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Doc Savage (Bantam) #92
The Awful Egg
From the frozen heart of the American continent comes a nameless prehistoric terror of unspeakable savagery, leaving a broken trail of mangled victims that shocks and baffles the world. Only the superhuman Man of Bronze can meet this horrifying menace on its own bloody ground -- and uncover the even greater evil that spawned it.
120 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1978
92 people want to read
About the author
Kenneth Robeson
918 books134 followersKenneth Robeson was the house name used by Street and Smith Publications as the author of their popular character Doc Savage and later The Avenger. Though most Doc Savage stories were written by the author Lester Dent, there were many others who contributed to the series, including:
William G. Bogart
Evelyn Coulson
Harold A. Davis
Lawrence Donovan
Alan Hathway
W. Ryerson Johnson
Lester Dent is usually considered to be the creator of Doc Savage. In the 1990s Philip José Farmer wrote a new Doc Savage adventure, but it was published under his own name and not by Robeson. Will Murray has since taken up the pseudonym and continued writing Doc Savage books as Robeson.
All 24 of the original stories featuring The Avenger were written by Paul Ernst, using the Robeson house name. In order to encourage sales Kenneth Robeson was credited on the cover of The Avenger magazine as "the creator of Doc Savage" even though Lester Dent had nothing to do with The Avenger series. In the 1970s, when the series was extended with 12 additional novels, Ron Goulart was hired to become Robeson.
William G. Bogart
Evelyn Coulson
Harold A. Davis
Lawrence Donovan
Alan Hathway
W. Ryerson Johnson
Lester Dent is usually considered to be the creator of Doc Savage. In the 1990s Philip José Farmer wrote a new Doc Savage adventure, but it was published under his own name and not by Robeson. Will Murray has since taken up the pseudonym and continued writing Doc Savage books as Robeson.
All 24 of the original stories featuring The Avenger were written by Paul Ernst, using the Robeson house name. In order to encourage sales Kenneth Robeson was credited on the cover of The Avenger magazine as "the creator of Doc Savage" even though Lester Dent had nothing to do with The Avenger series. In the 1970s, when the series was extended with 12 additional novels, Ron Goulart was hired to become Robeson.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
July 25, 2020
The 88th novel in the Doc Savage series (#92 by Bantam publication order) is representative of the later Doc stories, published during the WW2 years. This one was the second published in 1940 and features a plot that hints at the kind of fantastic elements from earlier novels but reveals itself to have a much more mundane plot. Perhaps the publisher wanted more realism by this time in the face of the growing war as well as to better match up to the competition.
But no matter, this book has most of the “Doc’isms” I hope for including appearances by all of Doc’s five aides. (But no Pat Savage in this one, alas). The plot features what appears to be the discovery of a dinosaur egg, with a Little one still alive inside and about to chip its way out. Even Johnny, master archeologist and geologist is convinced of its authenticity. But when the egg is stolen Doc and his crew must chase down the mystery before it eats its way through man and beast.
The plot quickly turns from a dinosaur hunt to a murder and stolen gold plot but it was another fun read. It’s written by the creator, Lester Dent and not one of the handful of ghost writers working on the series in the 1940s.
But no matter, this book has most of the “Doc’isms” I hope for including appearances by all of Doc’s five aides. (But no Pat Savage in this one, alas). The plot features what appears to be the discovery of a dinosaur egg, with a Little one still alive inside and about to chip its way out. Even Johnny, master archeologist and geologist is convinced of its authenticity. But when the egg is stolen Doc and his crew must chase down the mystery before it eats its way through man and beast.
The plot quickly turns from a dinosaur hunt to a murder and stolen gold plot but it was another fun read. It’s written by the creator, Lester Dent and not one of the handful of ghost writers working on the series in the 1940s.
November 9, 2024
The Awful Egg is a "Doc Savage" novel by Kenneth Robeson. Kenneth Robeson was the house name Street and Smith Publications used as the author of their popular Doc Savage novels. Though most Doc Savage stories were written by the author Lester Dent, there were many others who contributed to the series, including: William G. Bogart, Evelyn Coulson, Harold A. Davis, Lawrence Donovan, Alan Hathway, and W. Ryerson Johnson.
I love reading these old pulp novels from time to time. I read about 80%+ of the Doc Savage novels when I was a teenager but that was a very long time ago. I have been trying to find them again in the Bantam editions I read in my youth. I have found several of them in used bookstores and have bought several from online aftermarket bookstores.
In this one, Doc Savage and his men are in the thick of it again. The action is classic Doc Savage, filled with good old-fashioned adventure and gadgets that always seem to be there when the hero needs them. You can relax and escape for a little while. A good read in the Doc Savage series.
I love reading these old pulp novels from time to time. I read about 80%+ of the Doc Savage novels when I was a teenager but that was a very long time ago. I have been trying to find them again in the Bantam editions I read in my youth. I have found several of them in used bookstores and have bought several from online aftermarket bookstores.
In this one, Doc Savage and his men are in the thick of it again. The action is classic Doc Savage, filled with good old-fashioned adventure and gadgets that always seem to be there when the hero needs them. You can relax and escape for a little while. A good read in the Doc Savage series.
October 1, 2024
'Doc Savage Magazine' was changing with the times. June 1940 was a good chunk of the way into a world war that was hardly acknowledged when it began but was lasting too long to be ignored. So Lester Dent fashioned a story set on the fringes of that war that hasn't much to actually do with it. It's all rather prosaic and old-fashioned but, for quite a while, it plays at being a cunningly-fashioned mystery, mostly through one of the better-drawn supporting characters the series had ever seen, a rich New York physician called Dr. Samuel Harmony.
He shows up to work on the first page in his chauffeur-driven limo to find no patients. However, ten minutes later he's as white as a sheet and he promptly shuts down his entire operation. He asks his receptionist to cancel all his appointments and mail a set of messages before she's out of a job. He even asks her to close down his offices and hand in the key, before vanishing unceremoniously out of her life. Of course she doesn't do any of these things because why would she. Instead, she takes a look at his office to try to figure out what's going on, something that gets her shot at from some nearby building.
What she finds before then is that he was shocked by a photo in the paper, depicting two men who were departing from a steamship. One is Edward Ellston Parks and the other Doc Savage, who she finds herself immediately impressed by, even though Harmony had stabbed him through the chest with his pen. She's Nancy and she rings her boyfriend Clarence Older, known as Hickey, who knows exactly who Doc is and takes her to see him. Doc takes her story seriously and has Monk join Hickey as Nancy's bodyguards, which lasts precisely as long as it takes them to get down to the street, as she's promptly kidnapped not to reappear until the final chapter.
There's a lot of good stuff in these early chapters. The opening chapter is furiously busy, as if Dent knew he didn't have as many words to work with so got down to business immediately. I don't know if this is a shorter novel than its predecessors, but it seems like it is. Nancy and Hickey come to see Doc at his HQ, of course, but they're diverted onto the twentieth floor, where Ham and Monk are a sort of filtering committee. And, when Ham asks Doc about Parks, he's shown a box that contains a fossilised baby pterodactyl that he'd handed him for research purposes.
Best of all, while Doc's investigating Parks at the Ritz-Central, Harmony is running far and fast in a thoroughly complex chain of movements. Get this! He takes his limo to the train station, where he dismisses his chauffeur. But then he takes a taxi to the airport and buys a ticket to Chicago. Before the flight departs, he rings around private detective agencies to find an operative who looks quite like him and puts him on the plane instead. He takes a bus to Philadelphia, then flies to Miami and finds Nick Hostelli waiting for him with a gun. Hilariously, he didn't know any of the steps Harmony had taken to obscure his trail. He just figured he'd head for South America and that meant Miami.
However Harmony gets the drop on him with a knife he's been sharpening on the flight. He swaps clothes and ID with his would-be captor, then slices up the corpse's face to make it believable, and even wires Parks as Hostelli to say that he had to kill Harmony. Then he changes plans, flies to New Orleans, takes a sleeper train west, another plane and a bus, then buys a used car in a small town in Colorado. He drives around the west for a while, swapping cars frequently, until he ends up in a Dakotan town called Kadoka, where he hires a guide to take him fossil hunting in the Bad Lands.
That's quite a trail to follow but the tall and incredibly thin guide who seems to know a heck of a lot about archaeology and is careful to not use challenging vocabulary is a piece of cake for us regular readers to recognise. Yes, it's Johnny and he does exactly what Harmony wants, guiding him into a perfect area to find fossils and finding them too. There's the jawbone of a brontosaurus. There's a head from an ancestor of the horse. And there's a toebone from a T. Rex. However, the gig is up in an ice cave, when they find part of a dinosaur leg, complete with flesh, and, inside the ice, an egg. That's when Johnny hurls out an "I'll be superamalgamated" and Harmony knows exactly who he is.
During the ensuing chaos, the egg sits outside in the sun and, when Harmony eventually returns to check it out, realises that there's something alive inside. Something that, only a little later, as he's cooking dinner over a fire, cracks open. He looks inside and runs. Johnny calls in Doc and they find the ice cave blown up, the remnants of the egg still outside and whatever was inside it as gone as Harmony, so the chase is very seriously on.
I loved the first half of this book. It's thoroughly different to any earlier novel and, while Dent has us follow Harmony on a whirlwind tour of the country, we always know where we are, unlike those William G. Bogart novels that move us around like tumbleweeds in a tornado for no better reason than to keep us on the hop. Everything makes sense here and we don't feel cheated when we find that Johnny was able to follow him all the way without being noticed. The setup is good and I have no complaints about the fossils. It all seems far more grounded to me than what happened in 'The Land of Terror', even if we're hatching a dinosaur in the badlands of South Dakota.
I even liked the fact that Doc and his aides, all of whom show up for this one, don't seem to make a jot of progress. Whenever someone checks in with the rest, they find that they're all still firmly in the dark. They haven't found Nancy. They haven't figured out what South Orion is. Hickey's raging at how ineffectual the legendary Doc Savage is. And the bad guys keep chipping away at the team by taking them gradually hostage. Deliciously, Renny, who's one of the first kidnapped, finds out a lot more in half an hour of being questioned than the entire team has that far.
The problem is that the promise early on isn't maintained to the finalé. Once Ham figures out the identity of South Orion, the mystery fizzles and it all starts to rely on the monster that hatched in South Dakota, a monster that Harmony seems to be bringing back to New York with him, leaving a trail of mangled bodies in their wake. And, even though Doc encounters real live dinosaurs early on in 'The Land of Terror' and as recently as 'The Other World', only four months earlier in 1940, it never feels like this awful creature is ever going to follow suit. Dent does try, but the last third of the book gradually transforms into something utterly mundane.
Had he started out mundane and worked through with the care that Harmony applied to his long and tortuous escape route, maybe this would have become a worthy entry into the series. But, as it stands, it sets up so much and so well that the explanations had to be special to work and they just weren't. As such, this one ends up a disappointing dud, even though I may just read the first seven chapters again and imagine what it could have become from there.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in April 2023:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
He shows up to work on the first page in his chauffeur-driven limo to find no patients. However, ten minutes later he's as white as a sheet and he promptly shuts down his entire operation. He asks his receptionist to cancel all his appointments and mail a set of messages before she's out of a job. He even asks her to close down his offices and hand in the key, before vanishing unceremoniously out of her life. Of course she doesn't do any of these things because why would she. Instead, she takes a look at his office to try to figure out what's going on, something that gets her shot at from some nearby building.
What she finds before then is that he was shocked by a photo in the paper, depicting two men who were departing from a steamship. One is Edward Ellston Parks and the other Doc Savage, who she finds herself immediately impressed by, even though Harmony had stabbed him through the chest with his pen. She's Nancy and she rings her boyfriend Clarence Older, known as Hickey, who knows exactly who Doc is and takes her to see him. Doc takes her story seriously and has Monk join Hickey as Nancy's bodyguards, which lasts precisely as long as it takes them to get down to the street, as she's promptly kidnapped not to reappear until the final chapter.
There's a lot of good stuff in these early chapters. The opening chapter is furiously busy, as if Dent knew he didn't have as many words to work with so got down to business immediately. I don't know if this is a shorter novel than its predecessors, but it seems like it is. Nancy and Hickey come to see Doc at his HQ, of course, but they're diverted onto the twentieth floor, where Ham and Monk are a sort of filtering committee. And, when Ham asks Doc about Parks, he's shown a box that contains a fossilised baby pterodactyl that he'd handed him for research purposes.
Best of all, while Doc's investigating Parks at the Ritz-Central, Harmony is running far and fast in a thoroughly complex chain of movements. Get this! He takes his limo to the train station, where he dismisses his chauffeur. But then he takes a taxi to the airport and buys a ticket to Chicago. Before the flight departs, he rings around private detective agencies to find an operative who looks quite like him and puts him on the plane instead. He takes a bus to Philadelphia, then flies to Miami and finds Nick Hostelli waiting for him with a gun. Hilariously, he didn't know any of the steps Harmony had taken to obscure his trail. He just figured he'd head for South America and that meant Miami.
However Harmony gets the drop on him with a knife he's been sharpening on the flight. He swaps clothes and ID with his would-be captor, then slices up the corpse's face to make it believable, and even wires Parks as Hostelli to say that he had to kill Harmony. Then he changes plans, flies to New Orleans, takes a sleeper train west, another plane and a bus, then buys a used car in a small town in Colorado. He drives around the west for a while, swapping cars frequently, until he ends up in a Dakotan town called Kadoka, where he hires a guide to take him fossil hunting in the Bad Lands.
That's quite a trail to follow but the tall and incredibly thin guide who seems to know a heck of a lot about archaeology and is careful to not use challenging vocabulary is a piece of cake for us regular readers to recognise. Yes, it's Johnny and he does exactly what Harmony wants, guiding him into a perfect area to find fossils and finding them too. There's the jawbone of a brontosaurus. There's a head from an ancestor of the horse. And there's a toebone from a T. Rex. However, the gig is up in an ice cave, when they find part of a dinosaur leg, complete with flesh, and, inside the ice, an egg. That's when Johnny hurls out an "I'll be superamalgamated" and Harmony knows exactly who he is.
During the ensuing chaos, the egg sits outside in the sun and, when Harmony eventually returns to check it out, realises that there's something alive inside. Something that, only a little later, as he's cooking dinner over a fire, cracks open. He looks inside and runs. Johnny calls in Doc and they find the ice cave blown up, the remnants of the egg still outside and whatever was inside it as gone as Harmony, so the chase is very seriously on.
I loved the first half of this book. It's thoroughly different to any earlier novel and, while Dent has us follow Harmony on a whirlwind tour of the country, we always know where we are, unlike those William G. Bogart novels that move us around like tumbleweeds in a tornado for no better reason than to keep us on the hop. Everything makes sense here and we don't feel cheated when we find that Johnny was able to follow him all the way without being noticed. The setup is good and I have no complaints about the fossils. It all seems far more grounded to me than what happened in 'The Land of Terror', even if we're hatching a dinosaur in the badlands of South Dakota.
I even liked the fact that Doc and his aides, all of whom show up for this one, don't seem to make a jot of progress. Whenever someone checks in with the rest, they find that they're all still firmly in the dark. They haven't found Nancy. They haven't figured out what South Orion is. Hickey's raging at how ineffectual the legendary Doc Savage is. And the bad guys keep chipping away at the team by taking them gradually hostage. Deliciously, Renny, who's one of the first kidnapped, finds out a lot more in half an hour of being questioned than the entire team has that far.
The problem is that the promise early on isn't maintained to the finalé. Once Ham figures out the identity of South Orion, the mystery fizzles and it all starts to rely on the monster that hatched in South Dakota, a monster that Harmony seems to be bringing back to New York with him, leaving a trail of mangled bodies in their wake. And, even though Doc encounters real live dinosaurs early on in 'The Land of Terror' and as recently as 'The Other World', only four months earlier in 1940, it never feels like this awful creature is ever going to follow suit. Dent does try, but the last third of the book gradually transforms into something utterly mundane.
Had he started out mundane and worked through with the care that Harmony applied to his long and tortuous escape route, maybe this would have become a worthy entry into the series. But, as it stands, it sets up so much and so well that the explanations had to be special to work and they just weren't. As such, this one ends up a disappointing dud, even though I may just read the first seven chapters again and imagine what it could have become from there.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in April 2023:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
September 7, 2023
On the surface of it, it seems an impossible tale of The Awful Egg. A prehistoric egg found in an ice cave that, once brought into the warmth of sun and campfire, hatches. The hatchling appears to be from a long ago and extinct time.
The one aspect of the story that I loved occurs near the beginning of the book. Johnny, in disguise, acts as a guide for one of the antagonists. He guides thus character through the Badlands of S Dakota. I enjoyed for three chapters that revolved around Johnny. It was an essential part of plot building to the story, of course.
All five of Doc’s associates are involved in the story with Doc Savage. Most of the action in his sci-fi mystery takes place in New York City. There is some action in Miami and the Badlands, also.
Written by Lester Dent and published June, 1940.
The one aspect of the story that I loved occurs near the beginning of the book. Johnny, in disguise, acts as a guide for one of the antagonists. He guides thus character through the Badlands of S Dakota. I enjoyed for three chapters that revolved around Johnny. It was an essential part of plot building to the story, of course.
All five of Doc’s associates are involved in the story with Doc Savage. Most of the action in his sci-fi mystery takes place in New York City. There is some action in Miami and the Badlands, also.
Written by Lester Dent and published June, 1940.
June 6, 2025
This one gets a one-star bump for its nostalgic value. After reading the atrociously bad "New Doc Savage" thrillers books one and two, I was hungry for the real Doc Savage.
Doc Savage is not the bloodthirsty killer his grandson imagines him to be. However, he is also not the hero I remember. He has some clever moments and a few feats of strength. But, as I recall from my youth the majority of the work was done by his team, who at times are the most ridiculous group of men ever gathered.
This one was fun, but again, only because of the nostalgia factor. It is not exceptionally well written and the mystery isn't well-developed. But for a pulp novel, it was satisfying and scratched the itch I was feeling.
Doc Savage is not the bloodthirsty killer his grandson imagines him to be. However, he is also not the hero I remember. He has some clever moments and a few feats of strength. But, as I recall from my youth the majority of the work was done by his team, who at times are the most ridiculous group of men ever gathered.
This one was fun, but again, only because of the nostalgia factor. It is not exceptionally well written and the mystery isn't well-developed. But for a pulp novel, it was satisfying and scratched the itch I was feeling.
October 8, 2017
Read this Doc back in the 80s
April 21, 2018
Doc Savage and The Awful Egg, I liked the story but didn’t care for the ending so much. Still a fun one to read. 👍
October 15, 2016
The first Doc Savage story appeared in 1933 and the series ran in pulp and later digest format into 1949. Bantam reprinted the entire series in paperback with wonderful, iconic covers starting in the 1960's. Doc was arguably the first great modern superhero with a rich background, continuity, and mythos. The characterizations were far richer than was common for the pulps; his five associates and their sometimes-auxiliary, Doc's cousin Pat, and the pets Chemistry and Habeas Corpus, all had very distinctive characteristics and their byplay was frequently more entertaining that the current adventure-of-the-month. The settings were also fascinating: Doc's Fortress of Solitude, the Hidalgo Trading Company (which served as a front for his armada of vehicles), and especially the mysterious 86th floor headquarters all became familiar haunts to the reader, and the far-flung adventures took the intrepid band to exotic and richly-described locations all over the world. The adventures were always fast-paced and exciting, from the early apocalyptic world-saving extravaganzas of the early days to the latter scientific-detective style shorter works of the post-World War Two years. There were always a few points that it was difficult to believe along the way, but there were always more ups than downs, and there was never, ever a dull moment. The Doc Savage books have always been my favorite entertainments... I was always, as Johnny would say, superamalgamated!
March 3, 2016
Of all the pulp era heroes few stand out above the crowd, Doc Savage is one of these. With his 5 aides and cousin he adventures across the world. Fighting weird menaces, master criminals and evil scientists Doc and the Fab 5 never let you down for a great read. These stories have all you need; fast paced action, weird mystery, and some humor as the aides spat with each other. My highest recommendation.
January 13, 2017
A fast moving adventure involving missing gold and the gangs struggling to recover it, somewhat undercut by interweaving a B-plot involving one gang thawing out a dinosaur to kill the others. I get the feeling Lester Dent just read a lot about dinosaur hunting and wanted to incorporate it into another story.
November 15, 2018
read some time in 1979
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews