Who was "Kenneth Robeson"? / Notes on Bantam Reprints

Pulp fiction fans will be familiar with Kenneth Robeson as the author of the Doc Savage and Avenger series. In reality there was no such person — it was a "house" byline used by Street & Smith Publications. Six, possibly seven, different writers used the pseudonym for the original run of Doc Savage Magazine (1933-49); two other scribes, who never wrote Doc stories, were responsible for The Avenger (1939-43).

At its peak, Doc Savage Magazine was selling 250,000 copies a month.

Of the 180 Doc adventures published by Street & Smith, Missouri-born pulp master Lester Dent is reputedly the author of at least 136, to include the first fifteen. It was he who created the character of Doc Savage in Issue #1, The Man of Bronze, using a general outline provided by S&S business manager Henry W. Ralston (who was keen to launch another high-selling mag like The Shadow). Dent also is said to have polished or rewritten significant portions of some of the Doc tales by the other "Kenneth Robesons". In 1979, a Doc manuscript of Dent's that was rejected by S&S editors finally saw the light of day when published by Bantam as The Red Spider.

Below is a list of writers for Doc Savage Magazine and the number of stories each contributed. (Note: Some of these figures are disputed.)
• Lester Dent - 136 (?)
• William G. Bogart - 14
• Harold Davis - 13
• Laurence Donovan - 9
• Alan Hathway - 4
• Ryerson Johnson - 3
• Evelyn Coulson - 1 (?)

THE BANTAM REPRINTS
In October 1964 Bantam began reprinting the Doc Savage series in paperback form, starting with The Man of Bronze. Each edition was given a sequential number on the cover; unfortunately, Bantam chose not to publish them in chronological order after the first book. (For example: the 2nd in the Bantam series, The Thousand-Headed Man, was actually the 17th adventure published by Street & Smith.) Basically, the numbering system used by Bantam is meaningless. This wouldn't be that big a deal, really, given that very few of the stories are directly connected... if not for the fact that some of the best and most important of them are connected, picking up directly where the previous adventure left off.

With a few exceptions, Bantam pretty much stuck with Docs written in the years 1933-40 up until the publication of the first double volume in July 1980. This paired Satan Black (1944) with Cargo Unknown (1945), stories from the period when the magazine was reduced in size and page count. In fact, most of these "Double Docs" — which Bantam continued though 1986 — were comprised of WWII yarns, although again they were not printed in chronological order. (Nazi Germany could've already surrendered in the first story, only to be still at war with the U.S. in the second.)

In 1986 Bantam released the first of 13 omnibus editions, averaging 400+ pages each, which packed together four or five Doc Savage adventures per volume. The bulk of these novella-length stories came from the WWII and post-war period. Anyone interested in Doc's "Science Detective" phase, in which Dent stripped away the hero's near-superhuman powers and placed him at the center of more realistic, Noir-style mysteries, should look to these.

October 1990 saw the publication of the final omnibus, which fittingly ends with the very last Doc Savage adventure Lester Dent wrote for Street & Smith, 1949's Up From Earth's Center. This book marked a milestone for Bantam, who'd taken over a quarter-century to reprint the entire Doc saga.

Quite a ride indeed.