Alexander Drake is an action adventure series. Alexander Drake is a great inventor and world-traveling explorer who works to right wrongs and fight criminals on a global scale. He has a team of five scientific experts that help him in his endeavors. The series began as a pastiche of Doc Savage and grew into something more.
This series has changed three times over the years in major/minor updates. First, I changed the original name/codename of the character (explained below). Secondly, in my teens I decided to alter the gender of several of his aids, because in the original I had only five men just like Doc Savage. I wanted to be inclusive–plus at the time I considered having Drake marry one of his aids, in order to create a greater risk to him in all the “bad guys trap and kidnap his aids” scenarios. I dropped that aspect later. The third major transformation occurred after college when I decided to re-envision or update the series into modern times, because it was originally set in the Seventies. The advent of Internet and personal computers was at that time radically altering things and I realized the stories/universe needed to be updated to stay modern. They used to make phone calls from the office or talk on radios in the car, but now they could use cellphones, computers in the car, or the now ubiquitous computer cloud connections.
Alexander Drake is the second oldest universe/series I have on this site. The first book in the series was my third or fourth novel, which I wrote in fourth or fifth grade, about 1977-78. I still have some of these early books and they were typed on my mother’s Smith-Corona, on lined notebook paper because I could not center unlined paper, and typed single-space on the front and back on each sheet of paper because I though it made them look more like real printed books.
I never wanted to copy the Doc Savage name, so I didn’t name him Doc or Dr. anything (though he is one), but I wanted him to have a cool catchphrase or nickname, like The Avenger or The Shadow. Therefore, the first novel featuring him I wrote in the Seventies (in the first version of this hero) was titled Lucifer, the Devil Crimefighter. In this original version, he was going to be called the “Devil” or “Lucifer” by the criminals he went after, because he was their greatest nemesis– he was the devil’s devil, so to speak. This was because I was thinking at that time that everyone feared the devil, but what did evil criminals fear? I thought they would call their great adversary the greatest devil of all, Lucifer. I even tried the press referring to Drake as a devil to criminals route, but it was still too ugh to have him constantly called the Devil. Thus, I quickly decided that it didn’t work–especially since all my friends and family kept asking, “So, he is the greatest criminal of all? I thought he was a hero? Is he evil? Or is he a criminal turned good?” The devil aspect dropped out and only his name remained. In my teens I changed the series to The Dragon, as an allusion to his surname. However, I later felt this could be confusing with my fantasy works and/or Bruce Lee, thus I dropped this second codename as well. These types of things I still pepper in the books in the background, such as nicknames that reporters give in covering his exploits. As an adult, after I discovered the world of pulp fiction existed, I was very glad I abandoned this aspect of the title because there are other similarly named characters, especially in the villain pulps, such as Dr. Satan, Dr. Sin, and Dr. Death.