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Birds of Death
Doc Savage #104
by Kenneth Robeson
Bantam, 128pp
Published: October 1941, Bantam Omnibus #9 June 1989

I find myself in the unusual position of being disappointed by a Lester Dent Doc right on the tail of being impressed by a Doc written by someone else. That doesn't happen often. In this case, it was Alan Hathway's 'The Mindless Monsters' that impressed me, even though I wasn't expecting much from it, but Dent's 'Birds of Death' underwhelmed me, even though it's not a bad book and it has many component parts that ought to have made it far more notable.

For a start, it features a clever gimmick, namely that a number of people appear to have stopped  breathing but without actually dying. An industrialist called Winton Moldenhauer is the first but he's far from the last and there are few real clues as to why. I like the opening contrast between murder and a canary, a couple of thugs using the latter to get them into place to perpetrate the former. I like that their attempt doesn't work, because Benjamin Boot is an unusual character to say the least. And I like that, while Boot knows Doc as a scientist, because his mining company is using one of his inventions, but his butler, Julian, knows him as a composer for the violin.

That all arrives very early in the story and there's much still to come. We haven't even got to the traditional location shift yet, which is old school indeed, given that it's into inland Africa, and we haven't bumped into a lost civilisation yet. Even little touches pique the interest, like how Renny knows one character, a night watchman called Ollie Saff, because they worked a project together building a dam on the Nile, or how Liona Moldenhauer gets to scream, which must be something because she studied opera.

Doc and his aides are on the case quickly, but the only common elements in the mystery seem to be canaries and calloused feet, which really isn't much to go on. Oh, and I used "aides" there not "men" because this is a full boat adventure, with Monk and Ham as ever, along with Renny, Long Tom and Johnny, plus Pat, who has a few memorable scenes. Not only is she studying jiu jitsu but she reveals how she knows when things are happening in her cousin's world, which is through her pinching an un-scrambling device from headquarters that allows her to listen in to any of his radio communications. I like that.

In short, I like a lot of things about 'Birds of Death', but I don't really like the novel as a whole and I'm not quite sure why. Sure, part of it is going to tie to how easy much of this seems to Doc, who is not only able to leap through African trees Tarzan-style but do so while carrying the simian Monk, who has to weigh plenty, and right after being injured in the arm by a thrown runga. We know that Doc operates a level above even his aides in their specialised fields and more above everyone else, but it's been a while since he's seemed this superhuman to me.

It's almost like Dent is consciously reversing the recent series trend to make him seem just a little vulnerable. Without that vulnerability, it becomes hard to sell us on danger, even if Monk is scared silly by his trip through the trees. I also get that Doc has trained so intensively that he has what I'd count as an eidetic memory, given that he can remember things as abstract as fingerprints over a period of years, but suddenly he's an expert on canaries, just because. I'm sorry, but I couldn't buy into that. It's not just memorised facts, it's applied knowledge and that wouldn't seem to be much of a priority for someone tailoring themselves to fight crime.

Mostly, though, I think it's that the mystery never clicked for me. I like how it begins and I'm OK, I guess, with how it ends, but it didn't catch my interest in between. Dent doesn't connect the dots in a way that worked for me, instead breezing through the character introductions then whisking everyone off to Africa for an eventual explanation. In fact, only one character caught my interest, which is surprising. Usually Dent and the other names behind the Kenneth Robeson house name throw in quirky characteristics to give some life even to two-dimensional supporting players. That didn't happen here, except for Benjamin Boot.

And, while he's a fascinating exercise in contrasts, he doesn't seem to quite fit either. He's a rich man, who runs all sorts of businesses, but has time to indulge in unusual pastimes, not least the collecting of canaries. Monk says that he has the taste of a woman, which along with his habit of buying perfume, ought to mean that he's effeminate, arguably gay. However, he isn't. When the two assassins I mentioned try to murder him, they fail because he isn't the pantywaist they think he is and he takes them both down on his own. Oh, and he's in love with Liona Moldenhauer. He's the sort of character who ought to have shaken up an adventure like this, but somehow he proves unable to make it work either.

Outside of Pat's revelation, there isn't anything of note to add to the mythos of the series beyond Doc using a gas that Monk's been working on for use by military airplanes to knock out a mystery man who's been following him. I didn't even note down any cool slang. Arguably the most notable aspect that I haven't mentioned thus far is a name, that of O'Brien O'Callaghan, the tail that Doc knocks out with gas. It's an unusual name for a South African but sadly Dent doesn't build on that.

And so this was a dud for me, even with Dent behind it. Suddenly, I'm not looking forward as much to the penultimate Doc Savage novel for 1941, 'The Invisible Box Murders', but it's another one to feature everyone including Pat and it has an intriguing title, so I'll happily reserve judgement for now. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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