LATEST UPDATES



February 1, 2025
Updated Convention Listings


February 15
New reviews in
The Book Nook,
The Illustrated Corner,
Nana's Nook,and
Odds & Ends and
Voices From the Past



January
Book Pick
of the Month




January 15
New reviews in
The Book Nook,
The Illustrated Corner,
Nana's Nook,and
Odds & Ends and
Voices From the Past



January 1, 2025
Updated Convention Listings


Previous Updates

WesternSFA


The Golden Man
Doc Savage #98
by Kenneth Robeson
Bantam, 120pp
Published: Original April 1941 Bantam January 1984

Based on the few reviews of this book at Chuck Welch's worthy Hidalgo Trading Company website, the fans don't think much of 'The Golden Man', but I found it fascinating, the first novel in quite a while in this series to keep me totally on the hook. Most of their complaints are about the ending, which they consider lackluster, but I didn't have a big problem with it. Sure, it isn't close to being a traditional karmic ending, but it's original and unusual and I appreciated that.

That's not to say that I didn't find problems with this book. I did, but in other ways. For one, it's an interesting shift in prose style from regular series writer Lester Dent, which felt initially awkward in its overuse of em dashes—even though I'm rather fond of them in my own writing— and clumsy repetition of words within sentences and phrases within paragraphs. It all feels a little rough, but there are counters to that. Doc is notably more talkative in this novel than in any previous one, a single scene where, in traditional fashion, he deliberately doesn't answer the questions asked of him aside.

Another major shift is an incredibly long delay before Doc even shows up. Dent had teased this in a few earlier novels, setting up the story with the characters who experience it, and only bringing him in once that's done, but late up until this point has meant chapter four or five. He, he doesn't show until late in chapter seven and the two characters who witness the weird events before that point are Ham and Monk rather than the usual backwoods yokel who can't believe what he sees.

What's more, after doing so, our favourite bickering pair are locked up in an Argentinean jail for no fewer than fourteen weeks before the honest commandant discovers that Doc has mounted a global search for them. Even after they're released, they have to spend time travelling back to the U.S. while the villain who set them up, Pollo, gets a chapter to himself. Eventually they reach New York, where they're attacked outside HQ and a pre-warned Doc can save the day. One telling line, while they're in jail, is that "they had even stopped quarrelling".

I liked all that, especially how well Pollo frames them, because we can't blame that commandant in the slightest. Usually, they stumble into a half-hearted trap. Here, they're utterly blindsided by a professional level setup. The captain of the ship they were on claims not to know them. And Doc sends a telegram to say that they must be imposters, as the real Ham and Monk are there in New York with him. I liked the weirdness that led to them arriving in Argentina too, which is one of the best beginnings to a 'Doc Savage' novel that I've read yet, albeit one featuring a couple of lines I would say have aged very differently indeed to our eighty years of hindsight.

Ham and Monk start out on the 'Virginia Dare', a ship that's left Portugal for the U.S., so leaving the war behind. This novel was originally published in 'Doc Savage Magazine' in April 1941, so the war had already engulfed most of Europe and heavily expanded into Africa. While readers were picking up this issue, the siege of Tobruk had just begun, the Nazis invasion of Russia was only two months away and the Japanese were surely planning their bombing of Pearl Harbor in December. However, Monk erroneously states, "Compared to the kind of things Doc gets mixed up in, Europe is peaceful." More accurately, Ham notes a little later, "But we're not yet at war", "yet" being an important word. Even Dent seemed to acknowledge that it was inevitable.

But that's not the setup. Ham and Monk are on the 'Virginia Dare' when they see an unusual star in the sky, a black star with five points that's framed in red. Beneath it, in oddly phosphorescent water, there's a golden man, naked and floating as if nothing untoward has happened. Of course, he's picked up but he's beyond weird. He says that his mother is the sea and his father the night, but he also knows things that nobody should know. For instance, he knows that the ship he's on is going to be sunk around 11am, which it is. Even after it happens, he remains infuriatingly calm as he knows that they'll be rescued at 6pm by a Brazilian freighter called the Palamino, which they promptly are. This is glorious. How could he possibly know the future?

What's not glorious is the fact that we apparently forget about the golden man while we focus on Ham and Monk in jail in Argentina. Such accurate predictions ought to warrant an immediate call to Doc Savage, who monitors the globe for that sort of weirdness, but his aides just treat it like a curiosity. Of course, he'll be back, but only after some teasing hints. When Ham and Monk make it back to New York, there's a woman wearing a ring with a black star framed in red on it. She states that it represents the golden man. When Elva Boone shows up, she has a pin in her handbag with the same design. Clearly there's a huge mystery here but Ham and Monk, who saw it begin, seem not to realise it.

Another problem for me is one that Dent even acknowledges himself in the prose, as if he knows full well that readers are going to be frustrated by it. Doc and his men have been investigating a lady named Ruth Dorman because clues consistently lead her way and Elva Boone is her sister. In one scene, Doc, with some of his aides present, is asking Elva and Ruth questions in an attempt to figure out what's going on and they provide some answers while stubbornly refusing others. And then, as if by magic, Elva has a pair of dueling pistols in her hands and orchestrates an escape. It's clear that Dent had no idea how, so he's as stubborn as they are in not explaining it. "Where Elva Boone got her two dueling pistols was something that forever remained a mystery—but she got them, and they were loaded." Ugh.

So there's bad here, but the setup is magnificent and I have to admit that I was completely in the dark about how it could be remotely possible. After that scene with the dueling pistols, I felt like Dent might fail to explain the golden man and his impeccably accurate soothsaying too, but he's not going to fail us twice. He comes up with a reason that worked for me, even if it wasn't action-packed, and he also sets up and explains another apparently impossible mystery. Doc is in a room with Capt. Kirman, formerly of the 'Virginia Dare', when a body falls past them onto a ledge. Doc rushes down ten flights or so to find that the corpse is also Capt. Kirman. He makes sure too that both are the exact same man. That's puzzling, but there is a completely viable explanation later.

And so I dug this book a lot more than other fans seem to. Maybe I'm just ready for a much more grounded Doc as the war starts to drag on and not seem like a local conflict. I like explanations as much as I like lost races and hidden kingdoms. I've been aching to see how Dent and other writers acknowledged the war raging a continent away and finally they seem to be paying attention. He's not willing to name nations yet, but the sinking of the 'Virginia Dare' is a deliberate act to sour a neutral United States against one of its key allies during wartime. That plays well to me.

There are also plenty of more traditional parts to this book that play well too. Some is clever, the scene where Elva and Ruth deliberately lead Doc to the Dark Sanctuary so that he can uncover a "whole evil truth", knowing that he's following them but not realising that he can read lips, so is able to get ahead of them and read them again inside a diner. Some is series related, Doc having a legless ex-detective on the payroll to man a newsstand across the street from HQ and keep him in the loop when something weird happens. Monk has a special tie knot he's developed so that it won't strangle him if someone grabs it, but comes immediately loose instead. And there's a use of semaphore code, Doc using a handkerchief to send an "RARHQ" to Ham, meaning "report to the automatic recorder at headquarters".

Frankly, it all felt a little more modern to me, acknowledging what's happening in the world and not only bringing it into the story, in what limited fashion it could given Street and Smith's way of acknowledging their country's then neutral stance to it, but adapting the writing style to fit that sort of situation. The only moment that felt dated to me was the use of an utterly bizarre term to describe what else is in Elva's handbag along with that black star pin. Dent plumps for "woman-litter", which seems about as demeaning as it gets. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more Doc Savage titles click here

Follow us

for notices on new content and events.
or

or
Instagram or


to The Nameless Zine,
a publication of WesternSFA



WesternSFA
Main Page


Calendar
of Local Events


Disclaimer

Copyright ©2005-2025 All Rights Reserved
(Note that external links to guest web sites are not maintained by WesternSFA)
Comments, questions etc. email WebMaster