The creation of a newspaperman and pulp writer named Harold Ward writing under the obscure pen name of Zorro, Doctor Death was the star of his own bizarre pulp magazine back in 1935. He was equal parts Doctor Frankenstein and Albert Einstein, with a dash of Fu Manchu and a dram of wormwood. In reality, a Yale psychologist with the improbable name of Rance Mandarin, Doctor Death was a scientist who wandered over to the dark side, consorting with demons, elementals, zombies, disinterred mummies, other unclean denizens of Hell.
His supreme goal in life was to crush civilization. Apparently, Mandarin practiced a strange brand of necromancy because he believed that the Almighty had commanded him to force modern man to abandon automation, quit the factories, cease inventing, and revert to a pre-industrial state. In the depths of the great Depression of the 1930s, this may have struck the American reading public as the height of horror.
A frightened nation responded to this challenge by organizing the Secret Twelve, a band of the top U. S. civil and business leaders, whose number included the President of the United States and the nation’s top gang leader! It was quite a group.
The heroic head of that organization was the remarkable Jimmy Holm, a millionaire criminologist and occultist who joined New York’s Finest as a detective. Working under Inspector John Ricks, and sometimes allied with Mandarin’s mysterious assistant, the exotic Nina Fererra, Holm battled Doctor Death from Manhattan to Egypt and into the very bowels of Hell itself.
The series is one of the rare unabashedly supernatural series the pulps ever produced. There are no safe answers or facile explanations here. When Jimmy Holm confronts the undead minions of Doctor Death, the mummies and zombies are the real deal.
RadioArchives.com is resurrecting this wild and wonderful series by presenting Doctor Death’s first adventure, 12 Must Die, voiced by the talented Joey D'Auria.
Chapter 1: Twelve Must Die
Chapter 2: Gray Things of the Dark
Chapter 3: The Living Dead
Chapter 4: From Beyond the Veil
Chapter 5: Death Calls to Jimmy
Chapter 6: In the Power of Death
Chapter 7: Death Claims an Ally
Chapter 8: The Cave of Death
Chapter 9: Attack of the Zombi
Chapter 10: Public Enemy No. 1
Chapter 11: The Woman of It
Chapter 12: Vassals of Death
Chapter 13: The Elementals Attack
Chapter 14: Inside the Wizard’s Lair
Chapter 15: Orgy of Death
Chapter 16: In Death’s Depths
Chapter 17: Journey of Horror
Chapter 18: The Choking Terror
Chapter 19: The Secret Twelve
Chapter 20: The Stolen Body
Chapter 21: The Dead Hand
Chapter 22: The Dissolution Ray
Chapter 23: The Master Commands!
Chapter 24: Holm Turns Devil
Chapter 25: Caminetti Shows His Guns
Chapter 26: Slashing Torture
Chapter 27: The Diabolical Contrivance
Chapter 28: Zombi to the Rescue
Chapter 29: Fury of the Elemental!
Chapter 30: Death’s Conflagration
Chapter 31: The Final Threat
Joey D’Auria is a popular Hollywood voice-over actor whose work includes characters for animated cartoons, video games and looping. However, he is best known to Chicago audiences as WGN-TV’s Bozo the Clown from 1984 to 2001. During these years, Mr. D’Auria also worked in stage productions and in TV and radio commercials. Returning to Hollywood in 2002 he was the voice for Commissioner Spinklestarber for the anime series Daigunder. In Great Britain, in 2003 he was the principal writer and show coordinator on Star Trek The Experence for See Entertainment in Hyde Park, London.
After that project, Joey worked as head writer and occasional voice talent for Betsy’s Kindergarten Adventures on PBS. He also supplied assorted voices for Universal/Imagine’s Curious George The Movie, and as the voice of General Alister Azimuth for Insomniac Games, Ratchet & Clank Future—A Crack in Time. You will be able to hear him in the new animated film, War of the Worlds: Goliath for Tripod Entertainment.
