DOC SAVAGE: SKULL ISLAND - An Inside Look With Writer Will Murray

DOC SAVAGE: SKULL ISLAND - An Inside Look With Writer Will Murray

There have been some pretty amazing "team-ups" over the years, but there's something pretty unique about Will Murray's Doc Savage: Skull Island.

By EdGross - Dec 14, 2022 12:12 PM EST
Filed Under: Exclusives

Will Murray has made a literary career writing novels and short stories based on such pulp heroes as Doc Savage, The Shadow and The Spider, as well as crafting many adventures of Remo Williams, aka "The Destroyer" (soon to be the subject of a streaming television series).

He's brought Tarzan into contact with John Carter as well as King Kong, and in terms of the latter, has done the same with Lester Dent's Doc Savage. 

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A part of the series The Wild Adventures of Doc Savage, the novel — Doc Savage: Skull Island — was originally published in 2013 and offers up a pretty unique tale. "The intersection between Doc Savage and King Kong is that they premiered within a week of each other in 1933," he reflects. "And Doc Savage's headquarters was at the top of the Empire State Building, from which Kong fell. So they had a synchronicity of creation and fate in those two facts. Of course, people speculated where Doc was while Kong climbed the Empire State Building. Well, the only logical thing could be he was at his Fortress of Solitude and not involved, otherwise he would have been there. Otherwise you would have seen them on the screen in 1933 — not really, but that's in the premise of where they were if they lived in the same reality.

"I wrote a prologue," Murray, whose website is adventuresinbronze.com, continues, "in which Doc Savage returns from his Fortress of Solitude and Kong has just fallen to the ground. He's still lying on the streets and Doc's men take him to the corpse. There he says something to the effect of, 'I know this creature.' From there we proceeded to tell the story of how Doc and his men clean up the body of King Kong and get it on a ship going back to Skull Island. Once it's departed, Doc sits his men down and says, 'I'm going to tell you the story I never told you before of how I visited Skull Island just after the war.' And that's the body of the story.

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Doc Savage: Skull Island was Murray's first-ever crossover, and it came about from the fact that his cover artist, Joe DeVito, happened to be tied into the estate of Kong creator Marion C. Cooper and had property rights to the character. Considering that 2013 was going to be the 80th anniversary of both Doc Savage and Kong, he suggested that they should come up with something special. Permission was gained from Conde Nast, Doc's copyright holder, and the result was the novel. 

"Doc Savage was an explorer," Murray suggests, "and was always discovering lost cities, lost worlds and islands where strange things were happening. And Skull Island would be in his life; the first such experience. His first great adventure. And I think Doc recognized Kong as the last survivor of a race of creatures that is, for all practical purposes, extinct. And as a scientist adventurer, he made the conscious decision with his father in that book to never speak of Skull Island or the dinosaurs and great ape that lived there, because he didn't want that world spoiled by civilizations or hunters. So when he comes back from the Fortress of Solitude and finds Kong dead in the streets, at the base of their own skyscraper headquarters, it's a painful realization that his efforts were for nothing. Someone has come and brought Kong to New York. 

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"That may be my most successful book," he muses, "not only in sales, but because I didn't write it in the Dent style. I actually had to figure out a style to write that book in, and that's hard for me, because I don't necessrily have my own style due to the fact that I write so many other people's characters. This takes place just after World War I, so I couldn't use the Lester Dent style, which was part Dashiell Hammett and part certain pulp writers of his era. So I kind of keyed off of Edgar Rice Burroughs a little bit, but not too much, and came up with an approach that seemed to work."

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