A different sort of Doc Savage pastiche is Rush Randall and Adventurers Inc.
William G. Bogart created them using an edited Doc Savage story (he took his 1942 story The Magic Forest for this one). Doc became Rush, Ham became Malcolm “The Deacon” Dean, and Monk became George “Buzz” Casey. Though they have different backgrounds. Rush is an MIT electrical engineer, Malcolm is a chemist and an ex-Navy officer, and Casey is a mining engineer.
Their one pulp appearance, The Crazy Indian, appeared in the November 1946 issue of Ziff-Davis’ short-lived post war pulp, Mammoth Adventure.
In this story, Rush is the lead, with the two as his sidekicks. What was annoying was that (like some Doc stories) Rush disappears during much of the story, with most of the action focusing on his two associates.
No further stories came of it.
Other than a cameo appearance in one of Barry Reese‘s Peregrine stories, we wouldn’t get a new story of them until Jeff Deischer‘s The Spook Trail.
Jeff made some changes, which I think are good. Most importantly was making Adventurers Inc. an equal partnership, rather than a leader and two sidekicks. The difference was explained by having the original story being a pulp story of an adventure of theirs, which wasn’t accurate (as noted by the characters in this story).
That said, in this story, the Deacon seemed to take the lead. The story was interesting, and the type that Doc might have pursued as the team heads to the Ozarks to tackle a spook!
I hope we see further stories of Adventurers Inc. as I found this new story a worthy continuation of the original. If you want to read the original, you can find it in a collection of other Doc pastiches from Black Dog Books, while the new work is available from Westerntainment through Amazon.
