Doc Savage and the Dinosaurs

Doc Savage and the Dinosaurs! Of the 213 original super-sagas, only four revolve around prehistoric beasts. This is quite a statement since the Doc Savage novels walked a line between Science Fiction and hero Pulp but rarely crossed it. Were the dinosaurs real or just fakes created to scare people like Dr. No’s dragon in the James Bond novel?

The Land of Terror

As the second Doc Savage novel, The Land of Terror  (April 1933) has some odd features. This novel was written while Lester Dent was till trying to figure everything out so there are some unusual details that later books don’t have. The first is the level of violence. The bad guys and Doc are all using real ammo. No Mercy Bullets yet. And more startling is the presence of real dinosaurs.

The plot has a mysterious bad hat named Kar who uses the terrible Smoke of Eternity to kill his victims. Doc and his five aids chase Kar’s men until they lead him to Thunder Island, a remote jungle-covered island near New Zealand. It is here that the crew meet their first dinosaurs.

The shocking size of the horror was apparent. It bulged out of the steam like a tall house. It hopped on massive rear legs, balancing itself by a great tail, kangaroolike. The two forelegs were tiny in proportion—like short strings dangling. Yet those forelegs that seemed so small were thicker through by far than Doc Savage’s body!

The revolting odor of a carnivorous thing accompanied the dread apparition. The stench was of decaying gore. The hide of the monster had a pebbled aspect, somewhat like a crocodile. Its claws were frightful weapons of offense, being of such proportions as to easily grasp and crush a large bull.

Perhaps the most ghastly aspect of the thing were the teeth. They armored a blunt, revolting snout of a size as stupendous as the rest of the hopping terror. So great was the weight of the thing that its feet sank into the spongy earth the depth of a tall man at each step. (The Land of Terror by Kenneth Robeson)

Later Renny has a close encounter with a stegosaur:

It had a lizardlike body, armored with great bony plates. It traveled on all fours. Its head was uncouth as that of a mud turtle, but more than a yard in length. The low-slung carcass of the creature, although thin from side to side, was very high. Most striking of its characteristics was the double row of huge, horny plates standing on edge down its back. These looked like two lines of monster saw teeth. (The Land of Terror by Kenneth Robeson)

Certain dinosaur tropes from the 1930s surface here. Dent has the T. rex jumping around like a kangaroo and he mentions the small brains and slow reaction times of the large beasts. He also quite erroneously has his stegosaur trying to eat his men. (I always wished that James Bama had done the cover for The Land of Terror. He did have the chance to do so for the next novel but decided on giant weasels instead.)

The Other World

The Other World (January 1940) has the crew go into a Pellucidar-like world of dinosaurs and sabertooth tigers. Dent uses a little Science Fiction to explain a few things about this world, like when Doc explains:

“Gravity probably keeps the ceiling up,” Doc Savage said slowly. “Science, to tell the truth, has very few proven theories about gravity. One of the theories that gravity is the attraction of mass—in other words, you get a sufficiently large body of matter together, and you have gravity. Once the theory was even advanced that if the world was hollow, you could walk around on the inside of the shell, due to gravity being a mass attraction.”

As Doc flies his plane into the underground world, a flock of pterodactyls attack them. No doubt, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The People That Time Forgot (1919) was an inspiration here with its airplane/pterodon battle.

He meant the things that were like birds, and yet not birds, for they were covered with a reptilian hide instead of feathers, the wings being membranous after the fashion of bats, but resembling bats in hardly any other particular—certainly not in size, for the smallest of these things had a wingspread of not less than twenty feet.

There was a vast black cloud of the aërial horrors, and they flew with the speed of aërial express trains.…Teeth was a mild word for the armament in the long, somewhat parrotlike jaws of the flying things. They were somewhat like magnified shark maws. The birds—they were at close range now, unpleasantly illuminated by the strange “sunlight”—were totally hideous. (The Other World by Kenneth Robeson)

Doc got to encounter a T. rex in The land of Terror. He gets to again in this novel, watching from a tree as the beast kills a saber-toothed tiger.

The length of this one was more than thirty feet, which gave no real idea of the thing. It had a body thicker and longer than any elephant Doc had ever seen. The body was not fat, but gaunt and starved. Its covering was a plated armor somewhat similar to scales. The two rear legs were enormously overdeveloped, like a kangaroo’s, and also after the fashion of a kangaroo, this thing used its thick tail to balance itself. Both front legs were less developed, and terminated in hideously long steel-hard claws which turned inward; the front legs, it was plain, were used for grasping and holding prey.

The head was revolving. With the mouth closed, it resembled the head of a fantastic snake. The jaws, when they opened, proved to hold innumerable teeth that were like a bed of dirty white needles, each as long and thick as a good-sized dagger. (The Other World by Kenneth Robeson)

Dent/Doc supposes the T. rex and sabertooth are mortal enemies. This, of course, could only be true in the Other World, since they lived millions of years apart. Similar beast-on-beasts fights were part of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ prehistoric fiction.  (Thanks to Brian!)

The Awful Egg

The Awful Egg (June 1940) is quite an unusual novel in that Johnny is almost the main character for the first third of the book. Johnny’s love of paleontology takes him on the search for the awful egg and possibly a living dinosaur.

The egg was large, and it was more long than circular. Its shape was not entirely spherical, although the irregularities might have been caused by the pressure of the ice, instead of being inherent in the thing originally. It was very dark, almost black in color. (The Awful Egg by Kenneth Robeson)

Unlike the other two novels listed here, this time the dino turns out to be fake. Johnny follows a trail that takes him to a cave in the remotest part of the Dakotas. Posing as a cowpoke named Shorty, Johnny investigates the rumors of a live dinosaur chick that supposedly ripped a horse, a calf and several men to shreds. Ultimately, the dinosaur proves to be a fake devised by Sam Harmony as rival gangs vie for a fortune in lost gold.

Doc Savage and the Dinosaurs aside, Dent enjoys writing about the Dakota country. The book has a little bit of a Western flavor. Though most of Dent’s writing outside of Doc Savage is in the hard-boiled Mystery field he did write occasional stories for Western Trails, Pete Rice Western, Western Romances and other Pulps.

The Time Terror

The Time Terror (January 1943) has Lester Dent going full-on Edgar Rice Burroughs with a lost land in the Arctic filled with cavemen and dinosaurs. When a pterodactyl shows up at Trapper Lake in the Mackenzie region of the Northwest Territories, the monster attacks airplanes. Pat Savage, Doc’s female cousin is along for the ride as the dinosaur encounter leads to Pat being kidnapped by Japanese spies. (Being written in 1943, this is one of the wartime Doc novels and Dent knows who the bad guys must be.) Doc captures a soldier and a caveman named Ga. These two lead them to a world forgotten by time.

It all ends up in the crew going into a prehistoric world inside a mist-shrouded crater. Doc meets Ga’s tribe and wins their aid:

What made his hold on them complete was his annihilation of a large and ferocious dinosaur, a specimen which Johnny identified as a Tyrannosaurus rex, a carnivorous quadruped which resembled an enormous alligator walking on two large rear legs. Johnny claimed the creature was smaller than scientists had claimed the Tyrannosaurus rex had been, but it was as large as Doc cared to see them come.

Doc used a hand grenade on the thing. The explosion was tremendous, and blew the head of the thing to fragments. The body, however, took some time to become still in death, due to the sluggish nervous system. (The Time Terror by Kenneth Robeson)

Doc sees prehistoric men, bison as well as dinosaurs from different eras of the past. This leads him to the conclusion that the Japanese are behind the weird prehistoric creatures. They want to capture Monk Mayfair to get him to work on their evolution-accelerating compound. This is the solution to the weird prehistoric monsters. Taking a page from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Caspak series, Dent throws evolution into the mix to explain the unexplainable. (Burroughs would return the favor in 1944 when he named a Pellucidar novel, Land of Terror.)

Dent ends the novel with Monk’s description of the Japanese officer being eaten by a dinosaur. Once again it is a stegosaur, Dent repeating his error from 1933 again.

I wish I had discovered The Other World and this last novel back when I was crazy for Edgar Rice Burroughs (fourteen or fifteen). The lost world settings and actual cavemen and dinosaurs would have sold me more on the Man of Bronze. (I always felt the SF elements were too weak.) Unfortunately the reprints for the later novels all appeared long after my initial love of dinosaur-haunted realms had faded. Later I also came across Philip Jose Farmer’s Tarzan and Doc Savage pastiches. It really makes sense why these two dino-busting heroes appealed to him. Again, probably came to these too late but in recent years I have been enjoying the new Doc pastiches by writers like Will Murray, who took Doc to Skull Island.

Conclusion

In a series dedicated to the wonderful and astounding, it should be no surprise that dinosaurs should show up occasionally. While Dent was never that keen for true SF materials, he did like to send Doc and his five pals to strange corners of the Earth. In this regard, the Doc Savage novels were different than other Pulp heroes like The Shadow or The Avenger. All of them did false monster stories but since Doc was a little more on the Haggard/Verne/Conan Doyle/Burroughs spectrum, he got to see dinosaurs. Doc visited strange jungle islands, lost lands in the Arctic and even traveled under the earth. How could we avoid Doc Savage and the dinosaurs meeting once in a while.

Jack Mackenzie continues telling stories in the tradition of Doc Savage with his team of super agents, Wild Inc.