This past month, someone asked the folk of the Flearun, an excellent Facebook group dedicated to Doc Savage, a deceptively simple question. He asked for our favourite book from each year of the original run of 'Doc Savage Magazine', so 1933 to 1949. I found that I could give an honest answer for the first couple of years, 'The Phantom City' for 1933 and 'The Annihilist' for 1934, over a set of strong contenders, not least 'The Thousand-Headed Man'. But then it got difficult and I struggled to find answers for further years. I enjoy these books but they're often flawed and they often blur together.

The reason I mention this is that I enjoyed 'The Invisible Box Murders' so much that it's now easily my favourite book from 1941 with only one more still to come, December's 'Peril in the North'. It's not without its flaws early on, Lester Dent crafting a few notably awkward sentences, paragraphs and pages, but the thrust of it is good from the outset and it only gets better as it goes. In fact, it would be fair to say that I was waiting for it to fall horribly apart, as a number of other promising books have done, but it never did, even with a shockingly quick ending that doesn't adhere to the usual approach for the series. Could it be better? Of course. But nothing else from 1941 is close to it.

The awkwardness is especially frustrating for being right at the beginning and so doesn't give us a lot of confidence in what's to come. The first few pages read like Dent narrated them, finessed his ideas as he went and then didn't come back to proof what got typed up. So he introduces us to the first invisible box, which isn't an actual invisible box but looks like an invisible box but only like the invisible boxes are before they go invisible and if they were photographed. And it's half the size of a shoe box, if you go this way and that way but not the other way, but it doesn't look like at all like a shoe box. And Doc Savage is putting it on someone's doorstep, but he's actually putting it on his desk rather than the doorstep. It's all very clumsy and Dent could have made it as clear as day in a heartbeat, but for some reason he didn't.

I had to mention that at the beginning of this review because it's at the beginning so you're likely to be having the same sinking feelings about this review that I was having about the book at this point. However, I prefaced it with an introduction to get you through it, because I can happily now underline that this problem does not remain apparent after the opening few paragraphs. This is a good book, so let's dive into the goodness.

As you might imagine, the invisible boxes are harbingers of doom. A few have appeared in front of people recently and those people have died. Crucially, the boxes then disappear. Even when a set of cops enclose one to keep it safe, it vanishes anyway without any apparent mechanism doing the job. Of course, Doc's investigating this and the opening scenes involve him putting a fake invisible box onto the desk of J. P. Morgan (not that one, Dent carefully explains) to see how he'll react. He is an important man in investments and Doc has discovered that the only common factor between the other victims is that Morgan knew them all personally.

After leaving Morgan, Doc is visited by a young lady, Jeanette Bridges, who goes by Jen. It seems that there's a second man who knew all these victims and that's her brother, David, who's missing. She arrives at HQ in spectacular fashion, being attacked by an unknown assailant in the corridor outside, an assailant who promptly attempts to shoot Doc but with a gun rigged to backfire, so he blows the top of his own head off instead. Jen's an artist who draws the four men who kidnapped David, Ham recognises one of them from their investigation, Elmer I. Ivers, and so they go to visit him at his houseboat, where they find him murdered and the boat full of cops.

Crucially, the cops think Doc murdered him and with plenty of good reason. He's been set-up very well indeed, to the degree that Commissioner Strance and District Attorney Ernsflagen have him confined, suggesting that he's going to have to sit this investigation out. Doc certainly thinks so, but he's already figured out enough that he can give some cryptic instructions to his aides to take care of it in his absence. Place ads in newspapers to track down someone who can prove that they just slept for three weeks, someone who works in radium mining and anyone who's bought or sold a monkey recently.

We're only five chapters in and this feels highly unusual for three reasons.

The first is that the mystery clearly began before the book, Doc is already on the case and he's not far off the solution when we show up to pay attention. Typically, the mystery manifests in the first chapter, so we see it grow before Doc's even brought in to investigate. Sometimes he's aware but not involved. Often he's not even aware until whoever was there at the beginning manages to get to New York or get a message to New York to bring Doc into the mystery.

The second is that there have been a few books with Doc set up to be the prime suspect, arguably going all the way back to 'The Thousand-Headed Man', in which he's sought by the London police, and most obviously in 'The Munitions Master', with its peach of a public setup. However, in every one of these, he either remains at large throughout, so is able to investigate and clear his name, or he's arrested but promptly escapes to investigate and clear his name. Here, however, he sits back and accepts his fate, as a model citizen, while his aides clear his name. For a while, at least.

For a third, when he gives that set of specific tasks to his aides, he also gives us not only the key to the mystery, almost challenging us to figure it out before they do; he gives us a major insight into how he solves these mysteries. In other books, the author drops clues but generally doesn't tell us that they're clues. We have to notice them first and then connect them second. Here, Doc leaps on past those steps. He sees the clues and connects the dots for us. All we have to do is figure out the picture that results. That's pretty ballsy, but it works because we still likely don't see the answer immediately.

By the way, all those aides are here, relatively quickly too, including Pat, who has gained quite the talent at lipreading. Now, they all get trapped and kept captive, because of course they do, but I'd praise the ways in which that happens. Far too often, these supposedly highly intelligent men are suckered into the most transparent of traps, suggesting that, even if they're among the very best in their respective fields, they're also frickin' idiots. Here, the traps are thoroughly believable and we don't look down on them for falling into them.

What's new here is that an additional aide is forced upon them. If Doc's guilty of the invisible box murders, then his men are likely complicit, even though there's no evidence backing that up. Thus the commissioner assigns a cop to them, Lt. Blosser by name, so that he can keep a trained eye on what they get up to as they supposedly investigate the mystery. Blosser is initially an annoyance, so much so that Renny grumbles that "We get tired enough of Monk and Ham squabbling. Do we have to put up with a new addition to it?" However, he grows substantially as a character in ways I can't spoil but can say that I thoroughly appreciated.

There's much that I appreciated here and very little that I didn't. At one point, Pat retrieves some equipment in "one of the small bronze metal boxes which they habitually used as containers" and that's not good. It reminded me of how everything secret in the 'Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze' movie was counterintuitively painted bronze and labelled Doc Savage. However, that's a passing comment and I shouldn't overreact to it. There's another point at which Doc dyes his face with ink from a fountain pen, which seems a little odd. I had to use fountain pens in school and the ink had a habit of leaking onto skin and not wanting to come back off. Sure, Doc would have a bottle of the right solution to remove it, but it still feels like a stretch. But hey, that's about it for negatives. I'll return to the positives, because there are a lot of them.

For instance, chapter nine is particularly glorious because it features Doc in the best disguise he's used thus far in the entire series. It's not just that he's able to set it up carefully rather than have to conjure it up on the fly, which often stretches our belief. It's not only that he chooses to disguise himself as an actual person, with specific permission from that person. It's also that he liaises with that person as he goes, telling him what he's done and why, so that the real character can back up that it was him all along. It's all carefully constructed and it felt joyous, given how many times Doc has previously MacGuyver'd a diguise in mere moments that fools everyone instantly. This time it makes sense.

So does the response Doc gets from low level cops, who don't realise who they're talking to. Even with enough evidence against him that Doc himself acknowledges that the commissioner should arrest him, that doesn't mean that beat cops who haven't been made privy to any of it have doubt over whether it was the right call. This is Doc Savage, after all. Look at what he's done for people! There must be some sort of mistake, right? Of course, that's how they would feel. We meet some undercover cops too, who know that Doc's the villain because the bad guys say so. That's a peach of a detail. Some of the bad guys honestly believe that Doc's their boss. How do you counter that?

Even the eventual explanations are good, though I naturally won't outline any of them. Nothing makes us roll our eyes, unless it's at our own inability to figure out some of the details before the story explains them to us. There are earlier explanations too, such as for the locked room mystery, which again is handled well, without undue focus on the fact that it's a locked room mystery.

My final note is that, while this generally succeeds and succeeds well, it doesn't feel like Dent has gone back to the tried and true formula he used in the early years in the heyday of the series. It's not a look back; it's a look forward. 'The Invisible Box Murders' doesn't attempt to be a 1934 story. It's happy to be a 1941 story but it's the sort of 1941 story that nobody was writing, including Dent himself, who wrote most of them. And that's highly refreshing.

So yeah, bring on 'Peril in the North'. I can't imagine that it's going to take the crown of best 1941 novel away from 'The Invisible Box Murders' but I'm looking forward to finding out if it might. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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