'Doc Savage Magazine' was changing with the times. June 1940 was a good chunk of the way into a world war that was hardly acknowledged when it began but was lasting too long to be ignored. So Lester Dent fashioned a story set on the fringes of that war that hasn't much to actually do with it. It's all rather prosaic and old-fashioned but, for quite a while, it plays at being a cunningly-fashioned mystery, mostly through one of the better-drawn supporting characters the series had ever seen, a rich New York physician called Dr. Samuel Harmony.

He shows up to work on the first page in his chauffeur-driven limo to find no patients. However, ten minutes later he's as white as a sheet and he promptly shuts down his entire operation. He asks his receptionist to cancel all his appointments and mail a set of messages before she's out of a job. He even asks her to close down his offices and hand in the key, before vanishing unceremoniously out of her life. Of course she doesn't do any of these things because why would she. Instead, she takes a look at his office to try to figure out what's going on, something that gets her shot at from some nearby building.

What she finds before then is that he was shocked by a photo in the paper, depicting two men who were departing from a steamship. One is Edward Ellston Parks and the other Doc Savage, who she finds herself immediately impressed by, even though Harmony had stabbed him through the chest with his pen. She's Nancy and she rings her boyfriend Clarence Older, known as Hickey, who knows exactly who Doc is and takes her to see him. Doc takes her story seriously and has Monk join Hickey as Nancy's bodyguards, which lasts precisely as long as it takes them to get down to the street, as she's promptly kidnapped not to reappear until the final chapter.

There's a lot of good stuff in these early chapters. The opening chapter is furiously busy, as if Dent knew he didn't have as many words to work with so got down to business immediately. I don't know if this is a shorter novel than its predecessors, but it seems like it is. Nancy and Hickey come to see Doc at his HQ, of course, but they're diverted onto the twentieth floor, where Ham and Monk are a sort of filtering committee. And, when Ham asks Doc about Parks, he's shown a box that contains a fossilised baby pterodactyl that he'd handed him for research purposes.

Best of all, while Doc's investigating Parks at the Ritz-Central, Harmony is running far and fast in a thoroughly complex chain of movements. Get this! He takes his limo to the train station, where he dismisses his chauffeur. But then he takes a taxi to the airport and buys a ticket to Chicago. Before the flight departs, he rings around private detective agencies to find an operative who looks quite like him and puts him on the plane instead. He takes a bus to Philadelphia, then flies to Miami and finds Nick Hostelli waiting for him with a gun. Hilariously, he didn't know any of the steps Harmony had taken to obscure his trail. He just figured he'd head for South America and that meant Miami.

However Harmony gets the drop on him with a knife he's been sharpening on the flight. He swaps clothes and ID with his would-be captor, then slices up the corpse's face to make it believable, and even wires Parks as Hostelli to say that he had to kill Harmony. Then he changes plans, flies to New Orleans, takes a sleeper train west, another plane and a bus, then buys a used car in a small town in Colorado. He drives around the west for a while, swapping cars frequently, until he ends up in a Dakotan town called Kadoka, where he hires a guide to take him fossil hunting in the Bad Lands.

That's quite a trail to follow but the tall and incredibly thin guide who seems to know a heck of a lot about archaeology and is careful to not use challenging vocabulary is a piece of cake for us regular readers to recognise. Yes, it's Johnny and he does exactly what Harmony wants, guiding him into a perfect area to find fossils and finding them too. There's the jawbone of a brontosaurus. There's a head from an ancestor of the horse. And there's a toebone from a T. Rex. However, the gig is up in an ice cave, when they find part of a dinosaur leg, complete with flesh, and, inside the ice, an egg. That's when Johnny hurls out an "I'll be superamalgamated" and Harmony knows exactly who he is.

During the ensuing chaos, the egg sits outside in the sun and, when Harmony eventually returns to check it out, realises that there's something alive inside. Something that, only a little later, as he's cooking dinner over a fire, cracks open. He looks inside and runs. Johnny calls in Doc and they find the ice cave blown up, the remnants of the egg still outside and whatever was inside it as gone as Harmony, so the chase is very seriously on.

I loved the first half of this book. It's thoroughly different to any earlier novel and, while Dent has us follow Harmony on a whirlwind tour of the country, we always know where we are, unlike those William G. Bogart novels that move us around like tumbleweeds in a tornado for no better reason than to keep us on the hop. Everything makes sense here and we don't feel cheated when we find that Johnny was able to follow him all the way without being noticed. The setup is good and I have no complaints about the fossils. It all seems far more grounded to me than what happened in 'The Land of Terror', even if we're hatching a dinosaur in the badlands of South Dakota.

I even liked the fact that Doc and his aides, all of whom show up for this one, don't seem to make a jot of progress. Whenever someone checks in with the rest, they find that they're all still firmly in the dark. They haven't found Nancy. They haven't figured out what South Orion is. Hickey's raging at how ineffectual the legendary Doc Savage is. And the bad guys keep chipping away at the team by taking them gradually hostage. Deliciously, Renny, who's one of the first kidnapped, finds out a lot more in half an hour of being questioned than the entire team has that far.

The problem is that the promise early on isn't maintained to the finalé. Once Ham figures out the identity of South Orion, the mystery fizzles and it all starts to rely on the monster that hatched in South Dakota, a monster that Harmony seems to be bringing back to New York with him, leaving a trail of mangled bodies in their wake. And, even though Doc encounters real live dinosaurs early on in 'The Land of Terror' and as recently as 'The Other World', only four months earlier in 1940, it never feels like this awful creature is ever going to follow suit. Dent does try, but the last third of the book gradually transforms into something utterly mundane.

Had he started out mundane and worked through with the care that Harmony applied to his long and tortuous escape route, maybe this would have become a worthy entry into the series. But, as it stands, it sets up so much and so well that the explanations had to be special to work and they just weren't. As such, this one ends up a disappointing dud, even though I may just read the first seven chapters again and imagine what it could have become from there. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For more Doc Savage tiles click here