Cover Date: April 1941
Volume 17 # 2
Copyright Date: Friday, July 19, 1941
Author: Lester Dent
Editor: John Nanovic
Story Length: 38,467 words
Cover by Emery Clarke
WHMC: The collection contains seven folders for this story, f. 681-687. The original title was “The Wizard.”
Recurring Characters. The entire Iron Crew are all present in this story.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
“The Golden Man” by Kenneth Robeson
“The Emerald Dagger” by George L. Eaton
Doc Savage Club
Editor’s Page
On the refugee liner Virginia Dare bound from Portugal to New York, a strange black star appears in the night sky. Beneath it, a golden-skinned man is found floating naked in a patch of glowing sea. He is calm, nameless, and eerily knowledgeable. He predicts the ship’s destruction; minutes later a torpedo from a disguised submarine sinks her. In the lifeboats he calmly forecasts that the Brazilian freighter Palomino will arrive at six; it does. The glowing material follows the liner, then fades.
Monk and Ham, returning from Europe on Doc’s orders, are baffled. The golden man seems to know private facts about them and others. After rescue, he is taken to New York by Sam Gallehue and established as the charismatic leader of a lucrative cult, the Dark Sanctuary. Followers (“Believers”) treat him as a mystic seer. Meanwhile, blackmail of cult members begins, and attempts are made on Monk and Ham’s lives.
Doc Savage investigates. The golden man is actually Paul Hest, chief of intelligence for an unnamed European nation. He had flown out to warn the Virginia Dare of a planned false-flag torpedoing intended to inflame anti-foreign feeling in America, and to trap the attacking U-boat with a secret magnetic glowing substance that clings to metal hulls. A bomb planted by a counter-agent destroyed his plane; the blast caused amnesia and a shock-induced mental derangement. The black star was merely smoke; the luminous sea was his country’s anti-submarine chemical.
Gallehue, a crook who genuinely half-believed in the “wizard,” used Hest to build a profitable cult. A subordinate named Opsall ran a parallel blackmail racket using hidden microphones. Doc’s staged provocations set the two factions against each other. In the final clash Doc boards the cult’s high-speed boat, frees his captured aides, and deliberately grounds the vessel into a police ambush. Hest recovers under Doc’s shock treatment, Opsall confesses, and Gallehue’s gang is arrested. The golden man’s “supernatural” powers are revealed as residual intelligence knowledge plus the effects of trauma.
I recently finished reading “The Golden Man” which was first published in April 1941. It was a good story but not the same as the earlier bigger-than-life adventures. It seems obvious that the Golden Man is modeled after Edgar Cayce (1877-1945) who was also known as the Sleeping Prophet.
This story was written by Lester Dent and submitted to Street & Smith editor John Nanovic in July 1940 under the working title “The Wizard.” The story hit the newsstands on Friday, March 21, 1941.
The story begins with several items that appear supernatural in nature such as a naked man floating in the middle of the sea, the glowing water, and the strange black star. This all transpires about the line “Virginia Dare.” If you recall your history lessons, Virginia Dare was the first child born in the English colony of Roanoke. Incidentally, Edgar Cayce mentioned Virginia Dare in one of his readings and suggested he may have been related to her.
The Golden Man states his mother is the sea and the night is his father. The Golden Man then makes several incredible predictions, all of which come true. Everyone, including Monk and Ham, are astounded.
The institution in the story known as the Dark Sanctuary mirrors Cayce’s own Association for Research and Enlightenment which was created in 1931. Services are provided at no charge leaving patrons to make donations.
The Golden Man is described as having a face with “kindliness about it.” Edgar Cayce was frequently described as having a kind and gentle appearance.
In the story Dent exposes the “Dark Sanctuary” as a fraud. The Golden Man is portrayed as someone who is easily manipulated by others around him who have impure motives. I wonder if Dent was projecting his feelings about Edgar Cayce and his organization here.
Cayce was enormously popular with a book about him, “There is a River,” coming out in 1942.
On May 28, 1941, the shipyard in Wilmington, North Caroline laid down the hull for the liberty ship, Virginia Dare. She was launched on February 3, 1942, and served until she hit a mine in 1944.
Monk meets Mrs. H. Courtney van Stigh who is a superior social type. My immediate thought based on her name was a pig in a muddy sty. What first attracted Monk’s notice was her ring.
Astounding, March 1941 Advertisment