Doc Savage finds Churchill, Hitler and … a fish?

December 1944 through February 1945 fall solidly into the realistic style of Lester Dent’s WW II novels for the series. Doc is constantly nervous, doubting his ability to carry out his missions. He’s distracted by the sexy women of the first and third book. He’s increasingly fed up with Monk and Ham’s antics, which he finds childish, and they half-concede the immaturity of their clowning and squabbling. In Strange Fish he tries to remember how to distinguish a real and fake Oklahoma accent and can’t recall the information.

THE LOST GIANT starts with Doc absolutely terrified by the scope of his mission, so much so he doesn’t trust his own makeup abilities. Instead he heads to a top Hollywood makeup artist who transforms him into Joe Powell, two-fisted adventurer. That enables Doc to attach himself to Fay, a mercenary hunting a mysterious McGuffin for the Axis. He pegs Joe as a capable troubleshooter and brings him aboard. But someone else has kidnapped Chester Wilson, the one man who knows the McGuffin’s location; can Doc and Fay find it and get their first.

This is a good, solid spy thriller, and the McGuffin is actually substantial: Winston Churchill’s plane has been downed in the Arctic Circle and Chester Wilson knows how to find it. Dent makes it clear it’s not just the blow of losing England’s prime minister that we’re facing (Churchill scoffs at the idea he’s indispensable) but Churchill’s knowledge of the Allied war plans.

VIOLENT NIGHT (released in paperback, as you can see, as The Hate Genius) has Doc now hunting for Adolf Hitler, but the premise is better. Hitler’s fleeing Europe via neutral Lisbon, leaving his double behind in his place. However he’s arranged to have the double killed, apparently by Allied assassins; Adolf figures this will infuriate Germany, driving them to fight to the last man; Germany and the Allied forces will both pay for Hitler having to flee! And the kill goes down in just 48 hours unless Doc catches der Fuehrer first.

Unfortunately the execution is pedestrian, at best. People keep revealing hidden identities or secret agendas to Doc or one of the other players, then reporting to someone else that yes, Doc Savage bought the supposed Big Reveal! Dent got very bad about exposition during this period and this is a very talky one.

It’s also annoyingly sexist. Pat horns in on the action, convincing Monk and Ham that they should make themselves targets for Hitler’s crew to distract them from Doc. With the clock ticking, Doc wastes time and manpower trying to scare Pat off by having U.S. agents pose as a creepy bunch of Nazis. When that doesn’t work, he has her shipped off to America by force, but she has a McGuffin Hitler needs so the Nazis hijack the plane.

There’s also a curious moment when Pat refers to Doc as not being really close — they’re only third or fourth cousins. That’s not accurate, but it is explainable (maybe she was being careful not to make herself look like leverage).

STRANGE FISH feels like a short story stretched out to novel length, and even given they were short novels by this point, the stretching shows. We open on Paris, a millionaire heiress/WAC, sent back from Europe after recovering from war injuries. She’s happy in New York until she sees a mysterious man following her, prompting her to fly to her Oklahoma ranch and her trusty right hand, Johnny Toms. Johnny’s a native American who amuses himself talking like a movie Indian even though he’s Harvard educated (the third such faithful but intelligent Native sidekick of the war years, following The Goblins and Secret of the Su). Unfortunately the bad guys have followed Paris to Oklahoma; Johnny tries calling Doc, who’s happy to help as an exciting break from his current plastics research (plastics was a wonder material back in that era).

The crooks try to distract Doc by convincing him Johnny’s call is to distract him from the real threat, somewhere in Brazil; Doc sees through the ruse and heads to Oklahoma with Monk and Ham. They’re almost immediately framed for murder, but it plays almost no role in the plot after that.

And what is the plot? It involves an aquarium fish everyone wants to get hold of for no discernable reason. Somehow the fish ties in to a Nazi war criminal fleeing the collapsing Reich; the fish is supposedly a clue to his whereabouts. It turns out to be more twisty than that, but not clever enough to be interesting.

Weirdly, the story seems to take place after V.E. Day, which is still several months off. There’s constant talk of Johann Jan Berlitz, the German the Allies have picked to replace Hitler. Unlike Jiu-San, it doesn’t appear to be a plan for the future; it reads as if the Allies are already occupying Germany and ready to start the new government. Did the publisher get short-handed and have to use this novel early? Or what?

#SFWApro. Pulp covers by Modest Stein, paperback by Leaf Larkin, all rights to images remain with current holders.