I started my runthrough of Doc Savage novels, following the original pulp publication order, back in November 2015 after having so much fun at Doc Con 18, and I've finally reached the halfway point in seven and a half years, only two months behind schedule. This is #90, originally published in August 1940 and it completes the first half of the 'Doc Savage Magazine' run, because the final issue, dated Summer 1949, was #181. It'll take another seven and a half years before I'll get to that one, but the second half of the run starts next month, with 'The Purple Dragon', #191.

Frustratingly, given how much work Lester Dent had put into the series over the years, writing two thirds of the monthly novels, fifty-eight of them in all up until this point, he wrote neither 'Tunnel Terror' nor 'The Purple Dragon'. William G. Bogart penned this book, as he did its predecessor, 'The Flying Goblin', and Harold A. Davis took over for 'The Purple Dragon' and 'Devils of the Deep'. Dent would return in December for his fifth of 1940, 'The Men Vanished'. That's especially disappointing because, while 'The Flying Goblin' was probably Bogart's best contribution to the series thus far, he didn't similarly shine on this one.

It's one of those Doc novels that reads well enough as we're turning pages but, the more we think about it afterwards, the worse it gets. The mystery is suitably opaque but it's resolved very quickly and simply, without any thought to providing answers to the other questions we've raised while we read, like why did the villains of the piece do the particular things they did instead of, say, another set of things that would have been easier and more convenient. Why build the mythology they did and what was that grounded in? I couldn't tell you, because Bogart wasn't interested in telling me.

He starts us off with the usual character discovering something strange but there's a new angle to that this time out. That character is Hardrock Hennessey, a veteran mucker, meaning someone who digs tunnels. We don't know quite where he is because Bogart doesn't tell us at any point, but he's on his way to start a new job on the Yellow River Dam project and it's supposed to be in the west, so I'd lean towards Indiana rather than Georgia. Anyway, he runs into a mysterious fog that burns at a single touch. When it dissipates and he catches up with the car that didn't stop to give him a lift, to find that the driver has been turned into a dessicated corpse.

So far, so typical for a first chapter but, unusually, Hardrock is able to simply call Doc on the phone rather than spend the next few chapters trying to reach him, because he knows Renny from earlier jobs. Renny's right there, so he asks him to come down and look into this mystery, only to be caught by the same fog right there in a gas station. When Renny arrives by plane, with Monk and Ham in tow, along with Habeas and Chemistry, who have precisely no reason to be in this book, he finds the dessicated corpse of Hardrock. Except, Renny knows him and so also knows that the corpse isn't his old colleague. Hardrock has a tattoo of a mermaid on his chest. The corpse doesn't.

And so the mystery begins with their immediate search for the real Hardrock fairly hinting at much of what follows. We're introduced to further characters here and there, each of which vanishes and prompts a search. They might show up on that search, but one of the other characters vanishes and they have to start searching for that one instead. And so on. It feels like half the book is taken up in searching for people and random brawls, because Hardrock loves those and so does Monk. Another quarter is taken up with characters going down Shaft 9 in a bucket or coming back up again. There is no elevator yet, so going up or down the fifteen hundred foot shaft is done in a fast moving bucket.

Doc shows up out of the blue at the end of chapter four, after Monk's descended in the bucket, seen a mummy, joined a fight, got knocked out, woken up and found himself attacked by fog. Here, says Doc, put on this mask and let me carry you out of here, back up in the bucket to safety. If my maths holds up, searches, brawls and bucket journeys constitute three quarters of the book and half of the quarter that's left is dedicated to traps. Most of them are obvious, because someone crucial to the next part of the story has gone missing but left a note, and we know full well not to trust those. Doc doesn't, of course, and neatly turns many of these traps against their would-be captors.

Eventually, if we're not dizzy from searching here, fighting there and going down the shaft and up again far too often, we stumble on the big people. The first one is at Zeke Brown's farm, a skeleton eight feet long even crunched together a little, so it would have belonged to a nine foot man, much taller than the tallest man alive. The second one is in the woods but, as Monk leans over to inspect it, it grabs him by the throat and stands up. The skeleton's cool and the real tall man is even cooler but Bogart has no interest in explaining either. And so it goes.

I liked Hardrock, a reliable and well-respected mucker who everyone likes. He likes a brawl as much as Monk does but he also knows how to use his fists. There was good potential for him and he would have been worthy to show up for a cameo in a future novel. There's a girl, of course, and you surely know that she's a bombshell. Here, that's Chick Lancaster, whose has a particularly memorable first moment, punching Monk in the face. She may be a striking redhead, but she's also a capable lady in a fight and in a tunnel, because she's there to work, along with her brother, Raymond, known as Reds. Chick's easy to like too, but her impact drifts away as the pages run on and she's whisked out of there at the end for chivalrous reasons, which is a little unfair.

One nice touch is to set up the governor of the state, whichever state that happens to be, as a good candidate for the villain of the piece, though it would have had more effect if he'd actually showed up at some point. As always, in these shorter length Doc Savage novels, whoever does tends to be a villain and that holds true here. I won't spoil who it is, but you'll know as soon as he joins the fray at a late juncture. And that's about it.

There really isn't a lot of substance here beyond the bluster of searches, brawls and excessive trips up and down Shaft 9 in a bucket. At one point, Hardrock finds a claw in a tunnel that would fit over a human hand, not unlike Han's in 'Enter the Dragon'. It doesn't get used. The giant skeletons that show up here and there are a memorable touch. They don't get explained. The fog that burns when it touches is a brutal device and we know that, if it turns farmers into mummies outdoors, then it's got to be massively effective in an eighteen foot tunnel fifteen hundred feet below ground. It isn't explained. Jackhammer Edwards gets a quick cameo as a corpse, discovered in a torture device. It's not explained either.

And that's how 'Tunnel Terror' ends up: underused and unexplained. It has tunnels and it has terror. It's not breaking any advertising standards. However, it doesn't have a heck of a lot more. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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