At the end of the day, this is another Doc Savage novel with obvious flaws that lets itself down as it goes, but there's a lot happening here that's worthy of comment, even of most of it comes from a point of hindsight.

For one, while I'm reading these books in their pulp publication order, when they were published in 'Doc Savage Magazine', I don't actually own any of the pulps. I'm reading Bantam paperbacks, the reprint series that started in the sixties and, unlike every other pulp character, it actually finished its run. However, because the stories got shorter over time, only 96 of 182 novels were published in individual editions. I've covered 91 of those already, but this one is the earliest to appear as half of a pair in a double edition, alongside 'The Headless Men'. Later still, stories would be packaged into omnibuses, containing four or even five at once.

For two, just as Harold A. Davis was starting to get his teeth into the series, offering up two books in a row, the first being 'The Purple Dragon', that at least for a while, were notably impressive, he was about to vanish and that marked the turning of a tide. When fans think back to all Doc's many adventures, they tend to think of Kenneth Robeson being Lester Dent, who wrote the first and last and the majority in between. However, he wasn't the only author hiding behind the famous house name and Davis was the first of those, with 'The King Maker' back in June 1934. This was his twelfth Doc, published in October 1940, but also his last for six years. He would return only once more, for 'The Exploding Lake' in September 1946. Excepting a sprinkling from William G. Bogart and a new writer, Alan Hathway, it was gradually shifting back to being Dent's show.

For three, there's not only a real and deliberate acknowledgement that a war was happening but, for the first time, an acknowledgement of who was fighting it and how the United States fit into it. It's also handled appropriately, unlike the ham-fisted mess Bogart stuck Doc into only three books back in 'The Flying Goblin'. Back then, he introduced a villain whose crime was to want to stop that war, but, being a villain, Doc stopped him, and that really doesn't play well to history. Here, Davis introduced a concept designed for good but used for evil that preys upon the warmakers not for a moral standpoint but for simple profit, and is agnostic to their cause, raiding and sinking boats of all nationalities: British, German, American and anyone else's who wanders near enough.

That device is the devil of the deep, because there's only one of them, and it manifests in the form of a sea serpent, reaching out its tentacles to grab ships in the Gulf of Mexico. Once again, Davis is on top form setting up this story, showing us what this attack looks like, sensationalising it into the headlines and cleverly bringing it to the attention of Doc Savage. As the story runs on, we find that the people wielding this superweapon are particularly vicious, meaning that the death count here is substantially higher than the norm. Many ships are caught, their entire crews confined and then the vessels blown up, leaving rare survivors, memorably including a boy, Juan Lucke, who's found a perfect place to sleep without the captain finding him: under the captain's bunk.

What Davis also does that still confuses me is to set up a mistake by one of Doc's aides, giving us a clear indication that this could all have been wrapped up sooner if only it had gone differently. The thing is that it wouldn't and what we start to think of as a MacGuffin, a photo taken while the sea serpent device is attacking a ship and then sent to Doc at HQ, really doesn't matter, not just to us but also to the characters in the story. Why Davis has Monk decide that this photo isn't important and so not show to Doc when he has the opportunity, but then hide it close to his chest and slowly manifest guilt over being wrong about it, I have no idea. It doesn't matter.

By comparison he has Doc make a mistake, a very understandable one, late in the story, but for an important reason. You see, as the Emery Clarke cover art on the original pulp made obvious from the outset, the world at large starts to realise, from carefully organised circumstantial evidence, who's behind these dastardly and deadly attacks and that someone is Doc Savage himself. Much of this stems from a fight outside the Hidalgo Trading Company warehouse on the Hudson, which is subdued by Doc and his men firing their anaesthetic bullets into both sides, one of which turns out to be the F.B.I.

However, Davis cleverly re-enforces Savage as the villain by having him take his own submarine, not used in many novels, down to the gulf so he can hunt the bad guys by checking the sound that their propellers make. Finding one he can't identify, he captures it, only to realise that it's a new British design that hasn't made it into 'Jane's Fighting Ships' yet. He lets them go, of course, because he's not the villain—like you needed my confirmation on that—but the encounter neatly backs up how he's involved to a fickle world apparently ready to turn on one of its greatest heroes just like that on rather flimsy evidence.

I won't talk too much about the story here, because there really isn't much to it. Fundamentally, it introduces a cool sea monster that naturally isn't a sea monster; gradually lets us in on who might have created it, with some characters set up as red herrings to keep it interesting; then drops Doc in the net as the bad guy of the piece and has him quietly try to fix everything all at once. Davis is able to keep us guessing but how he does so is a little unfair, meaning that the grand reveals don't ring as true as they might. It also means that the beautiful lady in the story, because there has to be one of those, is both incredibly capable and wildly underused. Alice Dawn should have got more to do, even though the scenes she got are excellent.

And so this ends up another mixed bag for Davis. He underlines yet again how great he is at setup, taking his time grounding us in a weird mystery before introducing Doc and his men to it. It's not a setup to match 'The Purple Dragon' the previous month, also one of Davis's novels, but it's a good one nonetheless. He also shows how he has good instincts for the series, notably bringing Doc into actual wartime, which surely had to happen at some point given that World War II was now over a year old, in a way that avoided taking sides or a moral stance that might date incredibly quickly, if something changed in reality.

However, there are also few characters and the ones who warranted more attention didn't receive it. He has a go at Monk yet again, who can never seem to do anything right in a Davis novel, and he doesn't really give any of Doc's aides work of substance, even though all five of them show up this time out at some point. Beyond a few fights, this is mostly Doc's show, whether it's through action or decision. The ending, not unusually, for Davis, isn't remotely up to its beginning. And that makes me wonder what this could have been had it been developed differently. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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