The naughty side of Sherlock Holmes

The cover of this 1950s paperback edition of Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles is sooooooo odd, so '50s, so pulp, and so, well, naughty, that it's one of my favorites.

DVD review: DOC SAVAGE

A month ago, I mentioned that one of my guilty pleasures is the 1975 George Pal movie Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, and that it’s now available on DVD from Warner Brothers through The Warner Archive Collection. This is an on-demand service, and the DVDs are bare-bones but “studio quality.” The price may seem a tad high, but if you really love something, what’s twenty bucks, fer crissakes?

Anyway, I ordered my copy and promised at the time that I’d report back on the DVD.

Well, it is bare-bones. The packaging is minimal, but the DVD comes in a keep-case. As for the disk itself, it includes a promo for the Warner Archive Collection, the original movie trailer, and the film. I’m delighted. The trailer is in pretty crappy shape, full of blobs, hairs, bumps, etc. That’s no surprise. But the movie looks great to me. It’s presented in widescreen, and the print seems very clean and sharp, even on my 46-inch flatscreen. Now, I watched the movie on my Blu-ray player, and that’s supposed to amp up the picture quality a bit, so that may have something to do with it. But regardless, the print looks terrific.

As for the film itself, Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze remains a prize. While awaiting the arrival of the DVD, I re-read the first Doc Savage novel, written by Lester Dent in 1932. This is the story that the movie adapts. And you know something? Even with all the campiness, the movie is awfully faithful to its source material. Ron Ely still seems to me the perfect Doc, and the rest of the cast is spot-on, too.

So, Doc Savage buffs. If you’ve never before seen this little gem, take advantage of this. Buy the movie and treasure it. Last summer, I learned at Comic-Con that a new Doc Savage movie is planned. But in the meantime, this is the real deal.

Doc Savage is here!

George Pal's Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze (1975) always disappoints fans of the Lester Dent stories. But I love it. And I'm a big Doc Savage fan. Sure, the movie's silly. But the casting was great; Ron Ely brought back the old pulp image of Doc and played his role perfectly.

I saw Doc Savage at least three times in the theaters during its brief original run. I rented it on VHS a couple of times. I've seen it on TV a few times.

But no DVD release, at least here in the U.S. I understand it's been released as a "full-frame" DVD in Germany. And I've seen a few bootlegs online. But nothing official.

Well, the closest thing to an official Doc Savage DVD release is now available from Warner Brothers through The Warner Archive Collection. This is an on-demand service where you can order custom-made DVDs of WB films otherwise unavailable. Each DVD is $19.95 -- not bad for a movie you're just dying to own. Warners says they're "studio quality," but I don't know what that means. Are they widescreen or pan-and-scan? What condition are these films in?

That all remains to be seen. Since no retail release date has been offered for Doc Savage, I just may order this from the Archive. Then we'll all know.

I'll keep you posted.

Philip Jose Farmer RIP (1918-2009)

The lurid world of George Orwell

The copy on the back cover of this 1954 Signet paperback edition of Orwell’s 1984 reads:

Which One Will YOU Be In the Year 1984?

There won’t be much choice, of course, if this book’s predictions turn out to be true. But you’ll probably become one of the following four types:

Proletarian — Considered inferior and kept in total ignorance, you’ll be fed lies from the Ministry of Truth, eliminated upon signs of promise of ability!

Police Guard — Chosen for lack of intelligence but superior brawn, you’ll be suspicious of everyone and be ready to give your life for Big Brother, the leader you’ve never even seen!

Party Member: Male — Face-less, mind-less, a flesh-and-blood robot with a push-button brain, you’re denied love by law, taught hate by the flick of a switch!

Party Member: Female — A member of the Anti-Sex League from birth, your duty will be to smother all human emotion, and your children might not be your husband’s!

Unbelievable? You’ll feel differently after you’ve read this best-selling book of forbidden love and terror in a world many of us may live to see!

And how about that front cover illustration? Who’da thought Julia was so, well, HOT?

The Man of Bronze returns!

It’s been mentioned here before, but I’ll mention it again — this year is Doc Savage’s 75th anniversary. And in celebration, James Cavanaugh is beginning to “bookcast” the very first Doc Savage pulp novel, Lester Dent’s great The Man of Bronze. James reports that his narration will he dramatically enhanced with sound effects. Sounds cool to me. So far, a ten-minute introduction has been posted, and I assume chapters will appear week to week. Look for the podcast here.

Why I love Myke Phoenix

Once upon a time, about the time Neil Armstrong planted Old Glory on the moon, two adolescent boys from opposite ends of the country met through the letters column of The Amazing Spider-Man. In that era before e-mail, they became pen pals. The kid from California launched a mimeographed fanzine of imaginative fiction called Fantasy World. The youngster from New Jersey wrote a handful of stories for that zine, all of them about a superhero he christened H-Man. H-Man had a prosthetic arm that fired energy blasts. Not quite like an H-bomb, but what the hell. It was pretty darn cool.

Within a year, I’d discovered girls and stopped publishing Fantasy World. My friend Warren Bluhm had pushed H-Man aside to pursue other creative ventures. And eventually, we both lost touch, having never met face to face.

Thirty-five years later, in 2005, Warren and I became reacquainted courtesy of kismet and the Internet. Our friendship is one of the longest and most stimulating I’ve ever had. And, alas, we’ve still never met in person.

But here’s the point of this story. Warren has sent me a signed copy of his new book, his first book, called The Adventures of Myke Phoenix, along with an admission that “Myke is a direct descendant of H-Man and Fantasy World.” So I was predisposed to like Myke Phoenix before I even cracked open this volume. I was also inclined to like the book because Warren is a good buddy of mine who just so happens to be a fine writer. But even setting my biases aside, The Adventures of Myke Phoenix is a whole lot of fun, particularly if you enjoy the old pulps, comic books, and, well, superheroes who don’t take themselves too seriously.

In case you’re unaware, there are dead-serious heroes — like Batman, Daredevil, and The Shadow, for instance — and there are lighter heroes not to be taken seriously at all, like The Spirit, She-Hulk, and Hellboy. Myke Phoenix, fashioned in the tradition of the original Captain Marvel, falls into this second group. How so? Well, for one thing, among the bad guys who traipse through the five stories in this book are a half-man, half-duck named Quincey Quackenbos and a thieving philanthropist who goes by the moniker Doctor Skull. Funny, funny stuff. For another thing, Warren writes with — heck, there’s no other term for it — light whimsy. As I read Myke Phoenix, I felt Warren standing next to me, nudging my ribs, pointing out jokes he thought I might have missed, and grinning like the teen wonder he was when he wrote those stories for Fantasy World so long ago.

Yes, friends, the spirit of H-Man lives on in The Adventures of Myke Phoenix. And I can’t think of many better ways to spend a spring afternoon than with this book.

Eric John Stark rides again!

I’ve been a fan of the late Leigh Brackett for a very long time. First of all, she wrote the screenplay for Rio Bravo. Then she was the screenwriter on two Raymond Chandler adaptations to film — the classic 1940s noir and Bogart-Bacall vehicle The Big Sleep (co-written with William Faulkner, fer crissakes) and Robert Altman’s revisionist 1970s take on Philip Marlowe with Elliot Gould, The Long Goodbye. And she wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back shortly before her death in 1978, which certainly counts for something.

Most important, though, Brackett wrote some boffo science fiction stories and novels. More specifically, she wrote some great space opera. Even more specifically, she wrote some terrific space opera in the vein of Edgar Rice Burroughs, taking ERB’s Mars and Venus formulas, turning ’em on their heads, and adding a hardboiled edge that could come only from someone who also wrote noir and crime fiction.

Brackett’s most famous sci-fi hero was Eric John Stark, a kind of cross between John Carter and Tarzan, born and orphaned on Mercury, later turned rogue, thief, and mercenary. Two of Stark’s most famous adventures have been re-collected into a single, inexpensive, trade paperback volume under the title The Secret of Sinharat as part of Paizo’s Planet Stories pulp reprint series. These novellas are “The Secret of Sinharat” (an expansion of the 1949 short story “Queen of the Martian Catacombs”) and “People of the Talisman” (an expansion of the 1951 short story “Black Amazon of Mars”). Both stories are fantastic, filled with ancient crumbling Martian cities, cruel badguys, hot (if sometimes evil) Martian women, swordplay, gunplay, and high adventure. This stuff is not to be missed, and I understand that Paizo has at least one more collection of Brackett’s Stark stories on the way!

Celebrate 75 years of Doc Savage

In March 1933, Doc Savage was introduced in the pulp magazines. Rock on, Doc!

Who is Kent Allard?

Here’s big, big, very big news for fans of The Shadow. The August 8, 1937, pulp novel “The Shadow Unmasks,” by Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant), has finally, for the first time ever, been reprinted, complete with its original art. This is the notorious story that rocked the pulp magazine world when it revealed once and for all the true identity of The Shadow. For six years, Gibson had told readers that Lamont Cranston was just one of the crime-fighter’s public faces, a disguise The Shadow adopted only when the real world-traveling Cranston was out of town. So who was The Shadow really? He turned out to be aviator-adventurer Kent Allard, WWI aviator hero and adventurer, thought lost in Central America. This was a very cool revelation in its day, I imagine, and it’s great to be able to read the story for the first time. “The Shadow Unmasks” is paired up with “The Yellow Band” in The Shadow Vol. 15, part of Nostalgia Ventures’ terrific pulp reprint series. The volume also includes bonus articles about the famous Shadow “identity reveal” and a short bio of Colonel P. H. Fawcett, the explorer who inspired Gibson’s creation of Kent Allard.

Amazon claims the book is not yet available, but I found it at my local Borders last Friday.

Review: CHINATOWN DEATH CLOUD PERIL

Thanks to an entertaining Behind the Black Mask podcast interview with first-time author Paul Malmont last summer, his Chinatown Death Cloud Peril lurked in the darkest corners of my mind until the trade paper caught my attention at Borders two weeks ago. It’s a dandy book. Not perfect, but much greater than you’d expect from a first novel.

Here’s what makes Death Cloud Peril so much fun: its set in New York, 1937, and its characters are all real-life people, folks unfamiliar to most but whose names have drifted through my life for some 40 years. You meet Lester Dent (aka Kenneth Robeson), creator of Doc Savage. Walter Gibson (aka Maxwell Grant), father of The Shadow, is one of the leads. H.P. Lovecraft makes an absolutely shocking but oh-so-perfect appearance in the novel. L. Ron Hubbard is a major player. Doc Smith is here. The whole “pulp” world populates the book, and even the comic book realm pokes its head up a few times. But as gimmicky as that may sound, Malmont pulls it off terribly well.

Readers unacquainted with the old pulps will probably find The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril slow going at first. And that’s fair. It does dawdle a bit before building up to full speed. But fans of The Shadow and Doc Savage should be thoroughly engrossed from the first page. And at its midpoint, the story becomes a rip-roaring, page-turning adventure, as exotic as anything ever written by Gibson and as apocalyptic as anything penned by Dent. My summer reading has started with a bang.