Tuesday, October 4, 2016

DOC SAVAGE #83: THE RUSTLING DEATH

Another Sanctum Books classic...

Doc Savage #83: The Rustling Death and Terror and the Lonely Widow [August 2015; $14.95] reprints two Doc novels by Alan Hathaway and Lester Dent (writing as Kenneth Robeson).

Hathaway’s The Rustling Death first appeared in the January 1942 issue of Doc Savage Magazine. The novel is the fourth and final Doc Savage adventure by Hathaway. Here’s the back cover blurb:

Ham Brooks is rendered helpless by a strange sound that can destroy planes in midair and even disintegrate entire populations through The Rustling Death.

Dent’s Terror and the Lonely Widow has Doc searching for a missing atomic bomb. The novel, which is from the March 1946 issue of Doc Savage Magazine, might well have been the inspiration for the James Bond novel/movie Thunderball. The back cover blurb:

After his cover is blown during an undercover mission, the Man of Bronze heads to the South Seas to avert an atomic age threat in one of his most gripping postwar adventures!

Besides the usual informative essays by historian and novelist Will Murray and publisher Anthony Tollin, this volume also features an fine article on “Doc Savage in the Bronze Age of Comics” by former DC Comics editor Robert Greenberger.   

As with other Sanctum Books editions - The Black Bat, The Shadow and others - these Doc Savage novels are entertaining journeys into the heroic fiction of the pulp era.  They’re wonderfully made books and I regularly despair I might never get around to reading all of them. More to come.

© 2016 Tony Isabella

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