After a couple of William Bogart-penned entries in the series, Harold A. Davis returns for a couple to kick off the second half of its run, ninety-one novels in. It's a good one too, for a while, but it has trouble maintaining its power and ends up a little underwhelming. At least it starts well with what has to be one of the best initial mysteries of the series that's set up over three chapters.

Hiram Shalleck is kidnapped from the small town of Lamar, Colorado. He's a nice guy, who arrived a decade earlier out of the blue, set up a lunch truck and did well for himself. Little is known about him except the curious sheriff discovered that he's a fan of Doc Savage. Anyway, he's held up at his lunch truck by a couple of thugs who call him Joe, put him on a plane and tell him he'll soon see the Purple Dragon. After a jab, he wakes up to see that purple dragon emerging from a sheet of flame.

Cool, huh? Well, he wakes up next in Chicago, which doesn't surprise him much but everything's off. The cars are advanced, his favourite bar has been remodelled and where's Mike the bartender? It isn't even prohibition any more, which he remembers, thinking about taking Pinkle and Gunsey on their last rides. It's when he sees the date on a newspaper that he's truly shocked. It's 1940. It was 1929 the night before! He's lost eleven years and suddenly there's Pinkle and Gunsey ready to take him on a late ride.

It's after they all leave that the bartender puts it all together. He must be Joe Mavrik, the killer of the other two a decade ago. So off to the phone he goes and the news works its way to Doc, who is very aware of Joe and Hiram because he put the former through the crime college and set him up in life as the latter. Somehow he'd reverted back from Doc's procedure to cure him of crime, which seems a little fishy. We've always been told that there was an operation involved, but suddenly we find ourselves being asked to believe that a sudden shock might produce a short circuit in the brain to restore contact with the graduate's past. I'm not buying that.

Of course, other graduates start showing up dead or missing. Three of them try to trick Doc at his headquarters, but he sees through them. They're not bright. And so we go, with a story that has a number of excellent traps, a few new gadgets for Doc to use at just the right moment and a small cast of characters, so that the mystery at its heart isn't particularly deep, even though there's an impressive misdirection in a firm identification of the chief villain that we promptly mistrust.

The traps are probably the best parts. Ham and Monk follow Ears Dugan into one of them, finding themselves in the office of Dr. Constantine, expert in curing mental delusions. Of course, they are immediately taken for patients. Next thing we know, their photo's in the paper four columns wide with them hanging by their tails from trees like they're ape men. Yes, both of them and Chemistry for good measure. Ham won't live that one down. Then again, he won a bet when he had Monk be Chemistry and see if Renny noticed the difference when he lifted him unexpectedly out of a chair.

After that tree-hanging incident, they wake back up in Dr. Constantine's office, only to fight their way back into unconsciousness and next time they wake up it's in a room with a corpse next door, a suspicious gun conveniently located right next to it and scratches all over their faces. With sirens in the distance already, they realise they've been setup for a tough frame job and get the heck out of Dodge as quickly as they can. Once safe, they develop photos from the film Chemistry took (yes, he carries a camera around his neck nowadays) and discover they whodunit was them. And the police who promptly burst in already have an identical photo in their hands. Hmm. Suspicious much?

The gadgets are fair, but perhaps a little hard to swallow. Doc and his men apparently all wear the same brand of socks, with a small piece of a certain metal woven cunningly into their heels. If they need to check in on all the others, just press a button on some device and it'll vibrate the metal in each sock and absolutely nothing else. That's how we find that Long Tom's working yet another big power project in South America and Johnny's on another expedition in Asia, all while learning that Monk and Ham don't check in. Less effective is the anaesthetic powder that Doc has secreted in his shirt zipper, which sprays out if he yanks it upwards, an easy one to go horribly wrong, I'd think.

The weakest angle is the cast. Beyond a revolving door of former graduates who never stay long or do anything much, there's only Fielding Falcan, criminal lawyer; Marcella Walling, receptionist to Dr. Constantine; and Dude Starg, random henchman who apparently works for Falcan. Perhaps due to there being nobody else to give them to, he gets some great scenes, including one where he has Doc, in disguise as a criminal caught hiding in Juarez, Mexico, into a vat of quicklime, screaming as he sinks to his death. Needless to say, it's not really Doc, because he did a switch out of the switch, but you see the level of intrigue we're having to visit to get through this. The next most important character is Pal Hatrack (what a name that is!), who never appears, on account of being dead.

Davis has us zip here and zip there, with lots of characters getting knocked out and waking up in an entirely different place. Renny mysteriously survives one trap, in which he and Doc were suckered into a building which promptly exploded, only to find himself not in the Catskills but in a hospital in El Paso. That's not a fast trip, especially in 1940. At least he doesn't believe it's 1929! Other trends include learning things from newspaper headlines, which happens all the time, and people clearly dead turning up a few scenes later very much alive, which happens to almost everyone in the book, including Doc.

And so this is a good setup but an ultimately unfulfilling read. I do like the idea revisiting the crime college and its graduates. It's been done a few times in the series, but this initially plays out better than the others. Instead of Doc using these graduates as his very own brainwashed labour force, a dubious twist to a dubious methodology, he actually does what he always claimed to do, take thugs and crooks, remove their criminal tendencies, retrain them in something productive and set them up in life to be upstanding citizens. If only it wasn't so easily undone, as it is here!

Next month, another Harold A. Davis, 'Devils of the Deep', which appears to be a kaiju movie with a mysterious sea monster manifesting in the Gulf of Mexico, with a pulp cover that hearkens back to the days of Doc being chased by everyone as the believed villain of the piece. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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