Thursday, May 1, 2014

Doc Savage 005 - Pirate of the Pacific

Pirate of the Pacific
Doc Savage 005
by Kenneth Robeson (Lester Dent)
Doc Savage Magazine July 1933
From pulpcovers.com
Coming directly off the heels of The Polar Treasure, the gang returns by submarine to New York only to be attacked by Asian pirates.  The chase/capture/escape cycles go from the skyscrapers of New York to a cruise ship from San Francisco to a stand in for the Philippines.  Big action in this one, as Savage gets in more fisticuffs than I've seen in the previous books combined and his five compatriots tear through crates of ammo for their machine pistols.  Remmy gets the spotlight this time, and Monk and Ham get separated early on so there's less of their squabbling.

Not much in the way of plot.  After the failed assassination attempt, Savage tracks down and chases the culprits, led by the elusive pirate Tom-Too, who seems more like a pan-Asian revolutionary than a bandit.

I was worried about this one because it opened with an almost surreal barrage of racial invective.  Most of the time this stuff is just either outdated terms or casual bigotry, but Dent really unloads.  This makes for uncomfortable reading for the modern reader, but it was also just bad writing.  You really can't use "inscrutable" more than once in a paragraph.  Luckily it seems that he was just getting it out of his system and he lets off a bit later in the book, though he stirr lesolts to that annoying R and L swap in the diarect.  Also, Remmy is in black-face.


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