THE
WOLD NEWTON UNIVERSE
Part VII
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SAILOR STEVE AND THE IRON MEN by Matthew Baugh
LOOSE
LIPS SINK SHIPS by
Michael D. Winkle
PELLUCIDAR LOST: OR, THE DECLINE AND FALL
OF THE INNER-WORLD EMPIRE OF DAVID INNES by Peter Coogan
THE STAR-SPANGLED AVENGER: CAPTAIN AMERICA
IN THE WOLD NEWTON UNIVERSE by Jason Shepherd
What is Doc Savage’s real name? Is it James Clarke Wildman Jnr, as suggested by Philip José Farmer in his excellent biography of Doc Savage? Or was it truly Clark Savage Jnr as many Savage scholars claim? Or something else?
According to Farmer, in Dr Watson's account of THE ADVENTURE OF THE PRIORY SCHOOL (1901) Doc's father was identified as James Wilder, but this is also a false lead. It is possible to make sense of the mass of contradictions and confusion?
A recap of Farmer's postulate may be in order. Around 1865/66, Patricia Clarke Wildman, granddaughter of the Scarlet Pimpernel, had an affair with William Clayton, who would later become the 6th Duke of Greystoke. Patricia got pregnant and despite the future duke's pleading did not marry him. Farmer states that this was because of the stigma surrounding her father and grandfather and she thought it would ruin his career as a statesman. (Sir John and his son Sir Patrick Clarke Wildman both attempted to repeat the experiments of Victor Frankenstein leading to charges of grave robbing.)
This is true but she had also fallen in love with another man, Richard Henry Savage. Savage married Patricia after she had given birth to a son who was listed on the birth certificate as James Clarke Wildman. Savage married Patricia and adopted the boy who could then legally take the name James Clark Savage.
(As Jess Nevins points out in his Article "The Jewel in the Crown" Richard Henry Savage's grandfather was none other than William Savage whose exploits with the Thuggee can be seen in the novel THE DECEIVERS by John Masters. So the Savages have a love of adventure.)
Richard Henry loved the boy dearly but despite this and the doctor's warning that she should have any more children, Patricia wanted to give her husband a child of his own and immediately got pregnant again. Unfortunately, Patricia died giving birth to a son Victor Savage, who was named after his grandfather's hero Victor Frankenstein.
The half brothers lived happily staying with their uncle whenever their father was off adventuring. This Uncle was Culverton Smith who had married Richard Henry's sister. Culverton had three sons that James and Victor would play with, John Vansittart, Frances and Abercrombie Smith. (John Vansittart Smith would have his meeting with an immortal Egyptian recorded in “The Ring of Thoth” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Abercrombie Smith would encounter a mummy in “Lot No. 249” also by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.)
According to THE ADVENTURE OF THE DYING DETECTIVE Culverton Smith was responsible for killing his nephew, Victor Savage in 1887. Victor had a young family who he had sent to Australia as soon as he realised that his Uncle was going after him. Rick Lai in his article "The Savage Reversion" (Golden Perils #4 (May, 1986 V1 N4) and reprinted in THE CHRONOLOGY OF BRONZE) suggests that Victor had come into the possession of the Frankenstein papers his grandfather had and that is why Culverton Smith wished to kill him. This is true but Culverton was also the executor of Richard Henry Savage's will and had been stealing from the brothers. Smith killed Victor in an attempt to cover this up and also attempted to kill James who had just turned 21, and was to receive his inheritance.
After the death of his brother and the discovery he was broke, James Clark Savage returned to the name on his birth certificate James Clark Wildman and applied for a job with his natural father to hide away. His father agreed to hire him on the condition that he change his name to something different as Clayton was engaged to be married and he did not wish his jealous fiancé to find out and Wildman was changed to Wilder.
Later that year in a double ceremony William Cecil married Edith Appledore (also married was his nephew John Clayton to Alice Rutherford) and in 1891 William had a legitimate child, William Cecil Arthur Clayton.
By 1896 Edith Clayton had discovered James Wilder's true identity and made her husband an ultimatum either James left or she did. The Duke unable to turn away his son left Edith with no choice. After Edith left William hoped his sons would get on but that was not the case and in 1897 William Cecil Arthur was sent to board at the nearby Priory School.
James realised this and in a state of depression took to gambling. By 1900 James Wilder was in serious debt to the men known as "The Minions of Midas" and they were threatening him with exposure. This was not good for Wilder as he had just married Arronaxe Larson and when at the start of 1901 she announced she was pregnant, Wilder was desperate. In order to pay off his debt, Wilder then embarked on a scheme to remove his brother; he worked closely with a Midas Agent, Rueben Hayes. The results of this can be seen in THE ADVENTURE OF THE PRIORY SCHOOL.
On the run from the law, Sherlock Holmes and the Minions of Midas, James Wilder again changed his name, he returned to his original name James Clark Savage but he reversed the order of the first two names. So he was known as Clark James Savage.
His first act was to flee with his wife to Australia where he briefly visited his sister in law and nephew John Savage and arranged for them to set up a false trail before he went to Canada to visit his wife's grandfather Ned Land and his uncle Alex.
In November of 1901, his son was born and was named Clark James Savage Junior but the birth records were faked later as James Clark Wildman Jnr.
In 1933, John Savage on a visit to England was killed. The Investigation into his death was recorded in WHY DIDN'T THEY ASK EVANS (THE BOOMERANG CLUE) by Agatha Christie.
His son who had stayed in Australia maintained the family property but his granddaughter Sydney inherited the Savage love of adventure and became a secret agent first for ASIO and later for the freelance group DANGER GIRL.
Based on Ideas from Win Eckert and Rick Lai
BIBLIOGRAPHY
All rights reserved. The text of this article is © 2001-2004 by the author, Brad Mengel. No copying or reproduction of this article or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the author.
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With many thanks to Matthew Baugh, Chuck Loridans, Brad Mengel, Dennis Power, and especially Rick Lai, for their input, feedback, and encouragement, and contributions
And to my wife Lisa for putting up with my disappearances while I was writing this article
Among the various Wold Newton
articles which focus on Sax Rohmer's oriental mastermind Fu
Manchu, I have noticed that, while due attention has been paid to
the Devil Doctor's ancestry and descendants [1], less attention has been focused upon
the other rich characters who populate the universe of Fu Manchu
novels, stories, and comics. [2] I have lately concentrated my research in this
area, with an eye toward rectifying this oversight. Nevertheless,
my research also revealed a bit more about the family of the
Devil Doctor himself.
The Smiths
Fu Manchu's primary nemesis for over seventy years (from 1911 to 1982) was Sir Denis Nayland Smith. In Tarzan Alive, Philip José Farmer proposed that Nayland Smith (b. 1883) was the nephew of the famed detective, Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street. Smith's mother was Sigrina Holmes, an older sister of Sherlock. However, Mr. Farmer never identifies Nayland Smith's father. A likely candidate is John Vansittart Smith, F.R.S., seen in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Ring of Thoth.
Vansittart Smith was a man who excelled in many areas, such as zoology, botany, and chemistry, before finally settling on Egyptology. In October of 1889, while conducting research at the Louvre in Paris, Smith had a very strange experience. He encountered an Egyptian called Sosra, who claimed to be 3,600 years old. This man, whose father had been the chief priest of Osiris in the temple of Abaris, had discovered a chemical mixture which conferred immortality. Unfortunately, the great love of Sosra's life died of a plague before Sosra could administer the elixir to her. The elixir acted in such a way that Sosra could not die, even if he attempted suicide. Thus, he was condemned to near-immortality until the elixir wore off, or until he could find the antidote to the elixir concealed in the Ring of Thoth.
The Ring of Thoth also mentions that, at the time of the events, Vansittart Smith was a married man, and that his wife was "an Egyptological young lady who had written upon the sixth dynasty." I can find nothing in Mr. Farmer's work to indicate that Sigrina Holmes was not an Egyptologist in her own right. As the editor of numerous case files regarding Sigrina's brother, Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle must have been pleased at the synchronicity which brought the events of The Ring of Thoth to his attention and allowed him a further view into the detective's family background. However, Doyle respected the Great Detective's wish for privacy and did not identify the "Egyptological young lady" as Sigrina Smith, née Holmes, in the story.
Nayland Smith was also quite well-versed in Egyptological matters, and we may surmise that he learned a great deal from his parents, and his uncle, as will be seen below. Nayland Smith also met a man obsessed with immortality, although Fu Manchu's elixir of life never worked quite as well as the one described in The Ring of Thoth, and required repeated doses. It is probable that growing up on his father's accounts of Sosra gave Nayland Smith the open mind and worldview required to identify and counter Fu Manchu's fantastic schemes.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle also chronicled stories involving other members of the Smith family. As Rick Lai has pointed out in The Savage Reversion section of his masterful The Complete Chronology of Bronze [3], Doyle's and Watson's The Adventure of the Dying Detective concerned Sherlock Holmes' investigation of the murder of Victor Savage by Victor's uncle, Culverton Smith. William S. Baring-Gould's Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street places this case in November 1887. Rick Lai proposes that Smith murdered Victor Savage in order to gain access to the Frankenstein notebooks, as part of the reversion described by Watson. [4]
Culverton Smith had three sons, the aforementioned John Vansittart Smith, Francis Smith, and Abercrombie Smith. It is possible that they spent at least a portion of their childhoods in Sumatra, where Culverton Smith had a plantation and became an amateur expert of Far Eastern diseases. Fortunately the three sons did not take after their father.
The incident with Culverton Smith took place in 1887, when Nayland Smith was four years old. Surely Culverton was hanged shortly thereafter. There was probably very little discussion of Culverton in young Nayland Smith's household. Many years later, in 1914, when Dr. Petrie teamed with Sherlock Holmes to rescue Holmes' nephew, Nayland Smith, from the clutches of Dr. Fu Manchu [5], there was no mention of the familial relationship between Holmes and Smith. Now we know why. Holmes had put away Smith's paternal grandfather, admittedly an evil man. Dr. Petrie, the soul of discretion, failed to mention their relationship in order to spare Smith and his family any embarrassment over his grandfather's misdeeds and capture by Holmes.
Arthur Conan Doyle told the tale of Abercrombie Smith in Lot No. 249. Denis Nayland Smith clearly spent a good deal of time with his uncle, Abercrombie Smith, with whom he shared not a few character traits, such as smoking a briar-root pipe and clipped manner of speaking. While it would be possible to identify Abercrombie Smith as the father of Nayland Smith (b. 1883), there is nothing in the text of Lot No. 249, which takes place in May of 1884, to indicate that Abercrombie Smith is married or has a child at the time. Indeed, he is described as a bachelor, although that could refer to his residential status at University. Abercrombie Smith is in his freshman year at Oxford as a medical student, although he has studied four years previously at Glasgow and at Berlin. It is probable that a man such as Abercrombie Smith, who was so focused upon his medical studies, would defer on marriage and fatherhood until those studies were completed and his practice established.
Thus, between Vansittart Smith and Abercrombie Smith, Vansittart is the more likely candidate for identification as Nayland Smith's father. In any event, children often take after their uncles or aunts, thus explaining some characteristics which Nayland Smith shares with his uncle. And Uncle Abercrombie surely would have regaled young Nayland Smith with the brave tale of his defeat of the evil Edward Bellingham and the 4,000 year-old mummy at Bellingham's command.
Of Nayland Smith's other uncle, Francis Smith, we know little, except that he is described in Lot No. 249 as an elder brother of Abercrombie Smith.
Although Mr. Farmer does not explicitly identify any of Denis Nayland Smith's siblings, he must have been one of three children. As revealed in Dr. Petrie's Ten Years Beyond Baker Street (edited by Cay Van Ash), Nayland Smith had a brother, probably born in 1884 or 1885. Whereas Nayland was lanky and lean, like his uncle Sherlock, Nayland's brother took after the stockier, more heavyset Holmes line, such as Mycroft Holmes and Nero Wolfe. Nayland Smith's brother apparently died in the Titanic tragedy. However, it is possible that he survived and had his own reasons for failing to inform his family of this fact. He started a new life in America, but Smith was a sufficiently generic name that he may not have felt compelled to change it.
The call of crime detection was in this man's blood. Although one of his cases was first recorded by Dashiell Hammett in 1923, The Whosis Kid describes the man as starting with the Continental Detective Agency in 1917. However, the story This King Business mentions that he was an American intelligence officer in the army during the Great War. Arriving in America in 1912, he would have become eligible for citizenship in 1917. He must have joined the Continental Detective Agency in 1917, and then left briefly to serve in the American army during 1917-1918.
The Continental Detective Agency imposed a condition upon Dashiell Hammett in return for allowing publication of Smith's cases. Smith's identity must not be revealed in the tales. Hammett of course agreed, but found the whole notion of being forced to conceal the true identity of a man with the rather nondescript name of "Smith" highly amusing. He responded by declining to give his hero any given name. Hammett called his man "the Continental Op."
It is possible that the Continental Op, after retiring from the Continental Detective Agency, took the name of Brad Runyon and set up his own private detective agency. [6]
Denis Nayland Smith also had a sister. In the pages of the comic book series, The Hands of Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu, it is revealed that Smith had a nephew called Lancaster Sneed. Sneed would also be the great-nephew of Sherlock Holmes. We must presume that Nayland Smith had a younger sister -- let us call her Violet Smith -- who married a man named Sneed. Sigrina Smith would still be of child-bearing age in the late 1890s, although just barely. If Violet Smith was born in the late 1890s, her son could have been born in 1945, placing him in his 30s during the mid-1970s events depicted in Master of Kung Fu. Lancaster Sneed originally followed his uncle's footsteps in working for the British Secret Service. However, after an accident unhinged his mind, he went freelance and adopted a new identity, calling himself "Shockwave." [7]
Lancaster Sneed had a few cousins, the children of Denis Nayland Smith. Sometime before his first chronicled adventure, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Nayland Smith had two children. He probably met his wife, Joan Blakeney, in England before his first posting to Egypt in approximately 1903. [8] Joan Blakeney was the great-great-granddaughter of Sir Percy Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel. [9] Her mother, Joan Fielding, was a descendant of the Hornblower line, as will be more fully described in an upcoming article.
The two sons of Nayland and Joan Smith were likely born in Egypt sometime between 1903 and 1907, but their mother must have died well before the 1911 events of The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. The children were probably sent to live with family members, either their grandparents Vansittart and Sigrina Smith, or perhaps one of their great-uncles, Abercrombie or Francis. They also could have been raised by their grandmother, Joan Fielding.
One son, Horatio Smith, was an archaeology professor at Cambridge who emulated the exploits of his illustrious ancestor, the Scarlet Pimpernel. He used his digs, under cover of seeking evidence of an ancient Aryan civilization, to enter Nazi Germany and help dissident scientists, journalists, artists, and others escape.
Professor Horatio Smith's story was told in the 1941 film Pimpernel Smith, covering a period from Spring to September 1, 1939. Despite the fact that neither Sir Percy Blakeney nor the Scarlet Pimpernel were ever mentioned in the movie, there is the obvious allusion of the film's title. Horatio Smith was also in line to inherit a title. Horatio's older brother, Sir George Smith, was the British ambassador in Berlin. It is likely that Sir George was knighted for the performance of some service, in addition to being an heir. If he was actually titled at the time of the film's events, that means that his uncle, John Blakeney (b. 1893), great-uncle, Peter Blakeney (b. 1863), and his distant cousin, Peter Blakeney (b. 1891), would all have pre-deceased him. This is possible, but unknown.
Horatio Smith displayed many characteristics which demonstrate his worthiness of being included among the Smiths and Blakeneys. He managed to outwit the Gestapo at every turn, and showed great courage, even remaining completely silent and motionless after being wounded by a rifle. He had great physical endurance, had a natural capacity for melting into the landscape, and pulled off his dual identity scheme faultlessly. He ultimately rescued twenty-eight people. Upon his escape from Germany, on the night before the Nazi invasion of Poland, he left his nemesis, General von Graum, with these words: "Don't worry, I shall be back. We shall all be back."
According to fellow Wold Newton researcher Brad Mengel, in The Family Tree of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Denis Nayland Smith had another son, John "Hannibal" Smith, who was born almost thirty years after his half-brothers Horatio and George. In the early 1980s, Hannibal Smith was the leader of the A-Team and displayed a flair for disguise, as did his father and other members of the Holmes line. As might be expected, Hannibal Smith bore some resemblance to his distant cousin, Archie Goodwin. [10]
What Mr. Mengel does not mention is the identity of Hannibal's mother. In Sax Rohmer's The Trail of Fu Manchu, which takes place in January 1933, it is strongly implied that the daughter of Fu Manchu, Fah Lo Suee, had sexual encounter with Nayland Smith, for whom she professed her love. A child would have been born in October 1933. The child's existence almost certainly would have been kept secret from Fu Manchu. Fah Lo Suee was presumed killed in this adventure, but we know she wasn't from her later appearances in the Fu Manchu series. Fah Lo Suee survived, went into hiding, and after her child's birth, she turned the child over to Nayland Smith to be raised. Hannibal Smith was raised by Nayland Smith's relatives for two reasons: Smith himself was too busy tracking Fu Manchu to raise a child, and the child had to be kept secret from Fu Manchu.
At this point it is worth a brief side-track to discuss the parentage of Fah Lo Suee, as established by researcher Rick Lai. Fah Lo Suee was the daughter of Fu Manchu and an unnamed Russian woman, as told in Rohmer's The Daughter of Fu Manchu. Rick Lai postulates that the unnamed Russian woman was also the mother of Madame de Medici, making Fah Lo Suee (b. 1897) and Madame de Medici (b. 1883) half sisters. Madame de Medici, whose father was Fo-Hi from Sax Rohmer's The Golden Scorpion, was featured in Rohmer's The Key to the Temple of Heaven in Tales of Chinatown and The Black Mandarin in Tales of East and West. [11] Mr. Lai further posits that the "unnamed Russian woman" was Princess Sonia Omanoff. Princess Sonia was also the mother of Talbot Mundy's Yasmini of India [12], and the grandmother of Dr. Julius No. [13]
Returning to the Smiths, John "Hannibal" Smith also had a daughter, named Leiko, who was born in the mid-1950s. Leiko's mother was probably Chinese. Apparently John and Leiko's mother divorced, or else Leiko's mother ran away back to her native country. In any event, Leiko grew up in poverty and suffered an abusive step-father. The tales of Leiko Smith, also known as the "Black Lotus," were told in the Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine in the early 1980s. [14] The first story was The Black Lotus.
In second story, Death From the Sky, Leiko makes several references to her grandfather, speaking of him as a great man who cast his shadow over all of the East and who might have ruled the world. It is also revealed that she may have been born "Leiko Gordon." If so, this could tie in with Matthew Baugh's identification of Nayland Smith with Robert E. Howard's "John Gordon," [15] under the theory that many pulp writers refer to their subjects by various "code names."
In her third and final appearance, in Doomsday Island, the Black Lotus reveals that she survived a lethal radiation exposure because her blood is special. She also tells Mike Shayne that she thought her grandfather was dead, but that they have found each other again. The three Black Lotus stories, which take place during 1980 and 1981, strongly imply that Leiko Smith is the granddaughter of Fu Manchu. The Smith name is also telling. A further connection is the reference by British detective Solar Pons to Fu Manchu as "the insidious master-mind of the Si-Fan and the Brotherhood of the Lotus." [16] Of course, in this genealogical reconstruction, it is evident that Fu Manchu is really her great-grandfather, but it is not unlikely that in the course of normal speech, this would be shortened to "grandfather."
The first Mike Shayne novel by Brett Halliday (a pseudonym for Davis Dresser), Dividend on Death, appeared in 1939. The last Shayne story was published in 1985. The 1939-1985 stories may really cover the cases of Mike Shayne and Mike Shayne, Jr. Red-haired Miami private investigator Mike Shayne was married in the very early novels, and then his wife Phyllis died during childbirth. Mike Shayne, Jr. and his sister Mary Shayne must have been twins. [17] After his wife's death, Mike Sr. acquired a secretary sidekick, Lucy Hamilton, who continued to appear into the 1980s stories. However, Mike Shayne, Jr. probably had his own secretary, and the use of the Lucy Hamilton character was just a fictionalization to continue the premise that there was only one Mike Shayne.
It is hard to say that Mike Shayne, Jr., and the Black Lotus were in love, although she did love him in her own way. She did make sure that he never came to permanent harm. They even made love once. However, this was in the first story, The Black Lotus, which took place in 1980. If a pregnancy resulted from this encounter, it is not discernible in their subsequent meetings. Nevertheless, any child of this union would be coming of age at the time of this writing.
Finally, returning to Leiko Smith's grandfather, Nayland Smith, it is interesting to note that he shares a characteristic with British detective Solar Pons, namely, the habit of tugging on the left earlobe in times of stress or deep thought. Brad Mengel proposes that Nayland Smith and Solar Pons are distant cousins, related through Pons' mother, Roberta McIvor, a descendant of the Holmes line. [18] It is significant that Solar Pons would also cross swords with Dr. Fu Manchu, although not to the same degree that Smith did.
The Grevilles
This was not the first instance that Fah Lo Suee found herself pregnant and in the position of concealing the child's existence from her father. Her first child was born in 1915. Her daughter did not follow in her mother's footsteps. Instead, she took a much different path and was eventually known as Ming Dwan, also known as Myra Reldon. [19]
The other instance was in 1930, when the child of Shan Greville and Fah Lo Suee was conceived, as implied in The Mask of Fu Manchu. In 1931 a child was born of that union. Fu Manchu, given Fah Lo Suee's constant betrayals, felt that her blood was tainted and wanted nothing to do with his grandchild.
What happened to the child is relatively undocumented, except that he was a former bishop, turned high-tech entrepreneur. [20] However, this may be an exaggeration. In any event, we do know that he was the Asian-Anglo father of the man identified as "John Rossi." (We know that this man is Asian-Anglo because Fu Manchu himself is only half Chinese, and his daughter, born of a Russian woman, is only one-quarter Chinese.) We may speculate that he was placed in an orphanage in Hong Kong and grew up there, perhaps the very same orphanage in which his son, the second man to call himself The Saint (b. 1964), would later grow up.
Robert Greville was the son of Shan Greville and Rima Barton. [21] He appeared in The Hands of Shang Chi, Master of Kung Fu comic series from Marvel Comics, but was quickly dispatched by Fah Lo Suee in an adventure which took place in the mid-1970s. (Obviously, despite the earlier intimate encounter between Shan and Fah, or perhaps because of it, there was no love lost between Fah Lo Suee and the Grevilles.) Rima Barton was the niece of Sir Lionel Barton, a central figure in the Fu Manchu novels.
According to the Master of Kung Fu series, Melissa Greville was the niece of Shan Greville. Melissa’s mother was married to Shan’s younger brother, Bertram Greville. Melissa’s mother also knew Clive Reston’s father, James Bond. What's more, it is implied that the knowledge was carnal. [22] This begs the question who was Shan’s sister-in-law (Melissa’s mother)? Or, to put it another way, which "Bond girl" married Bertram Greville after a liaison with Bond?
Melissa Greville was in her mid-twenties in 1977, making her year of birth somewhere in the early to mid-1950s. There are several likely candidates for Melissa's mother from this time-period. Tiffany Case, from Diamonds Are Forever, is a possibility. From Russia, With Love, reveals only that Tiffany sailed for America after the end of her relationship with Bond. John Pearson's James Bond: The Authorized Biography of 007 expands on this, imparting that she married an American military man named Nick.
From Russia, With Love's Tatiana Romanova is another possibility. However, in Master of Kung Fu number 108, it is divulged that Romanova is the mother of "Dark Angel," a Russian spy who has just defected to the West. It is unlikely that Tatiana Romanova is also the mother of Melissa Greville. Moonraker's Gala Brand can be eliminated due to the fact that she was set to marry a Detective-Inspector Vivian. We may exclude Doctor No's Honeychile Rider on the basis that Pearson's biography tells us that she married a rich man named Schultz.
Of course, perhaps Melissa's mother was one of the many women Bond courted, but who was not revealed in one of the novels. However, one possibility does remain, Live and Let Die's Solitaire. Live and Let Die takes place in January and February 1952. Afterward, Solitaire is not heard from again. It is certainly conceivable that after she met Bond, she met Bertram Greville and married him. Solitaire could have had a daughter, Melissa, by 1954, which would make Melissa twenty-three in 1977, certainly well within Melissa's age as portrayed in Master of Kung Fu. It should be noted that Melissa Greville also had a younger sister, Mandy.
The Petries
One of the sons of William Petrie and Margaret Mitten, William Petrie, Jr., married Anne Flinders, daughter of Ann Chappell and Captain Matthew Flinders, the explorer and cartographer of Australia. Their child, William Matthew Flinders Petrie, was born on June 3rd, 1853.
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie (1853-1942), the celebrated Egyptologist who has been called "the father of modern archaeology" was the father of Dr. Petrie, Nayland Smith's closest compatriot and the narrator of the first several Fu Manchu novels. [23] However, Dr. Petrie's mother was not Hilda Mary Urwin, later Lady Hilda Petrie. Dr. Petrie was born in Egypt in 1884, when his father was excavating at Tanis. Hilda Petrie, the wife of Sir Flinders, was born in 1871. She would be too young for Dr. Petrie's birthdate of 1884. Sir Flinders must have been previously married to a woman who died in childbirth.
Although never revealed in the Fu Manchu books, research indicates that Dr. Petrie's full name was Dexter Flinders Petrie, based on the possibility that "Dr." was an abbreviation for both "Doctor" and "Dexter," with the name "Flinders" coming from the theory that Dr. Petrie's father was the noted archaeologist. [24] Although Dexter Petrie flirted with Egyptology in his youth, he eventually went on to take his medical degree at Edinburgh.
An interesting mystery remains about Dexter's father, Sir Flinders. After his death, he was buried in Jerusalem, or at least most of him was. His head was supposedly kept in a preserving jar at the London headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons. However, the head in question looks remarkably like that of a younger man. The head has black hair, while Sir Flinders' hair at the time of his death was white. If this head is not Sir Flinders', then whose is it, and where is the head of Sir Flinders Petrie? Given Fu Manchu's penchant for faking the deaths of prominent scientists and then conscripting them into his service, as well as his ongoing interest in the Petrie family, one cannot help but wonder if the Devil Doctor was also involved in this mystery.
A Dr. Petrie (not Nayland Smith's cohort), an archaeologist at the Cairo Museum, was killed in the feature film The Mummy’s Hand, which researcher Chuck Loridans has dated to 1910. Could this be a relative of Sir Flinders Petrie? Although many biographers have stated that Sir Flinders was an only child, more recent research has uncovered the existence of Sir Flinders' younger brother, Major Thomas Flinders Petrie (b. 1864). Although Major Petrie was a skilled engineer, it is possible that, later in life, he followed in his brother's footsteps as a professor of archaeology, meeting his untimely end in 1910.
Kâramanèh, the love of Dr. Petrie's life, was a young Arabic girl introduced in the first Fu Manchu novel, The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. She and her brother were the slaves of Fu Manchu. Fu Manchu held her brother in suspended animation, and she had to perform his nefarious deeds, because he held the antidote. She also, upon first site, fell in love with Dr. Petrie. For the first several books, she would be rescued by Petrie and Smith, then be recaptured by Fu Manchu, and so on. Finally Petrie and Kara were married, and Fu Manchu seemed to leave them alone for a while. However, he did make it appear that their baby daughter had died. In fact, Fu Manchu had taken the baby and raised her as his own daughter. Fleurette Petrie (b. 1915) was finally reunited with her true parents many years later.
Dr. Petrie and Kâramanèh did have one other child, Val Petrie, who was born in about 1929. Growing up on the stories of his father's exploits with Nayland Smith, Val was naturally drawn to law enforcement. By 1979 he was with Scotland Yard, in which year he had an adventure which involved Prince Zarkon and several other notables, including his "uncle" Nayland Smith. [25]
Fleurette Petrie and her husband, Alan Sterling, had one daughter, Fiona Sterling, who after her marriage was known as Fiona Jefferson. [26] However, they had at least one other child. Their second daughter eventually went into the archaeology and anthropology fields, like her great-grandfather, Sir Flinders Petrie. She was born in 1934, and was named Catherine. Catherine Sterling was a bit "wild" in her formative years, and formed a penchant for black leather suits and boots, powerful motorbikes, and judo.
Catherine Sterling did attempt to settle down and was briefly married, but it didn't take. Her husband, a farmer in Kenya, was killed in the Mau Mau troubles, in which she learned to handle a gun with adroitness. She went on to earn a PhD in anthropology, and fought in the hills of Cuba with Fidel Castro. However, after Castro achieved power, he deported her to Britain due to her opposition to some aspects of his government. Mrs. Catherine Gale took a position with the British Museum, and by 1961 she was "selected" by British agent John Steed to be his next regular partner. After about two years, she apparently tired of Steed's brand of adventure. Following a short American holiday, she permanently returned to Africa. In 1968, Cathy Gale did work briefly with Steed once more, along with his other talented amateur partners, and then was not heard from again.
Footnotes:
Bibliography:
Other Acknowledgments:
All rights reserved. The text of this article is © 2001-2004 by the author, Win Eckert. No copying or reproduction of this article or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the author.
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Tracing the history of the Man with No Name
presents a lot of problems, but not because he had no name. The problem is that
actually he went by a lot of names. But as one of his enemies stated, he’s an
easy man to follow. He leaves dead bodies wherever he goes.
His first verifiable appearance was in Texas
and New Mexico during General Sibley’s campaign against 
Colonel Canby’s Union forces during the Civil War. This is the story known as
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and most of the tale takes place in February
1862. He had, apparently, been working awhile with a local bandit named Tuco
Ramirez. At the time he was known as “Blondie”, a nickname Tuco had given
him because of his light complexion. He wasn’t actually blonde but was
described as being “golden-haired” (red hair with yellow highlights or vice
versa), something that the actor playing him made no attempt to duplicate. The
two had a falling out and Tuco marched Blondie into the desert to die. There
they came upon a dying Confederate soldier who told them, each separately, a
different piece of information regarding the whereabouts of a large cache of
stolen gold. The two were forced to work together again, especially since a
sadistic killer known as Angel Eyes was also looking for the gold. Tuco is never
heard of again after this though there has been a persistent rumor that he moved
to Mexico and changed his name to Calvera. A certain bandit by that name was
later killed in a firefight with a band of American gunslingers hired to protect
a Mexican village from banditos.
There are a few clues, if genuine, that will
play into our tracing of this gunfighter’s history. First off, “Blondie”
is probably Confederate in his sympathies. He is wearing a long gray riding coat
at the beginning of the story. This was probably not a wise move for a
non-Southerner at the time. But he states he is from Illinois and is not known
to have spoken with a pronounced Southern accent during his entire career. But
“Blondie” does have many Southernisms in his speech and more pronouncedly so
when hanging with Southern boys. This could place him as having come from the
Little Egypt region in southern Illinois. At the end of the story, he has a
large amount of gold in hand. As “Blondie” does not have this any longer
when we next meet him, it can be assumed that he kept enough to start up a farm
in the south Missouri Ozarks and donated the rest to the Confederate cause.
He had, in fact, returned to the arms of the
woman who had bore his child some years before. This was just before the events
told in The Outlaw Josey Wales. Since his child is known as Little Josey, our
man was probably known as “Josey Wales” in the local area before that. For
the sake of convenience I will refer to him as Josey thru most of the remainder
of this article. Although he refers to this unnamed woman as being his wife
during the events of this story, in 1866, he would state that he had never been
married. This would make Josey’s a common-law marriage, which was not uncommon
in the place and time. In 1864 pro-Union Red Leg forces out of Kansas raided his
homestead, killed his wife and son, and left him for dead from a sabre stroke to
the head. Josey was an easy recruitment then for a Kansas Confederate
sympathizer known as “Bloody Bill” Anderson who rallied many Missourians
into retaliatory strikes against the Red Leg forces.
In 1865, the last of the Confederate forces
surrendered, including the remnants of Bloody Bill’s men. Bill himself had
already died in action. One of these groups was slaughtered by the Union army
and their Red Leg associates. Josey was the only one to escape this particular
massacre. (Other Bloody Bill associates, such as Jesse and Frank James, were not
there as evidenced by their own daring outlaw adventures after the War.) He
escaped into Texas and was taken in by the people of Santa Rio where he assumed
the name of Mister Wilson. Notice the Wales/Wilson similarity. We’ll see
variations on this name again, as well as the use of many first names beginning
with a J. Josey is also briefly enamored of a young girl he saves from
Comancheros, named Laura Lee. From remarks he makes a year later, it is obvious
that what she expected of him as a husband was too stifling for him to accept.
Nevertheless she did have a child by him. Legendary film director John Wilson
(White Hunter, Black Heart) is, without a doubt, his great grandson. Another
descendant in this line was New Orleans police detective Wes Block.
In 1866, Josey wandered south into Mexico. The
Spanish-speaking people there had a tendency to turn Josey in Jose (pronounced
Ho’zay), which led to the formation of a new alias: “Hogan”. Josey turned
mercenary at this time, as told in Two Mules for Sister Sara. He made a deal
with the Juaristas, who were fighting the French in Chihuahua, leading to the
final defeat of their forces there. Josey was quite taken with his compatriot in
this adventure, a prostitute named Sara who was posing as a nun in order to pass
information to the Juaristas. He was so taken with her in fact that she was able
to talk him into giving most of his booty to the Mexican forces. Their
relationship did not last long after this.
For those who find the identification of Josey
and Hogan implausible, it is actually rather obvious that they are one and the
same. He states that he spent two years fighting in the Civil War (that would be
1864 and 1865) and that he was a sucker (a reference to the slaughter of Bloody
Bill’s men who believed the Union surrender offer was genuine). There is also
the more characteristic evidence that both characters make nonchalant references
to buzzards having to eat too, when faced with the prospect of burying dead
enemies. And a little more circumstantially, both men do not have time for a
useless deity. And we will be coming back to that point.
The evidence for Josey’s escapades in the
following years is largely anecdotal and taken from the reminiscences of people
in the story Unforgiven. He took the name of “William Munny” and led an
outlaw gang that was known far and wide for the savagery of its depredations.
They may have operated out of the isolated town of Santa Rio but this is not a
positive identification. Even his own gang feared Josey, with the exception of
his friend Ned Logan. But around 1870, Josey fell in love with a woman by the
name of Claudia Feathers. He married her, settled down as a farmer in Hodgeman
County, Kansas, and had two children by her. Ned also settled down and married
Sally Two Trees (original name Little Moonlight), a Navajo woman whom Josey had
originally saved from fur trappers in the Indian Territory in 1865.
In later years, Josey would state that he
neither drank nor killed anyone in the years between 1870 and 1880. But the
evidence points to him and Claudia having a falling out in 1873 and that he left
her for approximately a 2-year period using the name of “Joe Monco”. As told
in the story A Fistful of Dollars, he initially traveled south of the border to
a town called San Miguel. Here the Rojo and Baxter clans, both operating with
the Comancheros of New Mexico, were struggling for control of the town and the
Comanche trade. Josey ably played the two sides against each other up to the
point where he was caught and given a beating that would have killed any other
man. But he managed to escape even as the Rojos were slaughtering the Baxters.
Josey later returned to wipe out the entire Rojo clan. It is interesting to
speculate on whether some of the events in this story led to the government’s
final suppression of the Comancheros in 1874.
During the events of this story, Josey saves a
young woman and her son and makes the comment that the only reason he’s doing
it is because he knew someone like her once and there was no one around to help
them. Some have taken this as some past history of Josey’s mother. Actually,
it is a guilt-laden reference to his own inability to save his wife and son from
the Red Legs back in 1864.
We next run into him a year later as told in
For a Few Dollars More. (By the way, this is probably the best story in the
series and should be more recognized than it currently is.) Josey was at this
time operating as a bounty hunter in New Mexico (still under the Monco alias)
when he went into partnership with a certain Colonel Douglas Mortimer to collect
the bounty on a bandit, known as Indio, and his gang. But Colonel Mortimer had
more than money on his mind as he was actually seeking vengeance for the rape
and murder of his sister many years before.
At the end of For a Few Dollars More, Josey
believes that he is going to collect around 40 grand in bounties and reward
money. What he actually collected was probably not as much as he hoped for, but
he did return to Claudia and attempted cattle ranching. This failed when an
epidemic wiped out his herds and left him once again as a pig farmer. In their
misery, Josey sank into a religious revulsion of his former ways (both shooting
and drinking) in trying to keep his only source of security happy. Claudia died
in the winter of 1878 but her heavy influence would keep him shackled to a life
he hated until the spring of 1880. This is where the tale Unforgiven takes up
the history.
At this time Josey was tempted out of
retirement by the offer of a gunfighter wannabe calling himself the Schofield
Kid. The Kid told Josey that $1000 was being offered for the assassination of
two cowboys responsible for mutilating a young prostitute. Josey asked his old
friend, Ned Logan, to accompany him north to the town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming.
The sheriff of the town, L’il Bill Daggett, found out about the deal but was
determined that no killings would take place in his town. He came upon Josey,
sitting in a bar and sick with a fever he’d contracted on the way up from
Kansas, and beat him senseless. Josey was in self-revulsion anyway and sank into
a horrible series of hallucinations of dead lovers and enemies from which he
only awakened thee days later.
Aware again of the fact that he needed to
collect money for his children’s sake, Josey callously killed one of the two
cowboys. The boy, who was not directly responsible for the girl’s mutilation,
died slowly, crying from the pain of the gunshot he’d received. Ned decided at
this point that he’d had enough and rode south. But he was captured and taken
back to Big Whiskey where he was bullwhipped to death by L’il Bill. While this
was going on, Josey and the Kid killed the second cowboy. The Kid was also
overcome with sorrow and left. But Josey found out about Ned’s killing and,
after drinking an entire bottle of whiskey (the first he’s had in years), came
straight into the saloon where L’il Bill was forming his posse. Josey gunned
them down in an orgy of cold-blooded slaughter. He had now come round full
circle to what he truly was.
After this, Josey and his children moved to San
Francisco. He initially tried working in dried goods under the name Philo
Callahan, but (still under his dead wife’s waning influence) started a
campaign of fighting injustice wherever he found it. He did this in clerical
guise, which earned him the moniker of “The Preacher”. A preacher with a gun
with which to enforce justice, as he saw it. But he ran afoul of California
political machinations and a corrupt Marshall named Stockburn was hired to gun
him down, which he and his deputies did. But Josey was not dead and holed up in
the Sierra Nevada to let his wounds heal. Everyone, including his children,
believed him dead and he thought that it was best that way. The children were
raised by friends in San Francisco and it is from them that that many modern
legends are descended: World War II hero Lieutenant Kelly, popular DJ Dave
Garver, Inspector “Dirty” Harry Callahan, art history professor and
photographer Robert Kincaid (rumored to have worked secretly for the government
under the code name Jonathan Hemlock), bare-knuckle fighter Philo Beddoe,
fighter pilot Mitchell Gant, Gunnery Sergeant Tom Highway, modern-day bounty
hunter Tommy Nowak, Secret Service agent Frank Horrigan, and astronaut Frank
Corvin.
As told in the story Pale Rider, Josey finally
came out of the mountains in 1882 and down to the town of LaHood, California.
There, an already rich gold tycoon was trying to force small time gold miners
out of their camp in Carbon Canyon in order to decimate the canyon, as he had
done others, with his hydraulic monitoring operation. Josey continued to pass
himself off as a preacher though it was evident to everyone that he was
something more. Josey was much more relaxed and had lost the terrible self-agony
of his married years. Marshall Stockburn and his deputies were hired to rid
Carbon Canyon of its tin pan miners, as Josey must have known they would. But
Josey came to town after the brutal murder of one of his new friends and rid the
land of them and their employer in his usual inimitable fashion. He then rode
back into the Sierra Nevada and “the Preacher” was seen no more.
We know, from the story Hang ‘em High, that
Josey headed east to St. Louis, Missouri. There he passed himself off as an
ex-Army sergeant under the name of “Jed Cooper” and took on work as a
lawman. In 1889, the Indian Territory was opened up for settlement by the
federal government. Josey took part in this and tried setting himself up again
in ranching. It was there that he purchased some cattle off a rustler who had
murdered the rightful owners. Josey ended up getting lynched for this and left
for dead. He was saved by the intervention of US Marshall Bliss and taken to
Fort Smith (called Fort Grant in the movie version) where Judge Parker (called
Fenton in the movie) recruited him as one of his marshals with the tempting
offer of bringing in the men who lynched him. Three of the vigilantes came right
into Fort Smith and shot Josey down in the local whorehouse. In a truly
remarkable display of recuperative powers (if that can be said of a man who has
already survived sword blows to the head and a lynching during his lifetime),
Josey recovered and hunted down his would-be slayers.
During his stint as US Marshall he also met one
Rachel Stovall. Among their descendants are country singer Red Stovall and Frank
Morris, one of the only three men who ever escaped Alcatraz. Frank would later
operate as a master thief under such aliases as Thunderbolt and Luther Whitney.
One thing that the movie doesn’t mention is Josey’s relationship with
another legendary figure, Marshall Rooster Cogburn, who also worked for Judge
Parker at the time. Since the chronicles of the two men make no mention of the
other, the assumption is that they did not care for each other’s company.
Judge Parker’s insistence on his own version
of justice eventually led to Josey’s departure. But as this involved taking
the law into his own hands, he again assumed a new name, that of “Jim
Duncan”. Capitalizing on his experiences as a US Marshall, he was able to
secure a job as sheriff in a town in Arizona Territory called Lago. But when he
threatened to close down the local mining company, the leading citizens of the
town recruited Stacy Bridges and the Carlan brothers to kill him. This was done
on a dark night with each of the assassins armed with bullwhips. But once again
he survived certifiable death and was able to claw his way out of his unmarked
grave.
As told in the tale High Plains Drifter, Josey
returned to Lago two years later just days before Stacy and the Carlans were to
be released from Yuma Territorial Prison. Showing his usual ability to set
opposing sides up for mutual destruction, he bullied and manipulated the guilty
townspeople (who did not recognize him for who he truly was) into setting up an
ambush for the gunslingers and then deserted them seconds before the killers
arrived in town. Stacy and his friends went on an orgy of vandalism and murder.
But as they prepared to kill the last of the townspeople, Josey returned and
killed them each in the darkness, only illuminated by the light of the burning
town. His revenge accomplished, Josey rode back into the desert.
Josey next wandered east into New Mexico where
he assumed the alias of “Joe Kidd”. Here he took up hunting to supply meat
at the Hickory LaApache Station. With the monies that came in he was able to
start another small ranch but seems to have spent most of his time drinking and
doing whatever he felt like doing. In 1898, however, he was caught up in Frank
Harlan’s scheme to kill a local Hispanic activist named Luis Chama.
Double-crossed by Harlan, Josey turned on him and shot him down in the
Territorial Courthouse. The last verifiable report we have of Josey was that he
took up with a Helen Sanchez and lived in the area for several years afterward.
Their descendants include Arizona deputy Walt Coogan and his cousin Ben
Shockley.
So who was this mysterious stranger anyway? I
started my investigation following the well-known
speculation that this man was actually Dan Reid. I was forced to drop this
line of investigation immediately as the dating of his history did not coincide
with the internal evidence of “The Man with No Name” stories. About the only
thing that came out of this was that Shane was another of Dan Reid’s aliases
and, chances are, that he is the grandfather of famous detective Mike Shayne.
The evidence of “The Man with No Name”
tales themselves led me to an irrevocably startling conclusion. That the man was
a calculatingly cold-blooded killer cannot be denied. If he was not killing for
money or self-defense, he was killing for his own inscrutable reasons. And he
was not above killing large numbers of people to achieve his own goals. His eyes
were the eyes of a killer. On more than one occasion, those eyes would freeze
his enemies (and his friends) to the spot where they stood. This gave him an
undeniable edge. He could be brutish but still appealing (especially to the
ladies). And though the actor who won his fame playing this character was
brown-haired, the internal evidence of the stories points to his having
golden-colored hair (and I actually believed that it was inclined to the
reddish).
Now this description is still not conclusive
for my final determination. But I think the following is. And that is the matter
of his death, or should I say deaths. One more than one occasion, our man was
left for dead. In 1864, he was left with a sword stroke thru the head. But by
1866 that vivid scar was no longer visible. In 1873, he took a beating that
should have killed him or, at least, left his left hand crippled for years to
come. In 1889, he survived both a lynching and a shooting, the scars of which
were no longer visible two years later. The same for the bullwhipping he
received in Lago and the multiple gunshot wounds thru the torso that he received
from Marshall Stockburn and his men. It would seem that this man could not die.
So who was he? The evidence is unmistakable.
The man we so lovingly recall as the Stranger and The Man with No Name, was
actually the immortal warrior Kane. Kane’s recuperative powers were remarkable
even if they were somewhat exaggerated by his biographer, Karl Edward Wagner.
His two most remarkable features were (to the prehistoric audience) his red hair
and (to everyone everywhere) his cold killer eyes. Those eyes are remarked upon
by everyone who ever saw them and were the feature that “The Man with No
Name” yarns always zoomed in on.
Kane was on many
occasions a calculating manipulator of people. He was not above turning on
benefactors to meet his own ends. And many an ally would end up dead by tale’s
end, oftentimes with his blood on Kane’s blade. And let us not forget Kane’s
eternal hatred for the being that had cursed him to eternal wandering. His
dislike for this deity is evident in many of the early “Man with No Name”
stories.
I can see the
objection being raised to the identification with Kane on several grounds. Josey
does not at any time try building an empire for himself, as does the Kane
character. But to this, I counter that, basically, Kane is on vacation. And just
as in many of the Kane stories, our ‘hero’ takes to banditry between his
more ambitious plans, Josey is basically just enjoying himself.
There is also the
matter of his time as Claudia’s husband in which he was definitely not in the
same character as at other times. But psychological problems must fall on all
humans at one time or another and I believe that Kane truly did try to forget
the truth about himself for awhile in the peace and security of Claudia’s
arms. And let us not forget the fact that the director of the film version of
that story, Unforgiven, was trying to make a statement about the cyclic nature
of violence and its degenerative influence on the human psyche.
Many Wold Newton scholars have wondered about
Kane’s history during the many long years between the fall of the elder races
and his appearances in England and America during the late twentieth century.
The only known appearance in between was
recorded by Simon Magus in the first century AD. But now we have another
marker as to this legendary character’s history.
All rights reserved. The text of this article is © 2003-2004 by the author, Ric Berquist. No copying or reproduction of this article or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the author.
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In the course of
the ongoing research I've been conducting into the life and family of Travis
McGee, I've recently begun reading Clive Cussler's biographies of Dirk Pitt and
I've noticed something.
Of course, the conventional wisdom is that the Pitt stories do not take place in
our universe, but in an alternate one. This is due to various
exaggerations made by Cussler, as well as dating problems. But it is
certainly a common thing for those writing about the various Wold Newton
families to fictionalize, lightly or heavily, certain facts about their
subjects, such as dates, locations, names, etc. It is not even unlikely
for these writers to tell entirely fictional stories. There are any number
of reasons given for this, the most common being an attempt to protect the
people involved in these events from unnecessary publicity. At the current
time, I'm willing to leave the sorting out of fiction and reality to other
researchers.
Here, I am concerned with one Delphi Moran, Pitt's antagonist in his first
reported case, entitled PACIFIC VORTEX. According to Win Eckert's
Alternate Wold Newton Universes web site, "Royce Testa also writes me to
mention the possibility that the villain Delphi, who Dirk faces in the first
novel, Pacific Vortex!, is the evil son of Doc Savage in this alternate
reality." I approached this book eagerly, looking forward to the
clash between Doc's son and Dirk Pitt. What I found suggested something
entirely different.
Delphi Moran is described as "massive," "huge," a
"giant." He is said to have "immense strength." He
stands over six feet, eight inches tall (he is specifically mentioned as
being that height). His face is long and gaunt, with wide cheekbones and
"a heavy layer of unkempt silver hair." His eyes are a
"hypnotic yellow, " "bright gold." (At one point, Pitt
accuses Delphi of wearing colored contact lenses, but this is at a time when he
thinks Delphi is an impostor, impersonating his father.) Except for the
silver hair, this certainly sounds like Doc Savage. But...
Delphi Moran is son of Dr. Frederick Moran, one of America's greatest classical
anthropologists. Now, I have no doubt that Doc Savage was indeed a great
classical anthropologist (he was a leader in every other field to which he
turned his attention), but this is not exactly the way most people would
remember him. Frederick Moran is also described as the "Oracle of
Psychic Unity," apparently some sort of New Age-ish prophet. Also not
a description apt for the Man of Bronze. Dr. Moran disappeared in the
so-called Pacific Vortex (a Pacific version of the Bermuda Triangle, located
north of Hawaii) "nearly 30 years ago." The book, PACIFIC
VORTEX, was written during the 1960s (a statement in CLIVE CUSSLER AND DIRK PITT
REVEALED, by Cussler and Craig Dirico, suggests that the novel was written in
1968. It can't have been much later than that, as the second novel, THE
MEDITERRANEAN CAPER was published in 1973. If I take the 1968 date as the date of the story, Dr. Frederick
Moran disappeared no later than 1939. That's a little too early for Moran
to have been Doc Savage, who was known to have been active at least as late as
1949. It is also stated that Dr. Moran would have been either in his
seventies or eighties at the time PACIFIC VORTEX takes place. Both ages
are given. I'm assuming that late seventies or early eighties are
intended, suggesting that Moran was born between 1883 and 1893. Too early
to have been Doc Savage.
Another point against Doc having been Delphi's father is the apparent fact that
Delphi Moran has no real genius for anything other than crime. He is in
possession of a semi-futuristic looking undersea base, located on a seamount,
which is the only remaining vestige of the ancient land of Kanoli. But the
base was constructed by two scientific associates of his father's. And,
instead of having a master plan to conquer the world, or create an enforced
peace like some of Savage's foes, or even to attempt nuclear blackmail like
Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Delphi specifically denies this plan to Pitt), Delphi
Moran is simply a pirate, capturing ships and selling the hulls and cargoes to
the highest bidders.
So, if Doc Savage is not the forbear of this gold-eyed, giant of a pirate, who
is? Fortunately, we have a couple of candidates. First, I'd like to
point out that in the archives of Wold Newton, there is a reference to a
criminal named Moran. I'm speaking of Col. Sebastian "Tiger"
Moran, the one-time lieutenant of Professor Moriarty. I would suggest that
it is entirely possible for Col. Moran to have fathered Dr. Frederick Moran
circa 1883 or 1893. (It is true that in an early draft, Delphi Moran
was called Delphi Ea, and that a reference to the surname Ea even made it into
print in THE MEDITERRANEAN CAPER, but this is an obvious pseudonym and
undoubtedly ranks with Burroughs' originally calling Tarzan "Lord
Bloomstoke" before changing it back to the more accurate
"Greystoke.") However, I haven't seen any evidence that Col.
Moran was a giant or possessed gold eyes. There is evidence that one of
his associates may have.
According to the work of Profs. Rick Lai and Win Eckert, the men named Wolf and
Death Larsen had a number of associations with criminal organizations in both
Europe and the Pacific Rim. Prof. Dennis Power has even suggested that Wolf
is the son of Prof. Moriarty himself, and Prof. Eckert has extended
this proposition to Wolf's brother, Death. Wolf Larsen was a man of great power
and intelligence and had eyes of unusual hue. Gold is one of the colors
mentioned in relation to them and, indeed, it has been speculated by Philip
José Farmer that Doc Savage may be descended from him on his mother's side.
Wolf was born in 1858 (possibly Death was also, since they may be twins).
Wolf Larsen and his brother were extremely immoral men of prodigious appetites.
I would not find it at all difficult to believe that either one of them
could have had a daughter before reaching the age of twenty in 1878. Allow
them to have had a child by age of 15 or 16, and you could conceivably push that
date back to 1875 or 1876. I don't find it impossible to imagine a
daughter of either Larsen having an affair with the older Col. Sebastian Moran
at the age of 15, in 1893, and she may have been as old as 18. (Quite
frankly, I can imagine one of the Larsen brothers selling a daughter to Moran,
or giving her in return for some favor, at an even earlier age.)
Therefore, according to my schema, Wolf or Death Larsen had a daughter. This
daughter had a child by Col. Sebastian Moran. This child was Dr. Frederick
Moran. Dr. Moran's son was the criminal Delphi Moran. So far, I have
been unable to ascertain the identity of either Delphi's mother, or the mother
of his daughter, Summer Moran.
Bibliography
PACIFIC VORTEX by Clive Cussler
THE MEDITERRANEAN CAPER by Clive Cussler
CLIVE CUSSLER AND DIRK PITT REVEALED by C. Cussler and Craig Dirico
"The Empty House" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Malevolent Moriartys, or, Who's Going to Take Over the World When I'm Gone? by Win Eckert
TARZAN ALIVE by Philip José Farmer
DOC SAVAGE: HIS APOCALYPTIC LIFE by Philip José Farmer
The Secret History of Captain Nemo by Rick Lai
THE SEA WOLF by Jack London
Asian Detectives in the Wold Newton Universe by Dennis Power
All rights reserved. The text of this article is © 2003-2004 by the author, Mark Brown. No copying or reproduction of this article or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the author.
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There are a group of spies who worked for the British Secret Service known as The Avengers. These include Cathy Gale, Emma Peel, Tara King, Dr David Keel, Dr Mike King and most famously John Steed. My fellow researchers have uncovered the connections to Wold Newton families for Cathy Gale (The Dynasty of Fu Manchu) and Emma Peel (All That Glitters is Not Gold). Yet nothing has been reported on the family of John Steed. Thanks to my connections in the BSS that allowed me to write something of the history of that agency I have been privy to the family of John Wickham Gascoyne Beresford Steed.
The first Steeds came over
to England with the Vikings and settled. The first Steed of any interest is
Marcus Steed who married Catherine Raleigh, a descendant of Sir Walter Raleigh.
John Steed adopted the code name of Sir John Raleigh when
he took control of U.N.C.L.E. in 1983 and referred to his descent from Sir
Walter.
Marcus and Catherine had one
son Everington Steed. Everington
was knighted for his role in the victory at Waterloo.
Sir Everington Steed later married Elizabeth Wickham, daughter of George
Wickham and Lydia Bennett. Elizabeth Wickham's brother George Jnr encountered
Bernard Sharpe in 1814.
According to PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, Lydia Wickham would often outstay her welcome with her sisters. Was Lydia visiting her sister and travelling as a companion on December 13, 1795? Sadly we will never know one way or the other.
Sir Everington and Elizabeth
had at least two children, a son Henry and a daughter Emma. Henry
Steed married a Gascoyne, a French woman. I have been unable to uncover any more
on this family. Henry
Steed had at least five children.
The first child Roger
married into the equally noble Aspery family and their son Steed-Aspery was
George Smiley's first boss. The second Joseph was mentioned at least once in THE
AVENGERS as giving Steed a solid gold toothpick. The third son, Rex was a Chess
Champion and his son Desmond was a Ludo Champ. There may have been a daughter
Sylvia who married a Peabody. She was reportedly a big drinker.
The fourth son George is
something of an enigma and the documentation of his birth is unclear, suggesting
that he might be adopted. Whilst not conclusive, it is possible that he may be
the child of his Aunt Emma Steed. Emma
Steed was an operative of the British Secret Service and on a mission in 1894, she
encountered Brisco County Jnr. Whilst
the report of this mission does not suggest any romantic connection, it is noted
that two months later Emma went on a leave of absence to tour the Continent with
her sister-in-law for a year. If
George is truly the son of Emma Steed and Briscoe County Junior, his father’s
family is explored in more detail here (Dennis Power’s Masked Memories: The
Story of the Reid family).
George Steed married Anabel Berresford. Her brother Thomas and his wife "Tuppence" would work in the espionage field, as detailed in five books by Agatha Christie. George and Anabel had two sons, Walter and John Steed.
All rights reserved. The text of this article is © 2003-2004 by the author, Brad Mengel. No copying or reproduction of this article or any portions thereof in any form whatsoever is permitted without prior written permission and consent of the author.
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