Some bear it better than others. We Savages, I think carry it poorly.” —Patricia Savage 1948
Of the many Doc Savage stories published by Street & Smith during the magazine’s sixteen-year run, “I Died Yesterday” is the only story told from Patricia Savage’s point of view.
Who is Patricia Savage?
She is the bronze goddess of pulp’s Golden Age and cousin to Doc Savage, the Bronze Man of Tomorrow. And she, like Batgirl who would follow her, is more fun and psychologically complex than the man whose shadow she spends so much time trying to get out from under.
Patricia Savage is an underdog not because she lacks intelligence and skill, but because the men that surround her – both heroes and villains – forever underestimate her.
In fact the only man in Patricia Savage’s life who does not underestimate her is her creator, Lester Dent.
As early as 1934’s “Death in Silver”, Dent planned for Pat to run her own detective agency within the pages of Doc Savage, but editors at Street & Smith rejected the idea. While Street & Smith billed Doc as the Man of Tomorrow, Doctor Clark Savage and his editors had quaint and patriarchal notions about a woman’s place in their brave new world.
So Pat Savage and Lester Dent settled for a beauty salon.
What trouble could she possibly get into running a beauty salon?
With Dent writing, quite a bit and when trouble failed to come her way, Pat cultivated a talent for elbowing into Doc’s adventures.
As a reward for her patience and after fifteen long years, Dent gave Pat her opportunity to shine in “I Died Yesterday”, and shine she does. But with Pat’s new radiance, the bronze light of the Man of Tomorrow fades from the visible spectrum.
Now Patricia Savage is not to blame for the red shift in Doc’s bronze light. The blame lies squarely with Doc since he orders Pat to stay put and stay safe within the confines of her Park Avenue beauty salon. With his patronizing and patriarchal advice, Doc writes himself out of the story. And perhaps for the first time in Doc Savage’s long and distinguished career, his male readership feels both snubbed and abandoned for the eyes they experience the adventure through are the eyes of a woman. And Doc has no room for a woman in his adventures.
While Patricia Savage’s eyes are as golden as those of her cousin, she never sees the world like her male counterpart.
From his aerie atop the Empire State Building, the Man of Tomorrow looks down on the elongated architecture of Technopolis as its citizens look up to the Man of Bronze.
In contrast, Patricia Savage is an intelligent and capable woman shut up in an upscale beauty salon by men who doubt her endlessly. Through the plate-glass windows of her salon, she sees Technopolis as an immense and mechanized city supported by an interlocking grid of fragile male egos.
And she delivers her sassy observations about these fragile egos with cheer, because for her, the male ego is not to be taken too seriously for that would destroy its comedic value.
When sass does not work, she fights, charms, and schemes her way through challenges. And if all that should fail her, she uses any number of gadgets she pinched from The Man of Bronze.
By 1948 Doc was no longer the supremely confident Man of Tomorrow that he was during the early years of the Great Depression. After WWII, Doc abandoned his gadgets and his globetrotting. In “I Died Yesterday”, Patricia Savage and Lester Dent lament for days gone by:
Personally, I had been grieved that Doc no longer made as much use of gadgets. His astonishing scientific devices, which he pulled out of his hat at the most unexpected times, had given him a great deal color and a weird touch I liked. His contraptions, and some of them were stunning in their ingenuity, were symbolic of Doc’s wizardry. Yet he seemed determined to drop away from using them, and that spoiled a lot of Doc’s special flavor for me.
What is so enjoyable about this story is for a moment, Patricia Savage revives old Doc’s wizardry by doing what Doc apparently can no longer do. I could write so much more about the psychological subtext of Pat assuming Doc’s place, but I will leave it for you to explore.
Finally I wonder who really ‘died” that day?
Does the title refer to the sack-suited man, who ambled into Pat’s Park Avenue salon, or to the Bronze Goddess, Patricia Savage?
Some readers might interpret Pat’s loss as a slight, but in reality, her loss of confidence completes her. She is not beaten, just uncertain and she is not afraid to admit it. In her long journey towards self discovery she found wisdom—she is only human after all, and that frailty makes her accomplishments all the more heroic.
Maybe the only casualty that day was the confidence or the overconfidence that fueled so many of those Savage adventures of the Great Depression?
Maybe the Great Depression went from being an economic state of affairs to being a great fear unleashed with the splitting of an atom?
And maybe that great and palpable fear ran into the marrow of those Savage bones?
“I Died Yesterday” is a remarkable story and in the annals of the Depression-era Doc Savage, there is nothing quite like it.
In the post-War twilight of the World of Tomorrow, there would not be anything quite like it again.
MARTIAN DEATH RAY 