At this year’s PulpFest, I picked up the third Zana O’Savin novel by Craig McDonald: The Death Killers. With another great cover by Douglas Klauba.
This series provides several pastiches of pulp heroes, but uses an interesting concept. Here, certain authors caused their characters to become actual beings, called “tulpas,” though not intentionally. Thus we have real versions of Doc Savage and his aides and cousin, The Shadow (though none of his associates), The Avenger and the members of Justice Inc., and others. And sadly, there are villainous tulpas as well. We will meet some additional tulpas in this one, including ones based on The Green Lama, The Domino Lady, The Moon Man, and others.
In the prior stories, Doc O’Savin, The Shade, and Richard Benedictus have joined together into Justice, Amalgamated. This story is set in modern times, and finds our heroes facing a new and dangerous threat, which they only know as “The Death Killers.” It is apparently a collection of tech billionaires, many with life-threatening medical issues, who aim to eliminate death in a strange post-human idea: uploading their minds to machines to later be downloaded into new bodies. The group includes a social-media billionaire and a boy genius who has now become the first of such computer programs. Further, they think that examining tulpas may help them create new bodies, as well as forcing Doc O’Savin to help them.
The TDKs try to take out Zana and her cousin, Clarke, even taking over their high tech SUV, which means the group will need to go back to using 1930s-era analog devices. The group makes an attempt on The Shade that fails, but also makes an attempt to kidnap one of Doc’s aides, which leads to the death of some of the group’s associates. As things go along, it looks like our heroes are able to prevail over the TDKs. But they learn that there is a bigger foe behind them, what may be the ultimate tulpa supervillain. Can they triumph over this bigger threat?
I did enjoy that we got more action from various characters. We get a good deal of involvement from Richard Benedictus and The Domino Lady, among others. This is always hard in a work with a large number of characters to give most of them good coverage.
While the main threat is eliminated here, some of TDK group is still operating and we will see them in the next novel, The Night Shepard. It’s not clear if there will be further stories. If Craig McDonald comes up with an idea for further ones, I would love to see it.
(You might want to check out his Hector Lassiter series and other works.)
It would be cool if the next O’Savin book is available at PulpFest 2025.
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