Adventures on the wild, lawless frontier of … Canada!

(Cross-posted from my own blog)

A few years back it struck me that it was silly to have the entire Doc Savage series taking up space on my shelves (in paperback reprint) and not ever reread them. So I did, though it took me a few years, and a few purchases for the ones it turned out I didn’t have already.

One of the things I noticed rereading was that several of them took place in a wild, outlaw, violent nation known as … Canada. A wilderness where civilization barely reached and if you didn’t have Mounties in a nearby frontier fort you were on your own.That’s the setting for Brand of the Werewolf —

Mystery on the Snow —

and The Three Devils.

Canadian adventures, sometimes called “northerns” or “northwesterns” were a popular genre in the first half of the 20th century. They look quite anachronistic now, when our stereotype of Canadians is either “incredibly friendly people with good healthcare system” or Wolverine.Last year I decided to rewrite my blog posts about the series into a book, Savage Adventures, which will be out this fall. Part of what I’m writing about is stuff that made sense in the context of the times but not so much now. As Canada, Land Of Lawless Danger seemed that sort of a topic I bought HOLLYWOOD’S CANADA: The Americanization of Our National Image by Canadian historian Pierre Berton for some perspective on the now defunct genre.

Writing in the early 1970s, Berton discusses how Hollywood (he doesn’t cover the pulps but I think his observations apply) took a landscape dominated by farmland and a number of big cities and remade it as a wilderness dominated by mountains and pine forests. Everyone lives in isolated hamlets and drinks in the local saloon (Canada was a dry country for a large chunk of its history). The Mounties struggle relentlessly to live up to their creed, “always get your man” and often have to establish justice with blazing six-guns. Everyone travels by horse or sled rather than modern vehicles, just as indigenous people wield bows and arrows, not guns. If an American stranger shows up in “the woods” everyone knows not to ask questions (Berton says that in reality, everyone in a rural area will be nosy about newcomers, much like small towns anywhere). Happy go-lucky French Canadians are omnipresent.Doc Savage’s Northern adventures fit squarely into the cliches. In Brand of the Werewolf, Doc’s uncle Alex Savage and his daughter Pat live in a sprawling estate so isolated that when the book’s villains kill Alex, there’s nobody Patricia can turn to. Well except her indigenous servants and they’re too much a stereotype to help: Boat Face is stupid, greedy, shiftless and throws in with the bad guys while his wife Tiny is a virago. Good thing Doc and his team show up to visit his relatives, huh?

The thugs working for the villainous Stroam in Mystery on the Snow are another stereotype of the time. In Canada, the Metis — mixed-race white/indigenous — are as law-abiding as anyone else, and recognized as a tribal population in their own right. In Hollywood the Metis are almost always degenerate devils, hybrids as alien from normal people as Marvel’s Homo superior. Stroam’s mob of “breeds” are half French-Canadian (never mind they’re nowhere near French Canadian territory) half indigenous or Eskimo, none of them having “pure” white or native blood. Which is bad.

Bruno Hen in The Monsters is cut from the same cloth even though he’s in the Minnesota north woods rather than Canada. He’s another “half-breed” and has zero redeeming features: he’s a petty thief, a bully and spiteful enough that when he robs a neighbor’s fish trap he destroys all the fish he doesn’t need.

Canada, Doc Savage did you wrong.

#SFWApro. All rights to images remain with current holders. Covers top to bottom by James Bama, Walter Baumhofer, Modest Stein and Bama again. Wolverine by Herb Trimpe.