Doc Savage, High and Low: The Flying Goblin and the Tunnel Terror (#SFWApro)

Both books this month are by William Bogart, not Lester Dent, and both covers are by Bob Larkin. All rights to covers reside with current holder.

THE FLYING GOBLIN starts off in cracking style: two hoods summon a hurtling Something from the sky to smash into Doc’s crime college (which hasn’t appeared since The Annihilist) and bust out Birmingham Jones. Jones has undergone Doc’s memory-wiping surgery, but he hasn’t been broken of the desire to kill, so the bad guys recruit him. Meanwhile Ham and Monk, acting on their own, investigate a pretty young woman’s story of seeing a similar flying object near Sleepy Hollow (there are references to the Headless Horseman, but nothing really comes of that angle). The flying thing destroys their car, almost killing them. What is this mysterious super-weapon/being? And what are the bad guys’ goals?

It’s a lively story until it falls apart at the end. There’s no good reason for the guys to have attacked the college (which is, after all, guaranteed to draw Doc’s attention, a thing to be avoided) as Birmingham Jones isn’t really any tougher or nastier than umpty-zillion other thugs in the series. And how did they know his mental state, given there’s no hint they have a spy inside the college?

Then there’s the climax in Paris. Once again, WW II infringes on the series, but only in the sense that there are two unidentified countries fighting somewhere else in Europe (apparently only two), and both sides think the other is using the flying weapon (a super-fast radio-controlled missile) against them. France? Apparently in the Savage-verse it hasn’t been fighting in the war since the previous year. Oh, unlike The Evil Gnome, the bad guy’s real goal isn’t to sell his weapon, it’s to terrify the world into making peace (in another WTF moment, the two warring countries do indeed stop fighting. It’s as incompatible with the real world as Fu Manchu assassinating Hitler).

In a minor note, Bogart forgets that Renny looks saddest when he’s happy and vice versa.

THE TUNNEL TERROR is flawed, but a lot better. It starts, like a lot of recent Dent stories, with an unemployed drifter; this time it’s veteran tunnel digger (“mucker”) Hardrock Hennessy. Hitchhiking out West to get a job with one of the big dam projects, he encounters a mysterious fog that burns when it touches and fatally desiccates anyone caught inside it. He narrowly escapes, but the fog is soon threatening other people in the digging tunnels around the big dam. There are also remnants of a lost civilization of giants — is it possible they’re still down there, alive? As with The Awful Egg, it’s not a possibility we can rule out.

It turns out, though that the gas and the supposed giants — the artifacts are real, but the makers are long gone — are part of a scheme to stop the dam project and relocate it to land someone else owns (land grabs are a familiar series plot). Today, of course, they might be able to stop the project based on the archeological significance alone. It’s a solid story, but the lost race probably needed to be played up or somehow tied in with the gas — as is, it’s like the bad guys were just throwing plots at the wall to see what sticks (which admittedly would be plausible). We do get one of the series’ competent women, Chick Lancaster, a tough-minded but (of course) gorgeous engineer working on the dam.