Category Archives: Doc Savage

Doc Savage is, in many ways, a pulp forerunner of the comics super-heroes. But one of the ways Lester Dent’s tales don’t resemble the comics is the lack of continuity.

Comics continuity fascinated me as a kid. In Justice League of America #34, to take one example (it was one of my early acquisitions), there are references to Dr. Destiny’s previous battles with the JLA, including footnotes identifying the specific issues. This made them seem more real to me — just like life, what happened one issue could affect what took place down the road.  Doc Savage stories, by contrast, almost never reference each other. When Murder Melody compared events to similar ones in an earlier book (Man Who Shook the Earth) it astonished me because that was so unusual. As witness this month’s novels—

THE BOSS OF TERROR (cover by Boris Vallejo, all rights to current holder) opens in media res: Doc, Monk and Ham crash an ambulance into a limousine, part of a plan to get inside the mansion of millionaire “Radiator” Smith (wealthy from manufacturing automobile radiators and the like). Smith’s scared, wants to talk to Doc, doesn’t want the meeting publicized …but when Doc, posing as Smith’s chauffeur, gets inside the mansion, Smith insists he never called, doesn’t want to talk, please go away.

And then Smith’s son gets done in with lightning. That struck him inside a closed room. And then more men, also named Smith, die the same way. By the end of this fast-moving adventure (not great, but fun), it turns out the villain’s gimmick is exactly the same as the McGuffin in World’s Fair Goblin — a suitcase-sized battery that can store enough energy to power a skyscraper. Or electrocute someone; it turns out the invention in this book can only generate static electricity, which doesn’t work for power generation, but does fine as a murder/extortion weapon.

At no point does anyone refer to the previous adventure, which happened only a year earlier. I’m guessing Dent realized he hadn’t done much with the device in the previous story, so he used it as a murder weapon this go-round. But reading in original publication order (the paperbacks were closer to four years apart) it does seem odd nobody mentioned the resemblance.

A minor surprise is that the woman in the story, Annie, is nothing but an adventurer looking to make money off the gadget. She seemed so purposeful, I assumed she must be a female spy like Annabel in The Angry Ghost.

THE AWFUL EGG (cover by Bob Larkin, all rights to current holder) is one where continuity references would definitely have helped. It opens with Dr. Samuel Harmony (a phony doctor, I should note), abruptly shutting up his business and firing his receptionist, Nancy. When she talks to her boyfriend about it, someone shoots at her — which convinces the couple to contact Doc Savage.

Harmony, meanwhile, heads out west into the Badlands of Colorado. It turns out he’s an amateur paleontologist (though Dent refers to paleontology as archeology throughout the book) so he decides to pass his time on the run hunting for fossils. Johnny poses as a local guide, giving him his best role in ages. We learn he started using big words as a rookie archeologist/geologist to impress people, but enjoyed it enough to keep it up even after becoming established in his field. During the expedition, they find an ice cave where they unearth a dinosaur egg. Which gives Harmony an idea … but not a great one. After splitting from Johnny, Harmony kills and mutilates an animal, then a human adversary, to make it look like something actually hatched out of the egg. Then he uses a mock-up dinosaur to attack his rivals — it turns he and the other bad guys are in a three-way contest for control of a gold hoard.

The thing about Doc Savage stories is, it’s entirely possible to have a dinosaur show up, unlike, say, The Shadow. Doc battled dinosaurs just a few months ago, in The Other World. So why not reference the story to make the fake monster more plausible? You’d think Doc’s men would bring it up. I’m not sure it would help, as the scheme is strained (at times it feels like Dent had just read up on dinosaurs and wanted to show off his know-how) and one of the villains pretty obvious.

A minor inconsistency is that Ham now smokes cigars, which is treated as something he’s been doing since forever (whereas Monk, who’s sometimes shown as a smoker, apparently isn’t). A minor surprise is that Nancy turns out to be a selfish gold-digger, so much so even the libidinous Monk isn’t interested. Usually the female guest-stars were good girls.

THE SPOTTED MEN (cover by Boris Vallejo, all rights remain with current holder) opens with steel kingpin J. Henry Mason and his troubleshooter “Tink” O’Neil testing out a race car built partly from Mason’s revolutionary new formula for a tougher, lighter steel alloy — one that has obvious military potential, as is noted later in the plot. Only the car axle made from the super-steel breaks. And Mason disappears. And a berserk steelworker shows up, fighting with superhuman strength and covered with spots.

The story that follows by William Bogart, isn’t great, but it’s reasonably entertaining. As more men run wild and a plane built from the alloy breaks too (carrying not only Mason’s daughter but her friend Pat Savage) Doc and his crew arrive on the scene. It soon becomes obvious there’s a conspiracy to shut down the factory — could it be that as in Bogart’s previous story Angry Ghost, the plot has roots in the new European war (this was a March 1940 story)? In a twist I must admit I didn’t expect, it turns out no — the real scheme is one of Mason’s relatives, plotting to shut down the steel mill, crash the company stock price and take it over for a song. It’s in the tradition of Death in Silver and other finance-centric evil plans.

The best part of the story is Pat miraculously saving the plane from a crash. Later on, Doc shows how much he cares about his cousin when she’s finally rescued. The worst part is that the plot is a mess. There’s an exact double of Mason’s daughter running around which only serves to confuse people. And while I understand Mason trying to keep the steel formula safe, there’s no explanation why he allowed steel made from the fake formula to go into O’Neil’s car and the daughter’s plane (it appears that’s the reason for them breaking up). And once again, I could figure out the masked villain because there’s really nobody else to suspect.

THE EVIL GNOME is a good one by Lester Dent, though Bantam went cheap on the cover: it’s a cropped version of James Bama’s cover for Red Snow (all rights to image reside with current holder). It opens with yet another of Dent’s young drifters, but this time it’s a woman: “Lion” Ellison, a female lion tamer currently out of work due to punching her last employer out for sexual assault. She answers an ad for circus work that seems tailor-made for her. And it is. After meeting the creepy old dude who placed the ad (the gnome of the title), Lion suddenly finds herself walking down the street. Two days later. And it appears that in the interim someone took a photo of her murdering the state governor. Fortunately she’s received a letter from her dead brother in which he references Doc Savage (whom Lion had held up as the kind of guy her weak-willed, petty-crook bro should be more like). Can he get out of whatever she’s stumbled into?

While it’s fairly obvious what the gnome’s secret weapon is — an anesthetic gas so quick-acting you don’t even know you’re under — its use in the book is really effective. In one scene, Doc and his crew catch up with one of the henchmen, who’s about to spill everything. An instant later (as far as they can tell) his head is bouncing on the floor, an axe lying next to it. Yet they didn’t see anyone!

I also like that while the killings are partly PR, they’re also partly about PR. The gnome and his crew plan to cap off their killing spree by whacking a prince who’s visiting the US to encourage American support and intervention against the Axis. Once they kill him, the gnome plans to let both sides of the war bid for their services; the winner will see the loser’s entire military and political command wiped out.

The circus angle is rationalized by several characters having known each other on the circus or carnie circuit. Mostly though, it seems an excuse for Dent to toss off a lot of circus slang, particularly in Lion’s early scenes. Lion’s skills never come into play, unlike some of Dent’s other capable female characters.

As you can tell, this is another where WW II plays a role but only in the background. It’s much more isolationist than usual: Dent’s narration speaks disdainfully of that foreign prince as trying to con the US into taking sides in the war. Previously Dent never expressed an opinion one way or the other. Was it that the pressure for intervention was becoming louder? Bobb Cotter argues another effect of the war was keeping Doc on the home front. He may have a point; I’ll look at the rate of overseas travel sometime and see if I agree.

THE OTHER WORLD (cover by James Bama, all rights to current holder) is a good SF entry that starts off with a mysterious pilot, Decimo Tercio, landing at a farm near St. Louis. When a bull charges him, he kills it with a spear thrown from an atlatl. Then he heads off to the city’s fur mart, where he puts down some incredibly beautiful, utterly unique furs. He charges five grand, with which, as we learn later, he plans to buy the best, most powerful guns and ammo available.

Two Winks, a local fur trader, remembers that two men — Fancife and Arnold “Chris” Columbus — have expressed interest in hearing about such a trader. Two Winks contacts them both, but throws in with the obviously crooked Fauncife. They try and fail to stop Columbus getting a message to Doc Savage. While neither crook rises above “petty crook,” they’re cunning enough to hold their own against Doc and Co. for most of the book.

Eventually everyone winds up going back to the source of the furs, a Pellucidar-like inner-earth world (though it’s a giant cavern, not a hollow Earth). What makes it more memorable than the lost land of Land of Terror is Doc’s geeky response, as he stares around, starts ticking off everything he’s seeing and makes mental notes on the things paleontology has gotten wrong. He’s so distracted, in fact, that he’s blindsided when a saber-tooth attacks him. And then comes the T. rex (there’s a reason Tercio wanted those guns). And then comes the giant weasels of the cover, a surprisingly effective menace that can run faster, jump higher and climb better than Doc. In keeping with Lester Dent’s ongoing efforts to humanize Doc, the Man of Bronze completely loses his cool and makes several bad mistakes.

Of course, things eventually turn out okay. The bad guys buy it, Chris stays in the cavern with Lanta, a beautiful cavewoman, and Doc agrees to keep the existence of this other world a secret.

THE ANGRY GHOST by William Bogart is much less effective. It starts with a young English woman, Annabel Lynn, apparently attacked by something unseen in the waters off Rockaway Beach. Then various installations — forts, gun ranges, bridges — start collapsing up and down the coast. Is some kind of invisible giant attacking America? The woman goes to Doc for help but a Ham imposter tricks her. Nevertheless Doc gets involved. What follows is lots of aimless chasing and confusion before we learn the secret of the “angry ghost”: it’s a sonic ray-weapon an unnamed European power is using to pressure the United States into forgiving that nation’s WW I loans.

It’s a weak story, partly because the “ghost” always seems like a ray from the very first. And the mystery only stays puzzling because people keep refusing to tell Doc anything. Not that this is unusual (Columbus in the previous book refused to reveal where Tercio came from) but Bogart pushes it too far: the government refuses to let Doc in on the problem because they’re afraid if he knows, it’ll leak to the newspapers. The feds should have known better. And at one point, Doc’s aide Long Tom actually cracks the secret, but Bogart promptly forgets this.

Once again, it feels like WW II is pressing on the series (this one came out in February, 1940). It’s very easy to assume the unnamed foreign power is Germany, which walked away from its promised WW I reparations (which was not seen as unreasonable at the time — they were quite ruinous). But it’s not absolutely definite, which let stories like this avoid the outrage of the isolationists (advocating for getting involved in another European war was a Bad Thing). It’ll be a while yet before full-blown Nazi adversaries become the order of the day.

Cover by Boris Vallejo, all rights to current holder.

In the middle of this month’s second book, it struck me that WW II had begun in Europe, yet there’s no sign of the war here. Just one or two references such as Congress requiring payment up front when the US government ships military supplies to warring nations.  Of course the war hadn’t touched America, except as a news story, but it still feels weird.

HEX by William Bogart is a straight-up Halloween story (it came out November, 1939). An engineer planning a Massachusetts highway through a ghost town near Salem suddenly starts babbling insanely. Rennie, a fellow engineer, steps in, and winds up babbling too, then both men disappear. Doc, Monk and Ham show up (Pat has an annoyingly brief role — like Poison Island, just serving as a courier) and discover assorted oddities: a mysterious garden in a seemingly abandoned building, the Screeching Lady of the Marsh, the sinister witch Hannah, and a descendant of Cotton Mather (not to mention a black mass midway through). Meanwhile there are reports of wealthy men who’ve started babbling the same way Rennie and his colleague were. What’s going on?

It turns out the bad guys have developed a strain of plant (in the hidden garden) that produces a new kind of truth serum. If someone asks you questions, you babble insanely for a couple of minutes, drop in the answer, keep babbling — and remember nothing afterwards. A perfect way to interrogate someone without the victim or others realizing what’s been done (Monk bluffed some captives about a similar drug in Poison Island). However the highway would force the villains to relocate the garden, and the plants are too delicate to transplant yet. Hence the scheme.

It’s a fun one, with one curious note (as Philip José Farmer points out in Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life). When Pat catches Monk hitting on a young woman, he’s positively embarrassed. That’s not Monk’s usual style, even given he likes Pat a lot — should we assume maybe they more-than-liked each other? Probably not, but still…

THE DAGGER IN THE SKY by Lester Dent is one I liked a lot as a kid, but drops a little due to not living up to my expectations. Which is not the book’s fault as much as it is my reading so much of the series so fast — plus I already know the big reveals.

The plot has the bad guys fomenting a war between the Country of Good and the Country of Evil, which is being equipped with all the best weapons for the job (compared Land of Long Juju, though this resembles Dust of Death too). When Doc takes off on vacation, the villains assume he’s heading to Cristobal in South America (Country of Good) and blow up his plane, after which a 200 foot dagger appears briefly in the air overhead. Smaller daggers show up stuck in people’s chests, then disappear. The daggers are supposedly the wrath of Kukulcan for the government’s transgressions, freaking out the superstitious natives (when not panicked, they’re stereotypically lazy and laid-back). It is, of course, a trick.

There are a couple of interesting aspects to this one. Doc’s vacation is another example of him rebelling against his training: he wants to kick back for a month, camp out, fish, eat unhealthy foods and generally not be superhuman. When he’s traveling through the jungle with Sanda, daughter of Cristobal’s leader, she’s so distracting Doc finds himself thinking what it would be like to kiss her, and stumbles into a trap.

I wonder if that attraction is why Dent emphasizes Sanda is a blend of Scots and Castilian blood (her family’s ancestor was a Scots businessman who settled there).  This seems an odd mix, but as it omits any native blood, was it to avoid any hint of miscegenation?

And then there are the villains. The brains behind the war are seven of the world’s wealthiest men. As one of them explains to Doc, they’re fed up with the government oppressing the wealthy by income tax, inheritance tax, forcing banks to insure deposits (a policy created in response to Depression bank failures, of course), etc., etc. So they’re going to conquer Cristobal, relocate themselves and their businesses there and make it a tax-free haven (the natives will Know Their Place or get shot). That’s a scenario I don’t think even Occupy Wall Street could have come up with. Of course, they lose, and Doc’s crime college brainwashes them into becoming philanthropists. We end with Sanda showing up in New York to hit on Doc, and Monk nobly sacrificing himself to hit on her first.

Both covers by James Bama; all rights to current holders.

Lester Dent had a number of stock openings for a Doc Savage story, such as one of Doc’s team discovering an evil plot, or a desperate person trying to reach Doc and running into trouble. One he seems to have added to his portfolio around 1938 is to have a likable young drifter stumble into trouble: Sagebrush Smith (The Pirate’s Ghost), Tom Idle (Mad Mesa), Hobo Jones (The Flaming Falcons) and now Herb March in POISON ISLAND (cover by James Bama, all rights to image with current holder)

To the dismay of his girlfriend Glendara Smith, Herb has decided he wants to do some adventuring before they tie the knot. That includes becoming part of a revolution in Hidalgo (yes, the country that provides Doc with the gold to finance his work), which in contrast to The Golden Peril is treated as a harmless lark (the government swats the revolutionaries down with little effort). Herb stows away on a yacht to get out of the country, tries to impress the gorgeous owner with his derring-do, learns she’s Pat Savage and realizes she’s way more an adventurer than he’s ever been (to say nothing of her cousin, of course). Then Herb discovers another stow-away plotting against the boat and gets a warning to Glendara before Pat, Herb and the crew pull a Marie Celeste and vanish. More vanishings follow in subsequent chapters.

It turns out the former right hand of one of Europe’s dictators (“The politician was one of the — well, he was the latest kind.”), having been exiled by the tyrant as a potential rival, is now trying to spark a war between his homeland and the U.S. The vanishings involve boats carrying fuel for the villain’s ship, or in Pat’s case gold for Doc Savage (though why she had to transport it herself is unexplained). It’s reminiscent of both The Submarine Mystery and The Devil on the Moon in riffing off the pre-war situation and bland as well. Pat might as well have been Pretty McCaptive for all the action she gets; Johnny speaks without his usual polysyllabic dialog. Glendara, on the other hand is a blast: plunged into danger, she discovers she kind of likes it. Although she and Herb appear to be headed back to normality at the end, I’d like to think of them both going off for more adventures (a shame none of the comics adaptations use some of these fun guest-stars).

Tech-wise, we learn Doc’s aircraft hangar has a kind of diesel-punk security camera, taking pictures every minute or so and then instantly, automatically developing them. Monk claims to have a truth serum that drives you mad while you babble your secrets; it’s a bluff, but Dent deploys a drug that does just that in Hex, coming up next month.

I found THE STONE MAN a lot more fun even though it’s just a fairly mundane Lost Race story by this series’ standards. The book opens with schemer Spad Ames (“His specialty was avoiding the law.”) discover said race in a Southwest cave system and sees his partner transformed into stone. Actually he’s been frozen by a miracle mineral that can lower the temperature to absolute zero. The lost people, while they want to stay hidden, also hope to somehow market this as the ultimate refrigerant; Ames wants control of it for the same reason (the book skates over the potential for using it as a weapon). Doc has to stop Ames while avoiding the hidden civilization’s desire to lock him up along with anyone else who discovers them. They are, however, much more mundane than, say, Land of Always Night.

Part of what makes it work is how Doc gets involved. Ames’ partner is Herman Locatella, a lawyer on the brink of deposing Ham’s standing as the world’s best-dressed attorney. So Ham bugs Locatella’s office, hoping to prove the guy is dirty. I also enjoyed some of the snappy dialog (“I lived on rattlesnakes for almost a month.” “That almost makes you a cannibal, doesn’t it?”). For whatever the reason I think I enjoyed the book more than it’s objectively worth.

A minor oddity is that both books involve Ham or Monk humiliating the other by tricking them into a sucker bet with an embarrassing penalty: Ham has to be Monk’s chauffeur in the first book; Monk has to bark like a dog when Ham enters the room in the second.

Cover by Emery Clarke, all rights to current holder.

Both stories this month are from Lester Dent’s frequent pinch-hitter, Harold Davis. Both were good entertainment, though neither one was first rank.

MERCHANTS OF DISASTER (cover by James Bama, all rights remain with current holder) is often compared to Davis’ The Munitions Master but other than one early scene (soldiers on a drill ground struck down by some unknown device, apparently suffocated) there’s no real comparison. It opens with a couple of other weird events — a hobo becomes the first victim of the mysterious death, a man with badly damaged eyes sees strange flashes through his protective glasses — and then the government calls in Doc Savage. Doc and his team have several run-ins with the death, surviving (of course) even though it negates things like gas masks and the concentrated oxygen pills Doc’s been employing since Mystery Under the Sea. Unlike the madman of The Munitions Master, the villains here have only the one weapon, but as you can guess “the oxygen destroyer” is a good one. A nice touch is that the bad guys aren’t plotting to conquer the world in any way shape or form. They’re quite literally acting as merchants, willing to sell the weapon to anyone who will pay their price — in fact, everyone who will pay their price, after which they’ll do a disappearing act before the buyers realize they didn’t purchase the only formula.

Once again reflecting the approaching war, this has attacks on the West Coast convincing officials that it’s imperial Japan’s opening act of war, followed by paranoid stories of Japanese landings or attacks around San Francisco. Just a couple of years later, those kind of warnings would be taken seriously in real life.

A minor point is that the villains’ gang all wear large watches, which are secretly designed to receive coded radio transmissions. This is worth noticing because Doc and his team use the same watches in the following adventure.

As Bobb Cotter’s book says, THE CRIMSON SERPENT is a rather Southern Gothic tale (cover by Emery Clarke, I believe, all rights remain with current holder). It opens with Renny working on a flood-control project in the Arkansas swamps. The swamp folk (every bit as primitive as the ones in Quest of the Spider) are not happy with the government coming into their turf. Neither they nor the engineers are happy when Renny’s crew keep winding up dead with the Crimson Serpent, a grotesque pattern of wounds, marked on their body.

The bad guys do their best to stop Doc getting involved, without success. Things soon get weirder, going from the dead men and strange clanking sounds to men in ancient armor who may be a lost colony descended from the conquistadors, or immortal conquistadors themselves—is it possible Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth is in Arkansas rather than Florida? No, but given Doc’s dealt with immortality formulas before, it wouldn’t surprise me if there’d been some truth to that. The climax has Doc and Co. battling through the conquistadors’ castle, which is laden with as many death traps as a good movie serial.

It turns out the bad guys have for years been using the isolated castle as the base for a counterfeiting ring; with all their equipment set up there, they don’t want to move so they’ve been trying to rile the swamp men up into killing the engineers and shutting down the project. The problem I have with this, though, is that as the swamp rats know about the conquistadors (the crooks have been scaring them off for years) it’s odd they don’t bring up these spooks sooner. Another weakness is that Davis’ description of the “serpent” never gives me a clear sense of what it looks like. Despite those flaws, a fun one.

Once again I decided to take a break from reading the regular Doc Savage series. My initial thought was to go with Philip José Farmer’s The Mad Goblin, but instead I went with Aaron Allston’s DOC SIDHE (cover by David Mattingly, all rights to current holder). It’s a clever, well-done riff on Doc, though like many books with an awesome premise, I find myself spotting the flaws when I reread it (as I’m no longer stunned by the mere idea of it).

The protagonist, Harris, starts out miserable: he’s a former Olympic kick-boxer who keeps getting his butt kicked in combat, flopped as an actor and his girlfriend Gaby just dumped him (she loves him but she’s fed up with his inability to take charge of his own life). Then Gaby gets kidnapped; trying to rescue her, Harris stumbles into an alternate universe where it’s the 1930s, but with a twist. Most of the world’s population is part-elf and the greatest hero of the United States (or its alt.world analog) is Doc MaqqRee, a pureblood elf. Doc naturally takes an interest in Harris’ case and soon discovers it’s more than it seems: Doc’s arch enemy is plotting to change the magic that ties the two earths together, so that if he brings humans across from our Earth, they’ll be his slaves. An army of slaves.

Allston does a good job on his worldbuilding. The magic isn’t well-defined, but he shows enough and tosses off enough detail (a debt, financial or from a personal favor, is something a mage can use to get his hooks in you) that it works. While there’s a lot to like about the world—environmentally more sensitive than ours (particularly for the 1930s) and a lot more open sexually—it’s not a utopia. There’s discrimination based on skin color, and despite iron being toxic, they’re still building skyscrapers with it because what else is there to use?

Allston’s Doc Savage-pastiching is good too. There’s no attempt to mock the pulp style or Doc Savage’s adventures, and Doc MacRee and his crew (including Alistair the surgeon and Noriko the ace fencer) work perfectly as a team of pulp heroes. There aren’t many specific Doc references, but it definitely has the feel of one of Savage’s adventures. The reference that does leap out at me is that Doc MacRee is in love and sexually involved with a revolutionary in South America, the equivalent of the real series Monja. Where Doc Savage is chaste by choice, Doc MacRee tells Harris the idea of cutting himself off from sexual/romantic pleasure for life is insane.

About the only thing that falls flat are the protagonists from our world. This is a portal fantasy (human pulled into alien world) so I understand Allston wanting POV characters who shared our perspective. But that takes time away from Doc and his gang, who are way more interesting (it’s The Gold Ogre all over again). Harris is a stock zero-to-hero type and he gets far away most of the action. Gaby has almost no personality besides loving Harris and being brave. The characters tell us Harris’s fatal flaw is wanting to bend over and please other people but it never really comes across.

Given how uninteresting they are, focusing on them was a mistake (though one Lester Dent made too). Even so, it’s a fun book to revisit, though it may be a while before I bother with the sequel, Sidhe-Devil.

If you picked up 1939’s THE GOLD OGRE for the adventures of Doc and his crew, you might be surprised. It’s actually the adventures of four American teenage boys with Doc in a supporting role and Monk and Ham coming in near the end.

The story opens with a man named Worth confronting a golden, midget caveman (I presume “ogre” sounded better than “dwarf” in the title) that knocks him unconscious. Soon the ogres are all over town, people are disappearing or going crazy (a side effect of getting hit with that spiked club on the cover). Suspicion falls on local business kingpin Marcus Gilt, who owns a collection of gold caveman statues (for no particular reason) that have disappeared. It’s the kind of situation Doc often gets in the middle of—but instead, we have four local boys taking point:

•Don Worth, son of the initial victim, an all-American Hardy Boys type. Quiet, but he knows how to fight.

•B. Elmer, who’s determined to get rich and sees money-making opportunities everywhere.

•Mental, the brainy one, with a constant stream of philosophical quips (though I actually like “A worm is the only creature that never falls over.”).

•Funny, the wisecracking fat kid.

According to Savage-ologist Bobb Cotter, Street & Smith hoped to spin the kids off into their own series, but reader interest was non-existent. Just as well, I think. Where Doc’s group have physical, visual quirks (Renny’s massive fists, Ham’s brilliant clothes, Monk’s apelike physique) the boys all have verbal ticks (equivalent to Johnny offering to bet on sure things) and that makes their conversations annoying and repetitious. Funny cracks wise. Mental makes with the epigrams. B. Elmer discusses how whatever’s going on could make them rich. It would have gotten annoying fast.

As for the bad guys’ scheme, which will eventually give them control of Gilt’s millions, suffice to say it’s way more elaborate than it needs to be, and not entertaining enough to justify it.

THE FLAMING FALCONS, by contrast (and may I say I love that James Bama cover?) is much more fun, one of Doc’s ghostbusting adventures. The book opens with vagrant “Hobo” Jones discovering a mysterious plantation out in Arizona, with a high-tech control room hidden in a fake haystack. And inside the control room, Jones discovers a dead man with a goat-sized bird perched behind his shoulder, with eyes like “blood-red blisters” and feathers “the hue of the skulls in doctors’ offices.” Said bird eventually explodes in a puff of fire.

A baffled Jones hooks up with pretty Fiesta Robertson (unusually we don’t get any quirky explanation for the name), and together they try to contact Doc Savage (as usual the bad guys try to stop them telling Doc anything). By the time Doc arrives in Arizona, the plantation has vanished. Clues eventually lead the good guys to another plantation in Indochina. In between, the falcons keep showing up, people drop dead, and the falcons turn into flame.

It turns out the plantation is growing a hybrid rubber plant that can thrive in the American southwest, so the U.S. will have its own rubber supply (Harold Davis used the same McGuffin in the less-interesting Land of Fear). The operation has been taken over by crooks, while other crooks—representing the established rubber industry—try to shut the operation down. The falcons are a tool to intimidate Crook Group A, with their tricks all explained by chemistry (Dent has a footnote that of course the chemicals are real, but for security reasons he can’t get specific). What isn’t explained is why someone growing plants in the Southwest would have a second plantation in the very different climate of Indochina—wouldn’t the Sahara be more logical?

Both covers by James Bama, all rights reside with current holder.