The general consensus amongst fans is that the best 'Doc Savage' stories were written early in the series by its creator Lester Dent and it gradually went downhill from there, for a bunch of reasons. Some talk about the other writers behind the Kenneth Robeson house name. Some talk about the war and how it shifted the writing into being more realistic. Some talk about the humanisation of Doc, who stopped being an unstoppable superman. Some talk about a late shift from 'Doc Savage' to 'Doc Savage: Science Detective'.
I've been keeping my eyes open for reasons and I can buy into much of this. Certainly, my favourite novels thus far, like 'The Phantom City', 'The Annihilist' and 'The Thousand-Headed Man', arrived between late 1933 and late 1934, while 'The Green Eagle' didn't come out until July 1941. However, there was much that impressed me with this one, enough that I'd call it the best story in a number of years. It's not perfect, partly because I could see through the mystery behind the chief bad guy immediately and partly because the pace is slower than I'd like, but Dent did so many things right here to my way of thinking that I'm now wondering if I'm going to like the later novels more than fans tend to do.
For instance, one reason fans might not like this one is that it takes a long while to introduce Doc and his aides, but that wasn't a problem for me at all. All five of them show up this time out but we're not introduced to any of them until well into the second third of the book, surely the longest wait of the hundred and one novels thus far. Now, I should add that Doc is technically in the story in the first third too, but we don't know that at the time, because Dent does a good job of hiding him.
Usually, when this sort of thing happens, I tend to see through his disguise quickly. Here, I didn't, assuming instead that the persona he adopted to go undercover at the Broken Circle dude ranch somewhere in Wyoming was really a minor villain, even given the clues Dent dropped. I rumbled him a little later during a telling desert scene, so a little way before he's introduced but not by a lot. To me, this was a way for Dent to substantially ground his story before having to dip back into the expected series tropes such as Monk and Ham bickering at each other.
The setup is particularly strong. We stay in Wyoming, except for a brief section back in New York, because something mysterious is going on there. It may not be centered on the Broken Circle but it's certainly centered on the vicinity, where a cowboy, Ben Duck (who hates being called Donald), stumbles on an old-timer, later identified as Pilatus Casey. He's dying and soon dead of starvation and dehydration, even though his pack is full of food and water, setting up one mystery. Another is that he wants Ben to get the other item in his pack to his niece Mira Larsen and it's a puzzle, quite literally. It's a hand-held puzzle with a short verse on it, tasking its handler to manouevre feathers onto a green eagle. Why it's important, nobody knows, but people seem willing to kill for it.
While Ben Duck is the first character we meet and he would usually be the one to solicit help from Doc and his men, in this instance he can't because he's kidnapped by the bad guys. Instead, it's an interesting choice of character who does it on his behalf, because it's a fake Mira Larsen, Johanna Hickman by name, who goes by Hicky. She's a New York actress who's paid to fly out to the Broken Circle, pretend to be Mira Larsen and bring back the puzzle. Neatly, she escapes a mysterious man in the desert and successfully makes her way to Doc's HQ in New York, only to find that Doc is the very same man she escaped!
I like Hicky, who's one of a handful of characters I'd like to have seen return for a future adventure. As far as I'm aware, she doesn't, because nobody does, but we can still wish. Long Tom would very much like to see her return because he notably likes her, enough that Dent has to call out that he doesn't react this way often, not like notorious skirtchasers like Monk and Ham, so when he does, it means something. Unfortunately, he's disappointed at the finalé because she's already fallen instead for Ben Duck.
I also like everyone else this time out, which ought to be a given because most of them are aides, but Dent sharpens them up here. There's some bickering between Monk and Ham of course, but it's done well, even with another in a long line of examples where one temporarily appears to be dead, thus upsetting the other considerably until they realise otherwise and double down on the bickering. Other than that, they're all highly efficient here, as they really ought to be, being the top men in their fields, but so often aren't, stumbling around and setting off traps and the like. Ham is notably efficient here, proactive and self-motivated, which is highly refreshing.
And that extends to a whole slew of other details that elevated this novel for me. There's a bomb planted that's thoroughly realistic. Doc's believably rumbled at one point, prompting him to fall into a trap, through no fault of his own. The bad guys set a lot of capable traps and also find a neat way to avoid being trailed at a crucial moment, namely to cause a stampede and ride inside it. The Green Eagle puzzle is well-hidden and well-found. There's also use of a telephone code, of the type that's been used before for things like telegrams, only to be completely forgotten about in future stories. Here, it's a question about Elmer that has a standard response to confirm that nothing is untoward. Any other response constitutes alarm bells. I wonder how soon Elmer will be forgotten this time.
Perhaps Dent takes this a little too far, given that Doc hurts his hand punching one bad guy and so has to use guns instead, albeit throwing them or clubbing with them rather than firing them. That said, he also punches a villain so hard that his jaw breaks in multiple places, requiring a surgeon of notable skill to reattach the pieces back together in a functional way. I wonder who that surgeon might have been! Well, Dent doesn't tell us, though he does highlight that a bunch of bad guys at various points will be picked up for transportation to Doc's upstate clinic.
There's one other series note to make here that seems oddly out of time. This story originally saw print in July 1941 in 'Doc Savage Magazine' and I'm reading a Bantam paperback edition from May 1968, but both those crucially predate the notoriously camp feature film, 'Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze', which was released in 1975. Fans have many complaints about that movie, but one of the most common is that everything Doc has is branded with his name, even the most secret stuff like the Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. Sure, it's a secret retreat in a location that nobody else on the planet knows, but it's got 'Doc Savage' stamped on it anyway.
Here, Dent counters that complaint thirty-four years before it was needed by explaining that Doc used to paint all his planes "a distinctive bronze color", as his plane in the movie would inevitably be painted, but had discontinued the practice after discovering that it made him too conspicious. Well, duh. Now I may well have not been paying close enough attention over the previous hundred novels, but I don't recall Dent or anyone else ever saying that he was painting his planes bronze. I guess this was a way to underline that he did but it was stupid and he's never doing it again. Until 1975, of course.
Oh, and there are a couple of new uses of slang that I hadn't seen before. The first is "mazuma", a word that clearly means money from the context"Heck, no. They wanted what mazuma me and Henry had, was all!" It turns out that it derives from a Yiddish word, "mazume" or "mezumen", in turn from the Mishnaic Hebrew. That's telling because, early on the very same page, a watch gets attention because it "cost a lot of shekels". I looked up "dornick" too, which means a boulder, but I must have mentioned that before, given that the Wikipedia page on the word handily references the second Doc Savage adventure, 'The Land of Terror', where Dent used it long before here. ~~ Hal C F Astell
For more Doc Savage titles 1-100 click here For Doc Savage titles 101 on click here
|
|