Doc Savage is a character created by a publishing house rather than by an author. This is not as unusual as you might think. Doc Savage first appeared in 1933 in “Doc Savage Magazine,” which was not a comic book but really one of their predecessors. It was a “pulp magazine” containing prose stories, generally with some illustrations but not as many as a comic — they would have cost more to print in those days. The Doc Savage character (his full name was Clark Savage, Jr.) stayed in print in his own magazine until 1949, and then was revived in 1964 when the issues began to be reprinted as paperback books. Bantam Books kept that going until 1990, and has appeared here and there in books and movies since then.
The interesting character in this story is not Doc Savage, but the lead writer for the original series, Lester Dent. He wasn’t the only writer — because the publishing house owned the rights to the character, several writers contributed, but all under pseudonyms. The pseudonym in question today is “Kenneth Robeson.” In 1943 Robeson (who in this case was almost certainly Lester Dent himself) wrote “Waves of Death,” in which Doc Savage was the main character. It contained this passage:
“The sound was the movement, and the movement was the sound. It was too great to be real or sensible. It was holocaust, din, bombilation, charivari, blare, blast. It was hell come there and having its moment.”
“Bombilation” and “charivari”? Those are real words, but you might not expect to see them in a story like that, would you? Bombilation, for example, is quite an obscure word that means buzzing or droning. it comes from Old French and is based on the Latin “bombizatio” (a buzzing). When it was used in the 1800s, it was usually in reference to either the buzzing of bees or the hissing of swans. It also appears (in its even more obscure verb form) in Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”:
“Fire!” cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong. And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row.”
As for “charivari”, it goes back to the Greek word “karebaria” (headache). That turned up in Latin as “caribaria” (severe headache), but by the 1300s when it landed in Old French as “chalivali” it meant the noise made by pots and pans. It turned up in English a few centuries later (about 1700) and by then it meant “rough music, especially as a community way of expressing disapproval of a marriage match”. Evidently the way it went in those days was when a couple married but people in the village thought the match was a really bad idea, they did things like telling the band at the reception to play nothing but heavy metal tunes nobody could dance to, on the basis of “that’ll show them.”
Wouldn’t have bothered Doc Savage in the least.
