Magazine Review: Doctor Death February 1935

Magazine Review: Doctor Death February 1935 edited by Carson W. Mowre

While most of the single-character pulps were named after the hero of the stories, like the Shadow and Doc Savage, there were a handful of attempts to have pulp magazines centered around mastermind villains. The three-issue Doctor Death series was one of them. The character name was reused from short stories published by the same company, but the character was heavily revamped.

In this version, Dr. Royce Mandarin is a multidisciplinary genius who is not just a master of chemistry, electronics and other conventional sciences, but is also well versed in the occult. It’s the near future (of the 1930s) and scientific achievement has continued to advance. But the once friendly and seemingly stable Dr. Mandarin has undergone a change (never explained.) He now believes that humanity should never have developed technology and industrial civilization and seeks to return the human race to a utopian pre-science past.

Clearly the best method of achieving this goal is to adopt a new name and start killing people with magic science! In this first outing, “12 Must Die” by Zorro (Harold Ward), Doctor Death has identified twelve men in the United States who are the keystones for technological innovation. If he murders these people, scientific advancement should stall, which will prevent industrialization from growing too fast for Doctor Death to reverse in the long run. (What about non-American scientists? Never discussed.)

After personally murdering his former best friend, Death announces his kill list to the police in hopes that they will not sacrifice themselves in an effort to protect those men. It has the opposite effect, motivating them to oppose the mad scientist and his goals by any means necessary.

Leading this effort are Detective Inspector John Ricks, and rookie detective Jimmy Holm. Jimmy is our hero, having been scientifically trained and become knowledgeable about the occult before becoming a police officer. Once Doctor Death figures out Jimmy is a threat, he decides to bring the handsome young man on deck by luring him with Nina Ferrera, Dr. Mandarin’s beautiful assistant/adoptive daughter. In a plot twist no one could have foreseen, Nina falls in love with Jimmy.

Inspector Ricks may be considerably out of his depth fighting super-science and the occult, and makes several overconfident blunders, but is still useful. He’s the one who uses actual detective work to figure out Doctor Death is Dr. Mandarin, for example.

Jimmy forms a group known as “the Secret Twelve” to fight Death, which includes the head of American organized crime and the President of the United States! In response, Doctor Death recruits Communists. (Actual Communists may find the depiction of Communists in this story offensive–seriously, Death’s goals would be anathema to any self-respecting Commie.)

Doctor Death may seem like he’s got the upper hand. After all, he has death rays, hypnosis, possession, evil elementals and an army of zombies at his command. (Despite the Rudolph Zinn cover, he doesn’t shrink anyone in this story.) But in his madness, he’s forgotten certain important factors…

This is rip-roaring action, with the author pulling out stops left and right to come up with new tactics for Death. It’s interesting to watch the villain’s moral compunctions slip further and further as his plans are thwarted.

There’s a bit of classism, and the creator provincialism is strongly evident. There’s also a fair amount of implausibility in how many corpses Doctor Death has in his basement with no one noticing until now. Jimmy’s pretty bland and the love story is predictable (though Nina is cool.) And most irritatingly, the ending waffles on the occult stuff by trying to make it sound more “real science-y.”

To fill out the issue, there’s three horrific short stories.

“The Beast that Talked” by Damascus Blount has a mad scientist accidentally turn himself into a gorilla. He decides this is the perfect opportunity to get revenge for past wrongs. It doesn’t end well for him.

“The Black Orchids” by Arthur J. Burks has murder by flower. Can Detective Lieutenant Michael Lannihan figure out the connection between the victims and how the orchids are being attached before the killer gets to him too?

“The Skeleton Screams” by O’Casey Holt closes out the issue with a skeleton in a bathtub that had been a living man one minute before. Acid bath, obviously, but how did it work so fast?

If you like pulpy mad scientist supervillains, this Adventure House reprint will be right up your alley.