OK, the dirty secret is out, now. I collect the Man Of Bronze. Yep, I have 5+ feet of books about Doc Savage, plus some of the original pulps.

Partly it’s because I enjoy a world where Right and Wrong are a little more clearly dilineated than today’s world. In Doc’s stories, the Bad Guys are, well, bad, and easily recognizable as such. And the same goes for the Good Guys. And, more importantly, the Good Guys win. I find that point of view refreshing in a society that increasingly tries to claim that no one is bad, except, perhaps, those who win.

In Spook Legion, Doc has to deal with a plot revolving around invisible men (hence the “spook” of the title). But the plot isn’t really important, now, is it? What is imortant is that Doc, aided only by his own intellect (and, of course, the ominpresent Monk and Ham) succeeds.

Doc is the human we’d all like to be. He has no weight problems, no energy deficiencies. He has stuck to a serious training regiment that has resulted in a superb physical specimen (while his height and his bronze coloring seem to be genetically defined, the rest was up to him) and along the way he trained his mind, putting it through an “exercise program” no less rigorous.

But I think the real reason I’m attracted to Doc is much more primal than all that. The underlying theme in almost all the stories is how brilliant, capable people just don’t Fit In with society. They can’t, because society is composed of people who are neither brilliant nor capable. And because these people don’t fit in, they have two choices: to act against society, or to act in support of it. It’s almost Nietschean, but rather than being beyond the concepts of Good and Evil, the Doc books insist that these people must by their very thoughts and actions define, even embody, Good and Evil.

And that, my children, is what it’s all about. “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life , that you and your descendants may live…”