Jeff Deischer - The Adventures of the Man of Bronze: a Definitive Chronology

This new edition of The Adventures of the Man of Bronze: a Definitive Chronology has been fully revised to make it easier to read and to include new information such as Will Murrays new Wild Adventures of Doc Savage.

The first edition of this book was the first work to include Lester Dents original Doc Savage radio play scripts in a chronology, and to determine Doc Savages true birthday. This new edition now includes information of the Man of Bronzes family tree, which includes Armand Chauvelin (of Scarlet Pimpernel fame), Rosa Klebb and Irma Bunt (of James Bond infamy), Wolf Larsen, Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade as well as Frankensteins Monster and the Phantom of the Opera!

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The Adventures

of the

Man of Bronze

A Definitive Chronology

Jeff Deischer

a Westerntainment Publication

Text copyright 2012 Jeff Deischer

Cover copyright 2000 Frank Hamilton

Doc Savage is a trademark of Conde Nast

The Adventures of the Man of Bronze: a Definitive Chronology is a scholarly work. No copyright infringement is intended.

No part of this publication may be reprinted without permission, except for purposes of review or excerpts used in scholarly discussions.

Published by Westerntainment

Denver, Colorado, USA

http://westerntainment.blogspot.com

westerntainment@gmail.com

The cover to this book was provided by Frank Hamilton. It is a reproduction of a Baumhofer cover commissioned for DOC SAVAGE MAGAZINE in the 1940s but never used. I want to thank his son Brian for letting me use it once again for this new edition.

For Lester Dent, one of the great storytellers

Acknowledgments

This work would not have been possible without the help of Will Murray.

Much of my research was accomplished with the help of the Aurora and Denver Public Libraries, and through the use of The Time Tables of History by Bernard Grun and The New York Public Library Book of Chronologies . Additional material was made available by the Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri, and the Ask-A-Nurse program at Centura Health. Thanks also to numerous people who answered questions on a variety of topics, especially Lynn Ruth of the public relations office of the Empire State Building, who also sent me floor plans of the 85th floor.

I would be remiss not to thank Philip Jos Farmer, who started my lifelong love of books-about-books with his Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life .

Special mention goes to Jim Lannon and Jerry Nunez for their unwavering support.

Thanks also to Rick Lai. His insightful observations led to some of the changes for the 2002-2003 revision, which resulted in the 2008 second edition.

Lastly, thanks to my parents for all their help.

The Adventures

of the

Man of Bronze

A Definitive Chronology

Preface

An admirer of Philip Jos Farmers Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life , I began this chronology as an attempt to place into Farmers chronology of the Doc Savage stories those adventures which he had left out, and those added to the saga, such as the novels by Will Murray. In the early 1990s, I decided to re-read all the stories and prepare my own chronology.

As Farmer says in his introduction to the chronology in his biography of Doc, To explain in detail [the placement of every adventure] would ... take at least twenty thousand words, and only the most zealous Savageologist would care to tackle an essay of that length. I took up this challenge. And ended up with something more than twenty thousand words.

In 1993, Will Murray was kind enough to look my chronology over and make a few suggestions, the most important of which was sending me the list of the Order of Submission for the stories. This became the keystone of this complete revision, in 1999, of my earlier attempt.

This book is chiefly a chronology of Doc Savages adventures. It is not a Doc Savage encyclopedia, although there are numerous observations about a variety of topics concerning Doc and his aides, such as the Crime College, the Hidalgo Trading Company warehouse, etc. A familiarity with Doc Savage and his milieu is assumed.

pendix C, Docs 86th Floor Headquarters

Authors Foreword to the New Edition

Apparently my criticism of Philip Jose Farmers Wold Newton work has caused some hard feelings among some of his fans. It shouldnt. Im one of them. Farmer possessed a great intellect and creativity and he is one of my favorite authors. His Riverworld series sits on my shelf literally of favorite books. My 1975 copy of Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life is dog-eared, to put it kindly. I have pored over it and pored over it, making notes in the margins, before beginning an attempt at a Doc Savage chronology myself twenty years later.

I did not, as some seem to think, set out to destroy the Wold Newton universe. I did not, in fact, set out to do anything with it. I saw errors in Farmers Doc Savage chronology and set out to rectify them. I set out to tell the truth about Doc Savage. Along the way, I uncovered his agenda, which was counter to information in the Doc Savage series itself. Later research into ancillary literature revealed a widespread disregard for the actual texts of stories and their authors intents.

My criticism is both simple and specific (and, I might add, not personal): Farmer distorted information to fit his own agenda and labelled it as fact. For a scholar, this is inexcusable.

Generally speaking, Farmer fudged dates in order to connect the stories he used as the foundation for his massive Wold Newton genealogy. Among other things, he altered birth dates of some characters in order to marry them off to characters from other stories. One example of this is Professor Challengers daughter, Enid.

In constructing a genealogy such as the Wold Newton one, it is necessary to postulate children of which there is no official record. Farmer does so -- and then goes on to name these conjectured progeny. I believe it quite possible that Monk Mayfair is related to Professor Challenger -- and even Horace Holly -- but I object to the manner in which Farmer does it. Speculation ought to be labelled as such, in order for research to retain its validity and authority.

Specifically, Farmer had a view of Doc Savage that he wanted to promote in his biography of the Man of Bronze and he ignored or distorted information in the series to do so. His research is so meticulous that this distortion can only have been intentional.

Based on his two biographies of pulp characters, Farmer was not a pulp scholar. He was an author with a point of view, or agenda, that he wanted to get across, which, at least in the case of Doc Savage, was not wholly based on evidence in the series.

Farmer is better identified as a mythographer -- a documenter of myths -- than as a scholar. He took stories of heroes and wove them together into a single tapestry. The research alone is staggering. The creativity is no less impressive. And pointing out errors in the weaving to correct flaws in order to make a more accurate tapestry should not be misconstrued as disrespect for the weaver.

There is nothing wrong with playing games such as Farmers and I have nothing against them, personally -- but they should not be offered or taken as scholarly research. They belong where I and others have put them in fiction.