The prose style was action-oriented and Dent had a low opinion of his work, describing his life's output as consisting mostly of "reams of saleable crap".
[2][3] Henry W. Ralston, Street & Smith's business manager, decided that this was an opportunity to revive the idea of a magazine based around a single character.
[10] Ralston began work on the idea for Doc Savage in early 1932, and when Street & Smith hired John Nanovic to edit The Shadow, the two of them collaborated on the concept.
[10][11] Nanovic wrote up the notes from his and Ralston's discussions as a 28-page short story titled "Doc Savage, Supreme Adventurer" which provided "the characters, the basic concept, the background" for the whole series.
[11][note 1] In February 1932 Frank Blackwell, Street & Smith's editor-in-chief, contacted Lester Dent, a pulp writer in his twenties with a dozen or so published stories, asking him to submit one or more novels for The Shadow.
[18] Street & Smith may have been influenced to hire Dent by a story he wrote called "The Sinister Ray", the first of a series featuring Lynn Lash, a "gadget detective".
The story appeared in the March 1932 issue of Detective-Dragnet, and featured the same scientific approach to detection that Ralston was seeking for Doc Savage.
[14] John Nanovic Charles Moran Babette Rosmond William De Grouchy Daisy Bacon The first issue of the new magazine was dated March 1933,[note 3] and the lead novel was The Man of Bronze.
[26] His contract with Street & Smith paid him $700 for each novel,[note 4] but allowed him to hire ghost-writers if he wished, and in 1934 he began looking for another writer to take on some of the work.
[35] Donovan's rapid production meant that for two years Dent needed to spend much less time writing Doc Savage novels.
Wartime paper shortages forced Street & Smith to cease publication of many of their titles, but Doc Savage was one of the handful of survivors.
[6][note 5] Moran was succeeded by Babette Rosmond, who gave the day-to-day work of managing Doc Savage to a sub-editor, a woman who was unfamiliar with the magazine.
Bacon persuaded Street & Smith to go back to the original pulp-sized format, and switched the magazine to a quarterly schedule.
[47][48] The lead novel for the first issue, titled The Man of Bronze, introduced Doc Savage and five companions who would feature throughout the series: "Renny" Renwick, an engineer; "Monk" Mayfair, an industrial chemist; "Ham" Brooks, a lawyer; "Long Tom" Roberts, an expert on electricity; and "Johnny" Littlejohn, an archaeologist and geologist.
In The Man of Bronze Savage investigates the death of his father, and discovers a lost valley in central America, where a tribe of Mayans live.
Dent also recommended creating a list of characters with "tags": distinguishing characteristics that could be used to help the reader identify and remember the individuals in the story's cast.
The project never came to fruition; one reason was that the resulting novel would probably not fit well into either The Shadow or Doc Savage since adventure and mystery were quite different genres; another was that the readers of one magazine might not be fans of the other hero.
[56] Dent drew on his own experience for the background; he had worked on a ranch and as a telegraph operator, prospected for gold, and (by the mid-1930s) acquired a boat in which he sailed the Caribbean and dove for treasure.
[50] The science fiction ideas included a metal-destroying ray, a teleportation mechanism, and the ability to revive a dead person from history.
[9][6] Pulp historian Lee Server describes Dent as "recklessly generous" with his plot ideas, and cites as an example The Lost Oasis, published in 1933, which included "a hijacked zeppelin, a gorgeous English aviatrix, trained vampire bats in New York harbor, a pair of Middle Eastern bad guys, a desert prison camp, Doc and gang in an autogiro dogfight, jewel-bearing vultures, car chases, man-eating plants, a slave revolt, and a lost African diamond mine".
Murray describes Savage's character in 1946 as "little more than a high-powered detective whose cases might take him out of the country on occasion", also commenting that 1946 saw the "absolute nadir" of Dent's writing, with plots re-used from previous novels and unpublished material.
Dent changed his writing style to suit Rosmond's preference, in an attempt to copy the higher prose standards of the slick magazines.
[63] However, Johnson also made continuity errors, such as changing the hair and eye color of characters, and though Dent corrected some of these, the ones that slipped through were sometimes picked up by other ghost-writers and perpetuated.
[6] In 1936 Street & Smith launched The Skipper, another hero pulp with maritime settings; it failed after a year, but the stories featuring the lead character appeared in most Doc Savage issues until late in 1943.
These appeared under the house name Wallace Brooker; the stories were mostly written by Donovan and Norman Daniels, with a handful contributed by Bogart and Davis.
[6][67] The covers were initially all painted by Walter Baumhofer, and pulp historian Ed Hulse suggests that his "uniformly impressive" work played a significant part in the rapid success of the magazine.
Baumhofer left Street & Smith in 1936; he was succeeded as Doc Savage's cover artist by R. G. Harris, and then in 1938 by Emery Clarke.
[69] Hulse considers Dent "a fine writer of pulp fiction, owing to a remarkably fertile imagination and a keen sense of pacing".
[71] Despite the successes, Dent never felt that his work for Doc Savage was good writing, describing the bulk of his fiction over the years as "reams of saleable crap".
[1] MacDonald sold many short stories to Doc Savage, and in 1947 Rosmond asked him if he would be interested in becoming one of the ghost writers of the lead novels.