Reviews Literature / Doc Wilde

A Smart Pulp Adventure For All Ages!

Tim Byrd's "Doc Wilde" book is a great pastiche that outgrew pastiche. In ways it outgrew the material that inspired it. I love all the old Doc Savage stories, but Byrd captures the things that make those stories awesome but adds characters that seem more realistic (or at least more human), and writes better than Lester Dent ever did. That might not be fair though since Byrd benefits from a much longer writing/editing cycle than Dent, who had to write one of these a month.

The villains are clever sendups of the creatures in Lovecraft's "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." I enjoy Lovecraft, but I'm no scholar of his work. I enjoyed Byrd's playful reworking of Lovecraft's tropes. Oddly, in spite of the lack of nihilism and the overall optimistic feel of the story, the creatures in still manage to be surprisingly scary.

The book is full of pulp allusions that any pulp fan will enjoy. I really liked how Byrd took tropes not only from Doc Savage stories but all sorts of other tales and seamlessly wove them into a story that zips along at lightning speed. He also took tropes and made them his own. For instance, in the old Doc Savage stories, Doc had a weird tic in which he made a strange "trilling" sound when he was excited. It's an odd and, I've always thought, stupid feature of the stories that I always thought shouldn't have been there. There's a scene in Byrd's book, however, that uses that "trilling" in a way that makes complete sense in the world of Doc Wilde, and offers a reasonable explanation for what that trilling sound actually is. It's very cool.

Byrd also manages to not only fill the book with literary allusions (without slowing its runaway train pace), he works in some amazing science, ranging from Doc Wilde's reasons for using an autogyro rather than a plane or helicopter, to humans using echolocation like bats or dolphins (which seems impossible, but if you do a bit of research on the topic "Human Echolocation" you'll find it's fascinatingly real).

Tim Byrd's book definitely needs to be read by anyone who loves pulp adventures. It's sold as a kids' book but I enjoyed it as much as any "grown up" pulp adventure I've read in years, and a good deal more than most. It's smart and witty and fun. I'm looking forward to the next one.