Hey there, hi there, ho there! Everybody’s buddy, Oddcube, here saying hi and welcome to the column! This is my own personal little corner of the magazine where I get to expound upon just about any topic that I deem to be expoundable! And, being the civic-minded type that I am, I have chosen to broaden the public awareness by investigating an array of uncommon and even outdated issues, events, and occurrences. Or in other words, I check out the weird stuff so that you don’t have to! …Now, aren’t you glad I’m here? Of course you are! So let’s get going!
In case ya don’t know it, I’m kind of a fan of old-fashioned pulp. See, before there was television, there was radio. Before there was radio, there were the pulps! The pulps were cheap magazines with sensational fiction stories. Generally, they are thought to have evolved from the dime novels and penny dreadfuls of the nineteenth century, and eventually evolve into the comic books that we know today. They featured larger-than-life heroes like the Shadow, the Spider, Secret Agent X, and hotshot pilot Dusty Ayres, to name only a few. They had lurid, exploitative, and often ridiculous stories, and sensational and often risqué cover art. Countless titles were published by several publishers from about 1896 through the 1950’s, usually featuring a full-length novel and then a few short story “B-features”. What’s not to love, right?
Now, these old pulp stories are kinda hokey, and very cheesy at times…which is probably why I like them! You can still find some vintage pulp magazines through EBay and Amazon, but they all cost a fortune! However, there are various collections of pulp stories in book form and a magazine called “High Adventure” reprints stories and art from a wide variety of old pulp magazines.
That brings us up to speed with this article. See, not too long ago I took my Poor Old Mother™ to one of the local second-hand book shops (she digs them second-hand book shops, she digs them the most!), and while she was looking for some kind of mystery book by the likes of Hillerman or Jance (I’m SUCH a name-dropper, and not even ashamed of it!), I was looking for cool-weird stuff in the fantasy/sci-fi section! And much to my amazement, shock, surprise and chagrin I found myself a Doc Savage novel written by Kenneth Robeson himself!
Kenneth Robeson is the pen name of Lester Dent, and he is responsible for almost ALL of the stories about Doc Savage. This particular novel is called “The Polar Treasure” and is, like, the fourth story published by Doc Savage Magazine back in 1933, published by Street & Smith! This book was a reprint by Bantam Books; my copy is a third printing release from July of 1972. The cover shows some guy in the frozen wastes with a polar bear towering over him in a most menacing pose! Looks cool! Accidental pun! I had never read any Doc Savage before, so I was excited!
Now, I have mixed feelings on this adventure. I’ll try and explain why as I go. First off, there’s Doc Savage himself. He’s, like, six foot tall, well muscled, and beautifully bronzed, which just sounds like some sort of girly mag centerfold to me. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he was raised by a team of scientists to have near-superhuman abilities, strength, endurance, a photographic memory, a mastery of martial arts, and esoteric knowledge of a wide variety of sciences. Throughout his career it has been revealed that Doc Savage is an accomplished physician, surgeon, scientist, adventurer, inventor, explorer, researcher, and musician. He’s the sort of fantasy over-achiever that makes me feel like the inadequate slacker that I am. Real people don’t achieve that much in a whole lifetime! So partly because of my own insecurities and partly because I believe people in general are too lazy to achieve SO much…I have trouble accepting Doc as a believable character. Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s pulp. But I have a much easier time accepting that some wacko with normal human abilities is SO messed up that he thinks putting on a mask and fighting crime in the middle of the night is a good idea.
To make it even worse, this Superman, this Lyle Perfect has five dudes that hang out with him and help him out on his adventures. They are supposed to be the tops in their respective fields. Oops, sorry! I mean that they were Second-Best in their respective fields, cuz Doc is the best at absolutely everything! …Which makes me wonder why he needs these guys? He doesn’t really. In fact, later in the series, these helper-dudes were written out of the monthly stories and would only occasionally make cameo guest appearances.
Ok! Now then, “The Polar Treasure”! Well, it starts off with this blind violinist, he holds a concert and afterwards gets jumped by this gang of sailor dudes who mutinied on a passenger liner the violinist was on eighteen years ago. There was supposed to be millions of dollars worth of gold on that liner, so the crew mutinied, scuttled the boat somewhere in the polar ice and left it there to come back for it later. Doc Savage shows up out of nowhere to rescue the violinist.
Well, it turns out that the mutineers couldn’t get along, and are now divided up into two groups. One is led by a dude named Ben O’Gard, the other by Keelhaul de Rosa. These seem to be the only bad guys worthy of getting names. No wait, there was one other guy called Dynamite Smith, but he was just one of Ben’s lackeys. Ben and Keelhaul are the only two bad-guy names worth remembering.
So it turns out that the blind violinist has a map tattooed on his back, showing the precise location of the scuttled luxury liner. Both groups of mutineers are now after him to get the map, and therefore the treasure. That’s cool! I like that part! The tattoo can only be seen by using an X-ray device. That’s kinda silly, but also kinda cool. I can take it or leave it. The part I don’t understand is why they waited eighteen years before going back for the treasure? I guess once one side decided to go after it, the other side heard about it and just wanted to beat them there. This isn’t adequately explained. But a lot of things in pulps aren’t adequately explained, it’s one of the major drawbacks of old pulp.
Of course, there’s a lot of nonsensical, near-pointless adventure in New York City as both teams of mutineers kidnap the violinist and obtain a copy of the map on his back. Also, of course, Doc Savage and his team find out about it. At one point, Doc and one of his assistants gets locked in a disused vault in an old condemned bank that some bad guys are using as a hideout. Now get this, Doc has two extra upper molars. They are fake and each one contains a chemical. When the two chemicals are combined it makes an explosive compound which he uses to blast the door off the vault.
Now I don’t understand that one at all. I mean, what you get into a fistfight and some dude slugs you in the puss and cracks those two teeth open. Wouldn’t your head explode? Or maybe you would just have explosive spit like in that cartoon where Tweety tricks Sylvester into drinking the nitro glycerin.
Anyway, Doc fixes the blind violinist’s eyes so he can see again. They caught some bad guys…oh yeah! Get this! They catch some of the bad guys and send them to a facility in upstate New York to receive BRAIN SURGERY! Doc fixes it up so that surgeons take out “the part of the brain that makes you prone to criminal activity”. Once receiving this particular lobotomy, you become a useful member of the community!
Oh REALLY? I have a BIG problem with this. Why? Because brain manipulation is a BAD-GUY thing! The good guys are supposed to stop the bad guys from doing that sort of thing! You heard of Fu Manchu, right? The inscrutable Chinese devil-doctor? Well, he has a whole big gang of dudes called Dacoits. You know what makes you a Dacoit? Fu Manchu performs a lobotomy on you, removing your free will making you his Dacoit slave! And yet, the HERO has funded a special facility to do the same thing! That’s just wrong!
Anyway, Doc Savage gets the map off the violinist’s back and tells his guys he wants to go after the treasure, partly to help fund the lobotomy hospital, mostly cuz he thinks neither set of bad-guys should have it. So his group of learned, intellectual cohorts starts hootin’ and hollerin’ and generally carryin’ on like a bunch of frat boys at a kegger and shout “Woo-hoo, we’re going on an adventure, just like in the Goonies!”
Time-out! I’ve met intellectual people and they do NOT act that way! At least, not the ones I’ve met. So I have a problem with that, too.
So, Doc checks the newspaper and finds out that some guys with a submarine just HAPPEN to be orchestrating an expedition to the North Pole and require some extra funding. You guess it; this is one team of the mutineers! Doc and his boys go with them, and there’s a lot of nonsense with people stranding other people on glaciers and stuff. The formerly blind violinist shows up outta nowhere with a rescue plane. Doc gets to kill a polar bear with his bare hands. We find the boat still stuck in the ice and the violinist’s wife and daughter (thought to have died eighteen years ago during the mutiny) are both alive and well, and the daughter is eighteen and beautiful and has the hots for Doc because that’s apparently what the chicks are for in a Doc Savage story.
Of course by the end of the story, all the mutineers are dead and not from anything Doc and his crew did directly to them. Doc does NOT find the treasure, as it was taken off the boat and stashed during the mutiny eighteen years ago. Instead he waits for one set of mutineers to recover it and put it on the submarine, so we can strand them on an ice flow and take the sub and the loot.
Through out the story, Doc does this thing where he lightly touches the bad guys with one finger and they get rendered unconscious. I thought it was sort of cool pressure-point thing, sorta like what Xena does, ya know? But we find out that he has some other chemical built into some false fingertips, and that greatly diminished the coolness in my opinion.
So at the end of it, I can say it was a learning experience. I thought the story was kinda cool, but I didn’t like the characters of Doc Savage and his helper dudes. I guess I prefer the Spider, he just shoots everything. I can dig that. But Doc is all weird chemicals and more scientific knowledge than a real human brain can hold. I swear if he tried to learn something more his head would explode! Sherlock Holmes used to say that a brain was like an attic with only a certain amount of space.
Oh well, the time has come to rate this so as to keep up the weak façade of being a legitimate review column! For this purpose I randomly roll a pair of D&D percentage dice to determine a number from 0-1 or “Totally No-Where, Man, Avoid At All Costs!” to double 0, which actually means 100 percent or “It’s the Ginchiest and the Maximum Utmost!” So I shall give them an unbiased roll like that…
And end up with a 68! Hey, it’s on the internet so it must be true! But hey, that’s just one idiot’s opinion and you don’t have to take it! You could check it out for yourself if ya wanted to. You should be able to find the book through Amazon and other such book sellers, or maybe you’ll get lucky in find it in your local second-hand book store!
Well folks, that’s all I got for now! So come on back next month when I talk about something else entirely! You won’t want to miss it, and I won’t want you to miss it, either! …I need the hits! Anyway, see ya next time, folks! Be there and be square!
------Your Buddy, Oddcube
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