second year of Dent’s Doc Savage novels and quite possibly the best year in the whole run of that series. So Dent was pretty much at the top of his game when he wrote these Foster Fade stories, and it shows. The first one, “Hell in Boxes” concerns the deadly and mysterious Aroma Assassin, whose murders are accompanied by a distinctive smell. Dent throws in some killers from South America, as well. The second story, “White-Hot Corpses”, centers around nefarious shenanigans at a creepy, deserted amusement park (a great setting for a story like this) and features one of the grotesque, oddball murder methods that Dent often came up with for his stories. And the third story, “Murder in Circles” is the longest and best of the bunch, with Fade and Din trying to track down some parrots found floating at sea in a canoe. Why those parrots are so important is a mystery, but the quest to recover them involves half a dozen killings, another mysterious murder method, and an isolated Caribbean island. This story could have easily been done as a Doc Savage novel, but at this stage of his career Dent was so imaginative I don’t imagine he had much trouble coming up with plenty of plots.


An added attraction in these stories is the way Dent’s hardboiled prose gallops along at such a breath-taking pace. Most of the time, he was one of the best pure storytellers who worked in the pulps, and once you start any of these stories, you’ll want to keep flipping the pages until you get to the end.


Foster Fade is similar to Doc Savage (and other Dent characters) in that he’s obsessed with gadgets and always has some gizmo handy to help him get out of whatever jam he’s in. He wisecracks a lot more than Doc ever did, though. But as far as I’m concerned, Din Stevens sort of steals the show in these stories. She’s a great character, brave when she has to be, as quick with a wisecrack as her boss, and a real babe, to boot. Dent should have written more stories about her. She could have carried her own series.


It’s also interesting that Fade and Din work for a newspaper called The Planet. It’s been fairly well established that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were heavily influenced by Doc Savage in their creation of Superman, and here’s another instance where they might have been influenced by Dent’s work. Sure, the paper in these stories is a tabloid, and it’s called The Planet, not The Daily Planet, but that strikes me as close enough to be a possibility, anyway. So does the relationship between Fade and Din. A lot of their dialogue could have easily come out of the mouths of Clark Kent and Lois Lane.


All in all, THE CRIME SPECTACULARIST is a fine collection, and if you’re a fan of fast-paced pulp adventure stories, I can’t recommend it highly enough.