Wild Adventure Of The Sinister Shadow!

Since reading about this delightful crossover by Will Murray and weirdly Lester Dent (by way of a cache of unpublished materials) of the two most famous Street and Smith pulp heroes, I've been most eager to get my mitts on it and read it though. The Sinister Shadow from Altus Book's TheWild Adventures of Doc Savage imprint is a delight in many ways and easily something any fan of Doc Savage or The Shadow must have. For more from Murray on how it came together check this out.

(Joe DeVito)

The Sinister Shadow begins with Lamont Cranston going to see Doc Savage about the problem he has with The Shadow stealing his identity and (in his mind at least) threatening to kidnap him and extort money. He is in fact kidnapped along with Ham Brooks, one of Doc's five assistants, and that puts Doc and The Shadow both on the trail of a villain who calls himself "The Funeral Director" who has fashioned an elaborate organization of henchman dubbed variously as Morticians, Undertakers, Gravediggers, and Pallbearers. This large gang has made a business of kidnap and ransom of various rich men in the society, so much so that it has drawn the attention of the criminologist George Clarendon.

In this rousing and fast-paced but unusually lengthy pulp adventure, we at different times find Doc and The Shadow battling each other and even working in tandem to bring down the Funeral Director's vile gang. The Shadow's men include Harry Vincent, Clyde Burke, and Cliff Marsland. Doc is helped by Monk Mayfair, Ham Brooks, and Long Tom Roberts. Sadly, neither Renny Renwick nor Johnny Littlejohn show up in this hair-raising war on crime.

(Joe DeVito)

Murray tells the story in precise short sentences and quickly paced paragraphs and the action rarely slows down and almost never stops. We get some very evocative descriptions of the characters, in particular The Shadow. If there is a big complaint about this one it's that the Doc fan gets slighted as The Shadow and his men seem to dominate much of the action. Each hero is showcased though and by the story's end the heroes appear to understand one another better.



The story, full of action as it is, needed a few more twists and turns. It does do a vivid job of drawing from the early stories of both characters, set as it is relatively early in the careers of both heroes. And we do get some neat switches for the fans. But maybe even more would've been nice. Not as well read in Shadow lore as I am in Doc, I felt most fortunate that I took the time last year to read the first three Shadow novels, they come in handy.

It's a pricey package, but a highly readable one. This wonderful pastiche gets the Dojo's highest recommendation.

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Kings Of The Jungle!

King Kong Vs. Tarzan by Will Murray from Altus Books has been sitting on my shelf since I first got my copy and finally spurred by the new movie Kong Skull Island I was filled with an immediate hankering to read it. To be fair to myself I started it sometime ago, but found the beginning of this rather longish pulp adventure a slow trudge in its first hundred pages.

We get a reprise of sorts of the events of the classic 1933 movie King Kong. What we have here is a story which answers the long-standing question which many who see the movie will think of later as they reflect on it, how the heck did they get that big ape to New York City anyway. The movie effectively short circuits all those complications by jetting forward in time to after the transport to the moment when King Kong will make his debut before the American public. This novel answers that question and some of it is just as tedious as you might expect.

The story operates in the same fictional universe fleshed out by Joe DeVito in his prequel to the original King Kong story Kong: King of Skull Island where we get a back story of sorts for Kong and the natives who live alongside him and the dinosaurs across the great wall. We see as the ancient woman dubbed the "Storyteller" who tends to Kong's legend and reality and who accompanies the The Wanderer and crew as they try to take the great beast across the vast oceans. She comes up with some herbs which sedate the great ape and we learn more than we need about the care and feeding of a monster primate. We follow the ship as they try to navigate the oceans, taking care to avoid storms and the authorities who might object to transporting such a monster to foreign lands.

The Wanderer eventually finds a safe harbor off the coast of Africa and of course Kong escapes into the jungle. Enter Tarzan of the Apes, a mythic figure that some have heard of and as we learn Denham has encountered. We see Kong as the thirty foot monster tramples across the wilderness terrorizing the prey he encounters. We eventually meet Tarzan (it takes a really long time) who takes steps to see to it that the "King" of Skull Island is neutralized as a threat. The best way to approach this novel is to see it as two pulps put together. The first deals at length with the transport of Kong and the second Kong's misadventures in Africa. Both are obviously linked and part of the same overarching narrative, but each part has a definite focus.

This is Will Murray's second King Kong novel in recent years. The first Doc Savage: Skull Island pitted Kong against a young Clark Savage Jr. and predated the events of the classic film and the novel in which Kong meets up with the Ape-man. And to be frank this is the best writing from Murray I've seen in a while. His previous Tarzan novel was too long and this one is long too, but it has enough going on eventually to justify that length. I was eager to see how they solved all the issues, even though we all know how the status quo must be reestablished before the novel's end. That would seem to be an insurmountable problem but it proves not to be in this instance. Here is a link to an interview with Murray about the project.

Recommended.

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The Many Books Of Bronze!

Last year I accomplished a life-long goal and completed reading all of the original Doc Savage "novels" from the 30's pulp era. Thanks to Anthony Tollin's Sanctum Books I was able to get them in reasonably priced and easy to read formats which made the mission doable and pleasurable. Now after a short break from all things Savage it's time to dive into Will Murray's contributions. I've read several of these over the years but never have I read most of them and never have I read them in what approximates an order. I hope to rectify that in the next few years or so. Murray is the new "Kenneth Robeson" and a scholar of the highest order when it comes to pulp fiction in general and Doc Savage in particular. He was picked by Bantam Books to use fragments from the files of Lester Dent to fabricate new Doc adventures back in the 90's when the company completed its run of the original material after decades of publication. He produced several tomes, some of which I bought at the time, but since then he's produced many more. Some are crossovers with The Shadow and are a hoot and half. Altus Books has been reissuing these over the last several years and I've been gathering them up. Now it's time to start reading them all through again. Should be fun.

Below are the covers by Joe DeVito of what Altus has released to date as well as one novel which no one has reprinted to my knowledge. 

(Moonstone Books published this version before Altus Books.)

Escape from Loki is the one Doc novel which has not yet been reprinted to my knowledge. Written by Philip Jose Farmer it's an origin story for Doc and his Fab Five. Copies show up on the back issue market, but we desperately need a new volume to make the Doc canon whole. Hopefully this will be accomplished soon.

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Tarzan And The Eighth Wonder Of The World!

I have not yet read King Kong Vs. Tarzan by Will Murray but I think I will soon as a way to ready my spirit for the upcoming feature film Kong Skull Island which opens in just under a month and frankly looks rather awesome. Take a gander.


Re-imagining the saga of King Kong is essential to allowing the franchise to grow. One of the fundamental powers of the original is its quite definitive ending, so finding ways to expand the saga without undermining that fantastic finale is critical. Murray's story takes a slice of the story which is ignored in the classic movie and only alluded to in other sources, the transportation of Kong to New York City. In this tale the great ape finds his way into the mythic jungle of Tarzan and the, as they say, it's on.

I rather hope this second Tarzan opus is better than Murray's last outing Return to Pal-Ul-Don which I desperately wanted to love but which beat me down with a plot far too slender for its size, pages and pages of the same finally disengaged me from Tarzan's efforts to penetrate the deadly land created by Burroughs so many decades ago.

With Kong on the march though, that shouldn't be a problem. I hope.

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Tarzan The Relentless!

The new addition to the Tarzan canon, officially sanctioned by the ERB folks is Return to Pal-Ul-Don by Will Murray from Altus Press. This sprawling adventure is available now in paperback sporting a lush wraparound cover by Joe DeVito. I was eager to tear into this latest adventure of the Ape Man, I was in a rush to revisit one of the most evocative ERB environments, and so I started the book with real excitement.

The story is a sequel of sorts to the early Burrough's novel Tarzan the Terrible which takes the Ape Man into a hidden land full of dinosaurs and different species of tailed humanoids. The land of Pal-Ul-Don (translates I think to the "Land of Man") but that is part of the problem here. The novel by Will Murray, a writer I have great confidence in considering his evocative and exciting Doc Savage adventures, alas disappoints. For one thing it's too long, considerably so given the meager plot. During WWII Tarzan as a member of the British military enters Pal-Ul-Don to find a missing courier who brings a potent secret to the Allies. He quickly finds himself allied with Torn Ear, an noble elephant and they penetrate the land of dinosaurs. We meet first Turtle People and later a single representative of the tailed people he'd met before. It's mostly a lengthy series of battles with a new breed, a silent, albino, and deadly race of Spider People who occupy most of the story and that's the rub.

Joe DeVito's panoramic cover art

The battles with the Spider folk seem to go on forever, and while the relentlessness of both the enemy and Tarzan is admirable, it all seemed too much of the same for too much of the story. We needed more human characters (or at least vocal ones) to stand as counterpoint to Tarzan's specific attitudes. There is some real excitement here, but between those moments we get long passages which seem to offer verisimilitude but not really much atmosphere. Fifty pages of this tome could've disappeared and the story would never have noticed.

I can only offer a limited recommendation for this one. It's certainly a new Tarzan adventure and for fans that's sufficient, but it's not the best one I've read, by far. Too bad.

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The Sinister Shadow!

Since reading about this delightful crossover by Will Murray and weirdly Lester Dent (by way of a cache of unpublished materials) of the two most famous Street and Smith pulp heroes, I've been most eager to get my mitts on it and read it though. The Sinister Shadow from Altus Book's TheWild Adventures of Doc Savage imprint is a delight in many ways and easily something any fan of Doc Savage or The Shadow must have. For more from Murray on how it came together check this out.

Joe DeVito

The Sinister Shadow begins with Lamont Cranston going to see Doc Savage about the problem he has with The Shadow stealing his identity and (in his mind at least) threatening to kidnap him and extort money. He is in fact kidnapped along with Ham Brooks, one of Doc's five assistants, and that puts Doc and The Shadow both on the trail of a villain who calls himself "The Funeral Director" and has fashioned an elaborate organization of henchman dubbed variously as Morticians, Undertakers, Gravediggers, and Pallbearers. This large gang has made a business of kidnap and ransom of various rich men in the society, so much so that it has drawn the attention of the criminologist George Clarendon.

Dave Stevens

In this rousing and fast-paced but unusually lengthy pulp adventure, we at different times find Doc and The Shadow battling each other and even working in tandem to bring down the Funeral Director's vile gang. The Shadow's men include Harry Vincent, Clyde Burke, and Cliff Marsland. Doc is helped by Monk Mayfair, Ham Brooks, and Long Tom Roberts. Sadly neither Renny Renwick nor Johnny Littlejohn show up in this hair-raising war on crime.

Joe DeVito

Murray tells the story in precise short sentences and quickly paced paragraphs and the action rarely slows down and almost never stops. We get some very evocative descriptions of the characters, in particular The Shadow. If there is a big complaint about this one it's that the Doc fan gets slighted as The Shadow and his men seem to dominate much of the action. Each hero is showcased though and by the story's end the heroes appear to understand one another better.



The story, full of action as it is, needed a few more twists and turns. It does do a vivid job of drawing from the early stories of both characters, set as it is relatively early in the careers of both heroes. And we do get some neat switches for the fans. But maybe even more would've been nice. Not as well read in Shadow lore as I am in Doc, I felt most fortunate that I took the time last year to read the first three Shadow novels, they come in handy.

It's a pricey package, but a highly readable one. This one gets the Dojo's highest recommendation.

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