Doc Savage

On the eighty-sixth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper waits a man built for the impossible. Clark Savage, Jr. — surgeon, inventor, explorer, his skin burned bronze by a hundred tropic suns and his eyes like pools of stirring flake-gold — was raised from the cradle by a council of scientists to be as near perfect as flesh and mind allow. The Man of Bronze rights wrongs and punishes evildoers in the far corners of the earth, and he does not go alone: with him ride the Fabulous Five, each a master of his trade — Monk the brawling chemist, Ham the dapper lawyer with the sword cane, Renny of the monstrous fists, Long Tom the electrical wizard, and gaunt, jaw-cracking Johnny the archaeologist. The adventures were born in the pulps, in Doc Savage Magazine from 1933 to 1949 — a hundred and eighty-one novels signed with the house name Kenneth Robeson, most of them driven by Lester Dent with hands like Harold A. Davis, Laurence Donovan, and William G. Bogart feeding the monthly deadline. Bantam's paperbacks carried the bronze giant to new readers from the 1960s, often two exploits to a volume. Decades on, Will Murray's Wild Adventures of Doc Savage finished unpublished Dent outlines under that same Robeson byline, and cousin Pat Savage claims her own outings. Expect breathless velocity: a fresh masked menace and an exotic locale every time, gadgets a decade ahead of their age, and clean two-fisted justice with no continuity homework to memorize. Each yarn stands alone, so a newcomer can drop in almost anywhere — but start at the source. The Man of Bronze (1933) introduces Doc and the five and hurls them toward a hidden Central American valley; read onward in publication order, since the paperback reprints scrambled the sequence.