Arabian thieves led by the diabolically clever Molallet set one fiendish trap after another for Doc Savage and his mighty five. Only “Doc,” with his superhuman mental and physical powers, could have withstood this incredible ordeal of endurance which led from the cavern of the crying rock through the pitiless desert of Rub’ Al Khali and its Phantom City to a fight to the death against the last of a savage prehistoric race of white-haired beasts.
THE PHANTOM CITY is a fun Doc adventure that appears early in the Super Saga chronology. A lost city, lots of fighting and double-dealing. A high point among many high points in the first years of Doc adventures.
Ah, who forgets his first? For me it was The Phantom City. I found the novel buried in my closet. I have no idea how it got there. I think it was devine intervention. Thirty years later I have a wonderful wife thanks to starting on my Bronze Road..
Oh, the novel? Well, who can pass up a Doc adventure with a lost city?
Mi primera novela, no solo de Doc, sino de cualquier tipo. Ten
Mi primera novela, no solo de Doc, sino de cualquier tipo. Ten
Another of my personal favorites. Doc in a lost city is always a nice reminder of where Indiana Jones came from. A creepy passage through a dark canyon, the evil Mohallet, the White Beasts and a stash of platinum. Saddle up, brothers, this one has it all.
I read this book right after Brand of the Werewolf because in that book a telegraph operator said that Doc and his men had taken a submarine up an underground river in Arabia to a hidden city in the desert. I was hooked. My one caveat is that Monk, being a chemist, should have recognized the platinum gates of the city that seemed to be the treasure everyone was after. Minor slip. Good book. Great fun.
“The Phantom City” is one of the awesome quartet of classics that Dent wrote in the fall of 1933 (along with “The Lost Oasis,” “The Sargasso Ogre,” and “The Czar of Fear”). Ol’ Lester must have been in pretty close contact with his muse during those four months, because there isn’t another consecutive run of Doc adventures this good in the whole canon. As for “City,” it’s nonstop fun from cover to cover. Since it was written very early in the series, Doc isn’t so formal and starchy yet, and actually uses terms like “fellers,” “search me,” and “don’t it stand to reason…” What’s more, Dent’s incredible ability to describe geography and exotic locales is never on better display than in this book
Another rousing lost civilization Doc Savage extravaganza!!! I agree with Andrew Salmon, the more Doc adventures you read, the more you begin to see their influence in much of today’s pop culture. Move over Indiana Jones, Doc and the boys were here first!
Just reading this for the first time! Really cool! I have the Bantam book cover!
What are those flying “birds” on the cover anyways?
John
Phantom City was also my first experience with Doc and the Crew. Found a copy lost in hallway in junior high and after not being able to trade it to a close friend for some comic books, I sat down and read the story and was forever hooked. That was some forty years ago. I hope all Doc Savage and The Shadow fans are buying the Pulp Doubles from Anthony Tollin at sanctumotr@earthlink.net, these are superb publications and a lot easier to read and collect and far superior to the old paperbacks. I’d prefer they were illustrated with the Bama and Bob Larkin covers on all of them, but what the heck we still get a few Bama covers mingled with the old pulp/Baumhofer,Clarke covers. Keep’em printing Anthony, there’s a whole new generation of Doc Savage fans to be entertained!
Hmmm…Actually, I HATED this one! I don’t know what it is, but I probably enjoy the Lost Civilisation kind of Doc stories least of all. I far prefer Doc and the lads strutting their stuff in less exotic locales. This may be because I was initially led to the stories by the Marvel adaptation of the excellent DEATH IN SILVER. For me, that firmly rooted Doc to a city locale, in this case New York. Also, I found PHANTOM CITY a bit of a muddle, with swarthy villians popping up everywhere. The only high point for me in this yarn was the introduction to the canon of that most excellent animal, Habeas Corpus. The scene in which Monk buys him showed me a gentler side to Monk’s otherwise belligerant nature and evidenced Dent’s superiority over the general run of pulp writers. I do enjoy the foreign adventures, though, but always have had a sneaking preference for those tales set primarily in New York, or at least somewhere in the USA.
They say your first love is special, and that’s true enough here. “The Phantom City” was the first Doc Savage story I ever read…oh so long ago. Not only was it an exciting adventure in its own right, but the lost civilization sub-genre is one of my favorites in the adventure field. Great seeing the two cover side by side.