Everyone who comes to the Doc Savage books in their youth remembers that first “Doc” with a fondness that defies understanding. Once into later life, the same reader wonders how writing of such “pulpiness” could have excited so much interest. Even after this second exposure, the nostalgia remains with the tenacity of a bad garlic sausage.
Why does Doc Savage inspire such delight in the young? Simple. The entire series was written with that intention, despite Bantam’s packaging of the Man of Bronze. Will Murray in his afterword to “A Doc Savage Adventure” relates an anecdote which sums this up completely:
Les[ter Dent] was more than a little scornful about starting out a Doc Savage novel with just a single fly…‘Who do you think you’re writing for, Harper’s? You want to know my audience?’ He then told me about a ‘scroungy looking pimpleface little kid about ten years old’ he had seen on the subway reading a Doc Savage magazine. ‘Write for him…’
Lester Dent and the other men (Donovan, Davis, Hathaway, Johnson, Bogart) who appeared under the house name of Kenneth Robeson, wrote for money. Dent himself was amazingly prolific, a total of 143 of the 181 issues of Doc Savage, between 1933 and 1949—an average of just under 9 novels a year. This tally does not include the ghosted novel that Dent rewrote, often putting in more time on them than on his own books.
Written at great speed and regularity, without a literary agenda, there is little reason why these books should be remembered by anyone except collectors of obscure pulps. Still, they endure when mountains of other pulp writings do not. What the Doc Savage books lack in technique, depth of character and greater meaning, they compensate for in color, vitality and unadulterated action. Doc Savage IS action.
Which brings me back to my own first “Doc” novel: #14, the 34th book to be published, The Fantastic Island (December 1935) by W. Ryerson Johnson and Lester Dent. Of the book I can recall little of the plot, except that the villain’s hideout is on an island with electrified floors. (Fortunately, Doc always wore shoes with rubber soles!) I can still remember how gripping that short paperback had been to the thirteen-fourteen year old who had read it. I never collected many Doc books back then, not on a kid’s allowance, but I do recollect them more fondly than any books of “quality” I might have been given. Doc Savage isn’t about the Existential Qualities of Life, nor is it about Man’s Place in the Universe, the Nature of God or Man’s Inhumanity to Man. It’s about hot summer afternoons with nothing better to do than hang out with six really cool guys. All you had to do was sit back and wait. Something exciting was just around the next corner…
