Books: Back to the Gore of Yore

A tall gray-haired man of distinguished appearance was browsing in a paperback bookstore. Balzac, Eliot, James, Kafka, Proust—all at once his eye lighted on a muscle-plated male glaring out of a black background. The slash, in big red letters, read: DOC

SAVAGE, THE MAN OF BRONZE! Startled, the browser glanced left and right; nobody was looking. Then with a furtive movement he snatched The Man of Bronze off its shelf and, slipping it deftly under a copy of Hazlitt's essays, strolled thoughtfully toward the cashier. Doc Savage? If you are over 40, you don't have to ask. Doc was the Hercules of the '30s, the natural father of both Superman and James Bond. Once a month, back before the war, every red-blooded American boy who could lay his hands on 10¢ plunked it down for a Street & Smith pulp called Doc Savage magazine. Now, once a month and at about seven times the price, any red-blooded middle-aged man who pines for the gore of yore can renew his literary acquaintance with derring-Doc.

In the past six years, Bantam Books has reprinted 61 of the 181 Doc Savage stories that first appeared between 1933 and 1945; No. 62, The Pirate's Ghost, will hit the racks next week. The 10.5 million copies now in print have realized about $4.5 million in sales. Doc Savage fan clubs have sprung up and three producers have been negotiating for film and television rights. "We've struck into a bronze mine," Bantam's Marc Jarre explains. "Publishing one a month, we've got six years to go in the series. Then we can start over."

Doc was born in the early '30s under the sign of the dollar. "We're in a depression," the business manager of Street & Smith instructed his editors.

"People feel weak and defeated. We need a hero so strong and so intelligent that nothing can stop him." The job of creating this giant was assigned to an unathletic and sketchily educated young writer named Lester Dent. Trained as a telegrapher, Dent was innocent of grammar ("of no value to we") and guilty of heinous cliches ("The warriors were certainly a chagrined lot"), but he could put out the prose at a Remington-wrecking rate. Under the pen name Kenneth Robeson, he knocked off a 60,000-word Doc Savage novel almost every month for nearly 15 years. As stories, most of them are bloody good. He is a funhouse mirror of the America that loved him and apparently still does—a big square joe with the body of Charles Atlas, the brain of Thomas Edison, and the implacable innocence of Mickey Mouse.

Everything about Doc is superlative. To begin with, he is the richest man in the world. He is also the handsomest. His eyes are "hypnotic whirlpools of flake gold" and his "perfect features display a power of character seldom seen." Best of all, Doc is really built. His "giant" body, "kilned by tropical suns and arctic winds" to a permanent bronze, possesses "a strength superhuman." He can dodge a bullet, crawl up a wall like a human fly, stay under water for eight minutes, smash through an inch-thick steel door with one punch, and take on—oh, say—a hundred armed men at a time and flip them about like Frisbees with his bare hands.