Doc Savage, the Man of BRONZE: a Retrospective
The year was 1933. The Great Depression was in full effect. Many people were unemployed, the economy was struggling, the future was uncertain, and life was grim. And to escape that grimness, if only for a bit, people turned to entertainment. Movies. Radio. Books. And the pulps: Book-sized monthly magazines printed on cheap wood pulp paper, full of lurid, sensationalist fiction.
And cheap fiction was what the public wanted. For ten cents – the price of a dozen eggs – you could buy 120+ pages of fantasy and excitement and temporarily be free of the Depression, poverty, and fear. It was just what the doctor ordered. And in March, 1933, a doctor was what the public got, as magazine house Street and Smith Publications followed up on the success of their earlier character the Shadow, with the premiere of another great pulp hero: Doc Savage.
Doctor Clark Savage Jr. – or just ‘Doc’ – was a physical and mental superman. He had been raised almost from birth by his father and a group of scientists to be the epitome of human development, supreme in body, mind, and ability. And he was. At least six-feet-tall and over 200 pounds of solid muscle – which in 1933, America made him a giant – Doc was an acrobat, athlete, aviator, explorer, and a near unbeatable fighter, almost inhumanly strong and fast, trained in martial arts and expert in armed and unarmed combat.
His real power, however, was his mind. There were few branches of science Doc was unskilled in, and he could routinely invent and create things that boggled even specialists. But first and foremost he WAS a doctor, a deeply moral and compassionate man, dedicated to the preserving and improvement of life. Much of his attention was on helping mankind through medical and technological advances of all sorts; or personally, through surgery.
He also built and used machine gun pistols, bulletproof clothing, and gadgets and gimmicks equal to anything James Bond’s Q would devise years later. Devices by which one man, or a small group, could fight an army. To Doc, these items were as essential as his medical work. And, indeed, were of a piece with it, because he saw helping mankind as righting wrongs, assistng those who needed it, and punishing those who deserved it. Personally.
Aided by five friends almost as extraordinary as he was, backed by tremendous wealth, from his headquarters on the 86th floor of the tallest building in New York – never identified but clearly the Empire State Building – Doc would charge forth via plane, car, ship, submarine, or dirigible. A modern-day white (or in his case, bronze: his skin was apparently permanently that color, perhaps due to chemical treatment) knight or wizard out to save the world, armed with science and skill and an arsenal of weapons and tricks.
His adventures spanned the globe, where ever there was trouble. He’d confront would-be world conquerors, tyrants, master criminals, mysterious beings, all using extraordinary means to terrorize, kill, and destroy… and defeat them. He had a strict code against killing intentionally, but very few of those who went up against Doc and his associates got away free. Or sometimes even survived
The series was an immediate and tremendous success. The idea of a paladin-like hero fighting terrible forces and winning at a time when the average man felt mostly powerless had an almost irresistible appeal. As was the chance to imagine oneself AS Doc: Rich, handsome, supremely competent, fearless, a man for whom anything was possible.
But in addition to these draws, much of Doc’s popularity was due to the skill and ability of his main writer. The house name under which the Doc Savage books were published was Kenneth Robeson; but the real author of most of Doc’s adventures was Lester Dent, a telegraph operator turned writer. Dent was one of the best and most prolific wordsmiths of the pulp era, turning out a steady and massive stream of usually very good novellas and short stories for all the publishing houses.
He was also a man in love with technology and learning, who kept up on all the latest advances in science even as he constantly increased his abilities. He learned to fly, to sail, he became an amateur radio operator and built his own set and he studied a variety of subjects, including poetry: Like Doc, he had considerable capacities.
The Doc Savage books benefited from all this, as Dent was able to equip Doc with gadgets that were plausible or at least seemed plausible. Radar. Wire recorders. Ultraviolet and infrared lights and photography. Knockout gas. Explosive bullets. Plastic explosives. Miniature radios with atomic batteries. A lie detector. And on and on: Doc was often called the Man of Tomorrow, and much of what he had, by the standards of the time, was like magic. Dent also used his real life experiences to give the stories an unmistakable sense of authenticity. When Doc flew a plane, for instance, Dent knew of what he wrote because he was an experienced pilot himself.
As to the stories, Dent followed a formula. He varied details enough to keep his work fresh, but almost always used the same general pattern. A pattern that even the other writers who produced Doc Savage stories stuck to. At the start, something bizarre, lethal, apparently even supernatural happened, and problems started. Doc would get involved and begin investigating, trying to save as many lives along the way as he could.
During the course of these investigations and efforts there would be several clashes between Doc and his friends and whatever it was that was causing the trouble, be it monsters, men apparently able to break physical laws, forces that killed invisibly and impossibly, or sometimes just gangs of thugs; with Doc and the others sometimes triumphant, sometimes barely escaping defeat.
Finally Doc, who had figured out what was going on, would scuttle the villain or villains’ plan, while providing explanations. Invariably, that what had been happening was trickery, or the effects of some technological device or process the bad guys had created that used the laws of nature in unexpected ways, or a combination thereof. The villains would die or be captured, the menace ended, and everything set right.
Not that extraordinary things DIDN’T sometimes happen during Doc’s adventures. Doc would routinely find lost civilizations, strange creatures, and at least twice, on distant, isolated islands, he came face to face with dinosaurs…
For 16 years, 181 issues of the pulp magazine that bore his name, Doc and his friends fought monsters, mad scientists, criminals, Nazis and Japanese, and Communists. Changing times changed the tone of the stories, and Doc, in 1949, wasn’t the man he’d been in 1933; but he was still going.
In the end it was the pulps themselves that died. They had depended on extremely cheap production costs during the Depression; WWII made wood pulp paper and publishing expensive, and in the years afterwards the trend continued even as the competition from comic books, ‘slick’ magazines, radio, and this new thing, television, cut into market share. Finally, in 1949, Smith and Street ceased publication of all their pulp titles and got out of the business. And that was the end of the Doc Savage saga.
For a while.
Doc was largely forgotten in the 50’s and early 60’s; but then Bantam Books began reprinting the Smith and Street Doc Savage stories in paperback. A new generation discovered the Man of Bronze, and liked what they saw. Adaptations and new tales involving Doc in comics, radio, a movie, and even new books were created. All these lack Dent’s touch, and it is a rare writer that can capture the flavor of the 30’s and 40’s. But the appeal of the character remains strong. And it would appear Doctor Clark Savage Jr. may be around for a long, long time.
Sources:
Doc Savage, His Apocalyptic Life by Philip Jose Farmer, Bantam Books, 1975
The Pulp Net – Information on Doc and links to Doc Savage fansites
The 86th Floor – A huge fan site containing collected facts and essays on Doc and Lester Dent
The Doc Savage Wiki – Information on Doc, his history, and his adventures
