The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan

by Robert E. Howard

Contents:

"Introduction" by Darrell C. Richardson

"The Alleys of Singapore"

"The Jade Monkey"

"The Mandarin Ruby"

"The Yellow Cobra"

"In High Society"

"Playing Journalist"

"The Destiny Gorilla"

"A Knight of the Round Table"

"Playing Santa Claus"

"The Turkish Menace"

Genres: Adventure, Pulp, Fantasy, Short Stories, Fiction, Action

192 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Robert Ervin Howard was an American pulp writer of fantasy, horror, historical adventure, boxing, western, and detective fiction. Howard wrote "over three-hundred stories and seven-hundred poems of raw power and unbridled emotion" and is especially noted for his memorable depictions of "a sombre universe of swashbuckling adventure and darkling horror."

He is well known for having created—in the pages of the legendary Depression-era pulp magazine Weird Tales—the character Conan the Cimmerian, a.k.a. Conan the Barbarian, a literary icon whose pop-culture imprint can only be compared to such icons as Tarzan of the Apes, Count Dracula, Sherlock Holmes, and James Bond.

—Wikipedia

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dennis Dorgan was the hero of ten stories that Howard wrote under the pseudonym Patrick Ervin. He sold three or four of them, but only one appeared during his lifetime, in the January, 1934 issue of Magic Carpet magazine. Howard had had success with his character Sailor Steve Costigan and Dorgan was created to try to capitalize on the same markets. Dorgan is a dumb but well-meaning sailor who participates in boxing matches to earn extra money. The stories are all set in Asia, and the "Oriental yellow-menace" theme is sometimes extant. Howard was a consummate pulp writer, and worked in many, many genres, though action and adventure figured most prominently in them all. The Dorgan stories are most similar in style and tone to his humorous Breckenridge Elkins western series. The stories were edited (and in one case completed) by Darrell C. Richardson for this Zebra edition, which has a fine Jeff Jones cover that has nothing to do with the subject matter. This is another one that's of interest primarily to Howard completists.

[Stuart Dean · Rating 4 out of 5]

Two fisted sailing man Dennis Dorgan travels the world engaging in prize fights and fights without prize. He is strong as an ox and nearly half as smart. Humorous episodes follow one after another where Dorgan's dim wits get him into scrapes and his iron fists get him out. Much mayhem and fun ensue.

REH wrote more fighting sailor stories than he did Conan stories. He wrote so many that he had to seek separate publishers to get them all in print. By just changing a few names he had two sailors in print at the same time in different publications. Since they were all basically the same they were equally successful. Much fun and broken bones were the result.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a lot of fun and very different from REH’s fantasy and horror tales. For all the violence, it has a cartoonish feel. Conan, Solomon Kane, Kull, Bran Mak Morn can all be brooding protagonists. Dennis Dorgan…is not that.

[Hal Astell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robert E. Howard surely needs no introduction to fans of fantasy and science fiction, as the pulp author who brought us 'Conan the Barbarian' and arguably pioneered the sword and sorcery genre, but he was a prodigious author who turned out short stories for the pulps like they were going out of style. He died at the young age of thirty, taking his own life when confronted with the loss of his beloved mother, who had fallen into a coma and was not expected to wake up again, yet his output is easily comparable to an array of other pulp authors who survived the era and wrote for it for decades.

We tend to remember him for his stories for 'Weird Tales' magazine, whether about Conan or his other recurring genre characters such as Kull the Conquerer, Bran Mak Morn and Solomon Kane, not to forget supporting characters who would gain a more prominent life after his death like Red Sonja. However, he wrote in many genres, especially westerns and boxing stories, the latter of which is the focus here in an excellent collection I was surprised to find while browsing the Bookmans shelves. His primary boxer was an Irish American sailor called Steve Costigan who was enough of a success in 'Fight Stories' and 'Action Stories' for him to keep writing more.

The catch was that he was writing these stories faster than they could be published, so he chose to come up with a pseudonym, Patrick Ervin, the latter being the E. in Robert E. Howard, and sell Steve Costigan stories to a different magazine, 'Magic Carpet Magazine' with the characters simply renamed. Costigan became Dennis Dorgan; his ever-present bulldog companion Mike became Spike; and his most frequent ship, the Sea Girl, became the Python. Otherwise, they were indistinguishable from each other. In fact, the earliest Dennis Dorgan stories were Steve Costigan stories.

The main reason I leapt at this volume at Bookman's, a 1974 hardcover from Fax Collector's Editions, is because I hadn't read any of these Dennis Dorgan stories before. That's primarily because only one was actually published since 'Magic Carpet Magazine' only managed one issue. That's the opening story, 'The Alleys of Singapore', in which Dorgan finds himself the victim of a fixed fight, losing to Kid Leary in the Sweet Dreams Fight Club in Singapore who had clearly come off the worst. Given that his shipmates had bet heavily on him, including the captain who had put up his ship, there's plenty of investigation to be done to reach a satisfactory conclusion and it's all done with just as much energy as we might expect from Robert E. Howard.

Nobody put us in the middle of the action like Howard, regardless of genre, because at heart he wrote adventure, simply finding it wherever he went in his fiction, whether that was a bygone barbarian age, a more defined historical era or the present day. Things happened for his regular characters to stumble into and they shaped the outcome with their fists and their swords, if not always their wits. Dorgan is a powerhouse of a man, a real dynamo in the Howard tradition, quick to anger and quick to let fly with his fists, but just as quick to fall for someone else's shenanigans, especially when that someone happens to be a beautiful young lady.

That happens in the next story, 'The Jade Monkey', which had been scheduled for 'Magic Carpet' but did not appear after the magazine folded after its first issue. This time he's in Hong Kong, dealing with Jim Rogers, a shipmate who needs fifty bucks to buy the titular statue, which a lady is eager to sell cheap to raise funds for her passage out of Hong Kong, even though it's worth thousands. Of course, Dorgan falls for Miss Betty Chisom and raises the money to help her out by fighting Swordfish Connolly for a purse of fifty dollars, only to discover that the historically important Yih Hee Yih monkey she's selling was made in Bridgeport, Connecticut and retailed for 15 cents.

That ought to be enough to give you the picture of the formula Howard worked to for these stories and set you up for the other eight collected in this volume. Most were unpublished manuscripts found after Howard's death by his literary agent, Glenn Lord, but a few had seen much belated publication in issues of 'The Howard Collector' in the sixties and seventies. One of them, 'The Turkish Menace', was accepted by 'Magic Carpet' but never published and also never found in a complete state. About half of its pages are lost, so Darrell C. Richardson filled in the rest, in addition to writing the introduction to the book.

The other detail I should add is that this isn't just pulp fiction written in the thirties, thus containing a lot of dated language when it comes to race, with characters described as "slant-eyed yeller giants", for instance, but a substantial amount of period slang too. As you'll have gathered, Dorgan is a good man and a great amateur fighter, but he's no brain and these stories are told entirely from his perspective, just like he was sitting on his Texas porch in his old age recounting his exploits to us from memory, with embellishments and exaggerations for the moment, as all tellers of tall tales employ. This doesn't only mean loose language like "I seen" rather than "I saw" or "offa" for "of of" but archaic throwbacks like "hadst" for "had" and a string of abbreviations that seem odd to us, like "riz" for "arose" or "clum" for "climbed". It's a fascinating glimpse into a past era but it's just as vibrant today as it was then.

Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in September 2023:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Odds-...

Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/

[Jefferson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Known primarily for his sword & sorcery tales, Robert E. Howard was highly underrated as a comedy writer. These stories about a hapless waterfront boxer are a delight to read, and show that Howard had much more range than most of his contemporaries.

[Little Timmy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Robert E. Howard is my all time favorite writer, but for many years much of his work was heavily edited. This is another of the heavily edited collections of Robert E. Howard's stories. I am a purist when it comes to a writers works. I know some of these stories are no longer PC but they should be read as Howard wrote them and understood that he wrote in another time period. Don't read this book unless you just can't find any others of Howard's unedited books to read. Message me if you need a list of what is good from this awesome fantasy and action writer.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

This (3.5 stars) & "A Gent from Bear Creek" (which I like a little better - read my comments on it) are the only two humorous books by Howard that I know of or have read.

A very strong, dumb sailor, who earns his money boxing in his spare time, Dorgan manages to get into all kinds of trouble. Only his hard fists, super human abilities & a laughing Fate manage to get him into & out of so much action. I still read it occasionally for a chuckle.

[H. Dean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have always regarded Robert E. Howard as one of the finest writers of this genre. In this series of tales he proves that he can intertwine humor into this rarely humorous genre like no other. Dennis isn't terribly bright but he does have an innate sense of wrong and right. He is also armed with pugilistic skills and a powerful physique that allows him to leave one frying pan for another. This is one of the more fun adventure books I have yet to read - or reread.

[Derek · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had higher hopes for this one over the Breckenridge Elkins collection: the criminal element, the dockyard lowlife, the exotic settings. But it all comes down to the same good-natured if pea-brained pugilist becoming enmeshed in the petty criminalities of others. Most of the stories center on or feature a boxing match, and the fistfights blurred together.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

Howard's humour boxing stories, featuring the character Dennis Dorgan, who was developed from Sailor Steve Costigan.

[Ronald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Howard is always a good read; these are all pretty much boxing or wrestling stories told from viewpoint of Dorgan