Doc Savage Audio Book: The Jade Ogre

When Bantam Books asked me to continue the long-running Doc Savage series, I knew I wanted to base them on the uncompleted works of the late Lester Dent, originator of the Man of Bronze.

As I moved forward with the series, I started looking at Lester’s files for material not conceived for Doc, but adaptable to the series. Early in his career, Dent had created a hulking hero he called Curt Flagg, a private investigator of the Sam Spade knock ’em and shoot ’em up hardboiled detective school popular at that time. This series appeared in a magazine called Scotland Yard in 1931.

I could detect some of the energy and ideas for Doc Savage percolating in the Curt Flagg stories. He was no ordinary PI. Flagg took on pirates, Zeppelin high-jackers and wicked master criminals, supported by a growing band of savvy operatives. He was Doc Savage before Doc Savage.

Scotland Yard soon fell victim to the Great Depression. When the magazine was cancelled, one complete Curt Flagg story and an unused outline were orphaned. It was the outline that interested me. It told the tale of how Flagg and some of his assistants booked passage on a San Francisco to Hong King ocean liner to hunt down Quon, the Jade Ogre—one of the most malevolent master criminals in the world.

By transforming Curt Flagg to Doc Savage, changing his lovely blonde assistant, Dita Vardi, to Patricia Savage, and inserting some of Doc’s men into the mix, I believed I had a template for a great Doc Savage story.

The Jade Ogre will carry you the listener from the fog-shrouded streets of the Chinatown of 1935 San Francisco to the crumbling ruins of Cambodia as the armless and ruthless Jade Ogre attempts to blackmail the world with his lethal Jade Fever. This is a quest, a running gangster war and a fearful excursion into the heart of darkness that is Asia—or the Asia Americans imagined in the 1930s.

Think Dr. Fu Manchu meets China Seas. You won’t be disappointed.