049 11/37 The Sea Angel

Posted by on Nov 11, 1997 in 1937, bama, Bantam 049-060, harris, nanovic, novel, pulp | 6 comments

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One by one, the biggest wheeler-dealers in the financial world of New York mysteriously disappeared, never to be seen or heard of again — brutally gobbled up by The Silver Ogre. Until the Man of Bronze took up the eerie trail when the next victim was one of Doc’s own men!


  • http://docsavage.info Chuck Welch

    First off, I have to say this is one of my least favorite Bama covers. The “Sea Angel” is bad enough to read about, and Bama made it look as rediculous as it sounded. Not as bad as See-Pah-Poo Poo, but close.

  • http://docsavage.info/ds/index.html Catherine Lavall

    This was the first Doc I read in quite a bit of a while. Not the best choice. The “creature” is hardly believable and the bad guys’ evil plan weak. All the aides are there, but Long Tom says 3 words at the beginning, Renny, 6 and they are never heard of again. Doc survives several days locked in a pantry, eating only canned fruit. First, I wonder how he opened the cans, second, I hope he was wearing his special crimson underwear, as described in The Golden Peril (judging by the pulp cover, he was. Pheew!).

  • http://www.paulcook-sci-fi.com Paul Cook

    I found (and still find) the Bama cover to be interesting (at least interesting enough for me to purchase the Graphitti Designs poster), but the story is really preposterous. This is almost as bad as The Mountain Monster. Fake spiders or monsters or things dangled from balloons just don’t work for me and I can’t imagine that it would work for anyone in the Thirties, except maybe for fourteen year-olds with vivid imaginations. I read this when I was seventeen and it still stunk.

  • Mark Carpenter

    This one had me shaking my head in disbelief. How could the author of “The Polar Treasure” and “The Majii” have written this jalopy?
    The waddling Sea Angel was embarrassing enough, but the henchmen dressed like green devils pushed this one into the stratosphere of stupidity. Ditto all the comments above

  • Michael Bloom

    aw, c’mon guys… this story isn’t that bad. Of course the “monster” was fake – we’re used to that.
    The cover is actually quite good.Look carefully at the Sea Angel’s face.
    It’s the Creature From the Black Lagoon! More of that Jim Bama sense of humor. The expression on Doc’s face is unusual, too.

    Even the worst Bama cover is better than what Pfeiffer and Vallejo came up with later in the series.

  • http://DocSavageOrganised Richard Cording

    Sorry, guys, but I have to strongly disagree with most of you on this one. THE SEA ANGEL is without doubt one of the best Doc Savage novels I have read in some time! I’ve been hunting for it ever since reading about it in Farmer’s APOCOLYPTIC LIFE back in ’75, and the search was well worth it. Unusually for a Doc tale, the Bad Guys weren’t really bad — misguided idealism is perhaps the only fault you could lay at their door. Even Doc stated to their leader that were it not for the fact that he believed their scheme for reforming crooked financiers was hopelessly impractical, he would gladly have helped them! With this in mind, Dent still made SEA ANGEL an edge-of-the-seat read for me, and Doc and the lads ( well, some of them anyway ) managed to have their hands quite full with the Sea Angel Gang. It’s a point well worth noting that the Doc Savage yarns were on a higher literary level than the majority of the ’30s and 40s hero pulps; they weren’t exactly War And Peace, but the quality of Dent’s writing lifted them well above the others. The only other pulp hero who could boast anything like the same level of literateness, in my opinion, was The Avenger. All in all, I heartily recommend SEA ANGEL. My rating? Definitely four and a half out of five for this bad boy!