Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 17, 1991 TAG: 9103210009
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Reviewed by PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
In 1946, Lester Dent published a mystery-adventure book titled "Dead at the Take-Off." It was billed as his first novel even though he had written more than 200 novel-length stories by that time.
Most of those involved a fabulous character known as Doc Savage, appearing in the pulp magazine of that name and credited to an author named Kenneth Robeson.
Although he is credited with having written the Avenger pulp-magazine novels as well, Robeson never existed. The name was made up by Street and Smith, publishers of magazines such as "Doc Savage" and "The Shadow," so they could use different authors if they had to.
But Dent wrote practically all of the nearly 200 Doc Savage stories, except for a few he farmed out to other writers and then often had to rewrite anyway. The magazine ran from 1933 to 1949, with Dent providing a story a month for most of that time. He wrote so fast that, in one story, he killed off the same gangster twice.
Marilyn Cannaday, who lived in Dent's home town of La Plata, Mo., has researched him and come up with a real-life character as fascinating as Doc.
Doc, or Clark Savage Jr., was a forerunner of Indiana Jones (Dr. Henry Jones Jr.) in his globe-trotting explorations and adventures - and so was Dent, who went treasure-hunting and exploring himself (he wrote many stories aboard his sailboat) and once had a narrow squeak with the Nazis in Czechoslovakia. Doc and Dent both had a fondness for miniature gadgets, like those Batman would later carry in his utility belt and Dick Tracy on his wrist. Doc likewise inspired the creators of Superman: both characters had an Arctic Fortress of Solitude, both were named Clark, and they were known respectively as the Man of Bronze and Man of Steel.
Dent (1904-1959) grew up on a Missouri farm, an only child with his imagination for a companion, and eventually returned there after becoming a successful writer in New York (his widow says he commanded more respect in New York than in La Plata). Cannaday uses her own later La Plata memories to gauge how Dent's experiences on the farm, in school and in the town must have affected him and how they show up in his writings.
Although he wrote more serious fiction and apparently regarded Doc as his personal albatross at times, Dent is mainly remembered for those rousing adventure tales - even by those who never read a pulp magazine.
Bantam Books began reissuing his Doc Savage novels in paperback (still as by Kenneth Robeson) in 1964 and has continued to this day. Nearly 100 came out as individual books; then, as Bantam got to the later and shorter magazine stories, as a dozen double-novel books, and 13 more as thick "Doc Savage Omnibus" volumes with four to five stories each. The books became popular enough to generate a "Doc Savage" movie in 1975, starring ex-TV Tarzan Ron Ely, but it was handicapped by its campy approach to the material.
With No. 13 published in September, Bantam has reprinted all the "Doc Savage" magazine stories, according to two afterwords (one of which gives more detail on the other "Doc" writers than even Cannaday did), is now planning to commission original ones by other authors.
The first will be by science-fiction writer Philip Jose Farmer (who published a fictional biography of Doc in 1973, "Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life") is already working on a prequel, telling how Doc and his five aides first came together in a World War I German prison camp. If Sherlock Holmes, James Bond and Perry Mason can live on in new books by new authors, so can Dent's creation.
by CNB