Bigger than Life by Marilyn Cannaday

Doc Savage starred in a pulp magazine that ran for 16 years. It was one of the most popular adventure magazines of the time. Each of the 182 issues featured a novel-length story by Kenneth Robeson, a house name owned by publisher Street & Smith. Each was supervised by the author contracted to produce them, Lester Dent, who wrote 165 of them himself. That was on top of writing stories and articles for other magazines and later in his career writing six novels.

 Dent, a native of La Plata, Missouri, was remarkable in ways that go far beyond his prolific catalogue of pulp adventure tales. Marilyn Cannady tells his personal story in Bigger Than Life.

 Bigger Than Life is the only book-length biography of Dent that I’m aware of. It is, unfortunately, a fairly short book. There is not much know about Dent’s childhood, partly because he didn’t talk or write much about it, though he was clearly shaped by his upbringing on isolated ranches and farms in Oklahoma, Wyoming and Missouri.

 Savage pursued fantastical adventures in the magazine; Dent was a real-world adventurer. He learned to sail, and hunted for treasure in the Caribbean using a metal detector of his own design. He was a pilot and ham radio operator. His interest in sailing, aircraft and technology informed many of his stories, both in Doc Savage and other magazines.

 Each chapter is written somewhat like an essay that focuses on a particular aspect of Dent’s life or career. This can make the book seem a bit disjointed, especially in comparison to biographies that take a more strictly chronological approach.

 Cannady, like Dent, grew up in La Plata. Her own experiences in the area, including a brief stint working at Dent’s aerial photography business, provide a flavor of what his life was like in Missouri.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

Men of Tomorrow by Gerard Jones

Mr. America by Mark Adams

1939 by David Gelernter

Pulp Art by Robert Lesser

 Cannaday, Marilyn. Bigger Than Life: The Creator of Doc Savage. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990.

The Innocent Man by John Grisham (audio book)

The Innocent Man by John Grisham (Random House, 2006)

Audio book read by Dennis Boutsikaris

This is the story of the trial of two men for the murder of Debra Sue Carter, a young woman who worked as a waitress in Ada, Oklahoma. Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz were convicted of a crime they did not commit, and the justice system consumed more than a decade of their lives before minimally correcting its error.

I’m not surprised it took so long to overturn the convictions of these men. I’m surprised it got so far to begin with. The police investigation was very incomplete and shoddy, even for 30 years ago when technology and science played a much lesser role in collecting and analyzing evidence (Grisham strongly suggests the Ada police had ties to drug dealer, including one of the detectives on the case, and that influenced the investigation). The lawyers for the defense were competent, but they were not supplied with the means to mount a good defense for their poor clients. Williamson was clearly mentally ill, but there was never a proper determination of his fitness to stand trial. The evidence was so thin I’m surprised a trial was permitted. They even let a former Ada police chief sit on the jury (admittedly, he was not forthcoming during jury selection, but you would think someone in that small town would have known or pressed the issue more).

I can understand the thirst for answers, especially in a small community where a violent crime captures the public attention. It reminds me of the 2005 conviction here in central Missouri of Ryan Ferguson for the of journalist Kent Heitholt in 2001, when Ferguson was still in high school. The conviction rested on some uncertain eyewitness accounts, possibly influenced by police and prosecutors, and the confession Charles Erickson. There seems to be little evidence against Erickson except his drug-induced loss of memories of the night of the crime. He took a plea bargain to testify against Ferguson. As with Williamson, police and courts seemed to pay little attention to the mental state of Erickson.

In spite of the lack of evidence to back up the witnesses few, in my mind Erickson is a very sketchy witness even to his own involvement, the jury convicted Ferguson. People wanted answers, order, justice, and a sense that the issue was resolved so they could return to a safe life. This made them blind to all the problems with the case against Ferguson. The police felt those public pressures and were too ready to go with a problematic case rather than go through a tough investigation that might lead to no answers. The case had other problems, and as people began to admit to false confessions and prosecutorial influence of witnesses, the conviction was revisited and overturned in 2013, after Ferguson had spent most of his 20s in prison.

I think our justice system is often close to the mark and produces mostly good results. However, it should not take years, or decades, to correct such problematic cases as these. In fact, these cases should have never come to trial based on such flimsy evidence.