Speculations in Bronze

2011-07-21T07:36:00.000-07:00

The New Pulp Revival continues! Professional author, playwright and educator Martin O'Hearn has written a pulp superhero novel The Terrible Troll which is currently available for the Kindle on Amzaon.com and soon will be out in other formats through Smashwords. Martin graciously accepted my invitation to do a Q&A interview about his new book.

Hello Martin! I have some questions about you and your new book.

1) Tell us a little about yourself and the work you have done.

I've spent three months a year for the last few decades out on the road as, most often, lighting operator on national tours to middle school audiences. The plays presented classic stories from Poe, Twain, Saki, and other authors famous for horror or humor. I was also one of the playwrights adapting stories like The Lady or the Tiger, The Most Dangerous Game, and The Monkey's Paw. The audience numbers have added up into the seven figures by now. Wish I'd gotten royalties instead of flat fees!

2) You recently released a pulp superhero novel, The Terrible Troll.

a. Please describe the story

Robin Pace has come to New York in 1937, and, like Harry Vincent in The Living Shadow, she's caught up in the fight between villain and hero. The Troll, Günther Grieg, is using a strange apparatus to walk through walls (and more) in pursuit of a devastating secret.

King Hudson and his five companions fought Grieg in 1936, on a battlefield of the Spanish Civil War. In testing Nazi weaponry, the Troll gained the power to destroy men's minds; only two out of seven walked away from the battle. Now King recruits Robin in chasing Grieg and his stolen secret documents from New York to Germany by way of the zeppelin Hindenburg.

By the time they reach Grieg's castle on the Rhine, Robin's barely escaped death by gunshot, arson, and fall from airship.

And this is where, as per Lester Dent's Master Plot, the heroes "get it in the neck bad."

b. Describe your pulp hero King Hudson

You'd mistake him in a dark alley for Richard Henry Benson, not Clark Savage, Jr. He infuriates the viewpoint character, Robin, because he can do just about anything and he's not at all modest about it. He's pretty much a magician pulling abilities and talents out of his hat as the situation calls for them--until the Troll outthinks him.

The biggest mystery of the story is King Hudson. Who, exactly, is he? Where did he get all those powers? What is his connection to the Troll?

c. What inspired you to write the story?

Doc Savage and Lester Dent. Troll, by the way, was one word left over after Goblin, Ogre, Devil, Spook, Ghost, Elf, and Monster in the original Doc titles.

d. Where did you get the idea for King Hudson?

By a very roundabout manner, out of the science fiction novel The Creature from Beyond Infinity by Henry Kuttner. But that involves the mystery I mentioned; I can't go into detail without giving something away. It did give me a way to rework Doc Savage, his Fabulous Five, and Pat Savage into the basis for new characters.

3) What were your favorite Pulp characters?

In the order in which I discovered them in reprint as a teenager: Doc Savage, The Shadow, The Spider, Captain Future, The Phantom Detective, and G-8. The Avenger, Operator 5, and so on, joined the list later.

4) Who are some of your favorite authors, pulp and otherwise?

Edgar Rice Burroughs; then the majority of those being published or reprinted in science fiction, mystery, and adventure paperbacks in the Sixties (including Dent, Gibson, Page, and the others, of course). Golden Age and Silver Age comic book writers like Jerry Siegel, Bill Finger, Edmond Hamilton, Gardner Fox, John Broome, and writer/artist Jack Kirby. A couple of writers whose new stuff I've never missed in decades: Stephen King and Dick Francis.

5) Are you intending to visit any of the Pulp conventions?

No; my first few comics conventions were plenty.

6) Will there be more King Hudson stories?

7) If so any hints on what is coming up for King Hudson?

8) Do you have other stories planned for publication?

The (fictional) history of the Terrible Troll manuscript answers those questions: it was written by a young comic book writer in 1945 as he tried to crash the slightly-more-prestigious pulp market. Unfortunately, he'd written a 1930s science fiction-style epic when editors wanted sophisticated detective stories. And Troll was pretty much a standalone novel; it left nowhere for a series to go. The manuscript lay abandoned in a trunk for over sixty years.

The next novel I'm planning has that writer enmeshed in a crime plot as he returns to comic book writing after World War II. I'd actually written the story in which he begins his career in 1938--then The Adventures of Kavalier and Klay came out.

9) Are there any other things you want to tell the fans about? (Opportunity for a few shameless plugs!)

I hope to start blogging soon, about crediting old comic books' writers and artists. My website will link to the blog. Eventually my article for Alter Ego on telling apart the writers of the Superman stories of the early Sixties, commissioned by Roy Thomas and delivered a while ago, should be published.

10) Please provide us with internet links

a. for your website

http://www.martinohearn.com/

b. Where the fans can get your book

It's $2.99. For the Kindle, at Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058IZSOC

In a few weeks, Smashwords will be distributing Troll to retailers like Apple and Barnes & Noble. Smashwords itself already sells the novel in the various ereader formats, for upload onto Kindle, Nook, iPad, and the rest:

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/71903

The free sample at Smashwords, where I could set it at 30% rather than Amazon's 10%, takes the reader to a major plot point that I sidestepped mentioning above, in avoiding a spoiler.

Martin, thank you for coming on my blog. I know that pulp fans will really enjoy The Terrible Troll. I wish you good luck with this and future endeavors. And thanks for being part of the New Pulp Revival.

Doc Savage's Origins: Another Perspective

2010-06-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

Most people who think of Doc Savage's origins will think of the work of Philip José Farmer in his books Escape from Loki, Tarzan Alive! ,and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. But if we look at the Savage Canon itself as it was written and edited by Lester Dent between 1933 and 1949, the information we find gives a different picture from the one crafted by PJF. Phil Farmer added his own creative flourish to Doc's background in some cases filling in he blanks left by Dent and in others providing what he thought were needed corrections. By doing so, He created a Doc Savage that included elements both of Dent's and his own imagination.

But what if we looked at what Dent himself included in the Canon? What conclusions might we draw? Could the data be organized in ways very different those of PJF? And might this not be closer to Lester Dent's own vision of his character?

My friend Jeff Deischer is the author of The Adventures of Doc Savage: A Definitive Chronology which is in its second edition.

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-adventures-of-doc-savage-a-definitive-chronology/3489302?productTrackingContext=search_results/search_shelf/center/4

Jeff firmly grounds his views using the actual material in the Canon though he does add some modest speculations of his own. What he has come up with is a unique theory about Doc's Origin and background which is different from those of the Wold Newton advocates.

I am a big fan of Phil Farmer and I really enjoy the Wold Newton Universe. I have even written some stories that lean heavily on PJF vision of Doc.

But Jeff Deischer's ideas are interesting and worthy of our perusal. He presents an alternative view of Doc Savage that has story potentials that are not possible in that Wold Newton Universe. And he has come to his views trying very hard to be faithful to Lester Dent's original work on Doc.

I was so impressed with Jeff's work that I intended to write about it here on my blog. Then I thought to myself, "Why not ask Jeff to write a brief article about this and I'll feature it here?"

So for your edification and reading pleasure, here is Jeff Deischer's article:

WHAT DENT WROTE, WHAT DENT KNEW, WHAT DENT MEANT

Copyright 2010 Jeff Deischer

At first glance, Lester Dent, one of the co-creators and the main writer of the DOC SAVAGE series, seems to have been careless in his facts regarding Clark Savage Jr.’s background. In The Man of Bronze, the first novel of the series, Dent tells us that Doc met his five aides during the Great War – World War I. In later novels, Dent makes comments regarding Doc’s age that indicate that he was too young to have served in the war.

For example, Devil on the Moon (which occurred in 1936, according to my chronology of the series) states that Doc Savage is “a young man”. This almost certainly indicates that his life is not yet half over at the time; based on the life expectancy of a man of his era, this means that he was born no earlier than 1904. But we know that he was born by 1911, when, according to They Died Twice, he had already acquired his nickname.

Cargo Unknown states that “the elder Savage had died about the time Doc’s unusual training had been finished”, “about twenty years of training”. This strongly suggests that Doc’s birth year was about 1911, since The Man of Bronze takes place in 1931. So how could Doc have possibly served in World War I if he was born in 1911 (or even 1904)? There is some evidence that when Dent wrote The Man of Bronze, he did not have all the facts.

In The Ten Tons Snakes (written in late 1944), Dent stated that Doc “had never known just what had happened to his father to cause him to put his small son, Doc, in the hands of scientists for training”. However, in No Light to Die By (which occurred in 1946), Doc himself writes, “My father [was] victimized by criminals”, referring to the motivation of the elder Savage for Doc’s unusual training, which, Doc writes, lasted “from the time I was fourteen months old until I was twenty years old”. These comments have several significances, the most obvious of which is that it confirms that Doc was indeed about twenty in The Man of Bronze.

Second, in 1944 Dent did not know – or was prevented from saying – that Doc knew what had caused his father to have Doc trained as he was. Almost exactly two years later, Doc reveals this himself to the public. So Dent did not reveal everything there was to reveal about Doc, whether from lack of knowledge or by Doc himself preventing it. So it is possible that the same circumstance applies to Doc’s war service – or lack of it.

Third, the motivation for Clark Savage Sr. having his son trained to fight crime was because he had been victimized by criminals, not because he was trying to atone for any sins he might have committed previous to Doc’s birth. We may infer that the victimization caused the elder Savage a devastating loss, for him to go to such extremes to prevent something similar happening to others; one does not devote the life of one’s son to fighting crime because of a common mugging.
The introduction to No Light to Die By is the subject of some controversy: “Robeson” [Dent] wrote, referring to the writing of The Man of Bronze, “This thing started Nov. 12, 1932”. But Dent was relying on his memory when he wrote this, and he was wrong. In fact, the actual notation in his famous notebook reads “Dec. 10, 1932”. Philip Jose Farmer concluded that Dent was thinking of Doc’s birthday. He was not.

Information in Peril in the North conclusively puts Doc’s birthday in late May. In this story, Doc celebrates his birthday. At that time, the midnight sun is visible near Greenland. This occurs between May 25 and July 25. Due to the realities of publishing (which we know apply in Doc’s universe because of the introduction to No Light to Die By), the adventure could have occurred no later than May. The intersection of these two facts leaves only very late May for Doc’s birthday.

I believe that Dent was thinking of the date that the events that he would “novelize” as The Man of Bronze began when he wrote “Nov. 12” in No Light to Die By (he of course correctly remembered the year that he began writing). Evidence in the novel points to a placement late in the year (1931, to be exact). The date of November 12 does not disagree with any information in the novel. It in fact matches the weather and lunar data and the days of the week that seem to be weekdays and weekend days. But this is beside the point.

As I have written elsewhere, I believe the crime that befell Clark Savage Sr. was the murder of his wife. Cargo Unknown tells us that “Doc had never known his mother; she had died when he was less than a year old.” So between this time and when Doc turned fourteen months old, Clark Sr. decided to have his son trained as the Nemesis of crime. The Man Who Was Scared tells us: “Doc’s father, about the time Doc was born, evidently received some sort of shock which completely warped his outlook on life – made him devote the rest of his days to raising a son who would follow the career of righting wrongs and punishing criminals who seemed to be outside the law” (Danger Lies East calls them “the international sort”). This links the two events – the death of Doc’s mother and his father’s decision to train Doc to fight crime (chronologically, at least), leading to the not unreasonable conclusion that she was in fact murdered by criminals – and, based on the nature of Doc’s training, quite possibly by a fantastic mastermind such as those Doc himself would later face in his career. Not conclusive, I’ll grant, but very persuasive, I believe.

Dent may have known very early that Doc did not actually meet his aides in World War I. In The Land of Terror (the second novel in the series), he wrote that Doc’s “five friends … had first assembled during the Great War”. Note that it does not read “Doc and his five friends …”. Why no mention of Doc? Had Dent learned by this time that he had been in error in thinking that Doc had met his future aides during the war? Or had he been instructed by Doc to drop this fiction? In fact, the comment in The Man of Bronze is the only one in the entire series to refer to Doc being in World War I. Why? And although Dent’s notebook states that “the others were his companions in the World War”, there is not a single reference to Doc’s war service in the forty pages of notes about him – unlike that of each of the five aides. This seems a glaring omission if Doc had indeed served in the war.

What about Doc’s war medals, also described in No Light to Die By? These are four Purple Hearts. This type of medal had been discontinued before World War I and was not given out for service in that war. President Hoover reinstated it in 1932, so these awards had to have been for service during World War II. These are the only military awards of Doc’s ever mentioned in the series.

In the aforementioned Cargo Unknown, when Renny tells a friend about meeting Doc, he does not mention World War I (but he does not go into specifics). So Dent seems to have learned by 1944 that Doc had not met his future aides during the war, if he did not know earlier. Doubtless he made this aspect about Doc up because he did not know how the bronze man acquired his aides in the beginning, and it would seem awkward not to explain their relationship. By the second novel, he seems to have known that this was inaccurate, even if he did not know the true facts. If Dent ever knew the truth, he never revealed it. That Renny doesn’t reveal in Cargo Unknown how he met Doc suggests that Dent himself did not know even at this late date. But there is a clue, in – ironically -- The Man of Bronze: “Motivated by their mutual admiration for” the elder Savage, the five men “decided to take up his work of good”. If they have known Doc for more than twelve years at this point, why aren’t they motivated by him?

Doc, in The Man of Bronze, says, “Tonight we begin carrying out the ideals of my father”. Why weren’t they doing this before his death? Because Doc had not yet begun his career, and, it should be obvious by now, was too young to have done so. And the others were not yet his comrades; they seem to have been friends or colleagues of Doc’s father prior to The Man of Bronze, and knew Doc through him. This, too, is inconclusive, but very suggestive.

Because Clark Savage, Sr. was in Central America on two separate expeditions in 1911, it seems that his son would have been born “fourteen months” prior to this; certainly young Doc was in the care of scientists by this time. So Doc could have been born no later than 1910, if his father’s expeditions both occurred late in 1911.

What can we conclude? There can be no doubt that Doc Savage was born in late May, between 1904 and 1910 (inclusive). The preponderance of evidence suggests closer to 1910. I myself chose 1907, which is nothing more – and nothing less -- than a good deduction. But I could probably be talked in to either 1908 or 1909; any later than that, and I believe we have problems with Doc being a doctor by 1925, the time when he began the life-restoring process described in Resurrection Day (Doc had been working on the process for a full decade by the time of this adventure, 1935). By my reckoning, Doc became an M.D. in 1923 at the age of sixteen, after which he studied neurology.

Now that you have all the evidence, you can decide for yourself.

The truth is probably much more mundane: Dent, like later comic book writers, probably gave no real thought to the age of his hero initially, and soon found that his creation was aging much too rapidly for all the adventures he was having (Superman, for example, met President John Kennedy as both Superboy and Superman, due to this phenomenon!). So Dent simply dropped references that suggested that Doc was old enough to have served in World War I. Such is the “life” of an action hero.

But that shouldn’t stop us from enjoying the stories.

THE END

The Super Machine Pistol

2009-12-04T06:51:00.000-08:00

{This is guest post written by James "China Jim" Campbell. Jim has his own take on Doc Savage's history so this is an alternative world story with some factual information added. Enjoy!}

Of all the gizmos, doodads, gimmicks, and contrivances mentioned in the super sagas the technical aspects and history of the Super Machine Pistol (S M P ) has been bandied about. While the description given by Dent in his highly fictionalized transcriptions of the cases that Doc and his associates were involved in was cursory at best, I have taken it upon myself to go beyond the classic description of a over sized automatic pistol with a drum magazine that sounded like a roar of a bull fiddle when fired. With the help of that master of verbiage the erudite professor of archaeology and geology William John Harper whose name Dent changed to William Harper Littlejohn at the request of Doc and his men to protect to some extent their anonymity in public. (This will be explained in future articles.)

As a segue into this historical background of the Mark III Super Machine Pistol it is only right and necessary that I give a thumb-nail sketch of what prompted Doc to design and build the S M P which he and his men carried according to the sagas for a decade and a half. Unlike what Dent and P.J. Farmer had written Docs parents did not die separately but together in Brazil at the hands of a nefarious antiquities dealer and smuggler who hurled a jar containing burial chamber dust laden with a ancient bacilli which infected and killed his parents. ( Both of Docs parents were highly respected scientists and physicians) This happened in 1925 not 1931 as Dent had written. Doc was completing his medical training at Columbia University and at this university is were he met his five friends who would become his brain trust and brothers from 1931 to 1945. Doc swore to get justice not revenge for the death of his parents so from 1925 to 1931 he dedicated himself to developing mind, and body to near superhuman levels and to get the skills that he needed.

Since this article concerns the S M P Mark III we must first look at why he developed it. Doc understood that evil men with evil schemes used firearms so Doc realized he and his associates needed one too. Adhering to his Hippocratic oath about doing no harm and realizing if he took a life in the pursuit of justice he was no better than the the men he fought he sought to make a humane non-lethal weapon. Spending weeks considering and researching various ideas from the sublime to the ridiculous, Doc's choices came down to on two designs: the Mauser C-96 "Broomhandle" pistol and the Thompson sub machine gun. He decided to incorporate features from both of these weapons into his proposed new design.

Doc designed a cartridge that was capable of delivering an effective dose of an anesthetic drug without doing serious injury. He discovered that the blunt force trauma of most rounds at point blank range could still break bones or even stop the heart so he went for a small caliber projectile. After several tries using everything from .22 caliber to .45 acp Doc settled on the .32 caliber or 7.5mm cartridge using what would later be called wad cutters the .32 round would hit its target break one to three layers of skin and deliver the anesthetic.

Doc's next stop was the Walther weapons company in Germany. Doc presented his plans gave them one hundred thousand dollars US and five years to develop and perfect it in the utmost secrecy . During this five year period Doc with the help of one of his Associates developed a formula with a curare derivative which would render a person rapidly unconscious and paralyze their muscles but with no effect the autonomic nervous system (i.e. the heart and lungs would not stop functioning). Meanwhile he made several transatlantic flights to keep abreast of the SMP's development from prototype through the first two models. The Mark I had so much recoil that it was difficult to control on full automatic. The Mark II reduced the recoil but at the expense of accuracy and range. Doc rejected them both which led the Walther gunsmiths to nickname him "Goldilocks" since he considered the original models to be either too hard or too soft. The Mark III was just right.

Dent in his writings stated that the SMP used a rams horn (spiral) design much like what was used on the Luger tanker pistol but this was a complete farce. There was no way this could fit into a shoulder holster as described in the stories. The actual magazine was more like a banana clip than spiral drum. To say that a drum magazine was not used would be incorrect as well. Dent took the information concerning both and combined the two and so the ram horn design was created. In actuality the drum magazine was a miniature version of a Thompson drum containing 40 .32 cal. rounds The drum was developed by one of the Walther designers as a lark but Doc saw it liked it and said "Build it". By 1930 Walther had perfected the S M P to fire either semi-auto or full auto at the flip of a switch. In 1930 Doc took possession of six completed SMPs, each with five 10-rounds banana clips. He also got twelve 40 round drum magazines along with the plans, templates, tools, and spare parts for repairs.

What follows is the Mark IIIs technical information.

Mark III Super Machine Pistol Design :
Internal Blow Back ( the slide cycles internally i. e., Thompson SMG)
Barrel length: 115mm
Cartridge size: 7.5mm
Length of gun from butt to barrel: 167mm
Rate of fire on full automatic: 700 rounds/minute
Width: 43mm
Weight unloaded: 1.28kgs
Weight with 10 round magazine: 1.43kgs
Weight with 40 round magazine: 4.59 kgs
Muzzle velocity: 317 m/ sec. full round
Muzzle velocity mercy bullet: 158m/sec
Maximum range: 1,500 m full round
Maximum range mercy bullet: 750 m
Lethal effective range: 800m
Mercy bullet effective range: 400m
One handed accuracy: 75m
Held in two hands (Weaver grip or braced): 200m
# of grooves in bore: 6
Sight radius: 147m

During the development of the Mark III S M P the weapon was subjected to rigorous testing and it could function flawlessly in severe temperatures ranging from -50c to +70c and has proven reliable in wet and dusty conditions. Resistance to saltwater corrosion is due to a quality paint finish and proper interior oiling. The Mark III was highly resistant to mechanical damage. Test drops from 6m onto a concrete surface and 10m to a hard clay surface (including being dropped barrel first) found no mechanical damage. Being run over by an automobile produced no damage either.

The Mark III was also equipped with a muzzle flash suppressor and a internal compensator to negate a barrel climb when fired on full auto. This attachment could be unscrewed and replaced by a sound suppressor (silencer) chambered for the 7.5mm round which reduced the bullet crack to near zero. This suppressor was mentioned in one (to the best of my knowledge) super-saga. While Dent always mentioned the weapon being fired on full auto the Mark III could fire on semi automatic as fast as you could pull the trigger. Most pistols only held 5-7 rounds at that time. The 10 round magazine and 40 round drum made the Mark III a formidable weapon to face off against even at the semi-auto setting. On full auto, the rate of fire was 700 rounds/minute. This was faster than the basic Thompson SMG (600 rounds/minute) but slower than the Mauser C-96 on full auto (1000 rounds/minute).

So in conclusion the SMP like Doc took time to develop but it came to near perfection and the weapon served him and his associates well. What follows are photos of the Mark III with and without it s silencer, the shoulder holster and the drum magazine.

Quest of Tcho

2009-07-14T07:52:00.000-07:00

A mysterious lost race of little people in the frozen wastes of the Arctic known as the Qui captures Doc Savage and his crew to enslave them as they do to all normal sized humans. In the end Doc Savage triumphs and in a Lincolnesque turn abolishes slavery. Who are these little people and where did they come from?

There are several clues in popular literature which point to their true identity.

In the stories of H. P. Lovecraft and his circle there is mention of a diminutive race of hominids known as the Tcho-Tcho. They are described as horribly visaged, sometimes with hair, sometimes without, belonging to a different race than that of Homo sapiens. They have utter contempt for mankind and in fact are cannibals who delight in human flesh. The name of this race is derived from the Tibetan word tcho which means 'black magician,' 'evil monster,' or 'destroyer.' They are said to worship the dark gods Lloigor and Zhar.

The Tcho-Tcho come primarily from South East Asia but there have been enclaves noted in the Pyrenees and Greenland.

The first mention of the Tcho-Tcho people is in August Derleth's stories "The Thing That Walked on the Wind" and "Lair of the Star-Spawn"(1933) where they are said to come from Burma. Lovecraft himself mentions them in his epic saga "The Shadow Out of Time" (1936). Later stories from the Cthulhu and Delta Green stories describe them as "the nastiest people who ever lived." During the Vietnam War, they carried on attacks against both sides but singled out the Hmong (and their allies the Americans) for particular violent attention.

There have also been strange stories of The Little People told in various parts of Europe, Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. The Basques who are a human ethnic group long suspected of having descended from the survivors of Atlantis have an extensive folklore about these Little People which sound suspiciously like the Tcho-Tchos. After the initial sinking of Atlantis, a few islands may have remained where the survivors of the lost continent may have sought refuge.

In her novel, Taltos, Anne Rice describes a group of Little People in Northern Scotland who live in the woods to this very day and who have a unique genetic endowment of 92 chromosomes making them tetraploids. They apparently also have powers of telepathy, precognition, and telekinesis though they are not very highly developed. Nevertheless, these people are short hirsute and incredibly strong for their size. These Little People allegedly have babies after a very short gestation period who are born able to walk and talk. It is clear that some of these are gross exaggerations. Nevertheless these Little People are nasty, cannibalistic, and antithetic towards ordinary humans.

According to Rice, the Little People and the 7-foot non-human race known as the Taltos are closely genetically related to each other and more remotely to mankind. It seems that the two races had lived on a series of islands in the North Atlantic which sank into the ocean thousands of years ago forcing the races to migrate to Scotland and from there to the rest of Europe. It is through humans mating with Taltos and Little People that a hybrid form of human with 92 chromosomes came to exist which possessed various psychic powers. Rice called these hybrids 'witches.'

It is possible that the Little People and the Taltos races were genetically engineered in the deep distant past to be servitors to other races which have since vanished. They had survived the sinking of the main continent of Atlantis by living on scattered islands which later sank themselves.

It is interesting that according to Rice, the Taltos also have "walking , talking babies" from birth who mature very quickly. They also share some memories from their parents and their ancestors. This might help to explain the problem of John Sunlight who is now suspected to be the son of Doc Savage and the Countess Idivzhopu. If Doc Savage and the Countess each were hybrids carrying 92 Chromosomes, it is possible that their child would be a Taltos. That would solve the problem of how Sunlight could have been born in 1919 and still be a powerful man able to challenge Doc Savage in 1937. If he was actually a Taltos, he would have fully matured within just a few weeks of birth (not the mere hours that Rice claims in her novels). It would also help to explain Doc Savage's own unique physical and mental prowess if he carried the extra genetic material of one of Rice's witches.

If all of this speculation is true, then the story of the Quest of Qui may have been far more horrific than the novelization by Dent indicated. His publishers would not have permitted him to include the gory details of cannibalism and other Tcho-Tcho depravities in their publications.

The Wildman Coat of Arms

2009-07-03T08:23:00.000-07:00

Philip José Farmer the late great Science Fiction Grandmaster wrote biographies of the two iconic pulp characters of the 20th Century: Tarzan Alive! and Doc Savage, An Apocalyptic Life. In those biographies, he traced the ancestry of these two characters through the complexities of Burke's Peerage and demonstrated that they were not only related to each other, but also that they were descended from British Royalty. This entitled them to coats of arms based on their ancestry.

Farmer had a written description of Tarzan's coat of arms which was printed in Tarzan Alive! which was rendered as a line drawing in the book by Bjo Trimble. There was a coat of arms description in Doc Savage, An Apocalyptic Life but no actual drawing was ever made. UNTIL NOW!

In Farmerphile no. 14 (Oct. 2008) artist Keith Howell used Phil Farmer's original notes to create the first actual rendering of the coat of arms for Dr. James Clark Wildman Jr. aka Doc Savage.

This was something I have waited 37 years to see! It was well worth waiting for.

At the Farmercon in Peoria, IL held on June 6-7, 2009 I obtained a signed copy of this for my desktop and a poster that I now have framed and hanging in my library. I also purchased coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, and other quality reproductions of this image which were made available at the conference.

It is my hope that other Doc Savage fans will be as excited about this as I am and that they will send emails to mike@pjfarmer.com requesting that merchandise using this image be made available to Doc Savage fans through Cafe Press.

The Evil in Pemberley House by Philip José Farmer and Win Scott Eckert

2009-04-17T20:51:00.000-07:00

The great Grandmaster of science fiction, Philip José Farmer, was the consummate bibliophile. He was well read in classical English prose as well as the more popular literary works of modern times. His love for the broad sweep of English literature led him to create the Wold Newton Family, named after a place in England where a meteor had come to ground on 13 December 1795. Phil united all of his favorite literary characters and genres in one enormous scheme that spanned the entire length of human history even into the future.

Mr. Farmer first proposed his grand vision in his biography of the man whose life was fictionalized by Edgar Rice Burroughs in the Tarzan series. This book Tarzan, Alive! (1972) launched the Wold Newton Family. Farmer traced the family history of Tarzan, Lord Greystoke, through several centuries of English literary and historical characters. He continued this project in his next biographical work Doc Savage: An Apocalyptic Life (1973). Farmer had previously postulated a family link between Tarzan and Doc Savage in his controversial novel A Feast Unknown (1969). In his later biographical works, he documented the research to make the case for that relationship. Thus he was able to link Elizabeth Bennett from Pride and Prejudice to Sherlock Holmes, Major Barbara, Fu Manchu, The Time Traveler, and Robert Harrison Blake from the Cthulhu mythos.

Phil Farmer was always a maverick and an innovator. It is no surprise that he decided in the mid 1970s to write his own version of the romantic English novel but with a modern erotic twist. In this he anticipated by over a decade the trend in Harlequin-style romance novels which have become even more graphic than he had imagined 30 years ago. The story would wed together the settings and characters from his favorite works of literature and the extended Wold Newton Family he had created to unite them. Thus was born the original outline for the novel The Evil in Pemberley House.

As often happens to men of literary genius, Phil Farmer's fertile imagination birthed many plot lines, some of which would never be brought to fruition. There are so many ideas yet there is so little time. As he completed work on his Riverworld series, started his Dayworld series, and finished the one work of which he was most proud (The Unreasoning Mask), The Evil in Pemberley House receded into the background and became an idea he had discussed with a few friends and colleagues decades earlier. But the written outline remained hidden in his file cabinet along with other tantalizing projects that never were developed. It was very much like that battered dispatch box of Dr. John Watson hidden in a bank vault on Charing Cross Road containing notes on the unwritten cases of Sherlock Holmes.

Eventually, the outline of Pemberley House came to the attention of Win Scott Eckert who has published widely on the web and in print on the Wold Newton Universe. He has helped to make the Wold Newton Universe an on-going world-wide phenomenon. Win realized the importance of this novel to the Wold Newton legacy especially since it came from Philip José Farmer himself who had conceived of Pemberley House at the height of his creative effort in creating the Wold Newton Universe. With permission from Phil and his wife Bette, Win collaborated with Phil in fleshing out the story and preparing it for publication. The final editing was completed in 2008 and Phil Farmer lived long enough to learn that his Pemberley House story was to be published by Subterranean Press in 2009. The master story teller Phil Farmer passed away on 25 February 2009 at the age of 91, but his legacy lives on.

The story of The Evil in Pemberley House is set in 1973. The heroine, Patricia Wildman, is the daughter of the great adventurer, Dr. James Clark "Doc" Wildman who had recently died along with her mother in a plane crash somewhere in the arctic. Their bodies were never found. After her parents' death, Patricia had married one of the physicians who had worked in the clinic with her father, but he dies tragically shortly after they are married and she is left alone and with no close family ties.

Patricia is a tall voluptuous woman with the same golden-flecked eyes, bronzed skin, and red-bronze hair as her father. She had been educated like her father from childhood to be a physical and mental marvel, though not with the same intensity with which her father had been trained. Even though she is a virtual superwoman, Pat is still a lonely young lady who is haunted by the loss of her father. He had been more than a mere parent to her. He was such a paragon of human perfection that he seemed more like a god. His memory still intrudes on her when she is with other men. None of these other men -- even her late husband -- could match up to her father in anything, and she burns with incestuous desire for him even though she knows he is dead.

As she struggles with her loneliness and confusion, she learns that through her father's lineage, she is next in line to inherit Pemberley House, the sprawling mansion in Derbyshire which is featured in Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice. It is also possible that she could receive the title of Baroness of Lambton. Pat decides to go to England and to see Pemberley House for herself and meet the 103 year old Duchess of Pemberley who currently owns the mansion. Based on what she will find, Pat will decide whether or not to accept the inheritance. She hopes that this adventure will take her mind off her recent personal tragedies.

But things are never that simple in a Phil Farmer story!

Pat meets an odd cast of characters: some grotesque, some nasty, some hostile, and virtually all of them lascivious. On the trip from the airport to the mansion, Pat must prove her mettle when she is brutally assaulted. But she shows that she is indeed her Father's daughter and routs her attackers. Pat also discovers that Pemberley House comes with its own ghost and family curse. Early on, Pat finds that many of the occupants of the mansion don't want her there and seemingly will do anything to discourage her from becoming the heir.

The book is filled with conflicts of various kinds including some incidents that would definitely have made the prim Ms. Austen blush. This is after all a Phil Farmer story set in the sexually turbulent 1970s and the erotic content is an integral part of the story. But the sexual content is very tame compared to similar modern stories and is not merely gratuitous.

The colorful cast of characters includes the dowager Duchess and her very personal physician multiple servants with mysterious pasts and those hangers on who gravitate into the lives of wealthy people when there are no relatives to prevent it. There are also the usual bedroom-farce antics and cases of mistaken identity that abound in romantic novels.

Pat is faced with several mysteries that need to be solved. The motives and identities of several characters need to be discovered. She has to understand why odd events in the house keep occurring. And most importantly, she actually confronts the apparent ghostly apparition and needs to determine whether it is truly supernatural or just another scheme to scare her away from the house and her inheritance.

During the main body of the story we are introduced to the history of Pat's family which included her grandfather who was the illegitimate love child of the Duchess's husband and who committed a great crime which sent him into exile to America. There was also a lost scion of the family -- actually the duchess's nephew -- who had been marooned in Africa as a child and who eventually returned to assume the identity of the Duchess's own son. There are also a host of other flamboyant characters that will be quite familiar to fans of Phil Farmer's biographical works. Wold Newton fans will be treated to numerous clarifications and extensions of the Wold Newton Family. Included in the final production form of the novel will be an updated Wold Newton family tree so that fans may keep track.

The denouement of the story is an extended action sequence in which Pat Wildman confronts the real villains and triumphs over them. She is depicted as fighting virtually nude in clothing that has been shredded during the action. It very much reminded me of the iconic image of Doc Savage and his torn shirt made famous by the art work of James Bama from the Bantam reprints of the Super Sagas. This is where the solutions to all the mysteries are revealed. I must comment that the flow of the battle sequences went very smoothly which clearly was the work of Mr. Eckert. Similar sequences by Phil Farmer in other works were often choppy and chaotic. Nevertheless, the content of these sequences was pure Farmer with editorial polish.

Overall, this was a fun book to read. It had action, adventure, mystery, sex, violence, and a large dose of Wold Newton connections. I think the collaboration between Eckert and Farmer was excellent. They made their own contributions to the plot and the final editing gave a satisfying flow to the narrative. The story also left open the possibility of a sequel or two. Or more. If there are any other outlines in Phil Farmer's filing cabinet, I for one would like to see Win Eckert be permitted to flesh them out into full fledged novels.

The Evil in Pemberley House stands on its own as an entertaining story, but in my opinion, one can better appreciate it if one has read the genealogical portions of Tarzan, Alive! and Doc Savage: An Apocalyptic Life. This is not strictly necessary but the reader will be rewarded with a better grasp of the underlying storyline. I think it is also highly recommended that one read Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Priory School which is also quite important to the background of the story

I am so pleased that this classic Philip José Farmer story was rescued from oblivion by the collaboration of Win Eckert and Phil Farmer. Wold Newton fanatics such as myself will find a gold mine of new canonical material from the master himself and bold writers will be able to use this to extend the Farmerian legacy to future generations.

The Evil in Pemberley House by Philip José Farmer and Win Scott Eckert will be published by Subterranean Press on September 30, 2009 in two editions

The trade hardcover edition is current listed here on Amazon.com at a substantial discount.

The Limited Edition of The Evil in Pemberley House is available directly from Subterranean Press. There will be only 200 copies printed each signed by Win Scot Eckert. It will come with an exclusive chapbook of bonus materials that includes Philip Jose Farmer’s original outline for the novel, as well as an extended family tree for the Wold Newton Universe.

Pre-publication orders are currently being accepted at both sites.

Philip José Farmer: A Tribute

2009-04-07T11:19:00.000-07:00

I want to give a personal tribute to Philip José Farmer the renowned author who passed on to his reward on 25 February 2009. He has been a major influence on my life and thought for 40 years. His work brought me many years of entertainment and thoughtful reflection. From his imagination sprang The Lovers, The Riverworld, the Wold Newton family, The World of Tiers, The Dungeon, The Night of Light, A Feast Unknown, and far too many thoughtful stories for me to catalogue here.

I first came to know Phil through his novel "A Feast Unknown" which was a parody loosely based on the pulp characters Tarzan, Lord Greystroke and Doc Savage. Phil's pastiche characters -- Lord Grandrith and Doc Caliban -- were his take on what a true feral human and Übermensch might be like. These characters were very different from the Pulp heroes upon which they were based. They were heroes for sure, but more human and apt to have flaws and foibles that made them more distant and frightening than their Pulp models.

This was a theme that went through all of Phil's work. He saw the hypocrisy in American society with its racism and prejudices. In his life he had been the victim of scams by powerful men who outwardly praised virtues of fairness and generosity but who stole his ideas and peddled them as their own. Phil was especially sensitive to propaganda that demonized "the other" whether in political, sexual, racial, cultural, or religious terms. He opposed such things openly and wrote some very controversial material which is somewhat tame by modern standards but in its day pushed the envelope of literary propriety.

But Phil never lost a sense of what was right and good. In a time when anti-heroes were popular, Phil Farmer wrote about REAL heroes who had values and standards and fought for them. Phil in fact was obsessed with the idea of the hero and in what that actually meant in the real world.

In his literary biographies Tarzan Alive! and Doc Savage: an Apocalyptic Life he took heroic icons from his own childhood and fleshed them out as real people. It was almost a religion to him. Phil once remarked to an interviewer that while some people believed in Jesus, he believed in Doc Savage.

This comment reveals to me that Phil Farmer was on a quest to find meaning in life and something in which to believe. He wrote several stories that were critical of the Fundamentalist Christianity which was so prevalent around him. In reaction against this, there was a time when he flirted with Catholicism. During that time he wrote the Fr. John Carmody stories which are personal favorites of mine. (It is one of my great regrets that Phil died before he could tell the story of what happened at Johns Hopkins to convert the master criminal John Carmody and move him to become a priest.) As a devout Catholic myself, it is obvious that Phil read widely in theology and understood the Catholic faith. In many ways, I can see remnants of that in his later works as well. But Phil could not reconcile the Catholic Church's teachings on sexuality with his own perceptions. I think this in large part inhibited him from converting.

One of my favorite stories by Phil is "St. Francis Kisses his Ass Goodbye." In it, Phil showed an in-depth understanding of St. Francis of Assisi which surprised me. This was projected on to a back drop of the dehumanizing aspects of poverty in the modern world when Il Poverello is projected forward into the 20th Century by a time-machine experiment gone haywire. To save the world from destruction St. Francis must be sent back to his own time. I think this story showed that Phil was not sure the piety of St. Francis really had a place in our day. Yet it was obvious that he appreciated and admired what St. Francis had accomplished in his own time.

Similarly, there was an episode in the Riverworld series where a Catholic Prince established a kingdom along the river which embodied all the virtues of the Catholic faith. Phil described is as a wholesome and good place.

I don't think that Phil ever gave up on God or on the Church. He just could not find a way to believe in perennial values. What Phil could believe in was personal integrity and the heroic spirit. This is what he found in Tarzan and Doc Savage. Good men who made virtuous choices and who persevered against evil even when against the odds.

Phil took this love of the hero to a greater length and created the Wold Newton Family to bring together his favorite heroes from all fiction into one literary universe where goodness and justice would in the end prevail. This was a religious vision of faith and hope in the heroic spirit as something working in history in the hearts and minds of people who projected their values into the stories which entertained and sustained them.

Phil Farmer has moved on now and our prayers and thanks go with him. I hope he finds in eternity what he was searching for in the world's longing for literary heroes. He has left us a great legacy which I will cherish and which I hope to help pass on to posterity. We will likely not see his like again for quite sometime.

Rest in peace, Phil. Thanks for everything. We will miss you. I hope to see you again soon.

Art Sippo MD, MPH

Monk and Ham's Excellent Adventure

2009-01-29T18:47:00.000-08:00

The above is the only known picture of Monk Mayfair (seated) and Ham Brooks (standing to the right). (The identity of the man on the left is not known.) This photograph was taken immediately after they had crossed back to Allied lines after escaping from the Loki Prison Camp and trekking across the Alps.

One of the background stories in the Savage Super Sagas is how Andrew "Monk" Mayfair and Theodore "Ham" Brooks met during World War I. The following rendition of the story was published in the original Doc Savage pulp magazine:

Originally in The Man of Bronze, we were told that General Theodore Marley Brooks was tried by court martial and convicted of stealing the hams, yet in the above retelling, Ham was able to talk his way out of it. So the story had evolved over time even in the Super Sagas.

In Escape from Loki, though, Philip José Farmer informed us that the two incidents happened before the two men were incarcerated in the Loki Prison Camp while Ted Brooks was a Lieutenant Colonel in the French Foreign Legion and Andrew Mayfair was a Lieutenant Colonel in the US Infantry.

Farmer's version of the story seems far more likely. It is doubtful that a general officer would have been convicted of stealing food from the mess and not been stripped of his rank and incarcerated. This would also have jeopardized Ham's ability to practice law back home since such a crime would have had been considered a felony under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In fact, the penalty for such a crime during wartime could have been execution.

Also, the teaching of rude French words to Monk sounds more like a practical joke among equals, not something a General Officer would do to a subordinate.

So based on the information from the Super Sagas and Escape from Loki, the two practical jokes which defined the relationship between Monk and Ham happened sometime between the Spring of 1917 and their incarceration at Loki in June 1918.

It is reasonable to suppose that Ham had joined the French Foreign Legion years before the United States entered the war. Many men from Harvard had done so. Paris was a very popular place with the American upper crust and several young men from the Ivy League had spent time there before the war. France was also a Republic very much like the United States which did not have a king or formal nobility. Defending her against the Kaiser and the Austro-Hungarian Emperor seemed to be natural for Americans.

Meanwhile, the American forces that came over in April 1917 had no formal chemical warfare training. They depended very heavily on both the British and the French to train and supply them for gas warfare. Gen. Pershing made the decision to send American officers to both Britain and France to observe their respective chemical warfare programs and serve with their units in combat.

With Monk Mayfair's background in chemistry, it is highly likely that he would have been sent as one of these exchange officers. The New Orleans Mayfair line (from which I have argued Monk was descended) was of French extraction, so it would have made sense for him to be sent to serve with a French "Z" unit. There were many Americans in the Foreign Legion and so that might be where he was assigned. That's probably how Monk and Ham met. Ham must have been Monk's sponsor within the Regiment.

This scenario would also explain how Monk and Ham became buddies and started playing practical jokes on each other.

One great mystery is how it was that Ham Brooks made brigadier general between August 1918 when they returned from Loki and the Armistice in November that same year. In fact, we know from Escape from Loki that at the time of their incarceration in the prison camp, Renny was a Captain, and Long Tom was a Lieutenant while Johnny was an civilian (albeit an American spy). Why was it that Monk was the only one of the Furious Five in the military who did not advance in rank after their repatriation?

Someday, someone will have to tell the true story of what really happened to Doc's aides during the Great War.

A New On-Line Doc Savage Pastiche

2008-11-26T18:11:00.000-08:00

I recently received a comment on my blog by Jean Michel, a writer and artist who has been a Doc Savage fan for many years. He has some of his graphics art-work on display on the "Clash City Design" blogspot.

Jean informed me that he was writing his own Doc Savage pastiche on a blogspot entitled Doc Savage & His Furious Five in The Sinister Plot of Helmut Faust. He asked that I read it and comment on it.

It can be viewed here:

http://docsavagemanofbronze.blogspot.com/

What Jean has done is very interesting. He has re-imagined the characters and created an alternative "Doc Savage" storyline in which familiar names and characters are portrayed in an unfamiliar way. Doc Savage purists may balk at the boldness of his reshaping of the character Lester Dent created, but I have always enjoyed the occasional "Imaginary" or "What if?" stories that were seen on occasion in 1960s comics but have become a mainstay in the comic book world since Alan Moore wrote his ground-breaking "Watchmen" in the 1980s.

Jean is a good writer and he keeps the story moving as he introduces new elements in his own take on the Doc Savage mythos. I await with anticipation his new twist on the old characters and background material. Jean does so many new things that I do not want to give spoilers to his story line.

In any case I am enjoying this exercise in creative writing and I hope that other Doc Savage fans will likewise enjoy them.

One thing I hope to see in the future are some graphic images by Jean depicting the characters and scenes from his story.

Doc Savage and Serious Literature

2008-10-22T23:52:00.000-07:00

Doc Savage has had a widespread influence in adventure fiction but very few people are aware of his appearances in two pieces of literature.

In 1966 author Truman Capote wrote an intense docudrama book -- what he called a non-fiction novel -- about the 1959 mass murder of the Clutter family in the small Kansas town of Holcomb where people did not even lock their doors at night. It was entitled In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences. The murders had been done by a couple of drifters and Capote told their story in meticulous detail. His coverage and writing of this story was the basis for the recent critically acclaimed movie Infamous (2006) which boasted an all star cast including Toby Jones, Sigourney Weaver, Daniel Craig, Sandra Bullock, Gwyneth Paltrow, Isabella Rosselini, Jeff Daniels, and Peter Bogdonavich. This was one of the best films I have seen in recent years and I recommend it highly.

In his original book, Truman Capote had a scene in the county courthouse where they are discussing the fate of the two murderers. A local minister brings up how Doc Savage would handle the case not by execution or incarceration, but by operating on the killers brains and curing them.

The Reverend Post, overhearing the conversation, joined in. "Well,"
he said, passing around a snapshot reproduction of Perry Smith's portrait of
Jesus, "any man who could paint this picture can't be one hundred percent
bad. All the same it's hard to know what to do. Capital punishment
is no answer: it doesn't give the sinner time enough to come to God.
Sometimes I despair." A jovial fellow with gold-filled teeth and a silvery
widow's peak, he jovially repeated, "Sometimes I despair. Sometimes I
think old Doc Savage had the right idea. " The Doc Savage to whom he
referred was a fictional hero popular among adolescent readers of pulp magazines
a generation ago. "If you boys remember, Doc Savage was a kind of
superman. He'd made himself proficient in every field -- medicine,
science, philosophy, art. There wasn't much old Doc didn't know or
couldn't do. One of his projects was, he decided to rid the world of
criminals. First he bought a big island out in the ocean. Then he
and his assistants --he had an army of trained assistants -- kidnapped all the
world's criminals and brought them to the island. And Doc Savage operated
on their brains. He removed the part that holds wicked thoughts. And
when they recovered they were all decent citizens. They couldn't commit
crimes because that part of their brain was out.Now it strikes me that surgery
of this nature might really be the answer to --"

A bell, the signal that the jury was returning, interrupted
him...

This reference is probably the cultural high point for Lester Dent's creation and it shows that even a pulp magazine icon may have important ramifications above and beyond the world of mere entertainment.

Tom Tryon was a handsome leading man in the 1950s and 1960s who was born in 1926 and died in 1991. He appeared in such films as The Millionaire, I Married a Monster from Outer Space, Moon Pilot, The Longest Day, Dr. Kildare , and The Cardinal. He also had a number of TV roles including that of Texas John Slaughter for The Wonderful World of Disney.

Today he is best remembered for his novels, most notably The Other (1971) and Harvest Home (1973). It is in the novel The Other that he has a Doc Savage reference in Chapter 1:

Frowning slightly, Niles carefully removed from a pocket a chameleon on a fine silver chain. He dropped it inside his shirt with the tobacco tin, then scrambled across to an upended crate partially hidden by the baskets. A divider in it held a pile of dog-eared magazines. He dug one out, then returned to the pool of light, holding it up to the flame. On the cover a man was struggling against a pack of vicious wolves, their fangs dripping gore onto the snow as they attacked a dogteam hopelessly entangled in the harness of a sled.

"'Doc Savage and the Winter Kingdom of the Akaluks,'" Niles read aloud. He peered expectantly beyond the candlelight into the dark. "Holland?"

"What?"

"I've got this idea, see? For snow."

"Snow." Holland sniggered; was always sniggering.

"Sure. Like Doc Savage and the Winter Kingdom. Remember the frozen tundra? Well, with snow we could have our own Winter Kingdom down here."

"How?" He sounded mildly curious.

"Easy. With cattails."

"Cattails? You mean bulrushes? " Guffaws.

"Sure — bulrushes. It's a good idea, no kidding. If we went down to the river and got cattails, we could shred 'em up and have snow all summer. A Winter Kingdom — huh?" He watched Holland's face while he gave it thought; somehow he was always the one to make the decisions. Certainly Niles was pleased to be with him, pleased with his company, pleased they were not only brothers but friends as well. Only, truthfully, they weren't — not really. Not that Niles didn't desire it — they just weren't close. Niles found Holland strange, unpliant, distant. Often secretive, brooding. Of a dark nature.

Holland was his own person, a loner, and who was there could do anything
about that?

Watching, Niles saw Holland's solemn wink. The Winter Kingdom was pronounced as having possibilities. He felt elated; clever, Holland had called him. In the flickering candlelight he considered how little their contemplation of each other across the dimly lighted space did to bring them closer together, though he passionately wished it. Holland was wearing his favorite pink shirt and khaki shorts rolled at the thighs. His eyes shone remote and glassy like a cat's in the night. Gray like all the Perrys', sober and deep-set under a shock of sun-whitened hair, they were oddly tilted at the corners beneath dark slanting brows, giving occasional random expressions a curiously Oriental cast; sometimes it seemed he must have come riding with Genghis Khan across the steppes from Tartary.

Niles returned the magazine to the crate and resumed his place.

When this novel was filmed in 1972, it included a scene with a shot of a paperback with the title "Doc Savage and the Winter Kingdom of the Akaluks" and a cover that was as described above. This was, of course, not a real Doc Savage novel but it was an homage in one of the premier psychological thrillers of that period.

Farmerphile #14 has a lot for Doc Savage fans!

2008-10-14T11:11:00.001-07:00

http://www.pjfarmer.com/farmerphile.htm#iss14

The Farmerphile Magazine Issue #14 has several articles that will be of interest to Doc Savage fans.

First of all well known artist Keith Howell is presenting for the first time a graphic representation of the the Wildman Coat of Arms that Phil Farmer had first described in his biographical work Doc Savage: An Apocalyptic Life. Win Eckert arranged for this and I encourage all Doc Savage fans to thank him for this. I have been waiting 34 years for this. Hopefully the new coat of Arms will be available for t-shirts, posters and coffee mugs.

Then we have a excerpt from the new novel written by Phil Farmer and Win Eckert The Evil in Pemberley House. It is the story of Doc Savage's daughter Patricia as she comes to claim her rightful inheritance in England in 1973. The story has many connections to the Wold Newton Universe and its extended family of adventurers. Currently, the authors are searching for a publisher. It is hoped that this completed story will be published very soon.

There is also an article by Savageologist Rick Lai The Doc Ravage Presidential Campaign. All of you are familiar with Rick Lai's masterful Doc Savage Chronology. This new article should be a real treat.

They are also running an article of mine This Played in Peoria? which is based on a brief speech I made at the Farmercon 90 celebration of Phil Farmer's 90th birthday in July 2008.

You may follow the link below to order your copy:

http://www.pjfarmer.com/farmerphile.htm

The Greystoke Coat of Arms

2008-10-04T05:47:00.001-07:00

Here it is: the Greystoke Coat of Arms rendered in full color as described by Phil Farmer and drawn by Bjo Trimble! Now if I could only find the Savage Coat of Arms!

Art

Who was Doc Savage's legal mother?

2008-08-03T18:57:00.000-07:00

As I have noted in an earlier blog, the birth of Clark Savage Jr. was recorded in the United States after the survivors of the wreck of the Orion made it to New York. It appears that they gave a false date for Doc's birth, May 25, 1901 and other false information to conceal the identity of his father. They must have also concealed the true identity of Doc's mother. Which woman was named as Doc's mother on the legal birth certificate? I have done some research and my sources have told me the following story.

Dr. Clark Savage Sr. (aka James Clarke Wildman, aka James Wilder) loved several beautiful women in his life many of whom died tragically.

In the mid 1880s, James Wilder met Priscilla Travis while he was traveling under the alias 'Clark Savage' with his cousin Richard Henry Savage. She was a vivacious young New York socialite and the sole heir to her father's railroad fortune. She belonged to the same illustrious family as William B. Travis who was the commander of the Alamo during its last stand against Santa Ana. Her Uncle Milt Travis was a Texas Ranger and one of the sidekicks of Jim Hatfield the "Lone Wolf " Ranger.

Priscilla's father, John, had made his fortune investing in railroads in Texas and other places in the southwest. Once he had amassed sufficient wealth he moved the family to New York to live the High Life along with other millionaires. At the time 'Clark' and Priscilla met in 1892, her father had died from heart disease and her mother was ill with some type of abdominal cancer (probably ovarian) from which she perished in 1896.

Priscilla had reddish-auburn hair and green eyes. She was a flirt and a bit of a scandal. She had no living relatives other than her ailing mother and lived entirely on her own. She had met 'Clark Savage' at a New York party and the two were immediately attracted. James Wilder was known for liking 'fast company'. They kept in touch frequently and James even established a residence in New York City under the alias 'Clark Savage' so they could spend time together. Priscilla was one of the few people who knew that Englishman James Wilder and American 'Clark Savage' were the same person. She often traveled to Baltimore in secret when James entered medical school at Johns Hopkins. She never told anyone where she was going and she traveled under different assumed names. Their friends thought it was all very romantic and mysterious and expected that it would be only a matter of time before Priscilla and James would become engaged.

But Priscilla still had casual liaisons with other young men in between her visits to 'Clark.' He knew about this but he did not mind. Priscilla was a 'wild child' and that is what attracted him to her. He did not seriously entertain the idea of marrying her. Their relationship was one of mutual enjoyment. He doubted that 'Prissy' could ever be a proper wife. As Clark became more involved in his medical studies, and her mother became more ill, Priscilla's visits became less frequent.

When James learned about his family's financial problems in 1894, he left the US to go to Canada leaving Priscilla with the promise that he would return. In fact, he never did. During his adventures which were chronicled in Ian Cameron's book "The Lost Ones", James Wilder fell in love with a Viking-Eskimo maiden, Freyja, who died a tragic death. After the conclusion of this adventure, James was taken home by Ned Land and met Arronaxe Larsen, Ned's granddaughter and the daughter of Wolf Larsen. The two were married and when James had finally saved his family's fortune in Canada, he and Arronaxe went to England in the hopes that his real father would now claim him as the true heir to the Holdernesse Legacy. Alas, that was not to be.

Priscilla was not a blushing wall flower and she loved male companionship. When letters from 'Clark' stopped coming (even before his captivity with the Viking-Eskimos) she did not stay unattached for long. Priscilla bounced back and started dating again. She never heard from 'Clark' after 1895. For all intents and purposes 'Clark Savage' had disappeared without a trace.

Ironically, 'Clark' had introduce her to his friend Hubert Robertson who was in a loveless marriage arranged by his father. Hubert and Priscilla became clandestine lovers and this lead to the ultimate decline of Hubert's marriage. They kept their affair secret because if word got out, Hubert's father would have disowned him. The lovers were very discrete. In fact, Priscilla kept up the pretense that she was still seeing the missing 'Clark' on secret rendezvous when in fact she was actually with Hubert.

Eventually Hubert's father died and shortly thereafter, Hubert discovered that his wife was having affairs with several different men one of whom claimed he wanted to marry her. He confronted his wife with the evidence, never revealing his own adultery. They mutually agreed to a divorce for 'irreconcilable differences.' The divorce decree was to be finalized in June of 1901, and Hubert planned to wed his beloved Priscilla at sea in the Mediterranean that summer with his friends from Harvard -- James Wilder and Gunter Asch -- in attendance. He had purchased a schooner in Jamaica for the occasion, the Orion.

Robertson accepted a position as a visiting professor in Zoology at the College de France in Paris that year and he sailed his yacht to Marseilles. Priscilla secretly came to Paris in the late summer and the two had an early "pre-honeymoon" while he was teaching. For reasons of propriety, they tried to keep their relationship secret even from the faculty of the College. But such a thing is almost impossible to do when you are young and in love in Paris. In the US, all that her friends knew was that Priscilla was living "somewhere in Paris". Most of her American friends believed that she had gone to Europe to be near her old flame Clark Savage. In Paris, Priscilla actually lived under the assumed name, Clarisse Dauphin. No one ever suspected the relationship between Priscilla and Hubert though it became well known at the college that he had a mistress in Paris.

In late May of 1901, the events chronicled in The Adventure of the Priory School occurred and Hubert along with the Wilders, Priscilla, and Gunter Asch set out early for the Caribbean. While at sea, Hubert as captain of the ship married his Priscilla and it was duly noted in the ship's log. Wilder decided to assume the identity of Clark Savage again and Arronaxe was given the alias of Clarisse Dauphin. Since she spoke fluent French, they figured that she could pull off the deception. On board the Orion, Robertson recorded another marriage ceremony between Clark and Clarisse in the log.

The story of Doc Savage's birth has been told before and we will not go into detail about it here. Arronaxe finally realized she was 3 months pregnant during their flight from England. Clark Savage Junior was born on the Orion during a light squall near Andros Island in the Bahamas. They got word to Ned Land who came to help find the treasure and to see his grandchild. Neither of the marriages nor the birth were registered in the Bahamas. It was their intention to do so upon landing in New York.

Seeing that he had a strapping new son, Clark Sr. determined that he would do as much for his child as he could. He would be a better father to his son than his own father had been. Dr. Asch ran a clinic in Switzerland which specialized in assisting in the rehabilitation of the wealthy and powerful -- especially the children of such people -- who had handicaps and moral failings such as alcohol or cocaine addiction. Asch had theories about the raising of children and how to maximize their potential. Clark Sr. asked Asch to help design a program so that his son would be raised scientifically.

When they found the treasure they informed the Bahamian authorities and had it sent back to New York on a bonded cargo ship. Gunter Asch had gone back to Germany over the summer, but he returned in November to assist at the birth. Afterwards he returned to Germany by commercial liner. He planned to meet the Savages in New York to help them start the training program for Clark Jr.

As the Orion was sailing to New York, it was caught in a terrible storm. The ship was literally torn apart by waves and wind. The only survivors were Hubert Robertson, Clark Senior, Clark Junior, and Ned Land. The women and the other crewmen were all lost. Hubert was able to salvage some records, but the ship's log was lost.

My sources record an incredible story, the veracity of which I cannot confirm, but I present it to you anyway. You may believe it or not. It appears that Arronaxe had baby Clark Jr. in her arms at the time that the ship broke up and she drowned in the ocean. The survivors struggled to find each other in the stormy seas for several hours. Eventually Clark Sr, Hubert and Ned were able to find a life boat and get into it. At first they could not find any other survivors including baby Clark. They feared that he had been drowned with his mother, but after dawn as the storm calmed they heard a loud wailing that sounded like a baby crying. They followed the sound and found a naked baby Clark floating on his back and screaming like a banshee. None of them believed that a baby could have survived for several hours in the cold waters of the Atlantic without dying of hypothermia. When they got him out of the water, baby Clark was hot to the touch. His body had already compensated for the cold water. They wrapped him in a woolen blanket and he slept fitfully.

They were only in the water for 32 hours when they were rescued by a ship of the US Revenue Cutter Service (the organization which was later renamed the Coast Guard in 1915). During that day in the lifeboat, the men rehearsed their story so that there would be no confusion.

In order to conceal his identity, it was decided that James would continue to use the alias of Clark Savage and that Arronaxe's real name would not be mentioned. Originally Clark Sr. was going to continue to claim Clarisse Dauphin as his wife's name, but Hubert objected. He recommended that instead, Clark Sr. should claim that Priscilla was his wife and the mother of his child. His reasoning was this. The relationship between Clark Savage and Priscilla Travis was well known and of long standing. No one knew about her relationship with Hubert. When Priscilla had gone to Europe, most people had assumed she was meeting Clark. It was far more believable that they might have gotten married than that she had married Hubert. Besides, Priscilla had a sizable family fortune of which Clark Sr could make good use. Hubert had his own fortune which was much larger and he did not need Priscilla's money. And technically, as her husband, the disposition of her estate was up to him anyway. With the ship's log gone, the survivors could say whatever they liked. Besides, this would give baby Clark one parent who was a proven American citizen so that he could be guaranteed American citizenship even if his father's identity as a British subject was ever discovered. Ned Land agreed to the deception to protect the future prospects of his grandson.

James Wilder alias "Clark Savage" took a cold hard look at what had happened in his life. His own weakness for bad companions had caused him to deceive and then kidnap his own younger brother. It also cost the life of Dr. Heidegger from the Priory School. It could also have cost the life of his younger brother. Wilder had caused great anguish to his father the Duke of Holdernesse who out of fatherly concern assisted him in escaping from England to avoid prosecution for kidnapping and murder. James' actions had most certainly cost the life of his beloved wife and it was only by the grace of God that their son had survived. This is where Clark Sr. decided that he needed to make amends for his many sins. His life was failure. He was on the run from the law and was certain that it was only a matter of time before the caught up with him. He decided that his son would be means of atonement. Young Clark Jr. would not only be raised "scientifically", but with the purpose of righting the wrongs done in the world and making it a better place. The plan would come into better focus as time went on but this is where the germ of it began.

When Gunther Asch came to America to help in Clark Jr.'s training, he likewise became a willing party to the deception about Priscilla and embraced the vision of making Clark Jr. an
übermensch. After Asch and Clark Sr. had had a falling out years later, Asch returned to Germany and eventually told the true story of Doc Savage's birth and training to German Intelligence.

So it was decided that the mother that Clark Sr. identified on baby Clark's birth certificate would be Priscilla Travis Savage who had supposedly become pregnant in the Fall during their tryst in Paris. Clark Sr. and Priscilla had been allegedly married on board the Orion by Robertson in January 1901. Priscilla was supposed to have stayed on board the yacht during her confinement and given birth on May 25th assisted by Dr. Asch. After the birth, the Orion sailed to the Caribbean. When they sailed, Hubert ostensibly brought along his French mistress, Clarisse Dauphin. With the log gone, and all the survivors in agreement, the deception was successful.

This identification allowed Clark Sr. to lay claim to the Travis estate and -- along with the money from the treasure found in the Caribbean -- it assisted him in establishing himself on Wall Street and starting the unique training program for his son.

The Fab Five: The Next Generation

2008-07-24T17:39:00.000-07:00

In his pastiche "The Mad Goblin", Philip José Farmer introduced us to the sons of Doc Caliban's aides Jocko and Porky who were his versions of Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks. These second generation aides were "Pauncho" Van Veelar and Barney Banks. The story was that their mothers had divorced Jocko and Porky and remarried. The boys had been raised by their step-fathers and taken their last names. We were told that they had served together in the Korean War which would have put them in their late teens or early twenties in 1950. They were likely born between 1928 and 1932. We were also told that they had their own "specialties" which were different from those of their fathers, but we were never told what they were.

When I read Phil's book "Tarzan Alive!" in 1972, I assumed that the characters in "The Mad Goblin" were based on actual children of Monk and Ham. In fact, this side story by Farmer made ample sense. It was very unlikely that all of Doc's aides had remained bachelors. So I decided to search for clues to whom the second generation of Doc aides could be.

"Pauncho" Van Veelar was described as tall and heavy set with an abdomen as tight with muscle as the chest of a gorilla. "Pauncho" obviously referred to his girth, but it could have been a play on words. The nickname "Pancho" is used by Mexicans as a nickname for "Francisco" or "Francis". There was one very prominent overweight character named "Frank" who was a good candidate for the real life son of Monk Mayfair and his wife Mabel (about whom we know very little). That was "Frank Cannon" the private detective about whom there was a TV series "Cannon". Cannon was a retired LAPD Detective (in fact he was once Chief of Detectives) who had a taste for gourmet foods, and luxurious living. He drove a Lincoln Continental Mark IV and fancied himself to be a lady's man. He really sounds like the son of Monk Mayfair.

My sources indicate that Monk had gotten married in the mid 1920s and he and his wife had had two children: Frank (1929) and Angelique (1930). Monk was very active in the late 20s and early 30s in his adventures with Doc and the aides. It was also the case that Monk liked the high life and often stayed out late into the night. His wife felt neglected and suspected that Andrew was cheating on her so she divorced him in 1932. Her father was a very prominent banker on Wall Street and he was able to virtually buy his daughter a divorce. Shortly there after she married a man named George Cannon from her father's firm. George adopted the two children as his own, but they still had visiting rights with Monk which he exercised when he could. George Cannon became involved in his firm's investments in California especially in the movie business and moved his family to to LA in 1937.

My sources indicate that Angelique Cannon followed in her biological father's footsteps and received a doctorate in biochemistry and another in molecular biology. Meanwhile, Frank became a policeman and eventually Chief of Detectives. He retired in 1970.

Porky's son, Barney Banks, was described as tall and thin like his father. My sources have told me that Ham Brooks had been married as a young man and had 4 sons by his first wife, two of whom joined his law firm. But they were far too old to be Barney.

I have discovered that the first Mrs. Brook, Nola, had contracted the dreaded 1918 flu which had killed millions. She did not succumb but remained very ill afterwards and died in 1920 of congestive heart failure and pneumonia. Ham Brooks was distraught. In 1925, he suffered a heart attack. During his recovery, he was assisted by a young law clerk, Dori Kravitz. The two became very close and in 1926, they were married. She became pregnant in 1929. While in labor, Dori Brooks ruptured a cerebral aneurysm and died almost instantly. Her son Bernard Anthony Brooks was delivered by emergency C-Section.

Ham was beside himself with grief. He did not think he could raise a baby by himself. His eldest Son, Barry, and his wife Ginny had been infertile up to that time. They took in little Berney and raised him as their own. As often happens in such cases, once their was a child in the house, the infertility problem vanished and Barry and Ginny Brooks had children of their own.

Berney was different from his siblings, most of whom went into law. He was always a trickster and enjoyed doing stage magic at an early age. Academically, he excelled and sought a degree in psychology. He became an expert in sensory perception and in ways of fooling the senses. His doctoral dissertation was on the perceptual and cognitive illusions used by stage magicians. He had become an amateur magician and studied with some of the great illusionists of the day. Finally, he decided to become a professional magician himself using the stage name Anthony Dorian. (There was another magician by that name and so Berney later had to change it.) His family was not immediately supportive of his choice, but Ham could see the spark of mischief in Berney's eyes and it reminded him of Dori. Ham became his strongest supporter. Eventually, under the pseudonym of Anthony Blake, he became a world renown prestidigitator and made himself a fortune.

His exploits were retold in the TV Series "The Magician".

"The Mad Goblin" does not mention any other descendants for the aides, but we know about them from other sources.

In a previous blog, I identified Long Tom Roberts with the character known as Tom Swift. In 1929, Tom Swift married his long time sweetheart Mary Nestor. We know that they had a son, Tom Swift Jr. , born in 1936 who was 18 years old in 1954 when his adventures were first published. Like his father, Tom Jr. was a brilliant inventor and adventurer. He engaged in early spaceflight experiments in the 1950s.

Tom Jr. had a sister, Sandra, who was one year younger than he. Tom and Sandy shared their father's blond hair and blue eyes. Sandy was a gifted scientist and business woman but less interested in adventure than her brother. She eventually took over the management of Swift Enterprises and turned it into a multinational conglomerate.

Renny Renwick did not have any romantic attachments in the Super Sagas. But in the Super Saga "The Ten Ton Snakes" in 1945 we were introduced to Mrs. Carter, his middle aged secretary. She was not described as a raving beauty, but she was a handsome woman who was very efficient at her job. My sources tell me that Elena Carter was the widow of Stan Carter, a construction supervisor who worked with Renny on several projects in the 1930s. Stan Carter's real name was Stavros Karras. He went by an Americanized alias because he thought his name sounded too foreign and he was afraid that it might prevent him from getting good work. He died in late 1937 in an accident during a building project that he was supervising for Renny. He was survived by his wife, Elena, and 2 small children. Renny felt responsible for his death, and tried to help Elena. She did not want to accept charity so he gave a job as his secretary. They had a brief affair in 1938 during which Elena became pregnant. Renny offered to do the right thing and marry her, but Elena was a proud woman and while she loved Renny, she was not in love with him. She declined Renny's proposal. She had their son, Damien, in 1939. Mrs. Carter continued for Renny during the 1940s and 1950s after which she retired.

Damien Carter was a bright but moody child. He was husky and had long arms and large hands from his father. Damien started boxing in Grade School and continued to box throughout the rest of his life. He preferred the nick name Danny to his real name which sounded to exotic to him. He was a Golden Gloves Champion in the New York CYO as a High School Senior. Damien attended Regis High School which was a tuition-free institution run by the Jesuits. "Danny the Hammer" excelled in science but also got a reputation as someone you did not mess with.

He went to Georgetown University and entered the Jesuit order. When he did so, he discovered that his legal name was Karras and so he adopted it. He was technically illegitimate and so he needed a dispensation to enter the order. His biological father, Renny, paid for his education through a trust fund. Damien obtained his medical training at the Georgetown Medical School while simultaneously completing the requirements for a PhD in Clinical Psychology. This was followed with a residency in psychiatry at Johns Hopkins. Fr. Damien Karras became the official psychiatrist of the Jesuit Maryland Province.

One of his most notorious cases was an exorcism in Washington, DC which was documented in the novel"The Exorcist" by William Peter Blatty. Contrary to the ending of the novel, he did not die from the fall out the window, but he was badly injured and recuperated over several months.

There is evidence that Renny married a woman of mixed Chinese and Hawaiian extraction in the 1960s. He apparently was using the assumed name of Randall Fox at that time. This could have been a new identity that he was cultivating because his treatments with Doc Savage's Immortality Formula had made him appear to man in his late 20s.

In any case he and his wife had a daughter named Sydney who was born in Honolulu in 1965 and grew up there. Sydney's mother died in 1976 and the young girl concentrated heavily on her studies. She eventually became a renowned archaeologist and anthropologist who specialized in finding lost artifacts. She was also an expert martial artist. Her adventures were chronicled in the TV series "Relic Hunter".

Johnny Littlejohn was a consummate academic and continued doing intelligence work for the US Government well into the 1950s. He was the least like of the five to actually get married. But in 1939, he met a feisty lady reporter named Theresa 'Torchy' Blaine who was trying to do an expose on Doc Savage. She and Johnny became involved in a mystery which has not yet been chronicled. Torchy Blaine was a pretty strawberry blond who had a police detective boyfriend Steve McBride who wanted her to settle down and be a conventional house wife. There was quite a lot of pressure on women in those days to do so and to fore go a career outside the home. Torchy loved McBride, but she was not the 'settling down' type.

Johnny found Torchy to be an interesting and intelligent woman who was making her own way in a man's world. It was her unconventional approach to life that attracted him. She was very knowledgeable in politics and had done some overseas correspondent work. He found that there were depths to this woman that no one else had appreciated. Doc and the boys thought she was a little flashy for Johnny and they thought it would be just a brief infatuation.

Torchy was flattered that such an erudite man would take an interest in her. He treated her like a colleague and an intellectual equal. She also found that he needed to loosen up a bit and she introduced him to the Coney Island Cyclone, the Cotton Club, Jitterbug, and Nathan's Famous.

They were a very unlikely couple, but somehow they worked. The two were married in 1940 in a private ceremony attended only by their closest friends. Doc, Pat, and the Boys were there. Steve McBride even attended.

Their early married years found them both pursuing their separate careers but linking up periodically for brief trysts. They wrote and phoned each other as often as they could. Even so in that first year, Torchy became pregnant and had a son they named Laurence. In 1941, she became pregnant again and this time had a pair of twin sons. The boys in those first few years were raised primarily by a governess.

Just before Pearl Harbor, Torchy was promoted to city editor and she had a more regular schedule. She and Johnny had a girl in 1942 they named Mathilda. Torchy identified much more with her daughter than with her sons and spent much more time with her. Mathilda became feisty and unconventional very much like her mother. Meanwhile her brothers were very stuffy and highbrow. All three of them became rather conventional Harvard trained lawyers.

Mathilda Littlejohn was an exceptional child. She was tall - over six feet - lanky, and muscular with green eyes, fire-red hair and a strong independent personality. She was considered a Tom Boy as a child but was actually very athletic and excelled at various sports as well as track and field. Because of her height, and long reach she took up fencing and was rated nationally in all three of the major sport weapons: the Épée, the Foil, and the Sabre. She also took up archery and was one of the few women of her time to master the English longbow.

Academically, Mathilda showed a penchant for literature and history. She entered undergraduate training at age 14 and started graduate studies at 17. She earned a PhD in English literature and eventually completed another PhD in European History. Linguistics was also one of her hobbies and she has earned a Masters in that field. Like father like daughter.

Mathilda became an instructor in the English Department at Columbia University in New York. Eventually, she was awarded a full professorship. She has been very active in women's causes.

She was one of the first women to shatter the 'glass ceiling' in the tenured world of the American University. She also has been an amateur sleuth involved in solving mysteries mostly in an academic setting.

Some of her cases have been chronicled by a fellow feminist academic, Carolyn Gold Heilbrun writing under the pseudonym Amanda Cross. Because of the controversial nature of these cases, Prof. Heilbrun changed the names of the participants to avoid legal problems. She also used the alias of "Kate Fansler" for Mathilda Littlejohn. The first "Kate Fansler" story (In the Last Analysis) was chronicled in 1964 depicting a story about Mathilda when she was a 22 year-old graduate student.

It should be noted that Mathilda eventually married a district attorney who figured prominently in her adventures. His name in Prof. Heilbrun's narratives was given as Reed Amhearst. My sources indicate that he is in reality Arthur Branch, the conservative Republican DA depicted on the Law and Order TV Series.

Branch was originally from Georgia and graduated from Yale University Law School. His first job was as a public defender in New York City and then he later became an assistant DA. He and Mathilda had met while he was a PD when she had been arrested during a college demonstration. They were lovers for a brief time, but eventually this evolved into a friendship. Arthur was always interested in academic law and published several articles during his tenure as an ADA. He also took additional graduate courses at NYU and was awarded an academic doctorate in Law.

In 1970, he was offered a position at Yale Law School. Within 10 years he was an associate Professor. When he was not offered a full professorship, he returned to New York and was hired as a special prosecutor in the early 1980s.

During his time at Yale, Arthur maintained his contacts in the New York DA's office and was often hired as a consultant by them. He maintained a platonic friendship with Mathilda and she often called him for help in some of her adventures.

In 1973, Arthur married a childhood friend, Lillian Matlock, whose brother was a famous criminal lawyer in Atlanta. They had one son, Robert, and two grandchildren, a boy and a girl. Lillian died in a tragic car accident just one year after their coming to New York.

Arthur Branch married Mathilda Littlejohn after a brief courtship. She did not take his name nor does she wear a wedding ring. Arthur does wear his wedding ring proudly.

The Secrets of "The Land of Always Night"

2008-05-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

A mysterious pale complected stranger named Ool with watery blue eyes, a black cape and an odd accent stalked New York City. The stranger used a fluttering motion of his hand to bring sudden death! He was searching for a pair of thick black-lensed goggles which were the key to finding a hidden realm under the frozen north where giant mushrooms grew and all manner of strange fungi.

In solving this mystery, Doc and his crew found a lost civilization that had gone underground thousands of years ago. These people had adapted to life underground and were technologically advanced. There sole source of light is strange device that makes the air itself glow but it can only be seen using the black lensed goggles. The primary source of food for him these people were fungi and fish.

Who were these people and how was it that they had adapted to living in a land where it is always night?

Several of the Doc Savage Super Sagas describe lost human races that had gone underground thousands of years ago to avoid some great catastrophe. The discovery of the city of Taz in the Super Saga "The Mystery Under the Sea" points to a technologically superior civilization that once existed in a sunken land in the Atlantic Ocean which led to the fabled story of Atlantis.

The strange pale people of the Land of Always Night must have been a colony from that same culture which went underground to avoid whatever destroyed Taz. This was a radical solution since it meant that they had to live in total darkness. Whatever they were fleeing must have been truly monstrous.

Of necessity, these refugees needed to make a number of adaptations, including genetic ones in order to survive. To begin with, they lost most of their skin pigmentation since they did not need protection for the sun's ultraviolet rays. But as a consequence, they could not use sunlight to manufacture Vitamin D3 which is generated by UVB rays in surface people. Furthermore, they had no good sources of Vitamin A, Vitamin C, Retinoids, and other nutrients which only come from green plants.

Then there were the vision problems. In a world with no high-output light source, vision would be practically useless and the "glowing air" device they had was decidedly unreliable in moist air as the Super Saga showed. Color vision especially requires much higher levels of ambient light than one finds underground. The goggles only enhanced light and dark vision and did not distinguish color.

The goggles themselves used photomultiplier technology and they were not merely crystal filters as the Super Saga implies. The power source was a small nuclear reactor that used a high yield radioactive isotope. The radiation was contained by a light-weight ceramic material.

According to my sources, the true capabilities of the Night People were not disclosed in the Super Saga to prevent a panic. For a variety of reasons, these people preferred to remain in their underground world and it is a good thing that they did!

I have discovered that the Night People were an artificially enhanced client race that the Taz civilization had developed to perform tasks such as mining and manufacturing in the depths of the Earth. They also were apparently granted abilities to make them effective underground soldiers to counter a threat from an underground source. One may speculate that the Night People were put in place to prevent the incursion of the underground realm of XINAIÁN into Taz's territories. the story of the XINAIÁN realm has been told in the Story "The Mound" by Zealia Bishop and H. P. Lovecraft.

In order for them to function effectively underground, the Night People had been given several anatomic and physiological endowments. First of all their livers had been enlarged and were capable of synthesizing several biologically important substances that surface people must obtain from vegetable sources including Vitamin C, Biotin, Vitamin A and a host of retinoids and bioflavinoids.

They had a particular enzyme system derived from sulfur-reducing bacteria that was capable of actively generating 2-carbon fragments from carbon dioxide and synthesizing sugars in a manner similar to photosynthesis but in the absence of sunlight. This same system activated Vitamin D3 as well without light. This process generally used sulfur as the terminal electron acceptor, but could use other molecules including sulfite, thiosulfate, acetonitrile, and even oxygen as the terminal electron receptors. The other sulfur-containing substrates are not very efficient, acetonitrile produces hydrogen cyanide which is toxic, and oxygen is frankly damaging to the organelle that houses the enzyme system if it is used for very long. For this reason while they can use othere compounds for short periods of time, elemental sulfur is a requirement in the Night People's diet to maintain optimum health. There was quite a bit of sulfur in their underground realm and this allowed the Night People to survive on a diet that would be substandard for surface people.

Sulfur was the most common material used in this process. This generated hydrogen sulfide which gives the Night People and their realm the distinct odor of 'rotten eggs.' Hydrogen sulfide is highly toxic and is chemically very similar to hydrogen cyanide. As a consequence, the Night People are very tolerant of both of these poisonous chemicals. The same protective mecahnisms also make them resistant to carbon Monoxide too. Nevertheless too much of any of these three chemicals can be fatal even to them. Trying to survive for too long on a substandard diet may result in auto-intoxication for them. They have several pathways to detoxify hydrogen sulfide including the synthesis of the essential amino acids cysteine and methionine both of which contain sulfur. There are also bacteria in the the intestines of Night People which can oxidise hydrogen sulfide to elemental sulfur and sulfates.

Sulfoplast

The capability to use sulfur to power chemical syntheses is present in intracellular organelles called sulfoplasts. These are similar in size and design to the mitochondria in eukaryote cells that use oxygen to generate cellular energy and the chloroplasts in plants in which photosynthesis occurs. The sulfoplast has its own DNA and protein synthesis system that uses unique ribosomes unlike those used in the main cytoplasm of the cell.

Night People also have been given enhanced retinal sensitivity to light and dark with a greater density of rods in the central area of the macula and a relative paucity of cones compared to the eyes of surface people. Consequently, their color vision is less sensitive than ours, but their night vision is extraordinary. The sensitivity of the rods has been shifted deeper into the infrared as well to improve thier vision. Their irises and pupils are enlarged compared to that of surface dwellers to let in more light.

Their eyes have also been designed to be "inside out" when compared to that of surface dwellers. (It is rumored that this is an extremely rare genetic variation among surface humans as well.) The human eye normally sends the optic nerve inside the eye and then spreads out to form the retina. Where the nerve enters the eye is a physiological "blind spot" which we normally suppress so that it is unnoticeable. The Night People form the retina from behind like the Octopus.

HUMAN EYE vs NIGHT PERSON'S EYE

The macula in surface people is insensitive to light and dark but highly sensitive to color. It is the most central part of our visual field and is necessary for reading and fine detail vision. At night we have two blind spots in each eye including one at each macula! But the Night People because of the way their eye is constructed have no blind spot at all.

The Night People have also inherited the ability to generate large amounts of electrical voltage in their bodies that can further increase the sensitivity of the retina. It allowed them to boost their vision in the same way that night vision goggles do using a photomultiplier effect. It also gave them a kind of "Radar Sense" that allowed them to perceive nearby objects in the dark using capacitance and radiowave projection.

The photo-multiplier ability fades with age as the eye becomes less sensitive to light. The power to generate electircal potential also decreases with age. That is the reason why the Night People developed the goggles which figure so prominently in the Super Saga. Ordinary young and middle aged people are able to see the "glowing air" effect with their naked eyes and have some limited color vision which makes the world look like a pastel-colored sepia photo. But the villain, Ool, (who was an older man) could not see the "glowing air" reliably. That is why he had the set of goggles with him when he escaped. Even so, he still had the ability to generate an electrical field sufficient to shock a surface dweller.

This ability to generate electricity is similar to that of the electric eels and a full sized adult male Night Person could generate a hefty shock which could be used as an offensive weapon. About one Night Person in a hundred is an adept who has an even greater electrical power which could generate potentially lethal shocks over short distances even though there was no direct contact with the victim. This power can be enhanced by selective mating of adepts with each other, but the Night People's government forbade the interbreeding of adepts except under a specific license. The adepts are automatically trained for the police and the military, but they are forbidden to be members of the ruling class. Any adept born into a noble family must renounce his or her claim to any title.

Other genetic differences included enhanced senses of smell, taste, touch, and hearing which use a similar electrical multiplier mechanism to the one that enhances their vision. The ears of the Night People are slightly larger than ours and their heads are wider to separate the ears more and enhance their ability to detect and localize sounds and echoes. Night People have a sensitivity to ultrasonic frequencies slightly better than that of dogs but not anywhere near that of bats. In the dark they can navigate by sound alone.

They also have longer more sensitive fingers and toes than surface people. Their skin contains light sensitive cells which gives them enhanced Dermo-Optical Perception. They are able to detect light and dark (and even some color) using these skin receptors in low-intensity light. Using this talent they could read the words in a book under starlight using their finger tips.

While vision remains the dominant sense for these people, hearing is a close second and the structure of their brains reflects this with enlargement of the auditory cortices. They also have enhanced spatial orientation skills. But their bodies are designed to move slowly and carefully in the dark and they cannot run for long distances. But they are great climbers and have a powerful grip in their fingers and toes.

Since the Night People's diet is primarily fish and fungi, it is low in carbohydrates and saturated fats. They have relative glucose intolerance and can become diabetic on some normal surface dweller's diets. Ool was quite smitten with chocolate candies on his first trip to the surface. He did not realize that even though they tasted good, for his race they were not a healthy food. A moderate amount of roughage may give them intestinal cramps and even constipation. They also can be overdosed with fat soluble vitamins from dietary sources because these are synthesized in their liver. And the saturated fats from red meats can cause premature cholesterol plaque formation and accelerated atherosclerosis. A well balanced diet can keep the production of hydrogen sulfide to a minimum and decrease the "rotten egg" odor to a point where it is not noticieable by surface dwellers.

Night People are very sensitive to light. They are virtually blind in direct sunlight and will get sunburned easily. Their skin does contain some melanin because it enhances the ability of their radar sense to detect the presence of other people. Some few Night People have a melanin content which approaches that of fair-haired Scandinavians.

Because they are so well suited to their underground environment, the Night People are happy to remain where they are. But now that Ool has escaped and found that the upper world is inhabitable, we should not be surprised if some Night People may venture forth into our world for either befeficent or nefarious reasons.

The Secret of the Mental Wizard and of "Klantic"

2008-03-25T09:24:00.000-07:00

The South American adventure entitled "The Mental Wizard" was first published in March of 1937. Doc and his crew discovered an exotic woman named "Z" whose every strand of hair has been coated with pure gold! Furthermore, this woman had a genius IQ, could read minds, project emotions, and even cause visual hallucinations.

We discover that she is a Princess from a lost colony of Egyptians who live in an underground city in the Amazon Basin. Their ancestors allegedly came across the Atlantic Ocean before the reign of King Tut led by the Pharaoh Klantic who had discovered the secret of incredible mental powers. They had created an underground city in the southern side of the Amazon inside a mile-long statue of Klantic himself. Any visitors to this lost Egyptian world were not allowed to leave. The ruling family was descended from Klantic himself and Z was the last of her line. The people in the lost city waited anxiously for Klantic to return them.

During her brief trip to the outside world, Z taught herself English and astounded Doc by reading technical journals with incredible ease. She also could read the thoughts of those around her. At one point when she felt that Doc and his men were being ambivalent, she was able to use her powers to make them all fall in love with her simultaneously. But of course, her eyes were really on Doc!

Supposedly, the secret of her powers was a reddish dust that was stored in the temple of the city and which she had ingested during her childhood. Monk Mayfair tried it and all it did was give him indigestion. Meanwhile he began to analyze the powder but we never learned its secret.

During their sojourn in the city, Doc Savage was able to 'prove' to the populace that he was actually Klantic who had returned to his people. While he was there, the people feasted and Doc did not catch on until they were half-way through that it was a wedding ritual for him and Z.

The mystery of Z and her powers was never solved in the story. It was assumed that she inherited them genetically and that there was no way to induce such powers in others.

Recent information has come to light concerning the actual identity of "Klantic". It seems that the time when Klantic and his people fled Egypt was right after the events recorded in the Book of Exodus in the Bible. The Pharaoh at that time was Ramses II who had many sons by many wives and concubines. One of his sons Khalfani Kek (meaning "the dark Lord Kek shall rule") became a priest and a wizard. It was he and his fellow wizards who did battle with Moses in Pharaoh's court in Exodus:

Exd 7:8
And the LORD said to Moses and Aaron,
Exd 7:9
"When Pharaoh says to you, 'Prove yourselves by working a
miracle,' then you shall say to Aaron, 'Take your rod and cast it down before
Pharaoh, that it may become a serpent.'"
Exd 7:10
So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did as the LORD
commanded; Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh and his servants, and it
became a serpent.
Exd 7:11
Then Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers;
and they also, the magicians of Egypt, did the same by their secret arts.
Exd 7:12
For every man cast down his rod, and they became
serpents. But Aaron's rod swallowed up their rods.

Exd 7:20
Moses and Aaron did as the LORD commanded; in the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants, he lifted up the rod and struck the water that was in the Nile, and all the water that was in the Nile turned to blood.
Exd 7:21
And the fish in the Nile died; and the Nile became foul, so that the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile; and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt.
Exd 7:22
But the magicians of Egypt did the same by their secret arts; so Pharaoh's heart remained hardened, and he would not listen to them; as the LORD had said.

Exd 8:6
So Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt; and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt.
Exd 8:7
But the magicians did the same by their secret arts, and brought frogs upon the land of Egypt.

Exd 8:16
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Say to Aaron, 'Stretch out your rod and strike the dust of the earth, that it may become gnats throughout all the land of Egypt.'"
Exd 8:17
And they did so; Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and struck the dust of the earth, and there came gnats on man and beast; all the dust of the earth became gnats throughout all the land of Egypt.
Exd 8:18
The magicians tried by their secret arts to bring forth gnats, but they could not. So there were gnats on man and beast.

We can see that according to the biblical account, the Egyptian magicians had true powers and up to a point they were able to match their power against Moses and Aaron. Eventually though Moses and Aaron were able to perform feats that they could not duplicate and so the magicians failed which led to a disastrous defeat for Ramses. In his anger the Pharaoh banished his son, Khalfani Kek and his entire retinue of priests from Egypt. When he did so, they took the secret of their arcane arts with them and -- using their powers -- sought refuge from Ramses wrath on the other side of the world. The name "Klantic" is just a corruption of "Khalfani Kek."

We know that in Alexandria Egypt there were ancient adepts known as the Alchemists who used a form of gold in a white powder that was known as 'mfkzt' or the Paradise Stone. This powder was used to make conical cakes that were ingested by the Pharaohs. It was revered as nourishment of the 'light body' (the ka) and was said to increase general aptitudes of leadership, such as awareness, perception and intuition. It was also thought to increase longevity. There was a fabled "Elixir of Life" made from this gold by the alchemists which purportedly had the ability to restore youth and perfect health. There is also the rumor of a hidden civilization where a form of gold turned human blood a golden color and granted longevity. (See the story "Golden Blood" by Jack Williamson.)

This white 'mfkzt' powder has been identified with an allotrope of gold known as m-state gold. M-state elements are a unique form of gold and other transitional metals such as silver, platinum, iridium, copper, and rhodium which are much more biologically active than their metallic form.

A mono-atomic element is not the same as a colloid. Colloidals are still in metallic cluster form, albeit in very small clusters. A colloidal element is one with a particle size so small that it will not settle out but remains evenly and semi-permanently suspended in water. However, a colloid is still in its metallic state, and exhibits the normal chemical properties of that metal.

In m-state, atoms have their electrons paired up into what are called "Cooper pairs". These Cooper paired electrons are not available as valence electrons and therefore do not form molecular bonds. An atom must have the ability to bond to other atoms of the same element in order to be metallic. Cooper pairing is one of the prerequisites of superconductivity, and in their m-state form, transitional elements are generally superconductive. While physicists have been searching for many years for room temperature superconductors, biologists have known for a long time that superconductive effects can be seen in living organisms.

Cooper pairing and superconductivity are generally properties associated with Bose-Einstein Condensates or BECs. BECs are substances which are composed of many atoms but which behave as a single atom. The common current belief among physicists is that BECs cannot exist at temperatures much higher than absolute zero or in a superconductive matrix structure. However, m-state elements may be the exception to this rule.

The Cooper-pairing of the electrons in these atoms or di-atoms seems to create a Meissner effect around each atom/diatom unit. This Meissner field provides a non-local quantum connection between other nearby m-state units so that together they exhibit behavior which follows the rules of quantum mechanics. If you have a great number of these mono-atom/di-atom units they can exhibit quantum physical behavior at classical physics scales. M-state elements may function within organisms by facilitating communication between cells, and are especially abundant within brain tissue. Some assays done on pig and calf brains showed that they contained 2.5% iridium and rhodium by weight.

The reddish powder that was stored in the temple of Klantic may have been a stable form of transitional metals -- mostly composed of gold -- in a form in which it could easily be converted to the m-state by secret chemical processes. We already know that the Klantic scientists could manipulate gold in a way that is not possible for us even today. Even in the 21st Century, we are not able to coat individual human hairs in pure gold.

What Z had received in small amounts over her entire life had been specially prepared conical cakes of m-state forms of gold and other metals which were incorporated into her growing brain tissue. As she grew up, she was instructed in techniques and disciplines to make the best use of this m-state matrix within her central nervous system. This then was the source of her extraordinary mental powers.

The secret of this process was lost to the Old World when Ramses banished the failed priests and sorcerers from Egypt and for centuries alchemists in east and west have tried to recover it. But the real secret had gone across the Atlantic Ocean and had hidden itself in the jungle awaiting a time when the secrets would once again be of use to the world.

One wonders if this m-state gold may have also been responsible for the intelligence enhancing formula from the Super Saga The Too-Wise Owl published in March of 1942.

Now, Doc Savage has become heir to these secrets which he had not yet revealed to the world. It appears that he may have used the m-form of gold in his longevity formula. What else does he plan to do with these secrets?

Ham Brooks' Law Firm

2008-02-26T09:25:00.000-08:00

We have known for quite sometime that Ham was a member of a law firm with partners. This was mentioned in the movie Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. There also was a mention of this in the Prince Zarkon story Invisible Death by Lin Carter. Carter actually names the partners himself: Drew, Van Dusen, and Rummel. In this article we will explore the identity of these men who worked so closely with Ham Brooks.

Carson Drew

Carson Drew was the father of the teenage detective Nancy Drew. He had brown hair and blue eyes. He was originally from the small town of River Heights, Illinois. He was a widower in the 1930s and apparently had been a classmate of Ham Brooks at Harvard Law School. The books say that he was a graduate of "Hale University." I assume this meant that he attended Yale as an undergraduate and went on to Harvard for law.

His wife, Mildred Austin Drew, had died in 1914 when their daughter Nancy had been only three years old. Carson and Ham had gone into partnership in 1906 after Ham started his own law firm. During the Great War when Ham Brooks went into the French Foreign Legion, Carson Drew managed the practice for him. In the next decade Carson made a small fortune which remarkably survived the Stock Market Crash in 1929. In 1930, he retired and moved back to his home town, River Heights in Illinois. Carson opened up a small law office there to keep himself busy. The Drews got a dog name Togo and bought a three story brick house.

Carson Drew shared several cases with his daughter, Nancy. Father and daughter worked well together as a team. This relationship would would prove mutually beneficial and set Nancy on the course of her future career.

Carson's sister Eloise who had moved to New York with them initially was a teacher in a private school in New York City. She maintained an apartment in Manhattan and Nancy often went to the city to visit her. The Drews had a housekeeper, Hannah Gruen, who was an excellent cook and a staunch church-goer. She became a mother-figure to Nancy after the death of her mother. Hannah was constantly worried about Nancy and her father but they were both survivors and could take care of themselves.

Life in River Heights got boring for Carson, and when Nancy started college at age 20, Carson rejoined his old firm. It was noted in some of the stories that the town of River Heights was "not too far from New York City" and not in Illinois. This anomaly has been noted by several commentators. You can't have it both ways. The town of River Heights in the first Nancy Drew stories must have been in Illinois. There is a River Heights in New York State and it is possible that when Carson Drew rejoined his old law firm, he moved his family there out of sentiment for his home town. It should be noted that the cast of Nancy's friends changed in the later stories. This may have reflected the new location in New York.

Nancy followed in her father's footsteps and went to law school. She did a clerkship at her father's firm and eventually joined it. She married her long time boy friend, Ned Nickerson but kept her own name for business purposes. Their daughter, Nancy, was precocious like her mother and many of the "Nancy Drew" Stories from the 1950s and later were really about her.

Professor Van Dusen

Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S., M.D., M.D.S. (and several other degrees from France, England, Russia, Germany, Italy, Sweden and Spain) was a brilliant detective and polymath. He graduated from college at the age of 10! He had degrees in Physical Chemistry, Philosophy, Law, and Medicine, among others.

He was the youngest man ever to have held a chair in philosophy at Harvard but was asked to leave over his presentation of a startling and unorthodox hypothesis. Just a few weeks later he saved the life of the Assistant Dean of the Harvard Law School. (See the story My First Experience With the Great Logician.) The Dean was so impressed with his logical reasoning that he took an interest in the young academic. That was when Augustus turned his sights on the law and received in succession an LLB and an LLD from Harvard Law School. It was during these studies that he met Ham Brooks. Prof. Van Dusen cultivated an international reputation in several fields, but especially forensic investigation. He was inducted into the Royal Society of London as a Fellow under the sponsorship of his friend and colleague, Sherlock Holmes.

Van Dusen became another partner of Ham Brooks. Originally from Boston, he too was a classmate of Ham Brooks at Harvard and joined the firm after the Great War. He was a small, thin man with a huge head and a bulbous, protruding forehead; his hat size was 8. He has sparse straw-colored hair and darting, intelligent blue eyes which sat behind thick glasses. His face was white with the pallor of the student; his mouth was a bloodless slit. He was the typical obsessed academic who was constantly consumed with his various researches and had little or no social graces. He is described as being petulant, irascible, and bad-tempered.

He had had a teaching post at Harvard as a Full Professor in the Law School. He also did lecturing in other fields including Medicine, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy. He retired early from his post in 1919 after twenty years cumulative years teaching at Harvard. He was not a very popular lecturer and the students began to annoy him. But every student that took his courses (especially his course on criminal law) admitted that the grilling he gave them stood them in good stead in their later professional careers. He was far more popular with the alumni than with the student body.

While theirs was primarily a business law firm, Brooks and his partners occasionally handled criminal cases especially when the crimes occurred on the premises of their clients. They also handled malpractice cases and some technical cases that required a knowledge of Chemistry and Physics. Van Dusen helped investigate crimes at the client companies and was particularly good at detecting embezzlement and other white collar crimes. He also did much private consulting work as well. It was his preternatural insight with regard to client choice and investments during the 1920s that made the firm as wealthy and powerful as it became. He was well aware of the problems in the Stock Market long before October 1929. He tried hard to get reforms enacted but was unsuccessful. Happily, his keen insights helped to preserve the fortunes of his partners and their clients through the Great Depression.

Known as "The Thinking Machine", Van Dusen was a very methodical and exacting investigator. He had earned his nickname from a disgruntled Russian Chess Master whom he beat using pure brute-force reasoning after studying the rules of chess for less than a day. His legal briefs were succinct yet comprehensive and accurate. His contracts had no loop holes and he never missed a trick. He was merciless on depositions and cross examinations. Sadly, he did not have much rapport with the jury, so many times others did the final summations for him. He was neither the heart or soul of the firm, but its methodical brain.

Beau Rummell

Beau Rummell, lawyer and one-time partner of private detective Ellery Queen, was a wealthy, personable fellow who was the true front-man for the firm. He was quick with a joke and was every man's best friend. He also had a dazzling way with the ladies. He joined the firm in the late 1920s after finishing law school and just before Carson Drew retired. Ham Brooks saw that he was a natural people person which was something his other partner lacked. Rummell had been the co-founder of Ellery Queen's detective agency. He came to Ham's attention during the case known as The Dragon's Teeth. Beau was a bit of a maverick, but his flourish and style complimented the quiet dignity of Ham Brooks and the arid intellectuality of Prof. Van Dusen. And he kept the clients happy.

As Ham became more involved with Doc's work, he began to spend less time with the firm. His two sons eventually came on board (as would Nancy Drew-Nickerson at the end of the decade). But the firm needed a real leader to fill in for Ham during his absences. Neither Van Dusen nor Rummell really could do the job. Luckily, at that point, Carson Drew had had enough of the rural life and he returned to run the firm.

Under Carson Drew's mentoring, Rummell was able to focus his energies and he turned into a very fine lawyer. He was eventually offered a junior partnership in the late 1930s. Meanwhile, the firm often called on Ellery Queen to do investigative leg work in the same way that Perry Mason used to call on Paul Drake.

So this was the roster of the law firm Brooks, Drew, Van Dusen, and Rummell, attorneys at law.

More of Sun Koh's Crew

2008-01-02T18:58:00.000-08:00

As I have learned more about the German pulp character Sun Koh, I have discovered other regular characters that occur in his stories. They are interesting and I thought people might enjoy hearing about them:

Gertrude Reinhardt née Shumann is the middle aged secretary who is the office manager for Sun Koh's offices on Friedrichstraß in Berlin. She is the daughter of an Admiral and the widow of a battleship captain. She had worked as a government secretary for 20 years when she started working for Sun Koh. She had four sons and two daughters. Her sons each went into a different military service: the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and Military Intelligence. Her two daughters married military officers as well. Gertrude had the highest possible security clearance for a civilian civil servant. She also had no sense of humor and a frown that could turn a basilisk to stone. She ran a tight ship and could be trusted to hold down the fort in a crisis. On her desk she kept pencils in a pewter stein that her husband always took with him on his ships in the Great War. She also had a human skull with the top of the cramium removed in which she kept black-and-red wax wrapped sweets. These sweets had a smoked caramel center surrounded by dark bitter chocolate. To say the least they were an acquired taste. In her desk drawer she kept her father's old Mauser C96 "Broomhandle" pistol. It was one of the 9x25mm Mauser versions of this classic pistol from World War I configured for full automatic operation and designed to use ammunition magazines of different capacities. Gertrude prided herself on her ability to fire the weapon accurately even on full automatic. She carried it with her going back and forth to work everyday. In 1930s Berlin, a girl could not be too careful!

Mordechai Absolam Jonathan aka Jack Holigan aka Rapier X aka Nimba was an Afro-American who had served in the US Army during the Great War and had been awarded the Croix de Guerre. His father had been a professor at Tuskegee Institute. Mordechai was the 'black sheep' of the family and ran away to New York to earn a living as a boxer under the alias Jack Holigan. He ran a foul of the mob when he refused to take a dive. To escape them he volunteered for the US Army to fight in World War I. He was attached to a French Army unit and fought with distinction. Despite his decoration, he could not find a decent job after the war and the mob was still looking for him, so he went out west as a cowboy. He carried a stiletto which he had obtained in France and used it in knife fights to kill his opponents. He was forced to flee the US and went to work in Canada under the alias Rapier X. He was rescued from captivity there by Sun Koh and brought back to Europe. Mordechai was a heavy weight boxer and remained undefeated, winning every professional bout with a knock out. He was also an expert swords man whose preferred weapons were the rapier and the stiletto. In gratitude for services rendered, Sun Koh gave him a small fortune with which Mordechai purchased a club in Paris which he named Au Coeur des Ténèbres (The Heart of Darkness). In the War between Italy and Ethiopia, Mordechai fought for the Ethiopian side under the pseudonym 'Nimba" and wore bullet-proof body armor.

Hal Mervin is the bellhop in the Hotel Adlon Berlin where Sun Koh keeps a suite. He was born in 1917 and was only 17 years old when he met Sun Koh in 1934. His father had died during the Great War and his mother had to raise him by herself. She eventually was forced into prostitution and Hal had to fend for himself much of the time. She died in 1933 under violent circumstances probably at the hands of SA thugs meting out vigilante justice. He is street-smart, self-reliant, and very observant. Hal has the uncanny ability to anticipate people's needs before they ask for anything and this makes him an excellent bellhop. He eventually becomes Sun Koh's personal valet and teen aged side-kick. Sun Koh becomes the Father he never had and personally supervised his education.

Gretchen Schulman is Rolf 'Schreck' Karsten's 'Gal Friday. ' She is the best documentary researcher in Germany and probably in western Europe. Gretchen is a petite blond with a smashing figure who dresses in a way that shows off her figure without appearing cheap. She keeps her blond hair in a large puffy hair-do that floats around her head like a cloud. She has a musical voice and is very conscious of the way people (especially men) perceive her. She is able to get the crustiest document guardian to let her "just take a peek." She exudes sexuality but is morally very conventional. She has been married and divorced twice and is Schreck's on-again/off-again lover. Hal Mervin has a boyhood crush on her. Even Sun Koh finds her very attractive.

One of the few men in the world who can stand toe to toe with Sun Koh on technical matters was Dr. Ildefons Peters a brilliant though eccentric scientist from the University of Heidelburg who was so far ahead of his time that he was dismissed by his colleagues as a crackpot. His brother was Col. Roch Peters of the Bavarian Staatspolizei. He was the typical obsessed polymath researcher who routinely had brilliant insights which advanced the fields of physics, chemistry and engineering without any effort. He eventually becomes a valued member of the Technocrat movement that Jan Mayen headed and moved to their secret island base in the Pacific.

Dr. Joan Martini is an Italian archaeologist and anthropologist who is continuing her father's life work of trying to prove the existence of Atlantis in the deep past. Her father was an archaeologist and Egyptologist from the University of Rome who looked for parallels between the Egyptian and Meso-American high cultures. Joan is also a lecturer at the university and an internationally renowned expert on Meso-American Indians and the sources of their cultures in Pre-Columbian America. She is constantly looking for any possible links between the Americas and Europe, Asia ,and Africa during ancient times. Joan is a titian-haired beauty of refined manners. She is a devout Catholic and very careful of her virtue. She is also a genius with an encyclopedic knowledge of ancient lore from both the Old and New World.

The Martinis were direct descendants of the Italian King, Victor Emmanuel II through Joan's grandmother, and so Joan was technically a Princess. Her father Albert was a staunch Fascist in the 1930s who had previously been a Freemason who dabbled in the occult. Joan disagreed with her father's politics and his anticlericalism, but she was convinced that he was right about the links between the Old and New World.

She met Sun Koh during a hunt for a a lost city in the Amazon Basin. Sun Koh was captivated by her beauty and her intelligence as well as her virtue. She was the first modern woman of royal lineage that he found worthy of his attentions. This created an interesting triangle between Sun Koh, his consort Shani, and Princess Joan.

In What Years were Pat Savage and the Five Aides Born?

2007-11-30T00:12:00.000-08:00

This represents an interesting problem. There are no clear indications in the Super Sagas or in Dent's notes as to the ages of Pat Savage or the Five Aides. People have speculated about this but in many cases I think they have severely underestimated the men's ages. This was considered necessary because otherwise the Crew would have been a bunch of old men in the 1930s and 1940s.

But I think that we have to assign them ages that are commensurate with their professional accomplishments,and with their military ranks during and at the end of the Great War in the Super Sagas and in Phillip José Farmer's Escape from Loki. It is our assumption that since all of Doc's men are the tops in their fields, they have obtained the highest academic credentials which would mean doctorates. That would require a total of at least 8 years of graduate and post-graduate training if not more. It would also take several years to build up a reputation and establish oneself in one's chosen discipline. If we assume that they entered college at the age of 16-18 years old, they would have had to have been at least 29-35 years of age in 1918 during the Great War. (Long Tom is the sole exception to this rule. He was a few years younger for reasons I will explain shortly.) That means that in 1931 when the storyline of the Super Sagas actually began, each of the four other aides would need to be a minimum of 42 years old and probably more like 45-50 years of age if not older. That is awfully long in the tooth to be going around chasing bad guys and getting coshed in the head regularly as Monk did. This is especially true in 1933 when medicine was not as advanced as it is today and lifestyle interventions for chronic disease were limited to rest or exercise or a very few medicines. Age would have caught up with these guys a lot faster than it does today.

We avoid the aging problems by acknowledging (as I did in my article on Monja F'Teema ) that in 1925, Clark Sr. had developed an anti-aging elixir which he shared with his son and eventually with his son's companions. This makes it possible for us to accept ages for the Fab Five that would otherwise be unthinkable.

Let's first deal with Patricia Savage, Doc's younger cousin. According to the consensus article on the Doc Savage Chronology at the Wold Newton Universe Website, she was born in 1914. We know she was the only daughter of Doc's uncle Alex Savage who lived on a ranch in Canada that her grandfather had founded. No mention is ever made of her mother. We first meet Pat in the Super Saga Brand of the Werewolf (January, 1934). At that time she would therefore have been 20 years old. This is a credible age for her. She is described as a young woman, not as a minor. In the subsequent Super Saga Fear Cay (September, 1934) Pat had moved to New York and opened a Beauty Salon and Spa that catered to a rich clientele. She worked at this business for the duration of the Super Sagas and was quite successful with it. It is never mentioned whether or not she became a US Citizen.

Some have speculated that she was 18 in 1934, but I do not think that is credible. She would have been too young to own a business and would more likely have gone to college instead. As it stands, we must assume that she had already attended College and received her degree, probably in business.

John 'Renny' Renwick was a construction engineer who had an excellent reputation prior to the Great War. In Escape from Loki, Monk recognized him at the German prison camp, Loki, in April 1918 as an old drinking buddy with whom he had built a chemical plant in Brazil a few years before the war. At Loki, Renny was a Captain in the Army Corp of Engineers. We know by the end of the year (i.e., after November 11, 1918 when the Armistice was signed) he would be discharged with the rank of full Colonel (Likely a brevet rank given so that he could fill a high level staff position). Renny was also the most accomplished marksman, driver, outdoors man, hunter, and pilot of Doc's aides. These were all skills he picked up working as an engineer in the field. (He also became the best fighter but only after Doc started instructing him in Karate techniques in later years which took advantage of his huge hands.) So I would estimate that Renny would have had to be 36 years of age in 1918 meaning that he had been born in 1882.

Thomas "Long Tom" Roberts was a First Lieutenant in the Signal Corp at Loki. Since he made Major by the end of the year (which was probably also a brevet rank) he must have been in his late 20s. In my short story Long Tom Robber (Soon to be published in Zine of Bronze #4) I tell what really happened with the 'Long Tom' cannon in that French town. I thought it was interesting that Long Tom earned his nickname not for an electronic device but for the makeshift use of an old mechanical device: a cannon. As I did my research I realized that Long Tom had not only studied with the great electronic geniuses Steinmetz and Tesla but also with Thomas Edison who was an inventor who delved into several fields including mechanical engineering. I also discovered interesting parallels between Long Tom Roberts and another famous inventive 'Tom': Tom Swift.

Tom Swift had dabbled in electronics, automotive, aeronautics, and even war devices including a "War Tank" and a "Giant Cannon." If they were the same person, it would explain why Long Tom would have felt confident enough to refurbish and use that old French cannon. He had had some prior experience with artillery. Tom Swift had some other interesting parallels with our Long Tom. They were both blond and blue eyed. They both worked on projects for the US Government before, during, and after World War I and World War II. And in 1929, Tom Swift married his sweetheart Mary Nestor. We have always read in the Super Sagas that Long Tom was a misogynist: a woman hater. While the other fellows were out chasing skirts (even Doc dated regularly in the 1940s) Long Tom was never moved by feminine pulchritude. The sole exception to this that I know of was in The Feathered Octopus (September, 1937) where Long Tom was smitten by the tall blond Valkyrie-like Lam Benbow. Even a married man is allowed a (platonic) crush now and again. But in-between, he will seem like a woman-hater when in reality he is just a woman-avoider trying to remain faithful to his spouse. Also Long Tom did not smoke or drink and neither did Tom Swift. Swift's father was plagued with lung and heart problems likely due to the common American habit of cigarette smoking. He may also have had an alcohol problem, though the Tom Swift stories do not say this. Such a problem would explain why his son would not drink alcohol. The impact of seeing what cigarettes (and alcohol?) did to his father might have made Long Tom into a non-smoking teetotaler. And the name "Swift" sounds like one of those semi-pejorative nicknames that smart kids got from the more average boys in their neighborhood.

According to the Tom Swift experts, he had been born in 1893 and would have been 25 years old in 1918. His first adventure, Tom Swift and his Motorcycle, was published in 1910 when he was 17 years old. That would also have been the right age for Long Tom by my reckoning since he was a Lieutenant at Loki in 1918. Supposedly, Swift had been home-schooled by his father to a college level with a heavy concentration in physics and mechanics. He had attended the local Public School for First Grade but the curriculum was so far behind his abilities that his father decided to teach the child himself. Tom had also been an active inventor since before he was 17, so he had started his life's work at an earlier age than the other Savage Aides. Through the social contacts of his father (who was also an inventor) he met and studied with many of the greatest American inventive minds of the time including Edison, Steinmetz, Tesla, Marconi, and Westinghouse.

Tom Swift took the entrance exams and made it into the MIT graduate division receiving credit for an undergraduate degree in physics at the age of 18. He earned his doctorate in Mechanical Engineering at the tender age of 22. He became more and more obsessed with electronics and all of its possible practical application over time. Before the Great War he had begun working on graduate studies in electronics and Electrical Engineering which he completed when he returned Stateside qualifying for a second doctorate. All of this fits our portrait of Long Tom. it also helps explain why he was not in many of the Super Sagas. He had a parallel set of adventures with his friends and family many of which have been chronicled under his boyhood nickname.

William Harper "Johnny" Littlejohn was a civilian during the Great War who was working secretly for US Army Intelligence while he was on an archaeological dig outside of Munich, Germany. He was caught in Germany after the US declared war and was interned in a civilian detention camp. He proved to be a difficult to keep imprisoned and so they sent him to the Loki camp with the incorrigible military prisoners. This was technically illegal. We are told in Escape from Loki that he had already earned a doctorate in Geology and was almost finished with a second doctorate in archaeology. Very likely he was already a full professor and had travelled to Germany during his sabbatical year to perform an archaeological dig as a requirement for his second doctorate. This would mean that he was at least seven years out from his first degree, if not longer.

It should also be noted that many intelligence agents were (and are) recruited in college as undergraduates usually during war time. For Johnny, this could have been around the turn of the century. He may have been recruited during the Spanish American War in 1898 and been an operative in Cuba. Later in 1903, the US instigated the revolution in Panama against the Colombian government which resulted in the US gaining control of the Panama Canal. It would not have been unusual for an American geologist to have been in Panama at that time and to have acted as an agent provocateur. In fact, Johnny's career as a geologist and an archaeologist would have been a good cover for traveling around the world and acting as a covert agent for Uncle Sam. We know that this was true in Germany in 1918.

So I propose that Johnny was born in 1880 and thus was 38 years old in 1918 at the time he was in Loki. By then, he was a seasoned intelligence agent with twenty years of experience in covert operations. It is to his credit that he simultaneously had a brilliant career in academia as well as a lucrative one involving the practical aspects of geology and archaeology. In fact, he had more breadth of knowledge in different areas than any other of Doc's aides. It included not only his primary areas of study but anthropology, folklore, linguistics, paleontology, religious studies, the classics, history, literature, economics, politics, and diplomacy.

Andrew Blodgett "Monk" Mayfair was an Infantry Lieutenant Colonel in 1918 at Loki. He also was a Chemist and Chemical engineer with an international reputation. He and Renny had first met on a chemical plant building project in Brazil a few years before the Great War. Some Savageologists have proposed 1894 as the birth year for Monk, but this is not credible. That would have made him only 24 in 1918 which is barely old enough to have gotten his doctorate and is not compatible with his being a renowned expert in his field before the war. It was also too young for him to have been a Lieutenant Colonel in 1918.

It has come to my attention that Monk was a member of the famous (infamous?) New Orleans Mayfair family whose history has been chronicled by author Anne Rice in her novels The Witching Hour, Lasher, and Taltos. These Mayfairs had a high degree of psychic ability which might explain Monk's telepathic capabilities in the 1930s. He and Ham were sometimes able to exchange thoughts even over long distances. [See for example The Mountain Monster (1937).] It might also explain his facility with chemistry which is just another way of concocting useful potions. Such things were in his blood.

I noted that in The Witching Hour there was a curious story. In 1888, Julien Mayfair took his niece (who was likely also his daughter) Mary Beth Monahan on a trip to Europe. Mary Beth was described as a large stocky woman with coarse features who could pass for a man in middle age. While in Scotland that year, she allegedly married a 'Lord Mayfair' who was a distant relative and was impregnated by him. There was never any documentation of such a marriage and the stories about their time in Scotland were full of contradictions. The alleged 'Lord Mayfair' supposedly died under mysterious circumstances shortly after he impregnated Mary Beth. Mary Beth had a child, Belle, in Scotland in 1889. In Lasher, the ghost of Julien says to Michael Curry that Mary Beth went out nightly to local drinking places and one morning returned saying that she had chosen a man and gotten herself pregnant by him the previous night. (As a witch, I supposed she had knowledge of such things.) But the ghost of Julien admitted that he often told plausible lies to cover up family problems. The Talamasca scholars who chronicled this incident thought that Belle was sired incestuously by Julien, but no one in the family believed that. I have a different proposal.

In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson published his classic horror novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in which the timid Dr. Henry Jekyll discovered a chemical formula that transformed him periodically into the brutish and "ape-like" Mr. Edward Hyde. The story ends with Dr. Jekyll on the verge of a permanent change into Mr. Hyde. Supposedly, Hyde committed suicide at the end of the story, but that could have been a cover-up for his disappearance. Rumors that he still lived circulated for years afterwards.

There has been much speculation as to the type of elixir that Dr. Jekyll had concocted. Some thought that it was a psychotropic drug that induced in him a state of multiple personality disorder. I submit that in fact, the elixir had a direct effect on his genome and that it activated latent atavistic genes that were present in his "junk DNA" leading to a reversion to a more primitive body type. We know from the Anne Rice novels Lasher and Taltos that some members of the Mayfair family carried a double set of chromosomes which included material that was only marginally human. We may surmise that Dr. Jekyll was also a carrier of these odd chromosomes which made him susceptible to this transformation. The process was gradual -- albeit with fits and starts -- but progressive and irreversible. It even affected his reproductive cells so that the newly activated traits could be passed on to his children. (Something similar happened to Michael Curry from Anne Rice's Mayfair Witches series under the influence of the demon Lasher that caused him to father two different Taltos children by Rowan Mayfair and Mona Mayfair.) Mr. Hyde manifested hybrid vigor showing not only tremendous physical strength but increased intelligence as well.

The events in the novella apparently transpired 2 or 3 years before the story was published. Around that time a curious incident occurred. There was a Dr. William Rutherford who had been a teacher of Arthur Conan Doyle. He and his entire family were stout brutish men with short tempers. He had a young cousin, George Rutherford who lived in the village of Largs in Scotland. George was a bit of a rakehell and in his youth sowed his wild oats extensively. As a consequence of his dissolute lifestyle, he found himself alienated from the mainstream of the Rutherford family in Edinburgh and ended up on a small estate in the country. He and his wife had only one son -- also named George -- who had been born in 1863 and educated in boarding schools. Young George was nondescript and prone to depression. He completed his basic education before being forced to return to Largs to care for his ailing parents. They were the poor relations that the rest of the family did not acknowledge. In 1884, the elder George and his wife succumbed to consumption and young George -who was now alone in the world and penniless - disappeared. The Largs estate was liquidated to pay off the family's creditors.

Then in 1886 a man claiming to be young George Rutherford began his studies at Edinburgh University. He claimed to have made money in business ventures overseas in order to pay for his education. He was a fiery red headed bull of a man with a short temper who was prone to violence. He was rude, crude, and lacking in both conscience and social inhibition. He was also a brilliant scientist. He completed degrees in Medicine, Zoology, and Anthropology. He was an iconoclast who challenged the accepted wisdom in all areas including morals. He was given the nickname "Challenger" by his classmates. Upon achieving his first doctorate he legally changed his name to 'George EDWARD Challenger'. He stated that the Rutherford family had abandoned him and his father so in his success he was abandoning them. He preferred to be called 'Eddie' by his friends. He eventually married a French woman, Enid Delagardie, to whom he became devoted and who was the one civilizing force in his life. On his trip to The Lost World, Challenger was noted to resemble the primitive ape-men on the plateau and to be rather ape-like in his body habitus.

I submit that George Edward Challenger was actually Mr. Edward Hyde who had either killed or discovered the death of young George Rutherford and assumed his identity. Based on what we know about the older George Rutherford's promiscuity, it is entirely possible that Henry Jekyll may have been his illegitimate son which would explain Hyde's physical similarity to young George.

There were several Rutherfords in Edinburgh none of whom really knew their obscure cousin and so the impostor was able to bluster his way into the family. Hyde had a rough physical resemblance to George Rutherford which he decided to exploit to create a new life and career for himself. John Rutherford of Edinburgh practically adopted him as his own son.

Mary Beth's brother, Vincent Blodgett Mayfair, had married Melissa Rutherford the daughter of John Rutherford. They had had met while they were each on vacation in the south of France. They had recognized an odd 'connection' when they first set eyes on each other. It may very well be that the Rutherford clan carried some Taltos blood in them and that they represented another line of genetic witches.

The New Orleans Mayfairs (of French extraction) had intermarried with some Canadian Mayfairs (of British extraction). The Canadian Mayfairs were quite familiar with the Rutherfords of Scotland and it appears that they introduced the New Orleans Mayfairs to the Rutherfords.

Julien and Mary Beth visited the Rutherfords while they were in Scotland and it was there that they met young 'George Rutherford.' He either seduced Mary Beth or raped her And as a result she became pregnant. It is not clear exactly what happened. It is alleged in Rice's novel Lasher that "Lord Mayfair" died on the night he seduced Mary Beth, but no proof is ever given for this. In any case my sources indicate that Mary Beth was terrified of the man who impregnated her and wanted nothing to do with him thereafter. It seems this lover was the only person Mary Beth ever came to fear. She apparently tried to control him with her telepathic powers but found she could not. Even the demon Lasher was cowed by this man's sheer brute power and was not able to harm him.

There was a quiet furor when John Rutherford found out that his brutish cousin had ravaged and impregnated Mary Beth. This incident along with George Ruherford's arrogance and generally uncouth behavior alienated him from the rest of the Rutherford family and led to him legally change his name to 'Challenger.'

Mary Beth bore twins in 1889: a boy and a girl in London. The boy she named Andrew. He was a brutish looking child that strongly resembled his biological father. Mary Beth found that likeness upsetting and could not stand to be around the child. The other twin, a daughter she named Belle, was a beautiful child and it was always preferred in the Mayfair line that the priamry heir be a woman. Even though she knew that Belle did not share her powers and thus was not a fit heir to the Mayfair legacy, Mary Beth loved the baby and kept her. But she wanted nothing to do with Andrew.

Julien arranged for Andrew to be brought to the United States and had him adopted by Mary Beth's brother Vincent and his wife Melissa. Thus the child was raised by his aunt and uncle. They had been childless despite years of trying and were more than happy to have a son. Such arrangements done discretely were not uncommon in Victorian times. This would explain why the family refused to believe that Julien was Belle's father. Her real father's identity was a family secret.

Mary Beth was an odd person. She was a big boned woman who often dressed as a man and cavorted around the night spots in New Orleans. She was a tough, ruthless business woman and she became the Matriarch of the Mayfair family. Under her leadership, the Mayfairs made numerous successful investments around the United States and the world.

At his sister Mary Beth's request, Vincent moved to Oklahoma City where he managed the Mayfair interests and became a successful commodities broker. He also maintained a home in Tulsa and had a an ersatz birth certificiate filed there for Andrew. He and his family often returned to New Orleans for visits and also went to Europe almost yearly. They also took trips to other major American cities to which the Mayfair family had spread. They had several cousins in New York and Boston and Andrew spent some summers with them as a teenager. He even did some odd jobs for spending money, once serving as a messenger boy for Grand Central Station.

Because Vincent's family was raised so far from the Mayfair family influence, the custom of speaking French in the home was not preserved. After Andrew came to live with Vincent and Melissa, their fertility problems ended and they had several more children. Melissa died in 1912 while Andrew was finishing his graduate training. Vincent married a younger Irish-German woman in 1915 whose father owned a brewery in New Orleans. The couple also had several children. They eventually moved back to New Orleans to be closer to family. Most of their descendants live there to this day.

Andrew was a precocious child with tremendous physical energy. He was prone to violent fits of temper and was far stronger than any other child in his school. When he was younger, the bigger children taunted him because of his looks. But as he grew bigger and stronger, no one bullied him anymore. Even the older children steered clear of him. He looked mean and had a temper to match. Though he never grew much over 5 feet tall, he went through puberty early and at 12 he could pass for a man of 18.

Andrew had a genius IQ despite his simian appearance. He had a fascination with chemistry and unlike most of his educated cousins was not interested in pursuing a career in either the law or business. There were no good schools in Tulsa that could meet his special needs so he was educated in boarding schools prior to going to college. Andy actually spent some time as a student in the famous Rugby School in England, but he did not get on well with his British classmates. After just a fews years there, he was taken back to the United States and completed his high school work in a Jesuit School in New Orleans.

Several of the Mayfair cousins attended Harvard, but Andrew found Boston too tame and staid. He also found New Orleans to be too old fashioned and languid for his likings. He had fallen in love with New York City, its shows, its modern pace, and its active night life. His "aunt" Mary Beth had tried to pursuade him to attend Loyola, the Jesuit University in New Orleans where her sister Carlotta was studying, but he wanted to live in New York.

He was accepted at age 15 to Fordham, the Jesuit University in New York which pleased his family. He received an undergraduate degree in Chemistry Summa Cum Laude. He did graduate work both at Fordham and Columbia earning a doctorate in Chemistry and a Masters in Chemical Engineering. He spent some time in Leipzig during his post-graduate training. Monk was offered a faculty position at Columbia which he accepted, but he also did consulting work which was his real forte. In 1914, he received his first big break. His Master's thesis on chemical synthesis had so impressed his advisers that they brought it to the attention of a major chemical company. The company hired Andrew on the spot to build a plant in Brazil that would use his new process. He was given full credit for his ideas and received several patents. These would be the first in a long string of such patents which would earn him income for the rest of his life. While he remained affiliated with the faculty at Columbia, his full time job was to be a free-lance consultant on chemical engineering for a variety of major corporations.

When war broke out in 1914. Monk was in Italy. He had a hankering for a good scrap and so he joined the Italian Army. After a severe injury, he was discharged and went to England to recuperate. As he recovered, he assisted in training British troops about chemical warfare and was granted a commission in the British Army.

When the US went to war, Andrew returned to America and volunteered for the US Army. He received a commission in the infantry and based on his experience was granted the rankof Lieutenant Colonel. The Mayfairs were of French ancestry and his whole family had a strong affinity for the suffering of the French people during the war. Because of his background in chemistry he became an exchange officer first with the British chemical forces and then with one of the French Z-Units that utilized offensive poison gas weapons. His recommendations early in America's involvement in the Great War lead to the adoption of French tactics in offensive chemical warfare by the American Expeditionary Force. It was while serving with the French that he met Ham Brooks who was then in the Foreign Legion. Monk was granted a brevet rank of Lieutenant Colonel and acted as a special staff officer for chemcial affairs to General Pershing. There would not be any formal Gas Warfare branch in the US Army until late 1918 so Monk remained officially in the infantry.

Monk was a raucous man who was always out for a good time. He liked cold beer, hot jazz, fast women, sloe Gin, and practical jokes. Needless to say he often got into trouble in Paris. Despite all of his achievements in preparing the AEF for chemical warfare, he was never promoted beyond Lieutenant Colonel and was lucky that he did not get demoted. He spent more than a few nights in the stockade. It was the intercession of Brigadier General Ham Brooks that protected Monk at the end of the war. Ham was sent home in early December 1918 becasue his wife had take ill with the deadly 1918 flu that year. He requested to have Monk sent home at the same time. The Adjutant General was more than happy to oblige.

Theodore Marley "Ham" Brooks has been given a birth year of 1888 by some Savageologists, but I again do not find that credible. This would have made him only 30 years old in 1918 which is far too young for a man who ended the war with the rank of Brigadier General. This is especially true since he was a Lieutenant Colonel in the French Foreign Legion while at Loki and did not return to allied lines until early August 1918. There just was not enough time for a such a young man to have earned that high of a rank.

Instead I propose that he had been born in 1876 and was 42 years old in 1918. We know that Ham had attended Harvard Univeristy and Harvard Law School and graduated with distinction in 1897 having earned a JD. He immediately started post-graduate studies towards an academic LLD doctorate in law. Then the Maine blew up in Havana harbor and Ham volunteered for the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment with Theodore Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. He served with them in Cuba during the Spanish American War as a JAG officer, and fought with the unit in each of its battles. He and Roosevelt became friends and the 'Two Teddys' became part of the upwardly mobile social set in New York. Ham Brooks finished his LLD and became a successful business attorney in Manhattan. Eventually he became the founder and senior partner of his own law firm. Ham was married in 1900 to his first wife, Nola, and they had four sons and one daughter. All of these sons became Harvard-educated attorneys and two eventually joined his firm.

In 1914, Ted Brooks was appalled at the brutality and illegality of the German attack through neutral Belgium. He felt strongly that the U.S. needed to weigh in on the side of the British and French but there were strong isolationist and pacifist feeelings in America especially with Woodrow Wilson in the White House. Disgusted, Ted Brooks followed the example of many Harvard men and went to France in early 1915 at the age of 38 to join the foreign legion. He was an enthusiastic soldier and a brilliant tactician. He had been given a commission as a Captain on completing basic training and rapidly was promoted to Major and then Lieutenant Colonel. Such promotions in the Legion for an American were virtually unheard of. He received the Croix de Guerre more than once and several other decorations. He was in fact the most decorated American in the Foriegn Legion by the end of the war.

His most notable achievement was when, as a battalion commander, he deduced a German move to envelop the French division to which his Foreign Legion unit was attached. On his own initiative he used his unit to effectively counter the German manuever. At first his Division commander was unaware of what was happening and was furious with Brooks for departing from the battle plan. When the entire story came out it was clear that Brooks' action had saved the division and he received a Division Croix De Guerre as a result.

When Doc and his men returned to the Allied lines in early August 1918 after escaping from Loki, Ham was transferred to the US Army. Because of special circumstances he was given the brevet rank of Brigadier General. He retired with this rank at the end of the war. At that time he was 42 years old which is still young for a General Officer. The exact cicumstances leading to this promotion will be chronicled in a future story about Ham and Monk that I am in the process of writing for The Zine of Bronze #5.

So in summation, I propose the following birth years for Doc Savage's associates:

Patricia Savage - 1914

Renny Renwick -1882

Long Tom Roberts - 1893

Johnny Littlejohn - 1880

Monk Mayfair - 1889

Ham Brooks - 1876

What was Doc Savage's Birthday?

2007-11-29T17:33:00.000-08:00

{I want to give a special thanks to Savageology scholars Chuck Welch and Jeff Deischer. Their critiques of the earlier editions of this blog led to the correction of several errors. I think the argument in this revised version is that much stronger because of their input. Thanks, Chuck and Jeff!}

One of the enduring mysteries of the Doc Savage Super Sagas is on what day Doc Savage was born. It is generally agreed that Doc was born in 1901, that the events in The Man of Bronze (March, 1933) occurred in March 1931, and that Doc had not yet reached his 30th birthday. There are two major theories about his date of birth. Based on a comment in No Light to Die By, Philip José Farmer fixed the date as November 12, 1901. Chuck Welch alleges that the known weather patterns around Andros Island on that date do not match what is written in The Golden Man (April, 1941) and he places Doc's birthday on November 7, 1901 based on his analysis of Peril in the North (December, 1941). You may follow his reasoning here at Doc Savage Info: Happy Birthday, Doc Savage.

Jeff Deischer has claimed that the internal evidence in Peril in the North fixes Doc's birthday in late May between the 25th and 31st. He prefers Doc's birth year between 1906 and 1910 because of the description of his training and the lengths of time mentioned in some of the Super Sagas in the 1930s. You may follow his reasoning at Doc Savage Info: That Stormy Night.

With regard to Doc's apparent youth in the 1930s, I believe that was due to the anti-aging Formula that his father developed in 1925 and cannot be used to establish Doc's true age or that of his aides who also shared it.

Julien Puga V in his article When Did the Legend Start? in The Bronze Gazette Volume 17, Issue 51 (September, 2007) champions the date May 25, 1901 and gives very convincing evidence to back it up based on material from Peril in the North. He builds his case on the prior work of Jeff Deischer while adding some of his own refinements.

It is my general policy on Wold Newton Questions to go with what Phil Farmer wrote unless there is some serious need to do otherwise. I like the material that Phil has used to connect Doc Savage to Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes. So in this case, I have to go with Phil.

The internal date mentioned in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Priory School (1903 ) indicates that the kidnapping of Lord Saltire occurred on Monday May 13th. Based on the story, the flight of James Wilder (aka Clark Savage Sr.) from England was on Wednesday May 22st the day after Holmes last spoke to the Duke of Holdernesse.

May 13 fell on a Monday in 1901. The closest other years when May 13 fell on a Monday were 1895 and 1907. Also Lord Saltire was 10 years old at the time of the story and his parents had been married in 1888. This is compatible with 1901 as the year of these events and is not compatible with the other years. A birth year of 1901 would also make Doc Savage 16-17 years old in 1918 and would be consistent with his serving in the Great War as Dent clearly states in The Man of Bronze. Many able-bodied young men at 15 or 16 could pass for 18 or older and during World War I and World War II many such young men lied about their age and volunteered to fight. Any year later than 1901 would not be credible, especially in the light of the events documented in Escape from Loki which was an authorized work and is officially part of the Super Saga Canon.

The proposed date of Doc's birth around May 25, 1901 is therefore not possible. It is too soon after the Priory School affair. There is no way that a wind Schooner could have arrived in the Caribbean that quickly, especially since the best evidence indicates that the Wilders met Hubert Robertson in France after May 22nd and departed from there a few days later. Nor is it possible for the Priory School affair to have occurred in any other year than 1901 except for 1895 or 1907 neither of which are compatible with the published material in the Super Sagas, Escape from Loki or The Adventure of the Priory School.

But there is no question that Doc celebrated his 40th birthday in late May, 1941. The internal analysis of Peril in the North confirms this. The analysis from Dreischer and Puga is so detailed that I will not reproduce it here but TRUST me, it is a slam-dunk. The most telling piece of internal evidence is that during the story, the Midnight Sun is seen over Greenland. This can only occur between May 25 and July 25 of 1941. This rules out any possibility that the story could have occurred in November. In light of what we demonstrated in the previous paragraph, how is that possible?

Well, we need to remember that James Wilder, and his wife Arronaxe were on the lam from the law. They were trying to hide their identity from the authorities. That situation did not change after Arronaxe had died. James was a wanted criminal. It would be only natural for 'Clark Savage Sr.' to claim that his wife had given birth to their child while she was on board the Orion in Marseilles on May 25, 1901. It was a known fact that James Wilder and his wife did not leave England until May 22nd, and they spent several days on the run. It is also very likely that Wilder knew the trail of their departure could be traced by the police after the 25th before they effectively disappeared in France and eventually left on the Orion with Hubert Robertson.

We must also remember that in The Golden Man, Doc Savage clearly believed that no one living knew that he had been born on the Orion near Andros Island. It follows logically that whatever report of his birth had been given to US Authorities did not reveal the true location where he was born. This must have been done deliberately to conceal the real facts and the family's identity. There is therefore no reason to assume that the true date would have been given either.

Besides, no one outside the couple themselves even suspected that Arronaxe was pregnant at the time that they left England. In May, she would have been in her 3rd month of pregnancy and in Victorian attire, no one would have noticed her condition at that point. Consequently a child born so soon after the Priory School affair would not have been linked to the fugitive couple.

The mystery of how the "Golden Man" (who was the head of German intelligence) knew the secrets of Doc's birth is never solved in the Super Sagas. I think the revelation in the 1989 DC Comics Doc Savage Annual that German physician Dr. Gunter Asch was on the Orion and likely delivered baby Clark solves that mystery. We know that Asch returned to Germany and eventually worked for the Nazis. He would have made available to them the information that Clark Sr. had withheld from American authorities. Later Dr. Asch died at the time of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin.

We should also remember that in Escape from Loki, Baron von Hessel tells young Lt. Savage:

"... Never mind all that, Lieutenant. Let us discuss other matters, if you
care to. For instance, a subject which greatly intrigues me. That is, the
efforts of your father to make you into a superman. What Nietzsche called der Übermensch..."

"Yes, I know much about that. Our Intelligence has a dossier on you and Doctor Clark Savage, Senior. Quite a lengthy one. I’ll be frank with you. I wouldn’t have invited you to dinner if you’d only been some Yankee flier with more courage than brains. We may talk about your peculiar education and your father’s motives for giving it to you..."

It is clear that even in 1918, the Germans were well informed about Doc Savage's life and his father's plans for him. This could only have happened if some insider had informed them about it. That insider was likely Dr. Asch.

But how could they hope to pass off an infant born in November as one born 6 months earlier? One of things that mitigated in favor of this prevarication was the fact that Clark Jr. was a large and precocious baby who at 3 months of age could already meet the developmental milestones of a 6 month old including standing unsupported, recognizing familiar faces, baby talk, and full head and neck control. He was also the height and weight of a 6 month old. In fact, at the age of 1 year, Clark was already walking, talking, climbing, and sounding out the printed word! It would have been ridiculous for Clark Sr. to try to pass-off his son as being his true age. No one would have believed him!

With regard to the question of the weather around Andros Island, there is no reason to think that the Orion sank on the same day that Doc was born or that it sank by Andros Island.

This is what it says in The Golden Man:

The golden man seemed not to hear the inquiry. He studied Doc for a few moments, then said in a deeply impressive, solemn voice, "Since that stormy night when you were born on the tiny schooner Orion in the shallow cove at the north end of Andros Island, you have done much good, and many things that are great."

The cove on the northern tip of Andros Island was the location of the boat when Doc was born. He was born at night and there was a storm of some kind, but there is nothing that says it was a big storm or that the boat was scuttled. In fact, the Super Sagas never say that the Orion sank. That comes from Dent's notes. So it is entirely possible that the Orion may have sunk off Andros Island or somewhere else in the Bahamas at some date subsequent to November 12 in one of those pocket hurricanes for which the Caribbean is famous.

All we know for sure from the Super Sagas is that Doc's mother died before he was one year old. In the story Cargo Unknown (Summer 1944) we are told:

Doc had never known his mother; she had died when he was less than a year old.

The best evidence we have is that she did not come to America with her husband and child after they recovered the treasure from the Caribbean that was the foundation of Clark Sr.'s fortune. We know that the Duke of Holdernesse had investigators searching for his son. But he would have been looking for James and Arronaxe and not for a man and a child. Especially if he child had been born at sea when it was clear that his son and non-pregnat daughter-in-law were clearly fugitives in France at the time that the birth occurred.

Meanwhile, a small rain storm on the night of the birth which had been localized to the area of the schooner is also feasible. We must not forget that Andros Island is on the edge of the Bermuda Triangle. All kinds of odd weather patterns come up suddenly and unexpectedly there. What we know for certain is that sometime after Doc was born and before his first birthday his mother died. It is very possible that the Orion sank in the vicinity of the Bermuda Triangle where many ships have mysteriously vanished in what had appeared to be clear seas and that his mother died when it did.

So I must defer to Phil Farmer. Doc Savage was born on November 12, 1901. But on the Birth Record that his father registered with the US authorities, he used the date May 25, 1901 to conceal their identities. As a result, Doc Savage has two birthdays! One is his LEGAL birthday and the other is his REAL birthday. Being a larger-than-life hero, he is entitled to both of them.

Murder Mirage and the Hiroshima Shadows

2007-11-05T23:01:00.000-08:00

{Spoiler Alert}

The Super Saga Murder Mirage (January, 1936) has a very interesting super scietnfic menace. It is an unknown radioactive element that causes a green "flash" which dissolves flesh and organic material leaving behind only metal artifacts like buttons and jewelry and the victim's shadow which is burnt into the ground.

This was a prescient predcition of Lester Dent which he made nine years before the Atom bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan in August 1946. the pictures above show some of the amazing shadows that were burnt into the landscape as a result of the atomic flash.

The most amazing ones are the two which show the shadow of a man who had been sitting on the steps outside his bank in Hiroshima waiting for it to open. He was within 0.3 miles of the atomic explosion. The man was totally disintegrated. Nothing was left of him except for his shodow on the steps. There were many of these death shadows found near ground zero. They captured people doing everyday tasks when the nuclear flash overtook them and they evaporated away.

The parallel between the Hiroshima Shadows and the Murder Mirage shadows are startling. I have found that Lester Dent was a great prognosticator. Almost frighteningly so. In The Secret in the Sky (May, 1935), Dent predicted that a faster-than-sound aircraft would make a loud booming noise when it passed over head analogous to the "crack" of a bullet as it passed by your ear. This was fully 12 years before Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier on October 14th, 1947 in the Bell X-1 rocket plane.

Lester Dent was clearly a man of vision and way ahead of his time.

The Roar Devil: Not as far fetched as you might think...

2007-10-30T20:40:00.001-07:00

{SPOILER WARNING}

In the Doc Savage story "The Roar Devil" (June 1935) the villain uses a machine that completely suppresses human hearing. He does this to cover the noise of massive TNT explosions that a gang is using to uncover a secret cache in the mountains. Phil Farmer in the 1970s considered this to be a "silly" story. I have reread it recently and I don't agree. The story is interesting and the sound dampening device is not that far fetched.

In the 1930s, some airlines had developed an anti-noise machine that was used in the passenger compartments of aircraft to dampen the noise of commuter plane engines. These were big bulky devices the size of a man that were place inside the cabin and they did not work too well. More modern versions of this have been miniaturized so that they will work inside of a set of personal earphones.

The principle behind it is that sound is a series of pressure waves travelling through the air. If you can create an "anti-sound" in which the peaks of the sound are matched by the troughs of the anti-sound, the noise will be cancelled out.

As you can see in the above diagram, the cancelling is not perfect but it is very effective.

So this technology was available circa 1933 and could have been used by the 'Roar Devil' as part of his scheme.

But we are told that the device not only dampened noise but also suppressed human hearing. This actually to is also possible.

There have been several patents since the 1970s of devices that could induce temporary deafness using a combination of high-frequency sound and microwaves. This sounds very similar to the weapon that Doc had in the Super Saga "Fortress of Solitude" (October, 1938) which could induce temporary blindness:

"The blackness was caused by a combination of short electrical waves, and high-frequency sonic vibrations, , which paralyze the functions of the rod-and-cone mechanism of the optic nerves in the eye."

It may be that Doc had used the device from The Roar Devil and applied it to vision instead of hearing.

In any case, the device described in The Roar Devil is not far fetched at all. I thin we must assume that it used a combination of anti-noise with a device that caused temporary deafness.

Thunder Island and the Smoke of Eternity

2007-08-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

In the second Doc Savage story, "The Land of Terror", Doc and his crew travel to Thunder Island where there are dinosaurs, primitive mammals, and other extinct flora and fauna. It is also on this island that the mineral needed to make the "Smoke of Eternity" liquid is located. This liquid is capable of dissolving virtually anything with the exception of an unnamed metal in which it is stored.

Early in the story, Doc developed a theory about what the "Smoke of Eternity" was:

"I am not sure what the Smoke of Eternity is," Doc explained. "But I have
an idea what it could be. When the substance dissolves anything, there is a
weird electrical display. This leads me to believe it operates through the
disintegration of atoms. In other words, the dissolving is simply a disruption
of the atomic structure."

"I thought it was generally believed there would be a great explosion once
the atom was shattered!" Johnny murmured.

"That was largely disproved by recent accomplishments of scientists who
have succeeded in cracking the atom," Doc corrected. "I have experimented
extensively along that line myself. There is no explosion, for the very simple
reason that it takes as much energy to shatter the atom as is released."

This is another bit of obfuscation. Indeed, some early experiments did show that it took as much energy to shatter some atoms as was released in the process. The atoms used were of elements somewhat heavier than Iron. Iron has the most stable nucleus of any element. With elements that are heavier than Iron, breaking up their nuclei (i.e., Nuclear Fission) releases energy. With elements that are lighter than Iron, the process of breaking them apart absorbs energy. For those lighter elements, it is fusing the nuclei together (I.e., Nuclear Fusion) that releases energy. As can be expected, the further away from Iron you get on the periodic table, the more energy can be generated by either fusing light elements or fissioning heavy ones to approach the configuration of Iron.

The nuclear fission experiments that had been done by the 1920s and early 1930s did not succeed in releasing more energy than was put in. It would not be until later in the decade that it was known that heavy atoms of certain Uranium isotopes spontaneously broke down and released thermal neutrons which could catalyse the fission of other uranium atoms releasing further neutrons. This did not require the input of any energy and opened the possibility of creating a spontaneous chain reaction within the Uranium that could propagate fast enough to release an almost inconceivable amount of energy. It was this theoretical possibility that led US Physicists to prompt Albert Einstein to write a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt warning that Germany could develop an atomic bomb. This letter eventually led to the Manhattan Project.

So Doc's theory at that time represented the conventional wisdom in 1933. It sounded plausible, but in retrospect we know it could not be true. The "Smoke of Eternity" destroyed both heavy and light elements equally well. Was this therefore an attempt by Dent or by Doc to confuse the issue and distract people away from what the "Smoke of Eternity" really was? More on this later.

In the story, Thunder Island is on the charts just a few hundred miles from New Zealand. It is described in the story as follows:

Johnny, the geologist, visited various local sources of information and dug
up what he could on Thunder Island.

"It’s a queer place," he reported to Doc. "It’s the cone of a gigantic
active volcano. Not a speck of vegetation grows on the outside of the cone. It’s
solid rock."

Johnny looked mysterious."Here’s the strange part, Doc," he declared. "That
crater is a monster. It must be twenty miles across. And it is always filled
with steam. Great clouds of vapor hang over it. I talked to an airplane pilot
who had flown over it some years ago. He gave me an excellent
description."

"That’s fine." Doc smiled.

"He says there’s another island, a coral atoll, about fifty miles from
Thunder Island," Johnny continued. "This is inhabited by a tribe of half-savage
natives. He recommended that for our headquarters."

This description defies credibility. Volcanic soil is notoriously fertile and it is not credible that there would be no vegetation on the outside of the cone. But if one wanted to conceal the actual identity of the island, then we would expect a bogus description. Considering what Doc and his crew found there, this would not be surprising. They had every reason to want to hide this place from curious explorers and those seeking the secret of the "Smoke of Eternity".

What is especially curious is that there are several different sources that confirm the existence of a volcanic island in the Western Pacific or Eastern Indian Oceans with dinosaurs and other weird creatures. Probably the most famous source of information is the story of King Kong. On an uncharted island way off the shipping lanes in the Indian Ocean, Carl Denham and his associates discover dinosaurs, hostile human natives, and a giant ape over 25 feet tall. This land is known as Skull Island because of a huge rock outcropping that looks like a human skull. Denham and his associates trapped the ape, brought him to New York and precipitated both a tragedy and a catastrophe.

The most recent version of the King Kong story indicated that there were cyclopean ruins on Skull Island built by an unknown civilization. it also showed that the flora and fauna on Skull Island did not exactly conform to the creatures that have been found n the fossil record, but are in fact descendants of them that have evolved substantially from the forms with which paleontologists are familiar. (See the book "The World of Kong: A Natural History of Skull Island" by the WETA Workshop.)

Another famous source came form stories told by American GIs who had fought in the Pacific theater. Many of them claimed to have landed on a place called Dinosaur Island. In at least one case, a giant mosasaur was claimed to have sunk a US Cruiser killing itself in the process. These allegations were documented in the DC Comics series "Star Spangled War Stories":

In 1918, Edgar Rice Burroughs had written a trilogy of stories about an island called Caspak in the far southern Atlantic with dinosaurs, cavemen, and other weird animals. The stories were "The Land that Time Forgot", "The People that Time Forgot", and "Out of Time's Abyss". The rationale that ERB gives for the flora and fauna of the island makes little sense. (Even though it sounded very much like that given in the Super Saga "The Time Terror". But that is another blog.)

There were also innumerable stories and legends during the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s depicting such an island in the southern portions of the Oceans.

Most notable was Farou Island which is where the monster Gojira (mispronounced in English as 'Godzilla') originated along with other kaiju monsters such as Rodan, Anguirus, Manda, Minya, Gorosaurus, Spiega, Kamakiras, and Mothra. In the film, "King Kong vs. Godzilla" we are told that Farou island was in fact where King Kong had originated making it identical to Skull Island. (In the several Toho films on Godzilla and other monsters, this same island is identified by various names such as Mondo Island, Ogasawara Island, Infant Island, and Monster Island.) There are ruins on the Island that are claimed to be those of the Mu and Lemuria civilizations which allegedly cultivated and bred dinosaurs. It should be noted that just like Kong, most of these kaiju are singular with no discernible progenitors or progeny. This will be explained below.

So it is clear that there was SOMEPLACE in the southern oceans where dinosaurs and other exotic creatures could be found and that the US government knew about it. We can only speculate as to why and how the exact location of this island has been withheld from the public.

We should also remember that H.P. Lovecraft in his story "The Call of Cthulhu" located the lost island city of R'lyeh where "dead Cthulhu lies dreaming" in the South Pacific at 47°9′S, 126°43′W. August Derleth gave the coordinates for R'lyeh as 49°51′S, 128°34′W in his story "The Black Island". Both of these locations are as isolated from the continents as one can get and --considering what is hidden at R'lyeh -- I am not surprised that this exact location was not given.

But in any case, R'lyeh had cyclopean ruins and exotic flora and fauna. It makes one wonder if there are one or more islands in that southern region that contain mysteries of both biology and prehistory.

The islands in the South Pacific are of various ages. Among the Hawaiian Archipelago, the oldest portion is the central volcano on Suiko which dates to 65 million years ago. The youngest portion is the volcano Manua Kea which is dated to ~400,000 years ago.

What about Thunder Island? How old was it?

My sources indicate that Monk and Johnny had pioneered in radionuclide dating to determine the absolute age of rocks. Samples of rock from Thunder Island analysed by them indicated that it was 15 million years old give or take 1 million years. This presented them with some problems.

First of all, their estimate for the end of the Cretaceous period when the last of the dinosaurs died out was 64.7 ± 1.2 million years. This meant that Thunder Island did not exist until 50 million years after the dinosaurs were extinct. So how did the dinosaurs get there?

Secondly, the flora and fauna on the island came from several different time periods. For example, the Tyrannosaurs and Triceratops were from the Cretaceous whereas the Brontosaurs and Stegosaurs were from the Mesozoic which was 50 million years earlier. Also included were ancient mammals that did not exist until the Pleistocene which was after the demise of the dinosaurs.

Finally, the 'Smoke of Eternity' was a very exotic material that occurred nowhere else on earth.

The only other place on Earth where dinosaurs were still to be found was Maple White Land in the Matta Grosso. (That was true in 1933. Later on Doc would discover dinosaurs in the far north of Canada in "The Time Terror" and deep underground in "The Other World".) I had always been assumed that Maple White Land was the last refuge of the dinosaurs that had somehow escaped the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. But the mix of flora and fauna there was also a mixture of creatures from several disparate time periods.

There could be only one inescapable conclusion: Thunder Island and Maple White Land were not natural occurrences, but ARTIFACTS created by something no earlier than 15 million years ago.

My sources confirm that Thunder Island was not a mere volcanic cone, but a much larger land mass with large ancient ruins of unfathomable age. They also confirm that this was in fact the same as the "Skull Island" from the King Kong story and the "Farou Island" of the Toho films .

So what was Thunder/Skull/Farou Island designed for? I submit that it was a biological laboratory where different creatures from Earths past were created and then studied in the wild. The exact motives for doing this are unclear but there appears to have been some odd glowing presences in both the island and the central lake in Maple White Land which my sources indicate represented Shoggoths.

Shoggoths were artificial amoeba-like lifeforms created billions of years ago by the Elder Things described by H. P. Lovecraft in his story "At the Mountains of Madness". They are enormous spherical entities at least 15 feet in diameter that can mimic the biological structures of other creatures such as eyes, ears and limbs. They must have been skulking around throughout Earth's History storing the genetic information of all the species that have arisen on Earth. For some reason, liberated Shoggoths in recent eons began creating experimental biological habitats where they created new forms of life and resurrected some old ones. We suspect that they are responsible for some of the weird biological monstrosities that have turned up from time to time around the world such as Kong, Gojira, and Rodan. Exactly why they have done this remains a mystery.

It also appears that they are responsible for the unusual minerals deposited at Thunder/Skull /Farou Island. After all, they were the servants of the Elder Things and they were responsible for constructing and maintaining the great cities in the Antarctic for their masters.

It would not be surprising if the civilizations from Mu and Lemuria did not themselves harvest some of these beasts and experiment with them.

The "Smoke of Eternity" it turns out in not a natural element but actually a kind of nuclear factory. The so-called 'atoms' of the smoke are able to absorb and fuse lighter elements such as hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen to create showers of 'negative matter' particles.

Negative matter is even more exotic than anti-matter. When matter and anti-matter come into contact, they annihilate each other and are converted into pure energy. Both matter and anti-matter have normal mass and so the energy released at their mutual annihilation is governed by the equation E=mc² in which 'm' is the sum total of the masses of the matter and anti-matter components. Negative matter has negative mass and when it makes contact with either matter or anti-matter, the particles mutually annihilate each other but since the masses are of opposite signs, they cancel each other out and there is no residual energy released.

The shower of negative particles from the "Smoke of Eternity" causes particles and atoms to just vanish. This reaction destroys chemical bonds and matter literally falls apart into dust and vapor. It appears that the reaction can be suppressed by a powerful magnetic field which causes the atom-sized nuclear factories to "shut down". The metal capsules and containers used to contain the "Smoke" were highly magnetic.

Why the Shoggoths manufactured the stuff is still a mystery but it can be used as a devastating weapon.

Contrary to the ending in the story "The Land of Terror" Doc Savage did not destroy the weird habitat of Thunder Island. This was reported in the story to preclude anyone from looking for Thunder Island. He did not learn of the Shoggoth connection until much later. These Shoggoths represent an irreplaceable resource. They contain the entire genetic history of life on Earth. They also are utterly alien and indeed dangerous. No one has been able to communicate with them. For this reason it is safer to remain aloof from them, especially since they have a disintegration weapon of such immense power as the "Smoke of Eternity".

In view of all this, I think we should acknowledge that Thunder Island was in fact the mysterious habitat of the Shoggoths that many others have documented and visited in the last century. And for simplicity sake, I suggest that we adopt the name "Monster Island" for this place.

Doc Savage and the Mount Shasta Conspiracy

2007-07-28T19:28:00.001-07:00

During the 1930s, Doc Savage came into conflict with many villains who possessed highly advanced technologies. In "The Monsters" it was a formula that could turn men into giants. In"The Midas Man" it was a device that could read minds. There was a teleportation device in "The Vanisher" and an invisibility machine in "Spook Legion". And let's not forget the super-sonic spherical anti-gravity ships from "The Secret in the Sky". And there was the laser and cold fusion technology from "Cold Death

Most of these technologies still remain unavailable to us even in the early 21st Century. How did these "mad scientists" develop them in the 1930s? I used to be very puzzled about this until Bantam republished the July 1937 story "He Could Stop the World" in November 1970.

In this story, a criminal genius (identified as scientist Professor Homer Randolph) harnessed atomic power and utilized virtually every technology we mentioned above from the other Super Sagas -- and several more -- including making 10 ft giant hillbillies who catch and eat 10 ft giant trout. There is an assortment of giant flora and fauna scattered around the base of Mount Shasta, California. On top of the mountain, the villains set up a high-tech city as a base from which to rule the world. But Doc Savage intervenes and stops them. Inthe process, he causes the city to self-destruct.

So it now became obvious. All along, Doc had not been fighting separate mad scientists. He had been fighting people who had either been a part of this conspiracy or who had broken away from it.

In consulting my sources, I have discovered that this cabal of scientists subsequently became known in the FBI's "Bizarre Unexplained Cases Files" (renamed "The X-Files" by Agents Arthur Dales and Hayes Michel in the 1950s) as "The Mount Shasta Conspiracy". Many of them were identified but never found, including Homer Randolph himself. The few whom they could find had had their minds "wiped" by some of the mind control devices that the Conspiracy had used on others and were unable to provide any details.

After the destruction of the high-tech city on top of the mountain, the US Army scoured through the wreckage and took several truck-loads of material out to an isolated location on US Government lands in Nevada. A secret laboratory had been established there to study materials recovered from a great undersea metropolis located below Devil's Reef just off the coast of Innsmouth, Massachusetts. The US Navy had torpedoed the city in 1928. (See the H. P. Lovecraft story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".)

This area in Nevada became the site chosen to analyze the debris from California. This site would later be known as the S-4 Site which is just over the hill from Area 51. Surprisingly little was learned from the debris because the technology was so utterly advanced. Since then, though, as our own technology has progressed, these studies have jump-started several technological fields including the laser, the personal computer, printed circuit boards, Quantum computing, and various sensors.

What few giant plants, animals, and humans survived the destruction of the city all died rather quickly afterwards while in government custody. They apparently needed a continuous supply of special medications and nutrients to survive and with the fall of the city, there was no longer any source of them.

Early on, the scientists concluded that the Mount Shasta Conspiracy had advanced technological information that was outside the mainstream of terrestrial knowledge. The government investigators considered an extraterrestrial source for the technology but found only disparate tidbits which led them ultimately to discount this. (It seems that the Aegis and/or the Eridanians and Capellans had covered their tracks well.) In any case, it was the Mount Shasta Conspiracy investigation that marked the beginning of US Government investigation into the possibility of an extraterrestrial presence on Earth.

Mount Shasta (Right) and Shastina (Left

Mount Shasta and its immediate neighbor Shastina are two dormant volcanoes in the Cascade Mountain range in California. Mount Shasta is the larger of the two. These are the two peaks which are depicted in the cover James Bama did for the Bantam reprint. Mount Shasta had long been a site that attracted mystics and occultists since the 19th Century and its reputation just grew after the events there in the 1937. In fact, in recent decades it has also been a center of interest for UFO enthusiasts.

The US Government never did identify the source of the technological information used by the Conspiracy. For several decades, it had suspected that there had been a prehistoric human -- or pre-human -- civilization that had left weird artifacts scattered throughout the Western United States. The Government had collected these objects and kept them under high security lock and key. There had also been reports of similar findings on other continents, the Polynesean Islands, and in Mexico and Canada.

My sources tell me that Doc Savage did his own investigation which included a debriefing of Professor Randaolph and his surviving aides. Doc concluded that the ultimate source of the Conspiracy's technology was TAZ, the sunken city that he had investigated in the Super Saga "The Mystery Under the Sea." Doc and his father had also found a cache of information (later identitifed as coming from TAZ) in The Valley of the Vanished stored insidee the strange pre-Mayan temple described in "The Bridge of Light". Doc kept his conclusions secret from the US Government and made sure that the released memebers of the conspiracy could provide them with no information.

But what was the actual source of the technology that Prof. Randolph had found? It apparently was not TAZ itself since its location had been kept secret and Doc Savage found that Randolph knew nothing about it. Dr. Randolph stated that in his stratospheric ship the Silver Cylinder he had done high altitude surveillance and had located an unusual site high in the Andes Mountains. It was a location that was clearly visible from a very high altitude (>30 miles up) but not detectable from the ground. Obviously it was intended to be found only by a technologically advanced society with high altitude flight capability. This was similar to the Nazca lines in Peru which depict huge animals drawings that can only be seen from the air. The cache contained a treasure trove of carved tablets like those found at TAZ along with numerous sample devices. It was a virtual museum of ancient technology.

It also included a detailed history of the TAZ civilization and indicated that a massive natural catastrophe had occurred which caused TAZ to sink into the ocean over 10,000 years ago. This coincided with the end of the last Ice Age at which point millions of cubic miles of glaciated ice melted raising the sea level dramatically. It was accompanied by a major crustal shift and disruption of the Earth's magnetic field. A large land mass around the Azores which partially straddled the Mid-Atlantic Ridge became covered over with water. This may have been the source of the Atlantis legend.

Several colonies from TAZ established themselves in protected locations. One group fled deep under the crust inside a bubble of dense pseudo-matter. This sounds like the civilization of Subterranae that Doc encountered in "Murder Melody". Three attempts were made to build an underground cavern in the far north with a volcanic pseudo-sun. Only one was completed and this appears to be the land that Doc visited in "The Other World." The second project decided to use multiple light projectors instead and is located somewhere under Greenland. This group may have been the one Doc discovered in "The Monarch of Armageddon" in the Millennium Comic series. The other project could not be competed on time and so the inhabitants had to adjust to living in constant darkness. This seems to have been the civilization from "The Land of Always Night." There were many other details about the Earth's past, but my sources refused to comment further.

According to their records, the TAZ civilization shunned Antarctica because of its associations with "The Elder Things" and avoided Australia because it was haunted by the ghosts of "The Great Race" and their adversaries the floating horrors". It also mentioned an island continent in the Southern Pacific Ocean (Lemuria) which was a remnant of an older continental mass (Mu). All of this was covered by the rising oceans and the crustal displacement @10,000 years ago.

The location of the Andes cache is now known only to Dr. Randolph and Doc Savage. At Doc's request, the site has been disguised so that it can no longer be located from the air.

I asked my sources if any other such sites were found on mountains elsewhere in the world, but, again, they declined to comment.

Sun Koh and his Crew

2007-07-26T21:54:00.000-07:00

The Nazi pulp übermensch, Sun Koh did not travel alone. Like Doc Savage, Sun Koh had his own crew of aides. Their number changed from time to time, but I have been able to piece together some of the Aryan warrior types that assisted Sun Koh on his adventures.

Sun Koh : Six foot six, well muscled, blond haired, blue eyed, bronzed skinned, and highly intelligent, Sun Koh was the last prince of Atlantis sent forward in time to prepare for the return of the Lost Continent before the coming Ice Age. (So much for global warming!) He had a tattoo on his back and left side which depicted Atlantis. His powers were mirror images of Doc Savage's. Sun Koh was also a "Man of Destiny" who had incredible luck in everything he did. He also had a "Danger Sense" that gave him a premonition of any threat to his person. He usually wore Jodhpurs, calf-high boots, and a military shirt with epaulets and pleated buttoned down pockets.

Map of Atlantis

Ashanti Garuda: (aka "The Daughter of Kali") Ashanti is the mistress and chief assassin of Sun Koh. Her nick name is Shani. She is a true Aryan from India who has mastered all forms of Yoga, Ayurvedic/Unani/Siddha medicine, Indian Mysticism, Sorcery, Alchemy, Kalaripayit, Marma Adi, Silambam, Varma Kalari, and other Indian martial arts. Her true age is unknown but she appears to be in her twenties thanks to her Ayurvedic Elixir of Life. She is a devotee of Kali and of the Left Hand Path of Tantra who has vowed eternal hatred on the British for oppressing her people. The six powers granted to her by Kali are pacifying (glamour, seduction), subjugating (hypnosis, sexual obsession), paralysing (pressure points), obstructing (grappling and throws), driving away (breaking kicks and punches), and death-dealing (strangulation, death blows, death points). Ashanti has a berserker attack that uses all four extremities and her head which is utterly devastating. She wears different colored Spider-web silk Saris that are light and airy and do not impede her leg movements but which can stop a pistol bullet or a knife. She has a blood red oval tikala mark on her forehead with a golden Swastika in the middle to honor Kali. She also has 12 swastikas tattooed on her body to protect her from harm (i.e., on the soles of her feet, the palms of her hands, inside of her thighs, the inner side of her arms, the outsides of her buttocks, and the lateral sides of her breasts). She has a pet miniature Golden Spitting Cobra with green eyes named Shakti that she wears as a bracelet entwined around her right upper arm or forearm. The snake remains still and appears to be just a bracelet until Shani awakens it. The snake can spit venom precisely from a dozen feet away on Ashanti's command to temporarliy blind an opponent. It's bite though is quite deadly.

Alaska-Jim : Jim Hoover, aka "Alaska-Jim," was a hunter and trapper in the Old West who also worked for the Canadian police. He was an associate of Sun Koh and was known for his riding, roping, and shooting skills. Jim was a giant mountain man with the ferocity and fighting prowess of Jeremiah Johnson. He was a Canadian of German descent who lived in the Yukon. He was one of the first of Sun Koh's associates. Jim always dressed in furs or Buckskins and wore a coonskin cap with a striped tail.

Jan Mayen : Jan Mayen was a detective-inventor-adventurer who flew around the world in an atomic-powered aircraft. He had adventures on every continent. He was like Captain Nemo in having advanced technology at his finger tips. He dressed in the uniform of an airplane captain with a round service cap.

Sturmvögel : (Storm Bird) Rudolf Rauhaar, aka Rolf Kraft, aka Sturmvögel was an associate of Alaska-Jim. Sturmvögel was seven feet tall and a well trained paratrooper, commando, and soldier in the manner of Rambo. While he had many adventures in the American and Canadian west, he also could handle himself in Jungle and desert terrain. He combined stealth with strength, speed, and lethality. He usually wore black fatigues and combat boots with either a German infantry helmet or an alpine military hat. He was the quintessential Storm Trooper.

Rolf Karsten : Rolf Karsten was a consulting detective and was known as , der Schrecken der Berliner Unterwelt (The Terror of the Berlin Underworld) or Schreck for short.. This was a private detective with edge who could match wits with urban criminals and who had no limits to what he would do to solve a case. Good with his fists and fast with a gun or a knife. Also an astute judge of human nature and human vices. He wore cheap suits with a small brimmed hat and was constantly smoking a cigarette. Sun Koh eventually used hypnosis on him to get him to quit smoking.

Minx : Ludwig Minx was a man of mystery: a ghost hunter, ghost breaker, and professional magician who usually wore a Top Hat, a tuxedo, a collared cape, a large wand/cane, and a goatee. He not only dealt with fantastic mysteries but more mundane ones as well. He possessed a wide range of mental powers, including hypnosis, telepathy, psychometry, and levitation. He was an expert in all forms of prestidigitation, and there was no phenomenon of somnambulism, of telepathy, of `telepsychics,' of levitation, hypnotism, magnetism, suggestion, and autosuggestion that was beyond him. He was trained by the adepts of the Agartha, the lost Aryan civilization residing inside the Hollow Earth and a member of the Thule Society. He was very much like the Shadow, Mandrake the Magician, and the Spider all rolled into one.

You will notice that none of these folks has a PhD or any constructive day job. They were all people of action, prone to violence, and having few moral limits.

Dr. Clark Savage Jr. and Princess Monja F'Teema

2007-07-24T08:39:00.000-07:00

Doc and Princess Monja

Over the years, Doc Savage has met and dated many beautiful women. In the Super Sagas, he was more inclined to do so in the 1940s than he was in the 1930s. His brief affair in 1918 with Lily Bugov, the Countess Idivzhopu, in Philip José Farmer's "Escape form Loki" is the most notorious such encounter. But there was Rhoda Havens in "The Freckled Shark"(to whom Doc as Henry peace proposed), "Z" in "The Mental Wizard"(whom Doc almost married), Sis Harrison in "The Talking Devil" (the daughter of a villain, but Doc took her to dinner anyway), and the beautiful Russian spy Seryi Mitroff from "The Red Spider" (aka: "In Hell Madonna") and "The Frightened Fish" (with whom Doc was getting very serious). There were also others in the Sagas.

We have also discussed his relationship to Bethany Abigail 'Abby' Johnson earlier in this blog. Then there was the doxy, Danielle Bouvier, from "The Devil's Thoughts" who vamped both Clark Sr. and Clark Jr.! Less well known was his fiancée Annette Bachelor who attended medical school with Doc at Johns Hopkins in the 1920s (that being another blog entry in the making).

And despite PJF's suggestion, there is no evidence that Doc and his second-cousin Patricia were ever romantically involved.

But through it all there was one woman who was a recurring character in the Super Sagas and who had always idolized Doc. I am speaking of Princess Monja F'Teema, Daughter of King Chaac, from the lost Mayan civilization of The Valley of the Vanished. The Doc Savage Chronology at Win Eckert's Wold Newton web site has her being born in 1915. This means she was 15 years old at the time of the events in "The Man of Bronze". Doc at that time was 29. While Monja may have been well developed and nubile in 1931, she was still jail-bait!

In 1936 when "The Golden Peril" occurred, Monja would have been just 20 years old. By 1942, when "They Died Twice" occurred, she would have been 26. At that point it would have been hard for Doc not to notice Monja as a woman, especially since he was more inclined to do so in the 1940s. And indeed his distraction because of her beauty is mentioned several times in the story.

While it was a romantic notion harbored by many fans that Doc and Monja would eventually get together, there were several problems. First of all, Doc remembered his father's marriage to the Mayan maiden, Itza. It had been a true social nightmare for her to come and live in racist America where Blacks, Indians, and even the Irish were looked down upon. Itza also was uneducated by American standards and could not speak English very well. Monja also did not speak English and had no experience of the outside world.

We then have the problem of Monja's safety. Early on, Doc had discovered that his enemies would try to get to him by attacking a loved one. (This was mentioned in the George Pal movie "Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze" where Doc actually tells "Mona Flores" that he once was engaged but that criminals kidnapped his fiancée. I have since discovered that this is a true story about an incident involving Annette Bachelor. But more on that in another blog!) . Monja would be safe in The Valley but Doc could not just stay there with her. His life work required that he travel the world. What kind of husband could he be to her if she was hidden in a secret place that he rarely visited?

Finally, we must remember that Doc was an extremely unusual man with a towering intellect and great physical prowess. Could a native Princess from the jungle really be as much of a helpmate to him as Brenna and Abby had been to his father?

But then there are the positives. Monja was head-over-heels in love with Doc from the moment she first saw him. She was determined to save herself for him and she had still not married in 1942 waiting for him. She was absolutely gorgeous with natural beauty and intelligence. She also was the only child of King Chaac. If Doc married her, he would be eligible to be her consort and thereby King of the Mayans! That would have sealed the deal on the gold in The Valley of the Vanished permanently. And she was isolated enough in The Valley that her safety would not be an issue.

We are told in "The Bridge of Light" that a missionary priest was going to The Valley to instruct the natives in the Catholic faith. The man the Bishop sent was quite familiar with the Mayan languages. He started a school for the children of the valley and taught them to read and write in Spanish. The curriculum included Spanish literature, math, science, and history along with religious instruction. Monja attended this school and so she had at least a basic grammar school education. Select students also were taught Latin and other subjects. Monja was among these.

In "They Died Twice", it states that the Mayan natives' basic tongue was Nahuatl. This cannot be correct. Nahuatl is the primary Aztec language and is not related to the Mayan family of languages.

It is possible that some Nahuatl was spoken in The Valley. My sources tell me that there were families from various non-Mayan ethnic backgrounds who had apparently come to The Valley seeking refuge in the 17th Century when the High Mayan resurgence occurred. They had preserved their languages within their families and some of their story cycles and literature.

But the primary language spoken in The Valley was Itza Maya (Itzaj), a rare dialect spoken today by less than 100 people outside of The Valley. It is related to Yucatec Maya which is a language quite commonly spoken among ethnic Mayans in Mesoamerica. The Itzaj and Yucatec languages have a common ancestry but are somewhat different. The relationship between them is analogous to that between Italian and Spanish.

Sadly, the priest was killed by the Mayan warrior, Morning Breeze, using the Red Death a few weeks before the events in "The Man of Bronze". At that time the Bishop of Blanco Grande had not yet named a successor. Doc spoke with the Bishop and was able to have a Jesuit, Fr. Carlos Sanchez S.J., sent there to run the mission. Fr. Sanchez was a Mexican Mayan scholar who was living in exile in Spain after being ousted by the anti-clerical government in Mexico. He wanted to do missionary work with native people and had been a missionary in Mexico before his exile. When he came to The Valley he could not believe his luck. He compiled the most complete Mayan Glyph dictionary to date. and set out preserving and recording stories and writings from all the Mesoamerican cultures that had been saved in The Valley.

He also reopened the school and taught all the basic subjects including reading and writing. The languages taught were not only Spanish and Latin but English as well. Doc made sure that it was well stocked with modern textbooks. Monja was the school's star pupil. She had a flair for languages and Fr. Sanchez began tutoring her in Greek, French and German. By the time of the events in "The Golden Peril" Monja was ready for college studies. Fr. Sanchez was very progressive and saw educating the Princess as a way of guaranteeing the success of his religious mission. The civil war in Spain made it impossible for her to study in Europe and Mexico was in the midst of internal disturbances with open persecutions of Catholics. Many of Fr. Sanchez's friends and colleagues had been martyred for the faith in Mexico in that decade.

The University of Cordoba, Cordoba, Argentina

So Fr. Sanchez arranged for Monja to attend the Catholic University of Cordoba in Argentina as a foreign dignitary. It had been founded by the Jesuits in 1613 and was the oldest university in South America. As a woman, she was not allowed to formally enroll, but she audited several classes and was privately tutored by the University's professors. She also did quite a bit of independent study. She was most interested in governmental theory and economics. With her language skills she was able to read the classics of Western Literature in their original languages. She apparently learned Italian just so she could read La Divina Comedia in Dantte's original Tuscan dialect.

And her education went beyond books. She learned about industry, motor cars, radio, telephones, newspapers, and the night life of the modern Twentieth Century world. She also became fascinated with western art and took up painting herself. The Princess traveled all over the Americas including some trips to the USA. On at least one of those trips, she visited with Doc in New York. She spent the Summer of 1938 touring Europe. Sadly, because of the Spanish Civil War, she would not get to visit Spain until after World War II.

At the time of "They Died Twice" Monja had just returned home from Argentina when the High Mayan -- scandalized by her studies abroad and other aberrations he blamed on Doc Savage -- clamped down and tried to return The Valley of the Vanished to its isolationism. He had forced King Chaac to imprison Fr. Sanchez just days before the events in the story. Doc soon defused the situation and, afterwards, had the opportunity to get to know Monja, the educated woman. He was aware of her studies abroad which had been financed by the Hidalgo Gold Syndicate in Blanco grande. He was duly impressed. She discussed her vision for her people in The Valley. She was concerned that their way of life was threatened by modernization and she was not pleased at the prospect of the The Valley becoming the target of modern vices. In many ways her views were much like those of the High Mayan! But she also knew that they could no longer ignore the outside world. And she was determined to fight the sexist bias she had encountered in Argentina and in her own culture. It was intolerable and wasted the talents of half of the adult population. Meanwhile, she had also developed a taste for Jazz and dancing in nightclubs.

Doc smiled to himself wistfully. He was falling in love with Monja. She reminded him of Annette, who had broken with convention and suffered numerous indignities to earn her medical degree from Johns Hopkins. Nevertheless, she was all woman and enjoyed a good night on the town. Sadly, Annette had become a target for his enemies and she was too head-strong to take a low profile. She had her own career and insisted on pursuing it without restriction. That was why Clark knew he had to break it off with her. It had been for her own safety. Would he now have the same problem with Monja?

Monja insisted that she wanted to know how the government of Hidalgo functioned as well as the workings of the Syndicate that had invested The Valley's gold. She wanted to go to work for the government in Blanco Grande, Hidalgo's capital city. Her Spanish was excellent. (In fact, it was too good for Hidalgo! Her pronunciation was more Castillian than Mesoamerican.) She had cultivated clerical skills in Cordoba, including typing. And she was a quick study. She could learn quite a bit working in the capital city and make important political connections that would aid her people.

But Monja did not want to stay in the outside world. She knew her place was there in The Valley and she wanted to return there to rule it when her father died. And she wanted Clark to rule beside her. She told him this looking him right in the eyes without embarassment. The proposition she was making to him was obvious and Doc came as close to blushing as he had in many years.

Without the slightest awkwardness, they kissed. Doc held her in his arms and they gazed into each other's eyes speaking in low whispers. Things could have gone a lot further, but Doc restrained himself, and told Monja that they needed to set an example for her people. She gave him a look that clearly said she did not care to set any examples for anyone. But she was smart enough to realize that Doc was no ordinary man and that, if she was to be his woman, she would need to be extraordinary herself.

A Self Portrait of Monja F'Teema

Doc made a critical decision that night. He went to his luggage and took out a hermetically sealed metal flask with a special adjustable reservoir in the end. He gave it to Monja the next day and told her that she was to fill the reservoir and drink its contents every day until the flask was empty. He had set the reservoir for the exact amount of fluid she would need for her height and weight. The flask contained around 1 liter of fluid which was enough for around 200 doses. She asked him what it was. He told her that it was a special medicine that would prevent all illnesses, heal all scars or injuries, give her smooth skin with thick gorgeous hair, protect her teeth from decay, and keep her beautiful for him. He did not tell her that this one flask alone would also preserve her youth and increase her longevity by several decades. Thereafter, once a year, he would send her a maintenance dose that she was to take immediately. He would also provide a small additional amount of the formula so that she could take an extra dose in case of injury. It had a pleasant taste, somewhat savory and a little sweet. He cautioned her that this was to be a secret kept just between the two of them. No one else was to know about this, not even her father.

This was the infamous "Formula" that Clark Savage Senior had first developed in 1925. He had spent most of his life investigating claims for longevity elixirs from around the world. At that time, he had collected 7 bona fide anti-aging potions and determined that they were all compatible with each other. It was after taking the first dose of the "Formula" that he and Abby had conceived Ripley. It was only the second time that Clark Senior had ever impregnated a woman. He shared the "Formula" with his wife and his sons, but no one else.

When Ham Brooks had a heart attack in 1927, Doc decided to share it with his five aides as well. Monk was particularly crest fallen because he was proud of his many scars and they all eventually faded after taking the elixir. The most dramatic effect was in Johnny. His left eye had been surgically removed in 1918 to prevent sympathetic ophthalmitis after he had sustained a severe injury to it after being struck in the face by a German rifle butt during the war. Since then, he had worn a spacer in his left eye socket with a glass eye prosthetic. After starting the "Formula", Johnny started having headaches until he took the spacer out. Over the next seven years, he regenerated a new eye. At first all he could see was light and dark, but then the vision started coming in distorted. Doc determined that he had some surgical clips and sutures still present from the original enucleation. He operated on Johnny in early 1934 just before the events in "The Man who Shook the Earth" and removed all foreign debris from the left orbit. Within days, the eye began to function normally.

There was also an interesting side effect for Monk Mayfair. In the Super Saga "Rock Sinister" (May, 1945) it was revealed that his all of his teeth had come out and he had had to wear dentures. Doc had a made a change to the "Formula" that year and for some reason Monk had had a paradoxic reaction to his yearly dose: all of his teeth fell out and he grew a new set over the next 3 months. Doc made an adjustment to Monk's formula and this did not happen again.

{The sharper readers will be wondering why Clark Senior had fallen victim to the Red Death if he had this illness preventing "Formula". The simple answer is that he did NOT die of the Red Death. According to my sources, he was shot and killed with the same large bore rifle that was used to fire at Doc in the opening sequence of "The Man of Bronze". The analyses that Monk said he had performed on Clark Senior's body were actually done on the body of Hubert Robertson. Apparently several attempts had been made to kill Clark Senior. There was a failed attempt by a sniper and a car bomb that we know about. Then there was the attempt to use the Red Death to infect him and the members of the Cabal who supported Doc's special education. This had occurred at a dinner meeting about three weeks before "The Man of Bronze". the Cabal met to prepare to finalize the transfer of funds from the Hidalgo Gold Syndicate to Clark Junior's control. All of the men there had been exposed to the Red Death, but only Doc's father had not taken ill. Within two or three days, they were all dead. Luckily, some of the Cabal -- like Sam Cantor and Jerome Coffern -- were not at that meeting. In frustration, the murderous conspirators killed Clark Senior with a Dinosaur Rifle that he himself had designed while he was going to attend to the dying Hubert Robertson. Tragically, Clark Senior was bringing an experimental penicillin formula to treat his friend, but he was shot before he could administer it. For public health reasons, it was decided to cremate the bodies of all the dead men who had attended the meeting including Clark Senior's. Why was this charade implemented by Dent, et al? My sources said that it was to protect the existence of the "Formula".}

Clark Senior had continued improving on the formula over the years. After his death, Clark Junior continued to modify it. In "Fear Cay" in 1934 he had stumbled upon the rejuvenating herb Silphium growing on a small Caribbean Island. Later that year, his cousin Tarzan had stumbled on the Kavuru longevity pills and sent samples to Doc for analysis. At the time that Monja was given her dose of the "Formula" in 1942, it contained 23 separate components and hundreds of different compounds. It even contained an allotropic form of pure gold with odd biological properties. (This gold allotrope was discovered in the Middle East as documented in the book "Golden Blood" by Jack Williamson.)

In any case, Doc gave the formula to Monja as a pledge of his trust and affection. He told her that he loved her, but that they both had some unfinished business to attend to before they could contemplate marriage. Doc was quite concerned about the war and the rising threat of international Communism. (He knew the alliance between Stalin and the West was a marriage of convenience which would only last long enough to neutralize Hitler.) And Monja was still preparing herself to rule her people. But King Chaac was getting old and it was important for political stability that the dynastic succession be guaranteed.

And so Doc proposed that he and Monja undergo the formal Mayan ritual of betrothal. This would placate the High Mayan, solidify Monja's political credibility, and give Doc a claim over The Valley and its resources. When Fr. Sanchez heard about it, he was fit to be tied, but Doc reassured him that the natives were not backsliding. In fact, this would guarantee that there would be no further attempts to imprison or kill him. Fr. Sanchez accepted this explanation but remained apprehensive.

Doc left The Valley shortly thereafter and arranged with the Hidalgo government for a job for Monja at the Captial. Monja -- under the name of Mona Flores -- became a clerk in the department of the interior. (This is another detail that the George Pal movie got correctly.) She worked there for several years and eventually became a department head dealing with Indian affairs. She also became a trustee of the Hidalgo Syndicate and through them endowed Hidalgo University which was run by the Jesuit order. Part of the University's charter was to educate both men and women in all programs. Monja then continued her education earning a law degree and an MBA. She was admitted to the Bar in Blanco Grande in 1948.

Back in New York, Doc became friends with hotelier Jim Anthony and they were known to party together. During this time Doc dated many beautiful women, something he had avoided in the previous decade. He did this because up to that time he was quite inexperienced with the fair sex and he decided to play the field for a while. Doc learned a lot about women in general and how to intereact with them. He even was finally able to imitate the female voice! But he found that, nice as they were, none of these women held a candle to Monja.

Doc visited her in Blanco Grande on several occasions and she also came to New York a few times. It is rumored that they took trips together to Europe, Asia, and the Middle East between 1945 and 1949, but my sources cannot confirm this. Doc always has been a very private man.

After the events of "Up from Earth's Center", Doc became more introspective and began to seriously consider his own mortality. The Doc Savage Chronology states that it was in 1949 that Dr. Clark Savage Jr. and Princess Monja F'Teema were 'secretly' married. Indeed the ceremony was performed by Fr. Sanchez at the Mayan style church that had been built in The Valley. They took their vows before the whole congregation along with select friends and family.

The Church of the Martyrs of the Americas, The Valley of the Vanished, Hidalgo

Aviation Experiments in the 1950s

2007-07-21T19:40:00.000-07:00

I had a rather interesting conversation with one of my confidential sources concerning Doc Savage, UFOs, and experimental aircraft in the 1950s. I thought it might be of interest to some of my readers.

The Advisory Group for Aerospace Research and Development (AGARD) was formed in 1952 and was intended to act as experiment in scientific cooperation among NATO nations. In 1953, an international AGARD scientific conference was held in Cambridge, Massachusetts to discuss the direction of future aviation developments in the light of the experiences of the Korean War. Attending the conference were two men who would have an important impact on top secret experimental aviation in the 1950s.

The first was Professor Rudolph Felix Popkiss (b. 30th October 1902, Budapest, Hungary). Popkiss was of German-speaking Swiss lineage. His father had been studying in Budapest at the time of his son's birth. His parents moved to Appenzell near the Austro-Swiss border when he was only a year old; it was there that his sister Heidi was born. In his youth he helped out a clockmaker by the name of Curt Gestler who taught him about delicate machinery.

Rudolph completed his doctoral studies at the University of Geneva in 1931 with degrees in Electronics, Aviation, and Rocketry and set up his own research complex outside Geneva. He was eventually named a full professor at the University in 1935.

Robert Goddard at Roswell, NM with one of his rockets.

Back in 1929, he had traveled to America to visit with Robert H. Goddard at his rocket laboratory in Massachusetts. The two became friends and they continued to correspond with each other during the 1930s. Popkiss came to visit his friend many times over the next 8 years and fell in love with the USA. There was very little work available in Switzerland for experimental aviation and Prof. Popkiss began receiving funding from the German Government in 1934 to continue his research. By 1936, the Germans were insistent that Popkiss come to Germany to work on rocketry and advanced aviation design. Popkiss was horrified at what the Nazis were doing in Germany and he refused. His major source of funding was summarily cut off and he was forced to close his research facility. By this time Dr. Goddard had moved his experimental operations to Roswell, NM and Prof. Popkiss took a liking to the American Southwest on his visits there. Meanwhile, his fellow German-speaking Swiss academics began to ostracize him for his refusal to work in Nazi Germany.

In 1937, he was offered a position as visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and he came to the United States. While he was here, Popkiss was approached by the US Government to do some consulting work. He agreed to do so. Among other things he was able to brief them on what German scientists were doing. They granted him a plot of land in Black Rock, Nevada to set up a laboratory for experimental work in rocketry and advanced aircraft engine design. When his visiting professorship at MIT was over, he was offered a special status green card and was employed by the US Government full time in experimental aircraft design. He helped develop the first fully workable jet engine for US military aircraft which was used in the XP-59A Airacomet on its maiden flight on October 1st, 1942. His rocket engine design was the basis for the XLR-11 rocket engine used in the Bell X-1 aircraft in 1946 to break the sound barrier. He also drafted the first proposal for a swept-back winged jet fighter which was the inspiration for the F-86 Sabre jet. He was offered a position on the aviation research team for the Manhattan Project but refused. He wanted to pursue continued advances in jet engine design.

After the war in 1945, Professor Popkiss returned to MIT as a full professor and he brought his sister Heidi to the United States. Their parents had both died during the war years and Rudolph deeply regretted that, for security reasons, he could not attend their death beds in Switzerland. In 1946, he became an American citizen. The Professor is a workaholic but he collects butterflies and tinkers with clocks and 'likes nothing better than to sit in front of a roaring fire with a good book'. He is a great reader of classical literature in several languages. But his greatest love is cooking, especially breakfast.

Professor Popkiss was the keynote speaker at the 1953 AGARD Conference and challenged his colleagues to "look to the future" and to push the envelope in developing revolutionary new power trains and aircraft designs. He got into a heated discussion with some British academics after the talk which continued on into the night. One of those academics was Doctor Horatio Beaker.

St. Edmund Hall, Oxford

Dr. Beaker was an interesting fellow. He was born on 23rd July 1912, in Tunbridge Wells, England. Horatio was a child prodigy and received straight A levels in every subject. He was a bit eccentric and absent-minded but absolutely brilliant. He attended Oxford as an Undergraduate and even coxed for the Boat Race. Horatio was a scholar at one of the oldest Oxford colleges, St. Edmund Hall, where he got a double-first in Maths and Physics (Part I) and Biology with Micro-Genetics (Part II.) He took further training at Cambridge where he did some student teaching. Ultimately he completed degrees in Electronics, Biology, Physics, Mathematics, and Aerospace Engineering. He gained his Oxford D.Sc in 1941, and was elected a Fellow of All Souls after the war in 1946, at the age of 34. He also was an student of Judo and was a founding member of the Oxford Judo Club.

He worked for Vickers Aviation for a while before the war and became known in the research community of the Air Ministry. His brilliance and revolutionary ideas made him a critical military asset and his identity was kept confidential. He was given a cover job in London to put foreign intelligence services off the track.

During World War II , Dr. Beaker OFFICIALLY worked for the Ministry of Food with Professor Magnus Pyke, educating the people in how to get the most nutrition from what food was available. In fact, Horatio wrote several pamphlets on the topic of enhancing the diet with plants and herbs from the garden including a particularly interesting one extolling the use of Rose Hips as a source of Vitamin C. His recipe for Rose Hip tea flavored with Hibiscus became a staple product of the Crabtree & Evelyn brand and is still in production today. Beaker is also, like Popkiss, dedicated to his work but he devotes a lot of his scarce leisure time to botany where he is still experimenting today with food plants to enable us to get more nutrition out of them and he also puts his fertile mind into trying to get plants to grow in inhospitable areas.

For most of the war, though, he worked for the Air Ministry spending a lot ot ime at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in Farnborough, HANTS. He worked with Dr. Sir Barnes Neville Wallis with whom he had been associated at Vickers before the war.

Rare picture showing Beaker on the left and Wallis in the middle.

They had collaborated on the design of the development of the Wellesley and Wellington bombers and of the use of Geodesic structures in airframes. During the war, theyworked on top secret aviation projects including the development of the bouncing "Dam Buster" bombs and the 12,000 pound Grand Slam bombs. The work Beaker did was highly classified and he often used the cover of "plant growth research" to conceal his involvement is secret Aerospace work.

The Royal Aircraft Establishment from the Air

In 1945, he took a teaching position at Cambridge. He also pursued several aviation research projects both under private and government contracts. He maintained his top secret clearance and was part of the British delegation to the AGARD conference in 1953. Officially he went to the US to study the growth of desert plants. In reality, he spent his time at the AGARD conference, the experiment flight section at Edwards AFB, and Prof. Popkiss's site at Black Rock.

In the heated discussions that night in 1953, Popkiss and Beaker found themselves on common ground for many issues and soon the discussion ended up as a dialog between these two men that occurred on such a high level of discourse that many of their colleagues could not follow what they were saying. The discussion wandered into the realm of extremely advanced theoretical engine systems and complex airframe designs. Beaker in his early twenties had proposed a design for what he called "The Manta", a hybrid fighter aircraft that could not only fly but also function as a submarine attack craft. He also had designs for a flying aircraft carrier and a rocket pack ejection system for both underwater and aviation ejection.* The problem was that these projects required special materials and power sources that were unavailable at that time.

{*In an alternate timeline, these projects became a reality and Great Britain fielded them in 1935. This can be seen in the film "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" which takes place in an alternate 1939 where Germany and Japan have been held in check by British air power.}

He also had an idea for an advanced sort of imaging system that could penetrate a visual obstacle -- the thickest fog, liquid water, even solid walls -- and present clear real time full color images of objects at a distance. This "Clear Vue" system was based on the Quantum Physics principle of the Josephson effect. This effect induced quantum tunnelling through any barrier by increasing the potential in the quantum state vector on one side of the barrier thus allowing energy and information to burrow through it. The actual image transmission occurs at tachyonic speed. Beaker was aware that this nascent technology could theoretically lead to teleportation. (He did not know that this had been the principle used by the teleportation machine in the Super Saga "The Vanisher".)

Popkiss shared his plans for a vehicle that used a magnetoaerodynamic system. It would use magnetic fields to suck air into a plenum chamber and then magnetically force the molecules to repel each other and cause direct expansion and expulsion of the gases by magnetic induction. Add some combustable fuel to the mixture and you would have a powerful engine capable of propelling an aircraft at hypersonic speeds. The theoretical limit of the top speed of an aircraft powered by such an engine could be over Mach 30. That would be fast enough to put an aircraft into orbit with very little on-board fuel using mostly air for reaction mass at higher speeds and altitudes.

Sitting in the back of the hall was Doctor Clark Savage Jr. As the other participants dispersed, Popkiss and Beaker began brainstorming together and Doc kept listening. He was greatly impressed by what he heard. At one point when the discussion was petering out as the two geniuses were becoming exhausted, Doc stepped forward, introduced himself, and offered to help make their speculations a reality. Doc arranged for a US government Black Project funding site and gave them access to certain high tech materials that were otherwise unknown at that time. A level 3 Top Secret, Eyes Only "need to know" was assigned to the project. The old lab facility at Black Rock was rebuilt and project "Touring Car" was born.

Popkiss and Beaker spent the next 2 years at their respective drawing boards. In 1955, the refurbishing at Black Rock was complete and Professor Popkiss and Dr. Beaker took sabbaticals from their respective teaching institutions to go into full time design and building of Project "Touring Car". These two old geniuses threw their hearts and souls into this project. By 1958 they had designed the most godawful looking hybrid airframe anyone had ever seen. It used advanced concepts including a jet ducting system that would allow true vertical take-offs and landings. Dr. Beaker also brought in another electronics expert, J. Fairleigh Prothero,of A.P. Electronics, to co-design Touring Car's electronics. Both he and Popkiss would call on outside experts for help, sometimes compromising the secrecy of their project. The project was far enough along that they finally needed a test pilot to test the rig's performance.

Doc had been monitoring the project over the years. The two brilliant men were great scientists but terrible bookkeepers and they each tended to go off on his own tangent. And they had a very little concept of operational security. He realized that they not only needed a test pilot but another team member to keep the project on track, keep the two researchers coordinated ,and maintain SOME modicum of security. This is how Mike Mercury got involved in the project.

USAF captain Michael Mercury Jr. was born on 22nd November 1930 in Lincoln, Nebraska. Mike loved flying from a very early age and had ample opportunity to study aircraft as his father was a pilot. The senior Michael became a fighter pilot in the European theater in the United States Army Air Force during World War II. Unfortunately, Michael Senior was killed in the war and shortly afterwards, Mike's mother died in a car crash. Mike Junior entered the US Military Academy at West Point in 1948 and graduated in 1952. He entered the US Air Force and completed an accelerated fighter pilot training program. By May 1953 he was flying missions over Korea and, within the month, he became an Ace. He had a war time total of 11 1/2 kills. He was shot down behind enemy lines by an experimental Russian SAM-1 Missile in June and he spent two weeks in the jungle evading North Korean patrols until he finally made it through to allied lines. He was the first American to see a Russian SAM missile in action and his debriefing was classified "Top Secret". Mike was awarded the Silver Star and the Purple Heart.

After the war, Mike became a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in California. He was injured in a crash in 1954 and while in the hospital he fell in love with his nurse, Julie Satinover. They were married in 1955 and Mike was promoted to Major. Julie Mercury wanted Mike to get out of test pilot work and pushed for him to advance his education. He began work on a masters degree in aerospace engineering under government sponsorship. He had even applied for the early space program in 1957 and could have been one of the first seven Mercury Astronauts. Mike finished his masters in June, 1958. He gained a reputation as a competent research assistant and a team player who helped keep his project members working together, on time, and within budget. He seemed to be a shoe-in for Astronaut selection.

But Julie became ill in July, 1958 and was diagnosed with an advanced case of leukemia. She died 3 weeks after being diagnosed. She also had been 5 months pregnant at the time of her death. The child was a son and did not survive. Mike was devastated and was put on a personal leave of absence in August. He was subsequently passed over when the Mercury astronaut selection was made in October of that year.

Doc Savage had heard of this young man's story and thought that Mike Mercury was just the man for the job of test pilot on the Touring Car project. He would not only be good for the project but the project would be good for him. Doc interviewed him personally and had him come to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada to meet with Popkiss and Beaker. The three men hit it off quite well. The older researchers reminded Mike of his crazy uncles back home who had taken care of him after his parents died. Popkiss was a sentimental father figure and Beaker was an absent-minded fuss-budget. Mike was a down-to-earth guy who could handle himself in a fight, keep track of the finances, and keep everybody focused on the task at hand. And he was a superb test pilot. He also made several technical contributions to the final design of Touring Car many of which resulted in patents essential to modern aircraft.

Mike was assigned to test pilot duty at Nellis AFB and continued in that status until 1960. During this period, he worked full time with Popkiss and Beaker. In 1960, Mike was transferred to the US Air Force Reserve and became a civilian employee of the Air Force. He continued in that capacity until he retired from government service in 2000 with the rank of Brigadier General

The prototype was based around a unique reaction chamber that consisted of two large square condenser plates which generated two magnetic vortices between them. One was on the right (Starboard) side of the plates and the other was on the left (Port) side. The system was powered by a small atomic reactor. The Port vortex revolved clockwise and the the Starboard vortex revolved counter-clockwise. This cancelled out the magnetic effects beyond the plates. Various things could be introduced into the plenum chamber for the vortex to act on. Different kinds of combustible fuels could be used that would have their efficiency dramatically increased by magnetic induction of expansion. Metal filings could also be introduced to increase the reaction mass and overall thrust. Because everything in the chamber was manipulated by magnetism there was no physical contact of reaction materials with the plates themselves.

When starting the vortices, you had to do only one at a time otherwise they canceled each other out. After you got one started, it helped to induce the other one. At the low energies during startup during the intital tests, there were no discernable magnetic effects detectable outside the plates. At high air speed the counter-rotating vortices canceled out each other's effects outside the plates. Later on, Doc Savage provided an unusual ceramic material that was superconducting even at high temperatures. This insulated the effect of the vortices at high energies so that even with one vortex functioning, the aircrat could still fly safely.

Early on they, discovered that virtually any fluid -- liquid or gas -- could be manipulated by the vortices, though only a diamagnetic gas like oxygen could use magnetic induction to force a rapid expansion in gas volume. Water molecules also have a diamagnetic moment and were excellent candidates for generating thrust through the chamber. With just a little bit of magnetic heat induction, the water could be converted explosively to steam. This allowed the engine to function under water.

The original hull was composed largely of carbon composite materials that were harder than steel but light as plastic. The plenum chamber and exhaust ducts and nozzles were made of ceramics. What metal was used on the craft was of special alloys whose properties were tailor-made for their function. Beaker actually formulated most of these ceramics and alloys. Later on, Beaker developed a thin ceramic armor with low thermal conductivity that covered the entire outside of the vehicle. This made Supercar bullet-proof against anything up to 30mm shells and flak.

The canopy was originally made of high tensile plastic, but it was not holding up as hoped to the stresses of hypersonic flight. Beaker and Popkiss were contemplating putting a metal canopy on with a small glass window. Instead Doc Savage suggest a special hardened "glassite" material which was extremely hard though relatively light. This was a highly "classified" exotic material that only he could get for tehm. They sent him the schematics and he provided them with ready formed pieces and some small test blanks so they could familiarize themselves with teh material's properties. Beaker became curious as he studied the material. He was astonished that it could not be scratched even by a diamond. He estimated its density at 3.3 g/ml compared to a diamond at 3.5 g/ml and ordinary glass at 2.4-2.8 g/ml. He did a hardness test and stopped at 20 million psi (pounds per square inch) because his equipment could not go any higher. The hardest diamond has a hardness of 14.5 million psi. It had such low thermal conductivity that you could hold an oxy-acetylene torch to one side of the glass and not feel the heat on the other. This was very helpful since air friction at hypesonic speeds routinely raised the external hull temperature above 900 degrees Farenheit. There was a variation in the thickness on curved parts which prevented optical distortion without sacrificing strength. Beaker believed that the density of the material was altered in those places. The optics of the material were very unusual. The material was transparent across the whole human visible spectrum but it blocked IR, Microwaves, UV light and x-rays. The way it reflected electromagnetic radiation was also bizarre so that radar could not see it clearly. It did not polarize light yet somehow it was able to filter out glare and improve visability. Early attempts to generate a spectrum of the material completely failed. (It would be several years before a powerful enough laser was available to use for this and the results were so bizarre that they were unclassifiable.)

The square shape of the plates dictated a flat design for the body of the test bed aircraft. Dr. Popkiss used a lifting-body design to generate lift. Small retractable wings were used to generate stability during flight. The canopy on the test bed was made large enough to hold 4 people so that more than one person could be carried on to the aircraft along with the pilot to do research.

It was Mike who dubbed the first flying prototype "Supercar." Popkiss had suggested the name Superzeug (German for "super thing"). Beaker had recommeded the name Petrel after a diving seabird. Mike suggested "Supercar" because of the project codename "Touring Car" and the fact that "the darn thing looks like a flying car!"

In the initial flight testing, Supercar could achieve fantastic speeds. It was actually capable of cruising at Mach 6! Pretty soon people were reporting visual sightings of Supercar as UFOs and more than once, radar spotted the craft and jets were scrambled. Mike Mercury became concerned about this so test flights were temporarily suspended. Beaker and Popkiss spent a few days thinking about it. Popkiss redesigned the shape of the hull to be more smooth and rounded. Beaker also formulated a radar absorbing coating for the body. Finally, Popkiss and Beaker collaborated on an active radar control system that could control the radar signature of the craft. It allowed it to be visible, or invisible on radar at will. It also could project a false image to imitate thermals, thunderstorms, flocks of birds, storm clouds or even specific aircraft. Within one month, they were doing full scale air trials again and were never tracked on radar after that unless they wanted to be. The visual sightings did continue and helped contribute to the UFO mythology of the 1950s and 1960s.

Mike took a shine to both boys and saw something of himself in them. He too was an orphan and had wanted desperately to be an astronaut. The Supercar team decided to help the young men. Jimmy stayed on at the Black Rock facility where he went ot school and learned how to fly. Bill was freed up to pursue his desire to be an astronaut. Mike and the two scientists pulled some strings . He got a Masters degree in Astronautics at MIT and did a thesis on using single stage manned rockets designed for human passengers as opposed to strapping them to high-G ICBMs which was what the current space program was doing. He, Popkiss, and Beaker actaully built and tested the system. The Air Force Brass was so impressed that Bill was selected as one of the second group of NASA astronauts in 1962. In 1964 he married his childhood sweetheart, Anne Stephens. Bill never made it into any of the flight rotations, but was part of the support team for several flights. He was also tagged to give input to the design team for the Saturn rockets which were the first NASA rockets designed to carry human payloads.

My sources indicate that Major Bill Gibson was awarded Astronaut wings in 1970 as was Col. Mike Mercury. This had something to do with a Black Ops space mission in that year in which an improved version of Supercar figured prominently.

During the 1960s, Doc began to use a vehicle called Ski Gull, to travel back and forth from the Fortess of Solitude. It was a twoseater magnetoaerodynamic jet desgined to be stealthy and capable of travelling at Mach 7. The design of this plane was based heavily on lessons learned from the Touring Car project.

Also during this time, Doc used a multi-environment vehicle that flew, ran under water, and was designed for land travel. It was called the Valkyrie. It was not desgined for hypersonic flight.

In his most recent space-plane, The Seraphim, Doc uses ten banks of flat magnetic engines each of which is five times as poweful as the one in the original Supercar.

Concordism or Multiple Worlds? How to handle the Different Docs

2007-07-20T16:35:00.000-07:00

Like many action characters, Doc Savage has gone through several different "incarnations" in different media and spawned several pastiche variations. The Doc Savage of the Marvel Comics Universe was quite different from the Doc Savage of the DC Comic Universe. The Doc Savage of Phil Farmer's "Apocalyptic Life" is somewhat different from that of the Super Sagas. The Millennium Comics Doc Savage is different from that of the Dark Horse Comics.

And the Pastiches! Phil Farmer has created Doc Wildman, Doc Caliban, Doc Ravage, and Doc Fauvre. Mike Black has his excellent Doc Atlas stories. Tim Byrd has his exciting Doc Wilde series. There are the Doc Ardan stories by Guy d'Armen (adapted by J-M. & R. Lofficier) and Win Eckert. Glen Cook creaed his fantasy homage to Doc Savage known as Rider. Aaron Alston has his fantasy-based Doc Sidhe stories. E. Hoffmann Price created his Doc Brandon. And we can't forget Doc Brass from Planetary. We even had a Doc Richards pastiche from the Fantastic Four! And then there were lesser known homages like Doc Garbage, Doc Sausage, Doc Sovage, Doc Frankenstein, and Doc Royal.

So what gives? Do we need to harmonize all of these disparate Docs into one timeline (a lá the post-crisis DC universe) or should we accept that all these different Docs inhabit different universes (a lá the pre-crisis DC universe and the Batman /Planetary crossover)?

Some of the Wold Newton devotees have elected to go with the former. I for one prefer the latter. I think it is more exciting to contemplate a whole series of different Docs than to try to force fit all the wild (and often contradictory) story lines into one complete narrative.

(For those interested, there are several good Wold Newton sites including The Wold Newton Pages & The Secret History of Wold Newton, on http://www.pjfarmer.com/ , The Wold Newton Chronicles , The French Wold Newton Pages, Yet Another Wold Newton Site, Jess Nevin's Wold Newton Page, and many others.)

This also allows each creative mind to develop his or her own "Doc" whole and entire. And to be honest, that may the way things really are if the Many-Worlds Theory of Quantum Physics is true.

One solution to the Quantum State Vector equation implies that at each decision node when reality could proceed in 2 or more different directions, EVERY possibility is actualized "somewhere" so that an infinite number of possible universes comes into existence. This means that all imaginable realities actually exist "somewhere". EVERY possibility without exception! So there really could be a universe with a Superman, or a Fantastic Four, or a Doc Ravage, or a Doc Sidhe.

I have problems with this Many-Worlds Theory. It requires that at each decision point the universe splits off and spawns slightly different clones of itself. This is a major violation of the Law of Conservation of Mass and Energy. If at every instant the entire universe duplicates itself, we should be able to document violations of the conservations laws routinely. There should also be some quantum tunneling effects in certain high-energy states which we just do not see. One of the great contributions to Quantum Physics by Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman was his "Sum over Histories" theory. It replaces the classical notion of a single, unique history for a system with a sum, or functional integral, over an infinity of possible histories to compute a quantum amplitude. Essentially, all the possible outcomes cancel each other out until only one remains ,and it is that one which is actualized.

This means that each possible world has a semblance of existence and influences the ultimate result of reality, but in the end, only one real world truly "exists" in the sense of having real mass and energy. Thus the Conservation Laws are maintained, but the "Many-Worlds" also have a form of existence in a purely conceptual way.

So human imagination does not just "make things up". It explores the conceptual possibilities which actually do "exist" in some way and which have contributed to the way the "real" universe is.

So "somewhere" there is a Doc Caliban and a DC Universe Doc Savage who are complete and consistent persons in and of themselves separate from the Doc Savage of the Super Sagas. They are real alternatives to the Super Saga Doc and do not need to be force-fitted together into the same timeline.

Doc Savage and his Fortune

2007-07-19T19:33:00.000-07:00

It is very clear from the Super Sagas that Clark Savage Senior had spent virtually everything he had in completing his son's education, building the Fortress of Solitude, funding the Empire State Building project, and establishing the Crime College on his upstate New York Estate. But Clark Senior had been a multi-millionaire who made deals over the phone dealing with tens of millions of dollars. What might be considered being cash-poor in his case would still be filthy rich to most of us. And we must remember that the 1929 Stock-Market crash and the Depression occurred around the time of The Man of Bronze. During those days even rich men were "cash poor" with much of their personal wealth tied up in frozen assets. In fact, in the Millennium comic series "The Devil's Thoughts" we discovered that -- in a twist of irony -- Clark Senior had to borrow $250,000 from the Mob in 1930 to finish the work on the Crime College. it was not poverty that led him to do this but a lack of liquid assets.

Clark Senior had liquidated many of his assets to fund all those projects, but he had also established trust funds to keep them going as well. At the time of his death, he was still worth hundreds of millions of dollars on paper. Cash flow was the issue. Doc himself had several patents from which he was drawing revenue and he had an investment portfolio which his father had started for him when he was a child. He had also received annuities from his father on his 21st birthday, and was supposed to receive more on his 30th birthday. It was then that Clark Senior was planning to reveal the gold supply from the Valley of the Vanished.

But merely having a supply of gold would never have been enough. You need to have a means of converting that gold to cash to make it useful. And compounding the problem, on April 5, 1933 President Franklin Roosevelt outlawed the ownership of gold by individual citizens and he confiscated any bullion or coinage that was in private hands.

From my confidential sources, I have learned that the deal which Clark Senior had made with the Government of Hidalgo and King Chaac from the Mayan city had been put into effect in 1917 just before he had left for Maple White Land and that gold had been flowing out of the mountains of Hidalgo from an alleged new mine since then. Between 1917 and 1930 over $250 million dollars in gold had been taken out of the Valley of the Vanished and processed by a syndicate in Hidalgo for investment both overseas and in America. The syndicate had included Clark Senior, Hubert Robertson, Hidalgo's President Martinez (who died in 1924) and several of the men who had been sponsoring Clark Junior's education. It was the list of these men that Kulkulkan had targeted for assassination in 1931.

At first, Clark Senior had managed the investments of the syndicate, but after his injuries in Maple White Land, his private attorney Sam Cantor took over. He began investing large amounts of money overseas as well as making key investments at home in the USA. At the time of "The Man of Bronze" (March 1931) Sam was overseas putting the finishing touches on the plan to transfer control of the Hidalgo syndicate to Clark Junior that November. Sam had heard of the deaths of the Syndicate members and stayed out of the country traveling under an assumed name. When his sources informed him that Clark junior had taken control of the situation and that there was no pending threat, Sam returned to New York and briefed Clark Junior on the final plan. Since the syndicate members were mostly dead at that point, it was decided to move the timetable up for the disbursement of the funds.

With an initial outlay of $10,000 in cash, Sam Cantor began a cascade of ownership transfers all over the world and the USA which within 30 days provided $10 million dollars in cash to the accounts of the Hidalgo Trading Company. At that time, Doc Savage was the sole proprietor of the company having inherited it from his father. Similar outlays of cash flowed through the Hidalgo Trading Company every quarter for the first year and then they started to go up in value after that. At the time that Doc took possession of the world wide portfolio, it was worth over $750 million. The value of the portfolio increased yearly and Doc was a multi-billionaire before the start of World War II.

It should be noted that while Doc was in The Valley of the Vanished, he had arranged with King Chaac that upon receiving a radio signal, a mule train with $5 million dollars (~5 tons) of gold ingots would be sent to Blanco Grande for conversion to cash. This was a separate from the syndicate shipments, though the same rule for dividing the value between the Mayans and the Hidalgo government still applied. Later on, Pat Savage would pick up some of these shipments of gold and transfer it to institutions overseas for disbursement. The gold was "laundered " through banks in the Caribbean and Cuba among other places. It became Doc's "mad money" for those special projects that were not budgeted through normal channels.

Doc also began selling Mayan antiquities from the treasure trove under the Pyramid to selected buyers and museums. Some of the antiquities attributed to the unknown Mayan "Site Q" which have been showing up on the antiquities markets for the last 5 decades have actually been from The Valley of the Vanished.

One of the things Doc arranged when he took over the reins of the Hidalgo Syndicate was to upgrade it into a world class international bank. By 1940, Hidalgo had some of the most favorable banking laws in the world for investors. In fact it became the "Switzerland" of the Americas and remains such to this day. At this point, Doc virtually owns the entire county.

In the late 1930s, the Germans became quite interested in South American affairs and their spies were everywhere. It became dangerous to continue the processing of gold from Hidalgo and so the mines were "shut down" in 1938 and Doc rarely requested "mad money" shipments from King Chaac until 1942. After the US entered World War II, Doc stopped the entire gold operation for security reasons. It was never reopened.

During World War II, Doc and Long Tom became heavily involved in defense contracting. All that work on a radio-wave insecticide device which they had been doing for the previous decade generated several key patents essential for advanced electronic devices and radar. Long Tom went into partnership with Dr. Brownlee an inventor who had provided specialty devices for many of the heroes headquartered in New York including The Spider, The Shadow, Doc Savage, and Jim Anthony, among others. They eventually incorporated their own specialty defense company (underwritten by Doc) using the grounds in upstate New York where Brownlee's original facility was based. They all made a fortune from this.

Further investment in post-war American industry and a continued flow of high tech patents increased Doc's fortune. His world wide connections opened markets to him that were untappable otherwise and he began to broker business deals in the far east. Doc used Hidalgo as the main repository for his wealth and he kept the populace happy and unlikely to be duped by Communist agitation.

By 1949, Doc's worldwide income was so great that he actually began shipping gold BACK to The Valley of Vanished for safe keeping. Over the next 26 years, Doc returned an average of $20 million dollars in gold every year. He more than replaced all the gold ingots that had been removed. The aging King Chaac thought that Doc was out of his mind. But Doc assured him that the Mayan's trust fund was even larger than what was being put back.

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon closed the "Gold Window". The last link between Gold and the Dollar was gone. The result was inevitable. In February 1973, the world's currencies "floated". By the end of 1974, Gold had soared from $35 to $195 an ounce. Then on January 1, 1975, after 42 years, it again became "legal" for individual Americans to own gold, and the price began to fluctuate. But by the end of the decade gold was worth $850 dollars an ounce. This meant that the gold returned to Hidalgo had increased in value to over 24 times what it had been worth when it had been repatriated. This was a staggering coup and it vindicated Doc's plan.

Today, Doc's economic empire is widely distributed across the globe and it is estimated to be worth over 2 trillion dollars! Still, every few months, a new patent is filed by the Hidalgo Trading Company for some esoteric mechanical, electrical, or chemical process. The patent usually is of little interest at first, but within a few years whatever was patented turns out to be the key part of a new and revolutionary product or technology, and the Hidalgo Trading Company draws royalties from it. There are several such patents still active that have not yet been found useful. And more HTC patents are filed every year.

Doc Savage and the Avenger

2007-07-16T18:06:00.000-07:00

Banking on the success of the Doc Savage series, in 1939 Street and Smith published another adventure series "The Avenger and Justice Inc." under the house pen name of Kenneth Robeson. The series was well written and entertaining but is lasted only for 24 issues.

The Avenger's name was Richard Henry Benson. He was supposedly in his late twenties or thirties and was a man of average height and weight: 5 foot 8 and 165 pounds. He was obviously named for Richard Henry Savage, the writer and adventurer of the late 19th Century.

The Avenger was similar to Doc Savage in several ways. His headquarters were also in New York down on Bleek Street. He was a genius with competence in multiple fields including medicine, dentistry, engineering, chemistry, physics, business, and electronics. He was a physical marvel with super strength, super agility, super hearing, super reflexes, telescopic vision, microscopic vision, and a mastery of the martial arts. He had a collection of talented assistants who were experts in their own fields. (Two of these aides were a black married couple, Josh and Rosabel Newton who were educated at Tuskegee Institute and treated like full members of the team. This was a real breakthrough in the 1930s.) The Avenger had received a serious shock when his wife and daughter disappeared during an airline flight. It turned his hair white at the roots and caused his face to blanch and loose the ability to make facial expressions. It was impossible to read his facial expressions and gave him a constant stoic air. The skin also became pliable like putty and this helped to make him a master of disguise. (Later on, another shock caused his face and hair to return to normal.) He carried two weapons: Ike and Mike. Ike was a stiletto and Mike was a four-shot .22 caliber pistol that he NEVER used to kill. He was such a great marksman that he could "crease" a bad-guy's skull with a bullet and knock him out. The Avenger, like Doc Savage, would not take human life without a good reason

So we have a well educated young man with superlative abilities who out of nowhere turns into a literal super hero. All of this really pushed the limits of my credibility as a 16 year old when I began reading the reprinted Avenger Sagas in 1969. Doc Savage had super abilities but he had been raised, educated, and trained since childhood for that role. Dick Benson was just a business man who went a little crazy after his family disappeared. Where did he get his education? His super powers? What was his origin?

Rick Lai in his Chronology of the Avenger postulates that there was a competing program for the development of a superhuman to the one that gave us Doc Savage. I must agree with Rick that this is a virtually inescapable conclusion. But Lai thought that it might have been a German program that started in 1902 the alleged year of Benson's birth. For a variety of reasons this is not feasible. The programs of Eugenics and Aryan racial mythology had their origins in the 19th Century but were not taken to their logical conclusion until after World War I and it was the Nazis in the 1930s who really implemented them in Germany. I think we would have to look elsewhere for the origin of Dick Benson's training. Furthermore, it was clear that Benson was an AMERICAN who had first travelled overseas in his teens.

The most likely situation was that Dick Benson was the end product of another selective breeding program similar to that of the Howard Foundation. One reason for suspecting this is that he later met a man named Cole Wilson who was around the same age as Benson and virtually his identical twin. Wilson had similar physical powers to Benson's even though he was not as well educated.

And then in the Doc Savage Super Saga "The Talking Devil", we meet a character named Butch who works for the Montague Ogden. He is a small man pale and soft looking but he is a big game hunter, and gives instructions in Jujutsu, wrestling, and knife-throwing. Towards the end of the story, he and Monk get into a tussle and Monk gets the worst end of it. Butch is not only very strong but quite fast and skilled as a grappler. Under ordinary circumstances, if you have a fight between a small jujutsu expert and a 250 lbs experienced bruiser like Monk Mayfair, put your money on the bruiser. The fact that Butch seemed to come out on top makes me suspect that he was another "Dick Benson" look-alike.

So it seems that someone had been breeding "Dick Benson" look-alikes around the turn of the century. Who was doing so and why?

In his Wold Newton family tree, Philip José Farmer identifies Richard Benson as the nephew of Phileas Fogg through Phileas' sister Isis. As we know from The Other Log of Phileas Fogg, Phileas was allegedly the super-powered human agent of Eridanian extraterrestrials. It may be that the entire Fogg family was bred for this work and that Cole Wilson was another Fogg descendant. But were these supposed "Eridanians" benign or did they have their own nefarious agendas?

Benson's history before he became The Avenger (which Rick Lai documents in detail in his Chronology of the Avenger ) makes it sound like he was always on the run from something. This seems reminiscent of Jarod, The Pretender, who was always on the run from an organization known as "The Centre". Was there an earlier incarnation of "The Centre" or some similar group responsible for breeding "Bensons"? Did he finally marry and settle down after defeating them so that he could come into the open?

The Avenger Sagas seemed to indicate that Benson had spent only 2 years in college, but he was too well versed in science and medicine for that to be true. I submit that he must have had private tutors and took special qualifying exams which earned him his degrees. He had to put in some time on campus and this was what the 2 years were all about. Very likely he spent much of that time as a medical student on clinical rotations. He had escaped from the "breeding program" as a teenager around the same age that Doc had joined the US Army to fight in World War I. He likely pursued private study in a variety of subjects and then later obtained his medical degree. Once he was free from his pursuers, he may have formalized other degrees.

It seems that Benson was raised and trained for a purpose but one that was very low-key at least in that early part of the 20th Century. I have often wondered if the "Eridanians" may not have been the same mysterious unknown aliens (The Aegis?) that sent Gary Seven to Earth in the original Star Trek series. (See the episode "Assignment: Earth".) Or was even this a cover for some group even more secret and sinister?

Since he would have been fighting preternaturally powerful foes, it is possible that Dick Benson sought help from a kindred soul who like him had been prepared from birth to be a superman. Could he have been aided by Doc Savage in his fight for freedom? My sources have been very circumspect about this question. It seems that there is disturbing information here that they think the world is not prepared to hear about even today.

"The Bridge of Light" and Dinosaurs

2007-07-12T13:37:00.000-07:00

As the protagonist in"The Bridge of Light" (whom I believe to have been Clark Savage Senior) proceeded through the jungle to find the lost Mayan city, he encountered two "dragons" which the Codex he bought in Spain had warned about.

The first "dragon" was a giant flying reptile -- a pterosaur -- that was as big as a small airplane with a 6-foot long beak filled with sharp teeth . The head did not have any elaborate balancing crest on the back as in a pteranodon, nor was there a tail. In the story it is described as being dark black in color and having what sounds like a 40 feet wing-span. It was a huge animal. No such pterosaur was known to science until the 1980s. That was when Quetzalcoatlus northropi was discovered.

It was the largest animal ever to fly with a wingspan of 45-50 feet.

It was indeed as big as an airplane.

And it would dwarf a man standing next to it.

One problem with this identifcation is that Quetzalcoatlus had a toothless beak. The species that Clark Senior encountered may have been a more primitve relative that still retained teeth. Or it may have been artificially equipped with teeth by whatever placed it there in the jungle. (More on this later.)

Notice that most of these images show Quetzalcoatlus as being blue/gray in color. This is no accident.

I think that this giant pterosaur was frequently seen in the skies over the Valley of the Vanished and that the Mayans took it as a good omen. In The Man of Bronze, the criminals painted their airplane blue and flew it over the valley to mollify the populace. They may have been doing so in imitation of the pterosaur. The black color of the creature's corpse may have been the result of the damage done to it at death after Clark Senior shot it down with his .45 pistol.

The other "dragon" was a giant meat-eating theropod dinosaur that Clark Senior and his guide encountered immediately after the experience with the pterosaur. Clark Senior described it as 30 feet tall with long sharp teeth. It was green in color with intricate geometric patterns on its skin to camouflage it in the jungle. It also had a "crest of spikes" on its head. In the story, this animal grabbed his Indian guide with one of its front limbs and bit his head off.

The largest known meat-eating theropods were about 40-45 feet long and stood from 15-20 feet tall when they reared up fully. They weighed between 6 and 8 tons. The animal Clark Senior encountered in the jungle must have been over 60 feet long and weighed 10-12 tons! What I find most fascinating is the description of "spikes" on its head and the colored pattern of its skin. The only horned theropod known at that time was Ceratosaurus which was always depicted with a single horn on its snout as seen below. And no one before the 1970s ever depicted dinosaurs with patterns on their skin. What is described in the book sounds like a REAL dinosaur as modern science would expect it to look.

A theropod with multiple horns on its head was unknown to science in 1929. But in the 1980s, such a fossil theropod was discovered in Argentina: Carnotaurus sastrei. It had two large horns over its eyes like a bull or a devil.

This animal lived in the late Cretaceous era. It was 30 feet long, stood 11 feet tall at the hip, and 15 feet tall when it fully reared its head. It would have weighed about 2 tons.

Obviously this is a much smaller animal than the one that is described in the story but the description is eerily similar. There is no way that anyone could have known about a multi-horned theropod at that time. Clark Senior must have encountered a large unknown species of the Carnotaurus genus with longer front limbs and a more exotic set of horns.

This was a frightening encounter with a demonic looking giant monster. Clark Senior was lucky to have escaped with his life.

The meat-eating dinosaur described in the book had a "crest of spikes" on its head which sounds like more than one pair of horns. There are dinosaurs with this type of head gear: Pachycephalosaurs. These were likely used in matting displays and occasionally as weapons. Pachycephalosaurs had thick domes of bone on the top of their skulls and probably used to run into opponents using the the top of their heads as a battering ram. Those spikes added an extra layer of hazard.

These dinosaurs looked like this:

The problem is that these are medium-sized plant-eaters, so the monster in the story could not have been one of them. I suspect that the animal in question was actually a early carnotaur with multiple spikes used as a mating display, longer front limbs, and a longer snout. Eventually, the multiple spikes were reduced to a single large pair over the eyes and few small bumps.

We have seen in the fossil record that in the late Cretaceous large solitary theropods were evolving into smaller theropods that hunted in packs. An example of this are the large predators Utahraptor and Megaraptor that are believed to be the early ancestors of the later smaller Velociraptor.

Or it could have been "engineered" for a particular purpose by some unknown being.

But the really BIG mystery is where did these two "dragons" come from? Only these two creatures are ever seen. They did not have mates or companions. And what were they doing in the jungle? Quetzacoatlus was a glider who would have nested on flat open ground and coasted on thermals near the shoreline. Likely he fed on fish and molluscs. And a huge theropod would generally have feasted on large prey animals such as Sauropods, Ceratopsians, or Hadrosaurs. But no prey that large lived in the Mesoamerican jungle and what did live there would have been small and fast and hard for a large animal to catch.

This introduces the possibility that these two "dragons" were specially bred and kept by someone or something to protect the Valley of the Vanished from intruders. This being may have arranged the feeding of its charges by special means. Maybe the Carnotaur was kept in hibernation or suspended animation for long periods until it was called on to attack intruders.

The pterosaur as we noted earlier likely was blue colored and its presence flying over the Valley was seen by the Mayans as a good omen. But maybe the flying reptile was actually doing aerial reconnaissance and could somehow communicate with its master or its fellow "dragon" to direct attacks on interlopers. It is probably no coincidence that it was the morning after Clark Senior shot the Quetzalcoatlus when the giant Carnotaurus found him and his guide. Maybe there was a telepathic link between the two "dragons" and the theropod had been directed to that spot before the pterosaur died.

One candidate for the master of these monsters was the centuries-old Mayan shaman who befriended Clark Senior and helped him in the Mayan city. He did possess some interesting advanced technologies. and it would seem logical for him to be the one who protected the city.

There is another possibility. There have been rumors that the extra terrestrial winged crustacean-like beings known as the Mi-go had some of their mysterious mines deep in the jungles and mountains of Mesoamerica. We know that they are masters of biotechnology and they could have created the "dragons" to guard their own privacy. Maybe they had an agreement with the Shaman who assisted them in some mysterious way. (See the Chaosium "Call of Cthulhu" game module A Resection of Time.)

The Shaman kept his own counsel on this matter and never revealed any connection between himself and the "dragons".

In any case, this explains why Clark Senior was so fascinated with Maple White Land. He wondered if there was some connection between the only two places in the Americas where living dinosaurs had been found: the plateau in the Matta Grosso and the jungles of Hidalgo.

One may ask why Doc and his men did not run into either of these monsters when they first came upon the Valley of the Vanished. They apparently came in the "back way" through a secret mountain pass. Meanwhile, the "dragons" protected the "front door" of the Valley which was in the opposite direction. Likely the patrolling pterosaur was shot down by Kukulkan's men without warning so that their blue painted plane took its place. Maybe it died before it could activate its fellow "dragon". In any case, Doc and his men were never molested by the monsters. It is possible that there is an untold story about how they neutralized this threat.

What was "The Bridge of Light"?

2007-07-11T21:50:00.001-07:00

In his 1929 novel "The Bridge of Light", author A. Hyatt Verrill tells the story of a man who discovers an unknown Mayan codex is a Spanish open-air market and pursues the location of a lost City in the Mesoamerican jungle. He finds that city and many marvelous secrets.

According to my sources, this is a fictionalized story of the discovery by Clark Savage Sr. of the Valley of the Vanished in 1910. He would later return with Hubert Robertson to arrange the transfer of some of the Mayan gold in the valley to the outside world where it would be invested in an international financial empire to prepare for the life work of Clark Savage Jr.

This is a truly amazing story with many weird elements. It is clear that the Valley of the Vanished was a much more exotic place than the Super Sagas let on. The High Mayan mentioned in They Died Twice was mostly likely the Mayan shaman who befriended Clark Senior and whose identity was kept secret even from Doc Savage.

One element in "The Bridge of Light" that is difficult to believe is the one that gives the story its title: the bridge of light. There is an underground cave through which the protagonist must travel to reach the inside of a pre-Mayan temple that is off limits to the inhabitants of the valley. In the story a volcanic vent generates a beam of light that is so hard you can walk on it! This allows the hero to safely cross teh underground abyss and find his way into the temple.

But of course this is absurd. You cannot walk on a beam of light. But my sources tell me that in fact there was a light that guided Clark Senior thorough the dangerous caverns and in fact illumined the path under his feet.

In the Naica mines in Chihuahua, Mexico, there are underground caverns that contain gigantic crystals which are big enough for a man to walk on. These caverns are 1200-feet underground and the size of large cathedrals. They are filled with giant crystals of selenite (gypsum) some of which are 4 feet in diameter and over 50 feet long. These crystals absorb and conduct light so that a light source on one end of the cavern will cause the crystals to glow on the other side of the cavern.

Note the miner at the left side of the picture to appreciate the scale. You can also see how the crystals capture the light.

A man can easily climb around on top of these crystals, some of which weigh over 50 tons. The crystals were formed by hydrothermal fluids emanating from volcanic magma chambers directly beneath them.

The inside of this cavern is very complex and hazardous. There are many pitfalls and broken crystals.

Here we see a miner walking along a crystal that has been illumined from within by an external light source.

My sources tell me that it was just such an interior illumination that made up the "bridge of light". There are similar caverns beneath the Valley of the Vanished but they are much larger than the ones in Mexico and very much older. The lattice-work of these crystals is supported over a crenelated bottomless pit filled with deep crevices, some of which still contain active vulcanism. Some part of the lattice lead to dead ends, some to broken columns that abruptly end over the abyss , and others to hazardous areas with poor footing deadly volcanic fumes.

Light from the volcanic vent in the Pre-Mayan temple illumined a series of crystals which were connected together and offered the only safe passage through this three-dimensional labyrinth. The "bridge of light" was a series of these illuminated crystals used by Clark Senior to make his way safely across the underground abyss.

I am told that what he found inside that Pre-Mayan temple was more than merely the volcanic vent that Verill mentions in his story. Could it have been an outpost of Taz, the sunken city from the Super saga The Mystery Under the Sea?In fact the "bridge of light" itself was a technologically designed artifact. There are many secrets that Clark Senior found there which assisted him in some of his later exploits. It provided the formula for the material out of which the blue dome of the Fortress of Solitude was constructed and the technique for polarizing the segments together with out any seams. It also gave him advanced medical techniques in neurosurgery which among other things helped him "rewire" criminal brains. And it provided him with medicinal formulas which helped to retard the aging process and enhance human performance. Clark Junior would not become privy to the true sources of this information until after his father's death though he had suspected for some time that his father had had such a hidden fount of knowledge.

Types of Ammunition for the Super-Machine Pistols

2007-07-10T09:17:00.000-07:00

Doc Savage and his crew employed technologies that were many decades ahead of their time. This was due to their access to highly advanced materials and concepts that were not available in the 1930s from mundane industrial sources.

The Super-Machine Pistol was a case in point. It was described as being larger than your average pistol and as having a "ram's-horn" magazine like the one below.

It could fire single shots or long bursts of fully automatic fire. It had a remarkable rate of fire between 700 and 800 rounds per minute. The sound this rapid-firing made was described like the roar of a bull fiddle. You can see a partial picture of this pistol on the Pulp cover of The Land of Terror above. In the picture, it seemed that the pistol had a drum magazine very much like that of a Tommy gun:

There is description of this in the Super Saga Red Snow:

Doc Savage whipped away from the shuttered window, ran to his hand bag-the one from which he had taken the binoculars-and jerked up one of the flaps which separated the container into halves. This revealed five weapons which, one not knowing much about firearms, might have mistaken for automatic pistols.
Doc Savage removed one of these. Just ahead of the trigger guard, he clipped a magazine which resembled one of the reels on which film for home movie cameras is put up. Lying beside the unique weapons were five cylinders somewhat over an inch and a half thick and nearly a foot long. Doc affixed one of these to the muzzle of the over-sized automatic device, by a patent coupling.

Such a drum could carry up to 120 rounds of ammunition. You couldn't fit a pistol with that kind of drum in a shoulder holster or on our belt. But you could do so if you used a straight or curved magazine that held 20-30 rounds and then switched to the larger drum in a fire fight. I think it would have looked like the machine pistol below:

This next illustration is a visualization of the Super-Machine Pistol by Jim Steranko for a fanzine in the 1970s:

Steranko's reconstruction has a front handgrip that can swing down for more steady aiming using both hands. It also has interchangeable barrels which includes a silencer/flash suppressor as described in the quotation from Red Snow, and an extended barrel for increased effective range.

The Super-Machine Pistol appeared to use a small bullet -- likely a .22 caliber. We are also told that the usual type of bullet used was a "Mercy bullet" which was a hollow metal shell that contained a rapid acting anesthetic liquid. In Brand of the Werewolf, we are told that one mercy bullet had enough anesthetic to render an average 70 kg man unconscious for around 30 minutes.

A hollow-shelled bullet would not penetrate well at all, which was a positive thing in a non-lethal bullet. But it would still need to deliver its payload through the skin and into the bloodstream. I submit that the most likely anesthetic used was a ketamine derivative dissolved in Di-Methylsulfoxide (DMSO) solvent. If you touch DMSO to your little finger, you will taste it in your mouth in less that 30 seconds. Ketamine is a very rapidly acting agent that renders a person unconscious within seconds but does not suppress respiration or blood pressure. In fact it supports cardiac and respiratory function. Its effects last for about 20-30 minutes. It would be most effective if the mercy bullet penetrated the skin, but if you got this mixture on your clothing and it touched your skin, it would be rapidly absorbed and would still knock you out in just a few moments.

In the Super Sagas, they describe other types of bullets:

-Regular Ball ammunition

-Explosive bullets that could bring down "a small house"

-Tracer bullets that burn brightly and can be tracked with the naked eye day and night

-Incendiary bullets that could light fires on flammable targets

We can speculate about other types of ammunition as well:

-"Death Cap" ammunition: Just like a Mercy Bullet but with 100 mg of hydrogen cyanide dissolved in DMSO. Even getting the liquid on your skin from one bullet would be rapidly fatal. They were designed for special commando operations. The shells were pointed and designed to penetrate more deeply than mercy slugs. You could never confuse the two becasue they looked so different frm each other. Eventually "Death Cap" pistol rounds would become standard issue for designated U.N.C.L.E field agents

-Steel-Jacketed Ball ammunition: For military use. These would meet the requirements of the Geneva Convention.

-Hollow Point: Expands on impact to deliver a maximum kinetic pulse.

-Armor Piercing: Using a tungsten carbide or hardened steel core, these could penetrate light steel plates that were one-half inch thick. Effective even against most modern light body armor.

-Ultra High Velocity ammunition: Delivers more kinetic energy knock-down power than a .38 special round. In either ball, jacketed ball, or hollow point forms.

-Bird-Shot round: Fires a spray of smaller projectiles like a shot gun. Most useful for small game.

-Sabotted Flechette rounds: High velocity nail-like sabotted flechettes designed to penetrate between the fibers in a bullet proof vest or heavy clothing. These can be tinged with poisons. A drop of ricin toxin on one of these flechettes hitting anywhere in the chest or head would cause almost immediate death.

-"Memory" Ammunition: This is an exotic alloy bullet that has "memory". On impact, it "remembers" to expand itself into into an enlarged disc or lattice work shape that does extensive damage in side the body.

-"Smart" Bullet: An exotic alloy which remains hard when striking soft tissue but becomes soft on hitting a hard surface. This type of bullet does not expand in the tissues and is more humane than a hollow point. But it also will completely discharge its kinetic energy if it hits a wall preventing ricochets and further penetration. It is considered safer in a crowded urban environment.

-Piezoelectric Shock rounds: Based on the electric rounds invented by Hareton Ironcastle for the ill-fated Maple White Land expedition in 1918. The initial shock of the discharge in the pistol is converted partly into an electrical charge by the exotic alloy bullet and an electric discharge is released on impact into the target. It has an effect similar to a TASER. The shock is only ~10,000 volts, but it can knock a man out if you hit him just right with one round or in several places at once. The exotic metal alloy that Ironcastle first used was very heat labile, so he could not use a standard gun powder. Contrary to popular belief, gun powders do not explode. They combust rapidly releasing large amounts of hot gas that push the bullet out of the gun while the flame heats up both the gun and the bullet in the process. Ironcastle developed a "cold gun powder" that released large amounts of gas adiabatically without heating either the bullet or the gun. It produced no flash and gave off a popping sound instead of a sharp report. The rifle that fired this special shell was dubbed an "air gun" but this was a misnomer.

-Silent Ammunition: Used for special operations. Uses any kind of projectile with Ironcastle's "cold gun powder" and a silencer. The powder charge could be set for subsonic muzzle velocity which might obviate the need for the silencer.

ADDENDUM: During World War II, Doc redesigned his Super-Machine Pistol to fire a higher caliber 9mm round for use in military operations. The variant ammunition included mercy bullet, jacketed ball, armor piercing, explosive, piezoelectric, incendiary, tracer, and sabotted flechette. All of these rounds, except the tracers, also came in silent ammunition form. After the war, Doc reverted to the .22 caliber Super-Machine Pistols again.

Cold Death - Cold Fusion?

2007-07-08T18:07:00.000-07:00

In the Super Saga Cold Death, Doc savage is confronted by a complex threat that includes a Cold Light Ray gun that not only can induce a rapid decrease in temperature but also cut a man in two and cause a few soft gumball like white lumps to create a massive blockbuster sized explosion. It is revealed that the villain has discovered a nuclear process deep in the ocean.

When I first read this story in the 1960s, I was certain that the Cold Light Ray was a laser beam. Lasers were able cut through materials and they were also able to apply counter vibrations to reduce the molecular movement -- and thus the temperture -- of select objects. Also there was talk at that time of using lasers to induce nuclear fusion. But that would require raising the temperature into the millions of degrees in a concentrated location.

It would not be until the 1980s that I learned about cold fusion. This is the theory that it could be possible to induce a hydrogen fusion reaction using Vanderwaal's forces between atoms and the affinity of hydrogen for the atoms of certain rare metals like Palladium. The reactions would occur at close to room temperture and be self-perpetuating.

The Cold Light Ray was a laser that had the capability of slowing molecular motion. Such a ray could cause a sudden collapsing phase change in a selected medium which then could induce a cold fusion reaction. The explosive "gum drops" in the story contained a combination of materials which included a large amount of hydrogen. When the ray struck them, the gumdrops under went a rapid shrinking pulse that induced a small CLEAN thermonuclear explosion.

Realizing the potential of this, Doc Savage has kept cold fusion secret for over 70 years.

Merchants of Disaster: The Oxygen Destroyer

2007-07-08T14:39:00.000-07:00

In the Super Saga Merchants of Disaster, the deadly weapon that is unleashed is an Oxygen Destroyer (OD). This is a gas that is released by a burning flare device which spits out blue and red sparks and which inhibits combustive oxidation stopping fires immediately. It also causes virtually instant hypoxia in the human beings who inhale it. The gas masks that were routinely in use by the US Army at that time could not protect against this gas. Only the immediate administration of oxygen or the ingestion of Doc Savage's oxygen tablets can save the victim. And the victim who has already ingested oxygen tablets will still succumb to the gas if they inhale it. Luckily, once the victim passed out and stopped breathing, he would revive shortly thereafter.

I have had an interest in chemical and biological warfare since the late 1960s. I did presentations on this for my ROTC classes in College and I did a paper on VX nerve agent for my toxicology class at Johns Hopkins. Later, I was the primary instructor in the chemical warfare section of the US Army School of Aviation Medicine at Ft. Rucker, AL in the early 1980s. Because of this I have had a very a great interest in this particular Super Saga. Based on recent information in the toxicological field relating to combustion by-products, I think we can identify what type of agent the Oxygen Destroyer was.

It has been known for quite sometime that halogenated hydrocarbons not only are not flammable but can chemically inhibit most oxygen combustion reactions. Certain metal and metal hydride fires are generally not inhibited by them. Some fire extinguishers in the past actually contained Carbon Tetrachloride. More recently the halogenated hydrocarbons have fallen out of favor as extinguishing agents because of their toxicity and the effect they have in breaking ozone down into diatomic O2 and inhibiting further ozone formation in the upper atmosphere. Ozone in the upper atmosphere blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation from the Sun which can cause skin cancer in humans and do severe damage to other living things.

Certain of these chemical are highly toxic to humans and can have a similar effect to that of the Oxygen Destroyer but only in high concentrations. But there is a halogenated by product of combustion that has never been isolated but which seem to act as quickly as the OD and in a very similar way.

Many modern plastics contain the halogen elements Chlorine, Fluoride, Bromine, and Iodine. When these plastics are heated in a fire, they can release significant amounts of Hydrochloric Acid (HCl), Hydrofluoric Acid (HF), Hydrobromic Acid (HBr) and Hydroiodic Acid (HI) all of which are very toxic to tissues. HF in particular dissolves human tissue very rapidly and is particularly dangerous because both the Hydrogen ion and the Fluoride ion are chemically active within tissue. But these acids are also very highly active chemicals and in combination with other elements in the plastics, they can cause the formation of very complex and highly toxic halogenated hydrocarbons that last only briefly -- seconds to fractions of a second -- but which are so chemically active that one breath of them can kill a man almost instantly. The chemical effect seems to be the immediate and total cessation of all oxidation at the cellular level. Death occurs so quickly that the victims have no other marks on them and the deaths cannot be explained except through rapid poisoning. No known chemical agent can do this.

The effect has been reproduced in experimental animals breathing the fumes from high temperature combustion of halogenated plastics, but the agent or agents have never been isolated. They degrade too quickly. This halogenated agent is considered by some toxicologists to be the fastest poison known.

The OD from the Super Saga is indeed the by-product of a kind of combustion flare. It is persistent in the air for several seconds to minutes and is rapidly fatal if inhaled. It blocks oxidation reactions in the body but if oxygen is provided rapidly enough, the victims can be revived. I submit that the OD agent was some form of Halogenated Supertoxin.

The question arises why the military gas masks did not protect against the OD agent. Simply put, the filter used in World War I style gas masks were most effective against vapors (i.e., aerosolized droplets of liquid such as nitrogen mustard and other blister agents) and gases that were water soluble like chlorine and phosgene. Such masks were practically worthless against lipophilic agents like the organophosphates. As such, they would also not have protected against halogenated hydrocarbons. Modern military gas masks use activated charcoal filters which adsorb both hydrophilic and lipophilic molecules and would probably have protected against the OD agent.

Oxygen Tablets

2007-07-07T18:53:00.000-07:00

In the Super Saga, The Mystery under the Sea, Doc Savage discoversed a sunken city which is called Taz because of a tableau over the arch at the city's gate:

Over this arch was a carving which explained why the place had been called Taz by Diamond Eve Post and the rest. The design consisted of three groups, probably intended to depict men engaged in mortal combat. Their interlocked, contorted figures, as seen through the crystal water, looked like the three letters: T A Z.
(Chapter 17)

The city of Taz contained a library of tablets that described advanced scientific devices and formulas. One tablet describedthe plans for a telepathy machine (Chapter 18). Another tablet described a formula which when ingested supplied oxygen directly to the blood without the need for breathing (Chapter 14). We are told that the formula tasted like "old socks" and that a spoonful of it would supply all the oxygen you needed with light activity for about 2 hours. As a result of this discovery, Doc later develops "Oxygen Pills" which are used in several later adventures.

Here Doc, Monk and Ham discuss this:

"What about this thing of our not needing to breathe?" {HAM} asked Doc Savage.

"The answer to that might best be started by asking a question," Doc Savage told him. "Why do you breathe?"

"Mainly to get oxygen," Ham said, promptly.

"Correct for the most part," Doc agreed. "There are other reasons, but we will not invite confusion by discussing them. Supposing a chemical mixture which, if taken internally, would supply the oxygen to meet your bodily requirements; what would that mean?"

"You would not need to breathe," Ham said.

Monk exploded. "But oxygen liquefied by compression would work something like liquid air. It would freeze a man’s insides."

"Wait," Doc Savage interposed. "An explanation of that was coming up. Oxygen is taken into the body to accomplish certain very necessary functions. It is conceivable that these same functions might be accomplished by another chemical or element, much less bulky than oxygen, and which could be handled more easily than oxygen."

Monk scratched his nubbin of a head, obviously lost in a fog of technical, chemical possibilities.

"Use your head, missing link!" Ham told Monk, unkindly. "Sure, it is possible. Take those concentrated food tablets we’ve been living on, blast them! They were not beef steak and onions, but they gave you the same necessary elements, did they not?"
(Chapter 14)

Doc made it clear that the actual function of breathing does other things than just provide oxygen, but he never elaborates about this in the story. In fact, the other proper functions for breathing are to exhale carbon dioxide and to thereby control the pH (i.e., acidity) of the blood. So he knew that, in order for this formula to work, it not only needed to provide oxygen but also capture carbon dioxide and buffer the blood to maintain a normal pH of ~7.40. The lungs also allow the off-gassing of other gases dissolved in the blood with decreased atmospheric pressure.

What could this formula have been?

It turns out that modern nanotechnology has been exploring an intriguing possibility which would accomplish this very end. It is possible to construct an artificial red cell that can be literally filled with oxygen which it could release in response to low oxygen tension and which also can be used to absorb carbon dioxide to maintain a balanced pH.

http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/nanotechAndMedicine.html

The average liter of human blood contains ~0.2 liters of oxygen at standard conditions whereas one liter of the nanotech artificial red cell can contain 530 liters of oxygen. That is 2650 times more oxygen! Since blood is less than half red cells, replacing them with the nanotech red cells would increase oxygen carrying capacity by more than 1000 fold.

The average non-athletic man in his mid 30s can absorb a 15 ml/min/kg of oxygen at rest. If he weighs 70 kg (normal average male weight) this translates into ~63 liters of oxygen per hour. With moderate exercise, this would be ~100 liters of oxygen per hour.

About 25mls of a thick concentrate of artificial red cells (One heaping tablespoon full) might reconstitute into 500 mls of artificial blood and contain between 100 and 150 liters of oxygen. So it could provide enough oxygen for ~2 hours at rest. They would also have to absorb carbon dioxide and then get it out of the body and could also be designed to scavenge up microbubbles of other gases as well. The CO2 and other gases could be released selectively into the lungs where they could slowly bubble out under water. It could also be released through the lining of the GI tract into the intestines. As the nanocells break down, they could be programed to excrete themselves through the liver into the bile and then into the intestines where they would be eliminated.

The human body contains about 10 liters of blood. If you replaced only one of those liters with a liter of such pure nanocells, you could hold your breath at rest for ~8.5 hours, at moderate activity for ~5 hours, and at heavier activity for over 3 hours. Now if these nanocells were self recharging and lasted for several days, you could scuba dive without tanks as long as you returned to the surface periodically to refill them with oxygen. And you would not run the risk of the bends because you would not be inhaling any air containing nitrogen or other mixture with a filler gas and the nanocells would clear any such bubble from the blood.

An added benefit from such a formula would be increased physical strength and stamina. The limiting factor in exertion is muscle fatigue caused by the build up of lactate in the muscles during exercise. The muscles burn glucose sugar to power themsleves and with strong exertion, they do so under anaeobic conditions (i.e., without the use of oxygen) because the blood cannot provide sufficient oxygen fast enough to keep oxidative phosphorylation going. The self-recharging formula in the blood would provide a virtually limiteless source of oxygen at high levels even n the deepest levels of the muscle. Anyone taking the formula could lift more weight over a longer period without fatigue, and also run faster and longer as well. The one danger to all this would be the tendency to overheat and create a fever from too high a metabolic rate.

So this "Oxygen Pill" -- especially if it could be taken by ingestion -- would give Doc and his men a marked advantage over their enemies in several ways.

This formula from Taz shows a high level of technical sophistication beyond our current capability but not beyond our comprehension.

Bullet-Proof vests

2007-07-07T17:21:00.000-07:00

In the Super Sagas, Doc and his men use bulletproof undergarments that are composed of light metallic chain-mail. These can garments can range in size from a torso protecting vest to long-johns with arm length sleeves. They usually are depicted as protecting the chest and abdomen. Even when they stop a bullet, the kinetic energy is still depicted as causing bruising or even cracking ribs underneath. The degree of protection provided by these undergarments varies in different stories and seemed to increase over time. In the post WWII story The Ten Ton Snakes, the vest is described as capable of protecting a man from a 30-06 military rifle shell at point blank range. In this article, we will discuss what a bullet proof vest is and what technologies Doc Savage had to provide in order for the protective undergarments to function as described in the story.

Ordinary bullets damage the body in two ways. First there is penetrating trauma where the bullet enters the body and directly damages internal structure. This is the most devastating effect of the bullet and the one most like to induce a fatality. Such internal trauma can in fact cause virtually instant death. The second type of injury is from kinetic trauma which can be transmitted to tissues which have not been directly in contact with the bullet. Modern high-velocity military rounds that enter the body at speeds in excess of 2000 feet per second can induce shock waves in soft tissue that disrupt cells and blood vessels and devitalize tissue for several centimeters around the bullet's path in tissue. In cases where body armor is worn, the impact of the bullet can still induce serious injury to bones and soft tissue that can be life threatening even though the bullet does not penetrate the skin.

So the goal of any body armor is to not only prevent penetration but also to attenuate the kinetic energy of the bullet to prevent its transmission to the body.

A plain chain-mail vest will likely prevent penetration but it will do little or nothing to attenuate the kinetic energy of the impact. It would therefore be necessary to have some type of padding or some rigid plates to distribute the force of the impact over a larger area. In the early 1930s, the usual weapon of the criminal classes was a .32 caliber or .38 caliber pistol. Such rounds were effective at close range but they did not have much knock down power. A simple chain mail vest with a padded backing would have been enough to prevent penetration and attenuate the force of the impact. But when you got up to the .38 special and the .45, the chain mail would have been hard pressed to stop penetration point blank and the force involved would cause contusion injury through any conceivable simple padding.

Modern bullet proof vests use woven plastic polymers such as Kevlar over a backing that will sometimes contain hardened metal or ceramic plates. Metal plates may deform under impact and undergo metal fatigue. Ceramic plates shatter and absorb kinetic energy by doing so. In both cases, the vest is permanently altered and may provide the same protection after more than one or two bullet impacts. The problem with the polymers is that such vests will fail if they get wet since water helps to lubricate the bullet through the weave and can chemically disrupt the polymer molecules themselves. And they are only really effective against pistols up to the .357 Magnum and the .45. Larger pistol shells like the .44 Magnum or the .454 Casull and rifle bullets like the 30-06 will both penetrate such vests and deliver significant kinetic damage. There are more sophisticated armors now that use kinetic-reactive plastics and even spider-web material which change their tensile strength and rigidity under stress. In some materials, the introduction of a rapid kinetic jolt alters the viscoelasticity of the material so that the entire vest goes rigid attenuating the force of the impact over a very large surface area.

The undergarments Doc's men wore were supposed to be light weight but containing metal mail. A good closely woven metal mail would provide excellent penetration protection and would minimize metal fatigue in the impact areas. If the alloy were properly formulated it would also become harder under rapid stress. (There are several alloys known today that will do this.) This would solve the penetration problem. But this would also require a padded backing material to attenuate the kinetic impact. I propose that the metal mail was worn over a cloth under garment with an internal cotton lining and an external plastic polymer weave that became rigid over a large area upon sudden impact. Such a polymer may have been sealed against water to prevent degradation of performance in harsh conditions. The use of the metal mail would also guarantee protection while wet. Theoretically such a vest could give the performance described in the Super Sagas even against 30-06 ammunition.

The technology that Doc Savage had at his disposal was always anywhere from 30 to 60 years ahead of its time. We are only now contemplating making a protective garment with the above performance characteristics but we are still using polymer weaves to prevent penetration. Maybe Doc knew better and an external covering of woven metal-alloy mail with varied tensile strength under stress is the way to go.