My favorite was, IIRC, Murder Melody, which had a subterranean civilization whose technology was all based on glass and sound. I read them voraciously as a teenager, and I recently checked the library catalog of my new locale, and they actually have a number of Doc Savage novels! Must… resist…
-Ben
I’ve never read Doc Savage, but I’ve seen some of the cover art. What’s the deal with his shirt? Is it the same shirt everytime, or does he keep ripping up new ones. And what exactly is he doing to cause that?
Doc is just so muscular that he bursts his shirts from the inside during the course of his adventures. Or it could be that he undergoes so much physical stress (explosions, landslides, attacks by gangs of criminals and monsters) that his shirts are ruined but he himself barely escapes.
Or like the extreme widow's-peak haircut and monochrome paintings by James Bama, it's a visual trademark to make the paperback covers stand out on the racks.
My favorite Doc novel would hve to one of the early ones fron 1933 or 1934. Over the top action, wild imagination, larger than life characters…I would have to choose something like THE LOST OASIS or METEOR MENACE.
FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE would be a good candidate. it explains many of the mysteries about Doc, introduces his greatest enemy John Sunlight, and is a very fast-paced romp.Do Philip Jose Farmer’s pastiches count?
Hmmm. Murder Melody is actually one of the 4? or is it 5? Doc Savage books that I own. What I like about the books is that the bad guys die. None of this Hardy Boy shit, they get shot, stabbed, run over, etc, and usually with a quote like " A stream of bullets pierced his evil heart, romoving him from the population of productive citizens without any remorse " Heeee! I love it!
Actually, when Doc caught the villains alive, he did something far worse than kill them.
The world's greatest surgeon, Doc took his prisoners to his 'College' upstate where he **operated on their brains**, removing their memories and changing their personalities! He then set them up with job and new lives in a different part of the country.
This was the creepiest thing I read when I was a kid. The Man of Bronze was a great hero and still one of my all time favorite adventure fiction characters but that was just wrong. This concept quietly faded out after a while and was not mentioned again. Giving crooks a lobotomy and a new set of memories is worse than just shooting them dead like the Shadow did.If I might expand upon the shirt thing…
I remember several covers in which Doc had a ripped shirt, defiantly standing on some crag holding a pistol. I also remember a number of covers on which he was calmy sitting in his laboratory peering at test tubes- wearing a ripped shirt. Note, too, that his jodhpurs were always impeccable.
Moreover, the shirt was always ripped the same way in every cover- one sleeve was split but the cuff was still attached, and there was a hole over one shoulder. I remember seeing a few jokes about this- one recent sci-fi novel had a fellow wearing Doc Savage’s shirt on the cover, but I don’t know the significance of it. I also seem to remember a movie in which a wimpy guy chased the bad guys off camera, and came back onscreen with his shirt very definitely ripped in the Doc Savage pattern.
As for the crime college, yes, I found it a little freaky too. It’s particularly creepy since there was no due process involved- the bad guys would just disappear off to a brainwashing camp which no one had ever heard of, and the police and the courts (not to mention their families) would never know what happened to them. Actually, there was one novel where someone infiltrated the Crime College- I think it was the Sleepy Hollow one.
-Ben