My wife and I were at a used book store in the Quad Cities and I saw some Doc Savage paperbacks. They were a series of stories reprinted from the 1930’s in my teenage years as paperbacks. I was REALLY into them back in the 60’s.
I saw the very first one I ever read and thought “What the heck” and got it to relive my school years.
Oh boy, wrong thing to do. lol. It was a rip roaring story that really moves along but my oh my is it badly written.
Doc Savage came out monthly so they were written VERY quickly with no revision. The author made pennies a word so he had to work fast to make a living.
I guess it’s true…you can never go back to the old days.
According to this site, Doc and crew are coming back sometime in the future. Not much more information.
Bob
Even in the pulps, Lester Dent was known as a fast writer. Before he did Doc Savage, he had been the sole writer for two monthly pulp magazines. He generally wrote a book in about ten or twelve days but he bragged he once wrote eight books in a seven week stretch.
Dear god, isn’t producer Neal Moritz the idiot who hired Seth Rogen for Green Hornet?
I loved Doc Savage, and yes there were some that had some bad writing, but in general you do the suspension from disbelief thing and roll with it. I was seriously disappointed with the Ron Ely movie 
I think if you treated it like the Lara Croft movies you could come up with a decent flick with the CGI ability now. [as long as you didn’t modernize and update. Leave it set in a slightly steampunky 1930s. I love well done costume pieces!]
I saw the movie when it first came out. I really wanted it to be good. Within two minutes I KNEW it was bad when Doc’s teeth sparkled. It was sad to sit through it. Just horrible.
That prose made me want to pound my piano wire chest.
I’ve never read any, so maybe someone can help me here…
My sense of Doc Savage is that there isn’t really very much drama, because he is simply so vastly more powerful – smarter, faster, stronger – than his opponents. It isn’t like Sherlock Holmes vs. James Moriarty; it’s like Sherlock Holmes vs. Old Doug the High Street Pickpocket. Old Doug doesn’t have a chance.
I’m also thinking of Mack Bolan, as the Executioner, as compared to Remo Williams, as The Destroyer. Mack was a top-level special-forces quality soldier…but Remo was a comic-book superhero level action figure. I could read (a few) of the Executioner books, because there was a sense that mafia finks with guns could hurt him, but I couldn’t read the Destroyer books, because it was established that Remo could dodge bullets. Uninteresting!
Am I misjudging Doc Savage? Is there really some sense of fair play in the drama? Or is it like (as Mad Magazine said of an entirely different fist-fight) like Marhsall Dillon beating up Miss Kitty?
Is Doc Savage “too good to be interesting?”
I’m more familiar with The Shadow, and, to me, he so much outclasses his opposition as to be less interesting. He’s shooting ducks from a blind. No drama. The same problem strikes me in The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician.
Tarzan and The Lone Ranger and Zorro always strike me as much more “fair and balanced.”
(Sigh… I’m a Modesty Blaise fan…and she completely outclasses her opponents…)
The best description I could give of Doc Savage is he had Batman’s skills and Superman’s personality.
LOL not a bad description. And possibly Wolverine’s sense of morality. He didn’t enjoy killing the bad guys the way the Punisher does—he’d rather do brain surgery on them to correct their villainy. But he had no problem killing someone if the situation called for it.
Or, as the writer put it, the brain of Sherlock Holmes in the body of Tarzan – with the goodness of Abraham Lincoln.
That’s the thing that creeps me out the most about him. Anyone who tries pulling that sort of thing off today is by definition a supervillain, not a hero.
Well, that’s all right, you will find that attitude adjusted when you regain consciousness. Count backwards from 100 . . .
I do not hold to that. I aim to misbehave.
Ha! Do you know, you really sounded quite convincing for a moment – but of course it’s all talk; you’re hardly the type to do anything remarkable, Mister Cranston.
When did Doc and his minions begin using “mercy bullets”?
By sometime in 1934, carnivorousplant. It’s been years since I’ve read any of my Docs.
Trinopus: It’s true that Doc Savage was the strongest and smartest man in the world. However, he did face considerable opposition, especially in the best stories. Many of his foes were scientific geniuses. Others were criminal geniuses with legions of crooks at their disposal. He often had to battle at least half a dozen thugs in combats. He also battled the German and Japanese militaries in some of the WW2 Docs, and encountered a few Soviet operatives in the post-War period.
He could dodge bullets, but he could also be shot, as he was in *The Annihilist *(12/1934) and others. He was knocked unconscious many times and taken captive when he was outwitted – *The Feathered Octopus *(9/1937) for example. He had grave troubles with *The Spook Legion *(4/1935), an army of invisible crooks, and its lieutenant cold-cocked him when he tried to infiltrate the gang. (This is a pretty good thriller. It has some excellent scenes of Doc trying to get around the streets of Manhattan while invisible.)
I won’t deny that many of the Docs are badly written, but I think Dent wrote some rip-roaring thrillers. However, there are some writers today (David Baldacci, I’m lookin’ at you) whose novels don’t make any more sense than a bad Doc and it takes far more time to read them. At least, you only have to invest a couple of hours in a Doc.
The writing did improve in the final six or seven years of the series. *The Time Terror *(1/1943), *The Lost Giant *(12/1944), *Violent Night *(1/1945), and *Cargo Unknown *(4/1945) are all decent WW2 thrillers. *Death in Little Houses *(10/1946) and The Disappearing Lady (12/1946) are pretty good noir novels.
Didn’t he give them the choice? Jail, or corrective surgery?
Marvel’s “Squadron Supreme” comics limited series explored the morality of corrective psychic surgery: it was one of the more thoughtful stories ever written.
Hell, I’d sign up for Doc Savage’s corrective surgery, just to help me with anger issues. If he could do something about my depression, I’d be a fan for life! Villain? If it’s voluntary, and if it really works properly, he gets to be a saint!
I’m of the opinion that in many cases, if you fix a criminal’s mind, all you’ll do is make him a better criminal.