After a several years, we get a new Doc Ardan story from his creator: The Fall of Inramonda. I have posted before on Doc Ardan, and Black Coat Press had promised us two further works from Guy d’Arman. And here is the first of those.
First up, French author Guy d’Armen created young adventurer Dr. 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 the 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.
Now d’Armen (or under other pseudonyms such as “Francis Annemary” and “Jacquis Diament“) also wrote many other 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 Doc Ardan stories. You can read more about this in the intro of the book. I do wonder how many such works were written or if it’s a case of discovering more.
To be clear, Black Coat Press has put out three volumes of Doc Ardan, and this is the fourth.
In The Fall of Inramonda, we get two works. The first is d’Armen’s “Fall,” from L ‘Intrepede magazine in 1935, though set in 1921, even earlier then the others which where set in 1926/27. We also get the original illustrations from the magazine as well.
In this one, Doc Ardan (here having only a doctorate in “earth sciences” and not medicine) is with his father, who we are told is an industrialist and archaeologist, in the remote regions of upper Siam (Thailand). They discover a dying man with green skin who seems to have come up from an underground river.
As they start their investigation, they have to deal with a native who is working for the bad guys and trying to cause problems. They also meet a German who is more then he seems. Then they are waylaid by a mandarin, and left to the mercy of a rogue Chinese general, and rescuing a Scottish doctor and his daughter — or trying to, as his daughter has been sold to someone called The Jade Lord who rules an underground realm of “Jade Men.”
In looking for this underground world, they are captured by these jade men after strange green rings come up from the earth and paralize them. The jade men claim to be over a thousand years old, and take the men to The Jade Lord, who is known as “His Eternal Wisdom” and wears a jade mask. He is the ruler of this hidden city of Inramonda.
Using his super-science and his army of jade men, he plans on taking power in Southeast Asia through a pretender to the Siam throne. Will Doc Ardan and his friends be able to overcome him, especially with others betraying them?
At the end, we get an epilogue that ties this adventure to a few that Bob Morane, a popular character in a series of books in France, had in the same area. I only know of Bob Morane through his appearances in Tales of the Shadowmen and really wish we could get an English translation of his adventures. Were there any further tweaks to the story to solidify the connections to these Morane stories?
In addition, we get John Peel‘s Doc Ardan story from Tales of the Shadowmen #16: “The Eye of the Hawk.” Here Doc is in the Congo of the early 1930s, where he teams up with Jane Clayton to find several missing scientists, such as Doctor Omega (another early French SF character I’ve posted on who is similiar to the first Doctor Who), among others. This story could be a good set-up for a sequel, as they come up against the son of Robur the Conquerer.
Hopefully we’ll see more Doc Ardan stories in future Tales. We are promised another Doc Ardan volume from Black Coat, this one having d’Armen’s The Hurricane Master from 1931. Not sure when it will come out or if there will be additional works.
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