Doc Savage Audio Book: Python Isle

Lester Dent and the History of “Python Isle”
Written by Will Murray

The greatest adventure hero of his time, Doc Savage was no lone wolf explorer. He had five wartime friends who joined him in his globe-spanning exploits. One hero. Six leads. It was a lot of work cramming them into every story.

On radio, Dent kept the cast pared it down to Doc and his chief sidekick, the colorful Monk Mayfair. It worked just fine.

Maybe that’s where Dent got the idea to leave some of his aides out of a select number of stories. It started with “Death in Silver”. Only, Doc, Monk and Ham Brooks participated. ‘Kenneth Robeson’ explained that the other three were scatted about the world, pursuing their rough-and-tumble vocations.

Lester always plotted his novels one, two or three ahead. He was considering a story starring the absent mechanical engineer Renny Renwick, provisionally titled “Lost Island.”

His editor approved the general concept and Lester sat down to outline it. He was dumbfounded when the outline was bounced back to him as unacceptable

The reason? “Python Isle”, as he finally called it, involved snakes, and reader reaction to similar stories had convinced Street & Smith to make serpent-themed tales taboo. The offending stories had been written by a young pulp writer and amateur herpetologist named Richard Sale. He later went on to Hollywood fame, scripting the suspense film “Suddenly” and creating the TV Western “Yancy Derringer”. But, in 1934, he was poised to ghost Doc Savage for Lester Dent. His first project? “Python Isle”!

Disappointed, Lester moved on to his next Doc Savage idea. Richard Sale never did write Doc.

The “Python Isle” outline gathered dust in Lester Dent’s files long after the cancellation of Doc Savage in 1949, and his own passing ten years later. I discovered it in October of 1978 while visiting Lester’s widow, Norma, and almost immediately recognized it as the skeleton to a lost Doc Savage adventure.

It was an audacious idea to attempt to flesh out the eleven-page outline into the first new Doc adventure since 1949. I had been reading Doc for less than a decade, having discovered him through a Bantam Books reprint of “Dust of Death” in 1969. Like many 15 year olds before me, I was hooked.

Now I was 28 – the same age Lester had been when he wrote his first Doc Savage story. Mrs. Dent agreed to let me try. So I pounded out the regulation 200 plus pages, signing it ‘Kenneth Robeson’. It was my first novel. The year was 1980.

Bantam Books read it and was interested but, ultimately, they decided to hold onto it until they ran out of original Docs to reprint.

Eleven years later in 1990, they did. “Python Isle” was printed with a gorgeous Joe DeVito cover – the same image that graces this first Radio Archives audiobook. Twenty years have passed and Joe and I, not to mention Lester Dent, are reunited in a new series, “The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage”, from Altus Press.

Doc Savage is rapidly becoming a Solar Myth – the bronze-skinned golden-eyed immortal hero who can never die. Now he’s starring in his first audiobook and I can’t say how delighted I am to have authored it.

There wouldn’t be a “Python Isle” audiobook if it were not for the success of “The Adventures of Doc Savage”, which Radio Archives released in 2010 on the 25th anniversary of the original National Public Radio broadcasts. Producer-director Roger Rittner and I considered a number of excellent voice actors to read this historic first Doc audio release. We both thought it would be wonderful if one of the talents who worked on the original Doc radio show could narrate this novel.

Happily, Michael McConnohie turned in a splendid chameleon-like job of bringing “Python Isle” to life. Listening to words you wrote years before can bring out the self-critic in a novelist. I can tell you that I fell into that trap only to have Michael’s steady, compelling voice transport me out of myself and back to 1934 and the always-absorbing world of the mighty Man of Bronze.

At the end of “Death in Silver”, Lester Dent drafted a blurb for the next adventure of his seminal superman – the one he never got to write. What Dent wrote sets up the story of “Python Isle” so perfectly that it cannot be improved upon. So I will quote it in full:

Doc and his men were relaxed, unconcerned, now that the trouble was over. They were accustomed to this sort of thing. They had been through it before.

They would go through it again, too–as much and more. Within the month, a fantastic, perilous series of adventures would befall them, although they had no way of foreseeing that.

Renny–Colonel John Renwick, the engineer who was now in South Africa–would be first to come in contact with the grisly mystery of Python Isle. A man would come out of the jungle, a wasted, stumbling bundle of bones. He spoke to Renny. And the instant Renny heard that voice, he was condemned to mysterious death.

For the words the man whispered had to do with a fantastic secret, a secret that was not of Africa, but of an incredible place in the vastness south of the Indian Ocean. It was of Python Isle that he spoke, and of the unholy thing to be found there, a thing which no man understood; he spoke of a treasure, too, a treasure for which men killed and themselves, died.

He wore weird garments, this man who came to Renny; he was a white man, yet his speech was strange. But most ghastly of all was the thing that was wrong with him–the spell wrought by the sorcery of Python Isle.

And because that strange fellow spoke to Renny, death was to strike, not only at Renny, but at Doc Savage, distant half around the world, in New York City.

Are you hooked? I thought you would be…