More Doc Ardan

I have posted before on Doc Ardan, and Black Coat Press has come out with a volume of new and old Doc Ardan stories.

So let’s be clear. French writer Guy d’Armen created young adventurer Doctor Francis Ardan in a trio of sf-adventure novels: The City of Gold and Lepers (1928), The Troglodytes of Mount Everest (1929), and The Giants of Dark Lake (1931), serialized in a French pulp magazine. All tell of Ardan’s adventurers going up against several super-science villains in distant areas of Asia. The first novel actually occurs after the second and third.

Because of his similarities to Doc Savage, Jean-Marc and Randy Lofficier made some tweaks to their translation to have “Francis Ardan” be an alias used by a young Clark Savage before his pulp adventures. This allowed for others to use Doc Ardan as a Doc Savage pastiche in Tales of the Shadowmen series and other works. As the earlier works were never available in English, claiming they were an influence on the creation of Doc Savage is a bit much.

Black Coat Press has put out the three novels in two volumes, and now have another volume: The Abominable Snowman. It contains more Guy d’Armen stories, plus the previous Doc Ardan stories from Tales along with new Doc Ardan stories.

Apparently Guy d’Armen wrote many stories of adventurers who, while they have different names, are pretty much the same character: set in the ’20s, a doctor/scientist, polymath, tall, blond, and with a driving father. So changing their names to “Francis Ardan,” and we have more stories. You can read more about this in the intro of the book.

From Guy d’Armen we get a set of short (and I mean short) stories:

• “The Abominable Snowman”
• “The Giant Bat”
• “The Vampire of the Hamada”
• “The Lair of the Javanese Witch-Doctor”

And then there are the several new Ardan stories. Most are reprints from Tales or other Black Coat Press works. A small number are original to this volume.

• Rick Lai: “The Midas Menace” (new) is set when Francis is still a baby, so this one is more focused on his father. This is supposed to be part of a new work Lai is working on that ties in the origin of Doc and The Avenger. Can’t wait to see that!

• John Peel: “The Biggest Guns” (from Tales #6) set in WWI, has Doc Ardan on a mission that has him involved with The Gun Club (from Jules Verne) and Lord Roxton (from Conan Doyle).

• Jean-Marc Lofficier: “The Star Prince” (from Tales #2) had Doc met up with The Little Prince.

• Vincent Jounieaux: “The Dreadful Conspiracy” (from The Shadow of Judex). In post-WWI France, Doc Ardan and friends (including Jules de Grandin) must clear his name, after being pulled into a conspiracy created by Bob Morane‘s foe, the Yellow Shadow. (Bob Morane is an interesting French adventurer who has many science fictional stories, and one of his long-time foes is the Fu Manchu-like Yellow Shadow.).

• Travis Hiltz: “Family Reunion” (new) has several members of the Ardan family meeting, including Michel Ardan from Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon and Dale Ardan, companion of Flash Gordon. And they also join with an associate of Dr. Omega.

• Jason Scott Aiken: “Ardan at the Pole” (from Tales #12) has Doc Ardan traveling to the North Pole to find a hidden race of reptilian people (from The People of the Pole, a French sf novel translated by Black Coat Press).

• Christopher Paul Carey & Win Scott Eckert: “Iron and Bronze” (from Tales #5) has Hareton Ironcastle (an adventurer from a French sf novel later revamped by Philip José Farmer) visiting a lost colony of Atlantis located in the Hoggarth Mountains in north Africa. Doc Ardan shows up toward the end.

• Matthew Dennion: “A Scientist First and Foremost” (new) has Ardan going up the Beast of Gevaudan, a legendary werewolf. Or is it? An interesting story, and an interesting explanation of The Beast. Could lead to more stories.

• Peter Gabbani: “Small Dreams of a Floating City” (new) shows a “day in the life” of Ardan, dealing with yet another megalomaniac, a floating city in Antarctica, and vampire zombie bats.

• Win Scott Eckert has been working with Farmer’s notes to complete the first Pat Wildman story, who is Doc Wildman‘s daughter. Doc Wildman is Doc Savage’s “real” name, per Farmer. So Eckert used these stories to setup the background of how Doc met Pat’s mother: Adelaide Lupin, the daughter of Arsene Lupin. “The Eye of Oran” (from Tales #2) introduces Adelaide along with and Violet Holmes (created by Matthew Baugh and Eckert), daughter of Mycroft Holmes. Here they deal with Dr. Natas (a certain oriental villain), and also meet Doc Ardan in post-WWII Algeria.

• “Les Lèvres Rouges” (from Tales #3) follows the story from the previous volume and has Ardan, with the involvement of other characters, including Nestor Burma, a French noir detective, retrieving the Eye from Adelaide.

• “The Vanishing Devil” (from Tales #1) is the first to make use of Doc Ardan and is set after Doc Savage’s published adventures, where he again comes up against Dr. Natas.

We also get some additional material. We get an introduction that also has a timeline for all these Doc Ardan stories set before “The Man of Bronze,” based on work by Eckert and Lai. As I noted, it also goes into more detail of what they did to turn these stories into Doc Ardan stories. And we get a new bibliography of Guy d’Armen works that expands what was in the prior volume. I think this is about three to four times as many as on the first list.

So is this it? Hardly. We are teased atleast four more novels, including one, The Fall of Inramonda, that has been tossed out as a possible title of the next collection. And there are all those additional stories listed in the bibliography, mostly short stories but also a few more novels. And there are several who can come up with new stories. So hopefully not the end of more Doc Ardan.