Titles: The Squeaking Goblin, Red Snow, The Red Terrors
Author: Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent, Lester Dent, Harold A. Davis)
Cover artists: James Bama, James Bama, Boris Vallejo
Condition: 7/10
Estimated value: $20 for the lot
[Gift to the collection from a Western NY Reader]
- "It ain't me what's squeakin', it's me musket!" squeaked Goblin Davy Crockett
- It's like if Hawkman and Hulk had a pin-headed monster baby
- Doc Savage tried to start his life over as a crossing guard at Mystical Orb High School for Avian Cosplay, but it didn't take
One of the hired men pointed. "Red was a-meanderin' over thot way, last I seed a' him."These books are all of astonishingly uniform length (~130pp.) and not at all badly written (at least on a basic grammatical level). They were originally published in the Doc Savage pulp magazine (in the '30s) and then were reprinted by Bantam roughly 30-40 years later, which puts them just before and toward the tail end of / just after the main time frame of my paperback collection (1939-69). Lester Dent (how wrote a ton of the "Kenneth Robeson" Doc Savage stories) was an accomplished crime fiction writer from the heydey of hardboild crime fiction. I covered one of his books back at Paperback 741.
Anyway, thanks to the lovely human who sent me these books in the mail today—individually wrapped! So thoughtful.
~RP
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4 comments:
There was a terrible Doc Savage movie in 1975 with Ron Ely. The ripped up shirt didn't look nearly as impressive in an actual person.
I paid money to see that. In my defence, I was 14, and I realised it was crap during the showing. My dad used to talk about Doc Savage a lot, along with Tarzan and Pellucidar and all that good stuff.
Lester Dent was a surprisingly good author for his genre and a decent if formulaic author in general. That's especially true when you consider he cranked out a million words a year.
It's interesting that both Bama and Boris show Doc with a clenched right fist and a splayed left (can't really call it a fear hand). I wonder if there's some textual relevance or just a visual trope.
I mean, hand-drawing is hard as f, so maybe just flexing?
RP
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