Books: Back to the Gore of Yore

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Don't get the idea that Doc is just a jock, though. He is also the world's greatest surgeon, the greatest chemist, the greatest inventor. He had Polaroid, television and the shotgun mike at least a decade before the public did, and if you don't watch out, he'll "teleport" you atom by atom to his mysterious laboratory near the North Pole. Like James Bond, Doc is gadget-gaga. Dozens of tiny martial devices—gas bombs, sedative darts, ultraviolet flashlights—are concealed in his clothing. His cars are rolling fire bases that can "go like Barney Oldfield" and crash like tanks through concrete walls. The transports and fighter planes in his private air force are really "whizzers."

The other characters in Dent's stories are understandably something of a letdown. The Fabulous Five, Doc's "companions in adventure and excitement," are said to be "the five greatest brains ever assembled in one group," but they talk ("Holy Cow! That's plumb ding-y!") like the Beaver Patrol on an overnight hike. Dent's villains are far zingier. They have names like Ull, Ark, Var, Zoro, Rama Tura, "The Sinister Count Ramadanoff" and "The Horrible Humpback"—whose hump, by the way, is packed with nefarious electronic gear. One of his nastiest creations is an Eskimo known as Heck Noe (humor is hardly Dent's forte). Others have long pointy ears, or keep secret laboratories in hollow mountains, or come from an advanced civilization in the center of the earth. All are insanely resolved to conquer the world, and all come equipped with secret weapons—like, say, a fluffy yellow cloud that sidles up to airplanes and skyjacks them.

In The Fantastic Island (1935), a book Ian Fleming obviously ransacked when he wrote Dr. No, the villain is a mad Russian pianist who owns an isolated Galapagos island, feeds his guests to a horde of clacking crabs and explains this little character problem in a marvelously sappy 19th century trope. "I am impelled to unspeakable desires," he sighs contentedly, "when my fingers wander over the keys!"

To tell the truth. Doc has a few little problems of his own. The big galoot can literally knock out a 12-ft. shark, but he is scared of girls—in one book he turns to a Mayan maid who is made lor him and stoutly "vouchsafes" the following: "Monja, you've been a brick." But not all of Doc's quirks are endearing. Billed as a paragon of fair play, he nevertheless tends to characterize non-Nordic types as "a low specimen of the Central American half-breed" or as "ratty, dark-skinned" people. In his books black men shuffle, gawk and sputter things like "ah never seed such muscles befo'." Even more peculiar is Doc's method of dealing with the criminals he captures. With confidence in his lofty motives, he ships them to his "crime college" in upstate New York, where their criminal tendencies are corrected by brain surgery.