Tarnished Bronze

I just finished reading Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze by Kenneth Robeson, and frankly, they just don’t write them like that anymore.

This is a good thing.

As much as I enjoy good pulp, this story was just…was just…wow.

First off, Doc is perfect, up to and including the fact that rain doesn’t adhere to his skin or hair. He is the smartest, fastest, strongest, etc. etc. This does not make for an interesting hero. If you can never be beaten, never be tricked, never be stopped, where is the drama? Where is the danger? Yes, I realize these novels are the literary equivalent of cotton candy, but still.

Then there’s the team; the five guys that Doc picked up that are the second-most experts in their respective fields (the first being Doc, naturally). Their entire raison d'être is to marvel about how awesome Doc is. The author also apparently lost his thesaurus along the way, because he only ever uses one adjective to describe each of the team members; “waspish Ham” or “puritanical Renny,” for example.

Suspension of disbelief is critical when you read Adventure pulp, but even so, the author has to maintain a world the reader can believe in within the context of the novel, and Robeson doesn’t.

The friend who lent the book to me opined that it was impossible to describe how bad it really is, but I think I can. From page 157:

“Upward wound the underground stream.”

Laying aside the fact that the sentence begins with the adverb, the implication is that the water is flowing uphill. With such a basic violation of physics so casually presented, can the rest of the book be any better?

(The answer is “no,” by the way.)