Readers of 'Doc Savage Magazine' back in the pulp era generally weren't aware that Kenneth Robeson was a house name, but I have a feeling that they still thought that something was up back at the offices of Street & Smith when this came out in November 1940. Today we can see that it was the fifth book in a row to not be penned by series creator and most frequent writer Lester Dent, whose most recent novel at that point was June's entry, 'The Awful Egg'.

It's telling that I can still feel the gloriously frantic first few chapters five months later but precious few positive aspects to the trio that followed from the pen of stand-in William G. Bogart, namely 'The Flying Goblin', 'Tunnel Terror' and 'The Awful Dynasty'. This one has all the elements that a 'Doc Savage' story ought to have and it has massive potential in synopsis form, but it just fails to engage, making us, or at least those of with the hindsight to know that Kenneth Robeson was made up, ache for a re-write by the best of the 'Doc Savage' authors, Lester Dent, who would have done so much more with it.

It's an Egyptology story that starts out on an ocean liner, introduces a curse, adds a beautiful princess—"as dainty-looking as a costly gem" with "large, deeply mysterious eyes" and eventually takes us into a pyramid from the Fourth Dynasty, the height of the pyramid-building age. There are millionaires and a buried treasure, the key to which is detailed on an ancient papyrus in a copper cylinder. There's even an albino villain by the name of John Black. These are quintessential elements to a high adventure and it's acutely disappointing that Bogart couldn't do more with them.

Unusually, Johnny is the first of Doc's aides to appear, keeping watch on a particular stateroom on that ocean liner. He sees the Egyptians bring their copper cylinder on board and he overhears details about what it might contain, but, after witnessing a weirdly glowing scarab beetle, is taken out of the picture. It's delivered to John Black in New York, sent by his cousin Northrup who recommends that he consult a noted Egyptologist, Lucius Pettibone, who proclaims it worthless. So he takes it to the millionaire A. B. Chickerelli, hawking an expedition that he must expect wouldn't turn up anything, all while the weirdly glowing scarab continues to dispose of people and hoodlums attempt to steal the copper cylinder.

We're five chapters in of sixteen when the story takes us to Doc's headquarters, where Monk and Ham manage to fluff their initial interview with Princess Amen-Amen, leaving Doc to materialise out of the blue and quickly save the day. It all feels a little off and the succeeding shenanigans with each of these characters trying to get one over on each other doesn't help any. The mysterious scarab, however many corpses it generates, never feels quite right either, with a host of characters recoiling in horror because they can see a bug in a room. At every point, I missed the hand of Dent.

The one redeeming factor from Bogart's point of view is that he brings in Pat Savage, who I find a little more welcome each time she shows up. I liked how he does so too, because she arrives at HQ to explain to Renny and Long Tom that Princess Amen-Amen was in her beauty salon wearing a scarab ring on her finger and talking of ancient Egyptian tombs on the phone. What's special here is that Renny and Long Tom have no idea who she's talking about, because it was Ham and Monk who dealt with her earlier, in the exact same spot they're standing, so Pat's ahead of the game as far as they're concerned. The catch to all this is that, one attack by gunmen on the Hidalgo Trading Company later, she's unceremoniously packed off home and plays no further part. That's quite the tease, Mr. Bogart!

The next problem is that the 'Doc Savage' formula has a traditional shift in location around the halfway mark and Bogart gets there far too late in this novel. Everything thus far has taken place in New York, a typical setup, but it hasn't truly engaged so we're eager for that move to somewhere exotic, especially as it's pretty clear from the outset that it's going to be the deserts of Egypt. Sure enough, that's where we go but not until three quarters of the way into the book. In chapter twelve, we set sail on the ocean and just five pages later reach the pyramid. That's quick going even for Bogart and the following scenes would have truly benefitted from a few more chapters to flesh them out. They're not awful, to borrow a word from the title, but they're not what they could have been.

And that's really where this one ends up. It's hardly the worst novel in the series thus far, but it doesn't live up to any of its promise. No wonder it got relegated to the tail end of the reprint series, the first of these stories to show up in an omnibus. The previous month's 'Devils of the Deep' saw publication from Bantam in paperback in a double, the approach taken when the series moved beyond its initial scope of one story, one book. However, there were a bunch of those and this one didn't make the cut, showing up in Omnibus 6 along with three other novels from much later in the series.

There isn't even anything interesting to say from the series standpoint. Nobody does anything unusual and nothing is introduced here for the first time. Frankly, the best detail is the very final one, when the game is over and we learn, as the dust settles, that the beautiful Princess Amen-Amen has quite a thing for one Lt. Col. Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, so much so that she wonders if he might propose to her. That's quickly solved by a cablegram sent to him care of her, calling him home to his wife because four of their children are down with the measles. Is this supposed to be a happy ending? I hardly think so, but it's not a bad way to wrap up an underwhelming novel. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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