Doc Savage: The Northerns - Dark Worlds Quarterly

Doc Savage novels have the advantage of having a toe in many different genres. This means the story never has to stop in one place. You can start in the concrete valleys of Manhattan, drive to upstate New York before flying off to truly spectacular places. And those places can change with every novel. Besides the usual jungles, deserts or the China seas, there are places real, such as Stanley Park in Vancouver (Murder Melody, November 1935) to the Dakota Badlands (The Awful Egg, June 1940), to the unreal like Ost (The Magic Island, August 1937) to the sinister island of Count Ramandoff (The Fantastic Island, December 1935) to a crater where dinosaurs still live (The Land of Terror, April 1933).

Among all of these, my favorites are the Northerns, stories set in polar regions or the wilds of Canada. Doc was fond of the North, having his secret hideaway, his Fortress of Solitude, in the cold wastes. Kenneth Robeson (whether he was Lester Dent, Laurence Donovan or any of the other writers) was well aware of the Northern as a sub-genre. Starting first with polar explorers like Sir John Franklin but later in the Yukon during the Gold Rush, tales of life in the Northern camps were a staple of early magazines and dime novels. The Pulps inherited this canon with writers like James B. Hendryx, Victor Rousseau, Samuel Alexander White and many others following in the footsteps of masters like Jack London, Rex Beach and Robert W. Service.

It was only natural that Doc and his five friends should go to the North. They did in 22 novels set in Canada, Alaska or the Big Woods, or about ten percent of all the supersagas. Certain Northern clichés appear without surprise such as Doc encountering Mounties, native warriors, a polar bear or wolves, less likely: Vikings, cavemen or people from lost, underground cities. These unusual images gave the illustrators of Doc’s adventures plenty to work with. Both Walter Baumhaufer, Doc’s best Pulp cover painter and James Bama, his best paperback artist did Northern scenes. The interior illustrations were usually done by Paul Orban, whose strong black and white is perfect for the land of snow.