SECRETS BEHIND THE POLAR TREASURE
PIRATE OF THE PACIFIC
PIRATE OF THE PACIFIC
Doc Savage #6 from Nostalgia Ventures reprints two of the earliest adventures of the Man of Bronze
by Will Murray
Doc Savage Books
The Polar Treasure and Pirate of the Pacific were published consecutively in the June and July 1933 issues of Doc Savage Magazine. This was a transitional time for the formative pulp superhero. Doc Savage was fast evolving from his dime-novel roots into a dynamic character of his own.
Writer Lester Dent had allowed his exhuberant imagination free reign in depicting the bronze man as human juggernaut of vengeance in his initial adventures. Now Street & Smith wanted Doc crystalized into a figure of justice tempered with mercy.
In The Polar Treasure, editor John L Nanovic trimmed away some of the excessively grotesque scenes, scaling back Doc Savage's more violent tendencies. For this volume, we've restored most of these in order to showcase this pivotal Doc Savage novel as Lester Dent originally intended. Even if you've already experienced The Polar Treasure, we've made it new again. This is only the first of several extensive Doc Savage restorations Nostalgia Ventures has in the works.
Both novels were inspired by half-forgotten events of 75 years ago.
Exotic adventures were Dent's specialty. His first sale, Pirate Cay, was published by Street & Smith's Top-Notch Magazine in 1929. It was set in the Caribbean. This was followed by a story of the Sargasso Sea and a Polar adventure, Buccaneers of the Midnight Sun. Dent discovered if he changed his locales often, pulp editors kept purchasing his manuscripts.
"Sell one story, and you're set for life," he once quipped. "Don't get excited and try to do a different one. When you've found one that will sell, just keep on writing and selling it."
Dent was a firm believer in following a fiction formula. In 1930, excited by a reported venture to circumnavigate the North Pole by a submarine refitted to travel under the ice shelf, Dent wrote "Time's Domain," wherein a team of explorers discover a strange lost Polar valley inhabited by still-living dinosaurs.*
Street & Smith's The Popular Magazine bounced the story, but editor Richard Merrifield believed the idea was good enough for Dent try reworking the yarn, this time without the dinosaurs. Dent complied.
S&S was his only market at the time.
Dent gave it his best shot, but editor Richard Merrifield declined "Under the Arctic Ice" with deep regrets, saying in part, ''the idea of a submarine going under the arctic ice is a romantic one, a la Jules Verne, but it is too hard to swallow..." His specific objections had nothing to do with the premise, which he believed was still good.
So Dent sought another market. As he wrote Top-Notch's John L. Laurence on September 5, "In view of the the increasing publicity directed toward Sir Hubert Wilkins and his submarine-under-the-Arctic-ice venture, there should be considerable reader interest in this direction during the winter and spring."
Still fresh to the field, Dent was learning the virtues of marketing. Unfortunately, after asking for a rewrite, Laurence bounced the manuscript, now titled "The Trouble Load." Other editors also passed on it. Dent refused to give up. The idea had ignited his imagination and would not go out.
Sending it out as "The Polar Corsair," Dent again found no takers. But pulp magazine markets were contracting in this first year of the Great Depression. Sales did not come as easily to journeyman fiction writers as they had before the October 1929 Stock Market crash.
In 1931, Dent moved to New York City to work as a contract writer for Dell Publications. Just prior to coming East, he had tried "The Polar Corsair" on Dell's Carson W. Mowre, who pronounced it "entirely too long" for All-Fiction Stories, but invited Dent to try again.
We don't know the circumstances under which the idea was revived, but during the first World War, Carson Mowre had been a Naval aviator. He probably worked on Dell's short-lived Submarine Stories. Perhaps after they met in person, Mowre suggested a new line of attack on the idea. Encouraged, Dent tackled the stubborn problem once more. The fact that Wilkins' Polar submarine venture was finally moving forward in real life may have motivated both men.
Once again the Dent luck seemed to have struck. The story, now called "Under the Pole," sold and was scheduled for the August, 1931 issue under the title, "Underwater Ice." Since the other Dell magazines masked Dent's name under fictitious bylines, this would run as by Lester Dent. He was elated. Then his luck turned again.
Dell folded its pulp line before "Underwater Ice" could be printed, throwing Dent out of work and out of New York, dead broke.
By that summer, after many months of delays, the Wilkins-Ellsworth Arctic expedition began moving forward.
This dangerous venture is today a forgotten chapter in Polar exploration. In 1930, Australian explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins leased a decomissioned U. S. naval submarine, the O-12, and began refitting her for operating under the North Polar icecap. (An earlier idea to build a wheeled sub designated The Defender was abandoned as too expensive and impractical.)
The plan was to sail submerged from Spitsbergen, Norway to the Bering Straits via the North Pole. For this, the U-boat was reconditioned with a retractable conning tower equipped with an emergency ice drill and other safety features, among them wooden "sledge runners" welded to the hull to fend off glacier ice and allow it to "ski" beneath the icepack, a spring-loaded bowsprit bumper in the event of a forward collision, and other diving innovations. Her superstructure was painted gray and the hull under the waterline red to make her more visible against the white wasteland.
Wilkins was no novice. He had crossed the North Pole in 1913, only four years after Admiral Peary's historic conquest. Later he flew over the Pole in an airplane, and is credited with inventing the first ski landing gear for airplanes. His partner, Lincoln Ellsworth, crossed the Pole on the dirigible Norge during Roald Amundsen's famous 1926 flight.
No one had ever braved the Arctic by submarine, and both men were convinced that an underseas boat would prove to be the perfect platform for a scientific exploration of that forbidding region. They assembled a volunteer crew of scientists and retired submariners. To help raise funds for the undertaking, Wilkins published a book, Under the North Pole.
The expedition was plagued by bad luck from the start. A snowstorm delayed her departure from New Jersey's Mathis Shipyard, where she had been refitted. Finally, she cast off on March 16. A crewman, radioman Willard T. Grimm, was lost overboard and presumed drowned on March 23 as the vessel entered Brooklyn Navy Yard to be formally christened Arctic Submarine Nautilus after Jules Verne's prototype submersible first described in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne's grandson, Jean Jules Verne, was among the spectators.
Severe storms and multiple engine failures marred the Atlantic portion of the estimated forty-day crossing. In June, Captain Sloan Danenhower was forced to broadcast an SOS when the sub became disabled. The USS Wyoming towed her to Ireland.
After repairs, Nautilus left for the Pole from Bergen, Norway on August 5. Storms and mechanical problems continued to harasss the expedition. Reaching the outer ice pack, Captain Danenhower prepared to make the first sub-Polar dive in history, when he noticed that the diving rudders were missing. Since repeated mishaps had created the growing concern that this was a suicide mission, crew sabotage was suspected.
The Polar crossing had to be cancelled.
Still, the Naultilus did managed to slip under the three-foot-thick floe ice for short periods and conduct some of the planned scientific experiments. Ultimately, Sir Hubert called off diving operations when he realized it was not safe to remain in the Arctic.
Storms chased the seemingly-jinxed pigboat for the remainder of her short life. One pummelled her return trip, another severely damaged the hull and Diesel engines as she attemped to reach England for repairs. The former SS 73 was now beyond salvaging.
On November 30, 1931, the Nautilus was scuttled in a Norwegian fjord. No other attempt to cross the North Pole by submarine took place until the U. S. Navy's first nuclear submarine succeeded in 1958. It too was named Nautilus.
On March 17, 1959, the nuclear sub USS Skate surfaced at the North Pole and scattered Wilkins' ashes there. Over a lifetime of exploration, he had explored both Poles many times.
Obviously, the Helldiver was modelled after the original Nautilus.
In nature, a helldiver is a type of aquatic bird which submerges when threatened. But Dent may have named Doc's sub after aircraft featured in the 1931 movie, Hell Divers, starring Clark Gable and Wallace Beery. Dent was a fan of Beery's films. "Helldiver" was the Marine designation for the Curtiss F8C biplane fighter, the same aircraft that shot King Kong off the Empire State Building in the 1933 movie.
There's an interesting footnote to Dent's interest in the Wilkins-Ellsworth expedition. After being inducted as an Active Resident in the Explorer's Club in 1936, he attended a dinner honoring Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who made the first transpolar airplane flight in 1926. The toastmaster was Sir Hubert Wilkins. It's not known if Dent spoke to the man who inspired him, or what they might have discussed.
Lester Dent thought s highly of The Polar Treasure that when he scripted a Doc Savage radio pilot in 1938, this was the tale he chose to adapt. Four chapters of the serial were completed, but the show never found a sponsor. Otherwise, "The Polar Treasure" might today be a well-remembered radio classic along the lines of I Love a Mystery's best episodes.
Lester once quipped, "I've never been north of southern Alaska, but I write wonderful stories about the North Pole." The Polar Treasure is a treasure-trove of pulp adventure, and no doubt the yarn to which he was referring.
No sooner does Doc Savage and his iron crew return from the North Pole than they are embroiled with a completely different brand of modern-day bucaneer. One can see the springboard for Pirate of the Pacific in this blurb Dent wrote to accompany an earlier story revolving around the 20th century corsair theme:
Major forays by Chinese pirates reached the imposing total of six hundred during 1929. This was brought out recently when storms of protest arose over proposals to remove military guards from the coastal boats. It was feared the attacks of the sea wolves would increase with the removal of the guards, usually consisting of one or two squads of British Tommies, who are kept at Hongkong in special detatctments, ready for duty aboard ship at a minute's notice. The ship owners and the officers of the vessels themselves claim the pirates do not fear the armed natives that were suggested as a subsitute for the Tommies.
For fierceness, the Chinese pirates rival the buccaneers of the ancient Spainsh Main. Their methods, however, are a little different. A portion of the gang sails aboard the ship they expect to loot, either in the crew, or as passengers. At a prearranged spot, they kill the officers and as many of the crew as neccesary, and take the prize. A junk manned by their fellows draws alongside and the pillaging gets under way. Many prisoners are carried off to be held for ransom.
The fictitious "Luzon Union" is simply another name for the Philippines. Luzon is the name of one of the Philippine islands.
Dent encountered some difficulty with this adventure's climax. His editor thought it was too rushed, so Dent was obliged to extend Chapter 20, and write two new concluding chapters. In his haste, Dent forgot to retitle the final chapter, which was originally called "Red Blade" and remained so, despite the absense of blades of any color in the climax.
Why was it called that? In the discarded version, Doc and his men run down the bloodthirsty villain after a wild chase. Here are the concluding paragraphs, showing how Tom Too originally got his just deserts:
There trilled over the grounds about the house a weirdly melodious sound, a strange, undulating note which defieddescription. It carried with a quality that was amazing. It might have been the song of some fantastic feathered creature of the tropics.
Mindoro, looking directly at Doc's lips, found it hard to believe the sound was coming from them. It was the signal which had been agreed upon.
Grim of face, guns in hand, Doc and his men charged the house.
Doc hit the front door--it caved. Renny beat in the panels of a side door with his keg-like fists. Monk dived through a window into the garage. Ham, Long Tom and Johnny opened the rear of the house with a hand grenade.
They expected a greeting of bullets. That didn't happen.
From a room in the middle of the house came shouts, grunts, blows and the noise of upsetting furniture.
Doc and his men burst in.
Stocky Captain Hickman lay face-up on the floor. More than ever did his features look like they had been soaked in beet juice. He writhed feebly, knocked half unconscious.
Astride Captain Hickman's chest sat slender, dapper First Mate Jong of the ill-fated Malay Queen.
Jong smiled widely at Doc and the others. He grasped Captain Hickman's throat.
"I have captured Tom Too!" he declared.
Doc, Mindoro, the five other men--they all made an ominous ring around the two on the floor.
"I was not in the plot aboard the Malay Queen!" smirked Jong. "I am an honest man. I was apalled at the ghastly thing which happened on the Malay Queen. I set out on my own to get Tom Too. I have succeeded. Here he is."
Jong's hands tightened. He was systematically choking Captain Hickman.
Doc Savage came forward. He picked Jong off Captain Hickman. He stood both men on their feet.
"You forget Captain Hickman was skipper of the Malay Queen from the day the vessel was launched," he told Jong. "He was merely bought by Tom Too's money. He is not Tom Too."
"I tell you he is!" snapped Jong.
"I looked up your record, Jong," Doc continued. "You signed up on the Malay Queen in San Francisco. You were making your first voyage on her."
Jong began to tremble a little. "What do you mean?"
"You are Tom Too!"
"That is right!" snarled Captain Hickman. "He was trying to make you think I was Tom Too, so he could get away. The doublecrosser!"
Then Captain Hickman quickly put his fist inside his coat, took it out, and hit Jong in the back as hard as he could.
There was a long knife in the fist. The point stuck out two inches in front of Jong's heart.A humorous note about Tom Too. As Dent outlined this tale, the cutthroat had booked passage on the luckless Malay Queen under a different name. His disguise? A dark and mysterious passenger calling herself Countess Olga, on whom Ham Brooks develops a crush!
Whether Dent had second thoughts, or John Nanovic vetoed this unorthodox imposture is unknown. But for that Tom Too would have gone down in pulp history as the first crossdressing villain in Doc Savage Magazine.
* This version appears to have been published in the July 1933 Thrilling
Adventures as "Valley of Giants" under the house name of Jackson Cole.
###
Copyright 2007 by Will Murray
Doc Savage Books
The Polar Treasure and Pirate of the Pacific were published consecutively in the June and July 1933 issues of Doc Savage Magazine. This was a transitional time for the formative pulp superhero. Doc Savage was fast evolving from his dime-novel roots into a dynamic character of his own.
Writer Lester Dent had allowed his exhuberant imagination free reign in depicting the bronze man as human juggernaut of vengeance in his initial adventures. Now Street & Smith wanted Doc crystalized into a figure of justice tempered with mercy.
In The Polar Treasure, editor John L Nanovic trimmed away some of the excessively grotesque scenes, scaling back Doc Savage's more violent tendencies. For this volume, we've restored most of these in order to showcase this pivotal Doc Savage novel as Lester Dent originally intended. Even if you've already experienced The Polar Treasure, we've made it new again. This is only the first of several extensive Doc Savage restorations Nostalgia Ventures has in the works.
Both novels were inspired by half-forgotten events of 75 years ago.
Exotic adventures were Dent's specialty. His first sale, Pirate Cay, was published by Street & Smith's Top-Notch Magazine in 1929. It was set in the Caribbean. This was followed by a story of the Sargasso Sea and a Polar adventure, Buccaneers of the Midnight Sun. Dent discovered if he changed his locales often, pulp editors kept purchasing his manuscripts.
"Sell one story, and you're set for life," he once quipped. "Don't get excited and try to do a different one. When you've found one that will sell, just keep on writing and selling it."
Dent was a firm believer in following a fiction formula. In 1930, excited by a reported venture to circumnavigate the North Pole by a submarine refitted to travel under the ice shelf, Dent wrote "Time's Domain," wherein a team of explorers discover a strange lost Polar valley inhabited by still-living dinosaurs.*
Street & Smith's The Popular Magazine bounced the story, but editor Richard Merrifield believed the idea was good enough for Dent try reworking the yarn, this time without the dinosaurs. Dent complied.
S&S was his only market at the time.
Dent gave it his best shot, but editor Richard Merrifield declined "Under the Arctic Ice" with deep regrets, saying in part, ''the idea of a submarine going under the arctic ice is a romantic one, a la Jules Verne, but it is too hard to swallow..." His specific objections had nothing to do with the premise, which he believed was still good.
So Dent sought another market. As he wrote Top-Notch's John L. Laurence on September 5, "In view of the the increasing publicity directed toward Sir Hubert Wilkins and his submarine-under-the-Arctic-ice venture, there should be considerable reader interest in this direction during the winter and spring."
Still fresh to the field, Dent was learning the virtues of marketing. Unfortunately, after asking for a rewrite, Laurence bounced the manuscript, now titled "The Trouble Load." Other editors also passed on it. Dent refused to give up. The idea had ignited his imagination and would not go out.
Sending it out as "The Polar Corsair," Dent again found no takers. But pulp magazine markets were contracting in this first year of the Great Depression. Sales did not come as easily to journeyman fiction writers as they had before the October 1929 Stock Market crash.
In 1931, Dent moved to New York City to work as a contract writer for Dell Publications. Just prior to coming East, he had tried "The Polar Corsair" on Dell's Carson W. Mowre, who pronounced it "entirely too long" for All-Fiction Stories, but invited Dent to try again.
We don't know the circumstances under which the idea was revived, but during the first World War, Carson Mowre had been a Naval aviator. He probably worked on Dell's short-lived Submarine Stories. Perhaps after they met in person, Mowre suggested a new line of attack on the idea. Encouraged, Dent tackled the stubborn problem once more. The fact that Wilkins' Polar submarine venture was finally moving forward in real life may have motivated both men.
Once again the Dent luck seemed to have struck. The story, now called "Under the Pole," sold and was scheduled for the August, 1931 issue under the title, "Underwater Ice." Since the other Dell magazines masked Dent's name under fictitious bylines, this would run as by Lester Dent. He was elated. Then his luck turned again.
Dell folded its pulp line before "Underwater Ice" could be printed, throwing Dent out of work and out of New York, dead broke.
By that summer, after many months of delays, the Wilkins-Ellsworth Arctic expedition began moving forward.
This dangerous venture is today a forgotten chapter in Polar exploration. In 1930, Australian explorer Sir Hubert Wilkins leased a decomissioned U. S. naval submarine, the O-12, and began refitting her for operating under the North Polar icecap. (An earlier idea to build a wheeled sub designated The Defender was abandoned as too expensive and impractical.)
The plan was to sail submerged from Spitsbergen, Norway to the Bering Straits via the North Pole. For this, the U-boat was reconditioned with a retractable conning tower equipped with an emergency ice drill and other safety features, among them wooden "sledge runners" welded to the hull to fend off glacier ice and allow it to "ski" beneath the icepack, a spring-loaded bowsprit bumper in the event of a forward collision, and other diving innovations. Her superstructure was painted gray and the hull under the waterline red to make her more visible against the white wasteland.
Wilkins was no novice. He had crossed the North Pole in 1913, only four years after Admiral Peary's historic conquest. Later he flew over the Pole in an airplane, and is credited with inventing the first ski landing gear for airplanes. His partner, Lincoln Ellsworth, crossed the Pole on the dirigible Norge during Roald Amundsen's famous 1926 flight.
No one had ever braved the Arctic by submarine, and both men were convinced that an underseas boat would prove to be the perfect platform for a scientific exploration of that forbidding region. They assembled a volunteer crew of scientists and retired submariners. To help raise funds for the undertaking, Wilkins published a book, Under the North Pole.
The expedition was plagued by bad luck from the start. A snowstorm delayed her departure from New Jersey's Mathis Shipyard, where she had been refitted. Finally, she cast off on March 16. A crewman, radioman Willard T. Grimm, was lost overboard and presumed drowned on March 23 as the vessel entered Brooklyn Navy Yard to be formally christened Arctic Submarine Nautilus after Jules Verne's prototype submersible first described in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Verne's grandson, Jean Jules Verne, was among the spectators.
Severe storms and multiple engine failures marred the Atlantic portion of the estimated forty-day crossing. In June, Captain Sloan Danenhower was forced to broadcast an SOS when the sub became disabled. The USS Wyoming towed her to Ireland.
After repairs, Nautilus left for the Pole from Bergen, Norway on August 5. Storms and mechanical problems continued to harasss the expedition. Reaching the outer ice pack, Captain Danenhower prepared to make the first sub-Polar dive in history, when he noticed that the diving rudders were missing. Since repeated mishaps had created the growing concern that this was a suicide mission, crew sabotage was suspected.
The Polar crossing had to be cancelled.
Still, the Naultilus did managed to slip under the three-foot-thick floe ice for short periods and conduct some of the planned scientific experiments. Ultimately, Sir Hubert called off diving operations when he realized it was not safe to remain in the Arctic.
Storms chased the seemingly-jinxed pigboat for the remainder of her short life. One pummelled her return trip, another severely damaged the hull and Diesel engines as she attemped to reach England for repairs. The former SS 73 was now beyond salvaging.
On November 30, 1931, the Nautilus was scuttled in a Norwegian fjord. No other attempt to cross the North Pole by submarine took place until the U. S. Navy's first nuclear submarine succeeded in 1958. It too was named Nautilus.
On March 17, 1959, the nuclear sub USS Skate surfaced at the North Pole and scattered Wilkins' ashes there. Over a lifetime of exploration, he had explored both Poles many times.
Obviously, the Helldiver was modelled after the original Nautilus.
In nature, a helldiver is a type of aquatic bird which submerges when threatened. But Dent may have named Doc's sub after aircraft featured in the 1931 movie, Hell Divers, starring Clark Gable and Wallace Beery. Dent was a fan of Beery's films. "Helldiver" was the Marine designation for the Curtiss F8C biplane fighter, the same aircraft that shot King Kong off the Empire State Building in the 1933 movie.
There's an interesting footnote to Dent's interest in the Wilkins-Ellsworth expedition. After being inducted as an Active Resident in the Explorer's Club in 1936, he attended a dinner honoring Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd, who made the first transpolar airplane flight in 1926. The toastmaster was Sir Hubert Wilkins. It's not known if Dent spoke to the man who inspired him, or what they might have discussed.
Lester Dent thought s highly of The Polar Treasure that when he scripted a Doc Savage radio pilot in 1938, this was the tale he chose to adapt. Four chapters of the serial were completed, but the show never found a sponsor. Otherwise, "The Polar Treasure" might today be a well-remembered radio classic along the lines of I Love a Mystery's best episodes.
Lester once quipped, "I've never been north of southern Alaska, but I write wonderful stories about the North Pole." The Polar Treasure is a treasure-trove of pulp adventure, and no doubt the yarn to which he was referring.
No sooner does Doc Savage and his iron crew return from the North Pole than they are embroiled with a completely different brand of modern-day bucaneer. One can see the springboard for Pirate of the Pacific in this blurb Dent wrote to accompany an earlier story revolving around the 20th century corsair theme:
Major forays by Chinese pirates reached the imposing total of six hundred during 1929. This was brought out recently when storms of protest arose over proposals to remove military guards from the coastal boats. It was feared the attacks of the sea wolves would increase with the removal of the guards, usually consisting of one or two squads of British Tommies, who are kept at Hongkong in special detatctments, ready for duty aboard ship at a minute's notice. The ship owners and the officers of the vessels themselves claim the pirates do not fear the armed natives that were suggested as a subsitute for the Tommies.
For fierceness, the Chinese pirates rival the buccaneers of the ancient Spainsh Main. Their methods, however, are a little different. A portion of the gang sails aboard the ship they expect to loot, either in the crew, or as passengers. At a prearranged spot, they kill the officers and as many of the crew as neccesary, and take the prize. A junk manned by their fellows draws alongside and the pillaging gets under way. Many prisoners are carried off to be held for ransom.
The fictitious "Luzon Union" is simply another name for the Philippines. Luzon is the name of one of the Philippine islands.
Dent encountered some difficulty with this adventure's climax. His editor thought it was too rushed, so Dent was obliged to extend Chapter 20, and write two new concluding chapters. In his haste, Dent forgot to retitle the final chapter, which was originally called "Red Blade" and remained so, despite the absense of blades of any color in the climax.
Why was it called that? In the discarded version, Doc and his men run down the bloodthirsty villain after a wild chase. Here are the concluding paragraphs, showing how Tom Too originally got his just deserts:
There trilled over the grounds about the house a weirdly melodious sound, a strange, undulating note which defieddescription. It carried with a quality that was amazing. It might have been the song of some fantastic feathered creature of the tropics.
Mindoro, looking directly at Doc's lips, found it hard to believe the sound was coming from them. It was the signal which had been agreed upon.
Grim of face, guns in hand, Doc and his men charged the house.
Doc hit the front door--it caved. Renny beat in the panels of a side door with his keg-like fists. Monk dived through a window into the garage. Ham, Long Tom and Johnny opened the rear of the house with a hand grenade.
They expected a greeting of bullets. That didn't happen.
From a room in the middle of the house came shouts, grunts, blows and the noise of upsetting furniture.
Doc and his men burst in.
Stocky Captain Hickman lay face-up on the floor. More than ever did his features look like they had been soaked in beet juice. He writhed feebly, knocked half unconscious.
Astride Captain Hickman's chest sat slender, dapper First Mate Jong of the ill-fated Malay Queen.
Jong smiled widely at Doc and the others. He grasped Captain Hickman's throat.
"I have captured Tom Too!" he declared.
Doc, Mindoro, the five other men--they all made an ominous ring around the two on the floor.
"I was not in the plot aboard the Malay Queen!" smirked Jong. "I am an honest man. I was apalled at the ghastly thing which happened on the Malay Queen. I set out on my own to get Tom Too. I have succeeded. Here he is."
Jong's hands tightened. He was systematically choking Captain Hickman.
Doc Savage came forward. He picked Jong off Captain Hickman. He stood both men on their feet.
"You forget Captain Hickman was skipper of the Malay Queen from the day the vessel was launched," he told Jong. "He was merely bought by Tom Too's money. He is not Tom Too."
"I tell you he is!" snapped Jong.
"I looked up your record, Jong," Doc continued. "You signed up on the Malay Queen in San Francisco. You were making your first voyage on her."
Jong began to tremble a little. "What do you mean?"
"You are Tom Too!"
"That is right!" snarled Captain Hickman. "He was trying to make you think I was Tom Too, so he could get away. The doublecrosser!"
Then Captain Hickman quickly put his fist inside his coat, took it out, and hit Jong in the back as hard as he could.
There was a long knife in the fist. The point stuck out two inches in front of Jong's heart.A humorous note about Tom Too. As Dent outlined this tale, the cutthroat had booked passage on the luckless Malay Queen under a different name. His disguise? A dark and mysterious passenger calling herself Countess Olga, on whom Ham Brooks develops a crush!
Whether Dent had second thoughts, or John Nanovic vetoed this unorthodox imposture is unknown. But for that Tom Too would have gone down in pulp history as the first crossdressing villain in Doc Savage Magazine.
* This version appears to have been published in the July 1933 Thrilling
Adventures as "Valley of Giants" under the house name of Jackson Cole.
###
Copyright 2007 by Will Murray
Doc Savage Books