Devil on the Moon

Kenneth Robeson Devil on the Moon (1938)
It's taken me a while to work out what or who Doc Savage is or was. I first heard of him in reference to the disastrous George Pal movie adaptation in the pages of Starburst when I was a teenager. The name was a new one on me, and the piece assumed I would either know who the hell they were talking about or else might at least be capable of making an effort to catch up. This, as an aside, seems a more civilised way of going about things, crediting the reader with some intelligence, as distinct from the contemporary approach which would doubtless endeavor to catch our attention with Doc Savage was kinda like the Commander Shepherd* of his day.

Later I saw some of that movie, and I vividly recall a stereotypical Oirish person who wears a green bowler hat and goes around with a pig under his arm, but I can't find any reference to this character on the internet, and although Monk in the books has a pet pig, the resemblance seemingly ends there. Maybe I imagined it.

Anyway, there are a million volumes of these things to be had in the second hand places around our way, and I figured I should at least try one. The Man of Bronze was the first in the series, and I was holding out for a copy but it never seemed to show up, so I nabbed this one on the grounds of it having a promising cover.

Stan Lee has cited Doc Savage as a prototype for the entire superhero genre, which seems fair. He predates Superman and even got there first with an arctic Fortress of Solitude - which is even identified as such. He has adventures, fights crime, and so on and so forth. Most of the books were written by Lester Dent, Savage's creator, as was this one, although they're all credited to the collective nom de plume of Kenneth Robeson. Dent and his colleagues churned these things out for most of the thirties and forties, and as you might expect they have a pulpy quality - if you'll pardon what has become a somewhat condescending term - emphasis on action, peril, fast-pacing, intrigue, and characters painted in bold colours. That said, Dent knew how to work a satisfying, occasionally arresting turn of phrase beyond the basic requirements of delivering generic thrills, and I particularly liked the scene setting.

The Spanish Plantation was situated in Virginia, near Washington, and its old Colonial architecture was pleasantly distinguished. There was a colored orchestra and a sign which advertised chicken dinners. It was a nice place.

Occasionally we get splashes of the genuinely weird.

But the victim screamed terribly; the ends of his fingers bulged like stepped-on wieners under the pressure, and one fingertip split and emptied crimson.

Somehow I couldn't quite tell what the story was about, except that it involved a lot of kidnapping, plus the intimation of a bad guy controlling everything from somewhere on the moon. It's something to do with certain European countries which Dent leaves unnamed despite that he's obviously referring to Germany, Poland, and others then gearing up for the second world war. The anonymity strikes an odd note, almost implying a reluctance to offend any readers who might have thought Hitler was lovely, but there's nothing in the text to suggest unsavoury sympathies. Some genius on Goodreads has pointed out instances of sexism in the book but, well, you know…

Devil on the Moon didn't change my life, but there's really nothing much to be said against it and it's good of its kind. I'm more likely to pick up one of these than to bother with another Heinlein, for example.

*: Apparently a character from a console game called Mass Effect, which I had to look up for the sake of a contemporary reference. I don't actually know much about the world or characters of console games because games are for fucking idiots.