FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE by Kenneth Robeson (Bantam 1968)

• Originally published in Doc Savage Magazine, October 1938
• Reprinted by Bantam as DS # 23
• Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson

Doc Savage vs. John Sunlight, Round 1.

It’s surprising that over the course of 180 adventures (spanning 16 years) the Man of Bronze never faced a recurring archnemesis in the vein of a Blofeld, Moriarty or Fu Manchu. Street & Smith editors were adamant that all the stories be self-contained, with no cliffhanger endings, yet such an edict would not have automatically precluded the use of a long-running supervillain. (To me this represents a significant lost opportunity.) The closest the series ever comes to such a character is the mysterious John Sunlight, the only opponent to survive a battle with Doc and challenge him a second time.

Sunlight — not his real name, which is never given — certainly fits the supervillain mold. Nationality unknown, he is very tall and gaunt, possessed of the high forehead and contemplative face of a poet or scholar. Burning, piercing eyes and freakishly long fingers (almost as long as the average man’s whole hand) lend him a decidedly sinister, inhuman quality. He habitually wears clothing all of a single matching color: one day it’s purple, the next day gray, and so on. While stronger than he appears, Sunlight has no special abilities beyond an incredible physical endurance (he can survive where other men would perish) and an uncanny hypnotic stare that reduces lesser beings to quivering jelly. His true power lies in his indomitable will — practically a tangible force, others bend to it much like victims in mesmeric thrall to a vampire. (Twice in the story his presence is compared to that of Dracula.) But to what purpose is this great willpower applied? Sunlight’s ultimate goal is as enigmatic as his persona, only truly revealed in the follow-up tale, The Devil Genghis.

As for Fortress of Solitude, the story begins with John Sunlight in Soviet Russia, tried and convicted for crimes against the state. Condemned to the harshest, most isolated gulag in Siberia, he leads the other prisoners in a revolt, destroying the camp and hijacking a navy icebreaker. Sailing into Arctic waters, the ship becomes hopelessly trapped in the icepack; Sunlight and his followers seem doomed, resorting to cannibalism as their supplies dwindle away. But Sunlight makes an astonishing discovery out on the ice — an immense dome-shaped structure with no visible means of ingress, watched over by a small tribe of tight-lipped Eskimos. He becomes obsessed with getting inside the dome and learning what it might contain, even at the expense of his and his comrades’ survival…

Weeks later, the murder of a Soviet diplomat in New York City draws the special attention of Doc Savage. As witnessed by his servants, the victim was literally disintegrated in a puff of black smoke! Then, while investigating the slaying, Savage assistants Ham Brooks and Monk Mayfair are subjected to a “blinding ray” which temporarily short-circuits the optic nerves. To the astonishment of his aides, Doc — who has heretofore displayed total mastery of his emotions under any and all circumstances — is visibly shaken, gripped by an anxiety of which he refuses to speak. He realizes that someone has violated his private sanctuary, the “Fortress of Solitude” to which he periodically retreats for intense study and experimentation.* Not even his most trusted associates, The Amazing Five, know its location.

Within the dome Doc safeguards the incredible superweapons he and his men captured during their many exploits. Also stored there are devices of Doc’s own invention, futuristic apparatus which would simply be too dangerous, given their potential for misuse, to reveal to the public at large. (Just such a device was the one Doc knows was used to kill the diplomat.) Whoever found and broke into the Fortress is obviously of high mental ability and criminal intent — and now has access to all of Doc’s technological secrets. If not stopped, they could throw the entire world into chaos…

Because it introduces the greatest villain of the series, and Doc’s secret sanctum (previously mentioned only in passing) is finally revealed and described, Fortress of Solitude is an absolutely essential title in the Doc Savage canon… making it all the more unfortunate that, prose-wise, the book is not one of Lester Dent’s better efforts. At times clunky and awkward, reading more like a first draft than a finished manuscript, it was apparently written in a hurry as Dent prepared to go on a lengthy overseas vacation. I really wish he’d spent more time tweaking it.

Grade: B

* Yep… DC Comics totally ripped off Doc Savage. The copycat "Fortress of Solitude" first appeared in a 1942 issue of Superman, four years after the publication of Dent’s story.