I was too old by the 1960s to be much of a pulp magazine reader. The pulps folded in the 1950s. And outside of collectors, the pulps found that digest magazines and paperbacks replaced them.
Many of the Doc Savage stories were written by Lester Dent although other writers also used the house name of “Kenneth Robeson.”
“The Doc Savage Magazine was printed by Street & Smith from March 1933 to the summer of 1949 to capitalize on the success of the Shadow magazine and followed by the original Avenger in September 1939. In all, 181 issues were published in various entries and alternative titles. Doc Savage became known to more contemporary readers when Bantam Books began reprinting the individual magazine novels in 1964, this time with covers by artist James Bama that featured a bronze-haired, bronze-skinned Doc Savage with an exaggerated widows’ peak, usually wearing a torn khaki shirt and under the by-line “Kenneth Robeson”.
“The stories were not reprinted in chronological order as originally published, though they did begin with the first adventure, The Man of Bronze. By 1967, Bantam was publishing one a month until 1990, when all 181 original stories (plus an unpublished novel, The Red Spider) had run their course.
“Author Will Murray produced seven more Doc Savage novels for Bantam Books from Lester Dent’s original outlines. Bantam also published a novel by Philip José Farmer, Escape From Loki (1991), which told the story of how in World War I Doc met the men who would become his five comrades.”
Doc Savage (real name Clark Savage Jr.) is a doctor, scientist, adventurer, detective, and polymath who “rights wrongs and punishes evildoers.” He also seems to have an inexhaustible pile of money to fund his adventures. If you’re in the mood for some old fashioned High Adventure, follow Doc Savage and his crew to South America where a strange, mysterious villain known as the Inca in Gray promotes war between two countries and uses a “dust of death” to kill his adversaries. Are you a fan of pulp fiction? GRADE: B
So many pulp fiction heroes, so little time. I love them all but I can only read a few at a time before moving on to other shiny toys. I prefer Doc Savage and The Avenger to The Shadow, but all provide the exciting, pulpIsh fun I forward to when I am in my “hyper-escape” reading mode. My favorite pulp hero? The Spider; the body count in all the Spider stories combined is about seven times the current population of the United States, I believe.
Jerry, I have a small stack of reprint editions of THE SPIDER waiting for me. Maybe in the months ahead…
Doc Savage, The Shadow, and A. Merritt never grabbed my attention, but I was heavily into the paperback reprints of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, Sax Rohmer, Hammett, Chandler, etc. Some say the 1920s and ’30s were the pinnacle of pulp, but for me, it was the ’60s when Ace reprinted ERB (along with Ray Cummings and Ralph Milne Farley, whom I only gave cursory attention), Lancer brought out Conan, and Pyramid reintroduced Fu Manchu. I was also a big Ian Fleming fan, surely pulp in spirit if not surface gloss.
Fred, I loved reading those Lancer editions of Fu Manchu in the Sixties. And, the Conan paperbacks with those fabulous Frazetta covers! Frazetta also provided some eye-popping covers for ACE Books’s Edgar Rice Burroughs novels!
It was books like this that convinced me I could be a writer — when I read them and (this is not a put-down!) said to myself, “I could write as good as this!”
Dan, you write a whole lot better than Ray Cummings and Ralph Milne Farley did!
The pulps were before my time too, but I like a lot of the crime stuff. Doc Savage and the others, though, have no interest for me. Had I been young and read them when they came out, perhaps that would be another story.
Jeff, pulps were basically print versions of what would turn out to be TV shows and movies years later. I can read a Doc Savage or Avenger paperback once in a while, but most of them are dated.
I read one and saw the Ron Ely movie! That satisfied me!
Bob, the movie version of Doc Savage had a lot to be desired!
When I saw the first pulps on my visits to London in the late 60s I was already too old for them – and anyway fantasy was not for me.
Only SF is worth reading!
maybe a few Carter Browns when I was tired and too lazy to think much …
Wolf, I totally agree with you on a few Carter Browns to relax!
And one actual pulp did persevere through the ’60s and (barely) into the ’70s, RANCH ROMANCES, in its last years as RANCH ROMANCES AND ADVENTURES, and always in a “standard” (or pulp or comic-book) dimensions, though on somewhat better paper in those latter-day issues. Lonely, but still on the stands…I remember seeing it myself as a young’n.
Todd, I fear the magazine is a dying artwork. I only subscribe to a few and one of them, MYSTERY SCENE, just abandoned their print edition.