If I've learned anything from the first ninety-five 'Doc Savage' novels, it's that the various authors worked to a general formula. They varied it on occasion to keep things fresh, but there were always commonalities. The typical novel started in New York but halfway, after plenty of intrigue, shifted to a more exotic location, one that during World War II had to be somewhere in the Americas. The plot was identified early but the mastermind behind it is kept obscured. Doc is present, of course, but rarely all of his five aides at once. Monk and Ham are the mainstays and they bicker endlessly. And there's a beautiful young lady who seems to be a villain but probably isn't. That's a broadest generalisation but it gives you an idea.

This one, arguably for the first time, ignores most of that. In fact, it doesn't even feel like it's only one 'Doc Savage' novel. It feels like two separate 'Doc Savage' novels shoehorned together, plus an Abbott & Costello movie added for good measure. Why, I have no idea but the author responsible was William G. Bogart, who had written a third of the titles over the previous year but would only write one more, a couple of years later, before Lester Dent took over for four more. After that, he would go on to write five of only six novels not to be penned by Dent, but all within eight months.

The first of those three novels is the closest to what we expect. Monk and Ham are caught up in a parade down Fifth Avenue. They're supposed to be meeting Doc and they're late, prompting all the usual bickering, but Doc isn't, which is unfortunate because the meeting was set to kidnap him. He takes down five guys in an elevator with a neat new trick to stretch his muscles and thus grow half a dozen inches, enough to reach the roof of the elevator car. He gets away, they get him again, then throw him into a hearse, the only vehicle that can get through the parade, and then he gets out of that too. So far so typical.

It's chapter three when we forget about that novel and leap into the Abbott & Costello movie. I've got to say that this is a fascinating approach, especially given that the famous double act had only just debuted in the movies, in 'One Night in the Tropics', which hit theatres in November 1940. The issue of 'Doc Savage Magazine' that featured this novel came out in January, 1941, so pretty close in the grand scheme of things.

The setup arrives at headquarters in the form of a simple telegram. Monk's uncle, Chester Mayfair, has died in England and Monk has inherited big. There are properties in Canada worth five million bucks, including the Estate of Mayfair, and there's also an earldom. The character we usually know as Monk or "the simian one", occasionally as Lt. Col. Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, is now also the Earl of Chester, of Essex and Cornwall. Cue the hilarity, given that he's wearing a checkered suit at the time that's worth maybe twenty bucks and he has the manners of the ape that he looks like.

It's too good to be true, of course, but Doc verifies it with the president of a highly prestigious law firm that's handling the estate, so they prepare to travel, once Ham can deck his lordship out in an array of more appropriate outfits for a nobleman at his regular tailor. Monk even tries to escape it all by vanishing, but Doc suckers him back in by planting a story in the papers about new challenges to his inheritance. And so off they go to Canada.

Of course, they're attacked when they get there. Of course, there are kidnaps and escapes and all the usual shenanigans, but there's one other unusual aspect here. When Monk and Ham and some of the others travel to the Estate of Mayfair, Doc heads off to the Fortress of Solitude. Except that he doesn't. That remote, unknown to anyone else, retreat and laboratory suddenly gets elevated into a ruse. He only pretends to go there, then backtracks and follows the other plane. Cue plenty more intrigue.

What you might be wondering at this point is where the story might be and that's exactly what I'd noted down, because this isn't a long novel, as was the case at this point in time, and we're halfway through it already. All we know is that Monk's now an earl and someone's trying very hard indeed to kidnap Doc. That's not a heck of a lot to hang a 'Doc Savage' novel on. It's perfectly fine to hang an Abbott & Costello movie on, because the double act we're following, here Monk and Ham, can happily bumble around for fifty more pages until the story falls out of the walls. Oh hello, a curse!

Eventually, of course, Bogart reels us back on track in a new, far more exotic location than Canada, and all this starts to make a modicum of sense. However, realistically speaking, there's a lot more attention given to the Earl Monk angle than was ever deserved for the benefit of that plot. Given how late it shows up and how ultimately simple it turns out to be, I can't even talk about it without venturing into serious spoiler territory. It's not without its merits, but it's easily too little, too late in a book this size to be truly substantial.

What I can say is that there's a real Earl of Chester, who happens to look and sound very much like Monk does, which is a lot of fun. I'm sure I'm hoping in vain for him to return in a later book in the series, but there's really no reason why that shouldn't happen. There's the inevitable beauty that I'd mentioned in my opening paragraph. Here she's Annabelle Nickerson and she thinks that Monk is cute, which naturally enrages Ham. And I guess I should add that there's a connection to the war, because I've been tracking how much, or rather how little, that happens. However, the villain here is doing what he's doing in order to sell a particular secret to "a European dictator whose country was already at war in Europe". No names provided. Guesses on the back of an envelope, please, to the usual address.

And so this is a real mixed bag of a book. I can't say I didn't enjoy it because making Monk an earl provides endless fun to his bickering with Ham, so much so that it spreads to other colleagues, but it doesn't do a heck of a lot for this story. As a one-off, this was thoroughly enjoyable, but it has to be a one-off. It would already be old hat by the following month, so I hope Lester Dent, who gets control back for 'The All-White Elf', ignores it completely. Fingers crossed. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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