Alan Hathway is back to don the Street & Smith house name of Kenneth Robeson for a third time, moving from 'The Headless Men' to 'The Mindless Monsters'. This is a much tighter read and the results are much stronger, starting with the gimmick at the heart of the novel, but it's hardly an impossible task to recognise his work. For all that he overtly plays into series tropes, his style is a very different one indeed to that of Lester Dent, the other author to frequently masquerade as Kenneth Robeson in 1941.
That gimmick is excellent and it underlines how Hathway's best aspect as a writer is his ability to set up a story. This time, a scrawny nothing effortlessly defeats Flatfoot O'Hallahan, local legend of a fighter who works as a bouncer outside a bank. The scrawny nothing promptly robs the place, entirely robotically, ripping up marble fittings and ignoring being shot, before escaping in a car. O'Hallahan, along with a bystander named Merwin Malo and Jacob Ringle, the bank's president, give chase and see him shot dead by a man wearing ring featuring a big snake with red eyes. This happens, perhaps coincidentally, outside Malo's store.
I'd mention here that these names are a little odd but rather subdued compared to the ones that Hathway trawled out in 'The Headless Men'. After all, who's more likely to have a nickname than a boxer? However, the other witness to this shooting goes by Ding Ding Corvestan, so named for his history as a "trolley-car motorman" before falling on hard times and becoming a stuttering tramp who hangs about outside Malo's store. Other characters still to come include Rowley Rutledge, the utility king; his secretary, Ingrid Nordstrom, who's entirely as beautiful as we might expect; and a typically initialled H. Cadwallader Smith.
And there's Rocky Emben, that scrawny nothing, who Doc recognises immediately, right down to his fingerprints, because he's been through his Crime College. That adds a new level to this, as it means that he's a former criminal, caught by Doc in some adventure or other and sent upstate to be treated and turned into an upright citizen. His last report came only ten days earlier and was entirely normal. Yet, suddenly, he became an apparently superhuman robot for reasons Doc has to figure out quickly, because, as you might expect, he might be the first but he certainly isn't the last such impossible crook to show up in this book.
Another one, a young workman, overpowers Doc with ease, then flips one of his armoured sedans that weighs about two tons, like it was nothing. Doc manages to win that fight, using brains rather than brawn, and ties the workman up. He promptly sits down and dies of old age in six minutes, in front of Ding Ding yet again, possibly explaining why the tramp is promptly kidnapped by a trio of other labourers. When the Chief Medical Officer of New York performs an autopsy, he lists the age of the victim as seventy.
This is all wonderful setup and, unlike 'The Headless Men', the explanations that eventually arrive aren't disappointing. They're hardly surprising, I should emphasise, except for a particular word, which I'll get to later, but they're not disappointing.
I liked a lot about this.
I liked how the mindless monsters are so physically powerful that even Doc can't remotely use his legendary strength against them and thus has to use other means. One of the best scenes in the book for me takes place at HQ where Doc utilises a strong electrical field to mitigate the strength of a mindless monster and cures him through the neat idea of convincing him that he'd succeeded in his mission, namely to kill Doc Savage. We're used to Doc's aides brawling well against greater numbers of opponents but eventually succumbing to inevitability, but this time out they have no chance at all. In one fight, Monk is thrown twenty-feet into a wall and Ham's anaesthetic cane is completely ineffective.
I liked how Hathway uses series tropes like Monk and Ham's bickering and the usefuless of their pets, Habeas Corpus and Chemistry. The former can get old quickly if it isn't handled well, but the early scene at HQ where Ham apparently miniaturises Habeas to a quarter of its size is a peach, even if Monk really shouldn't have fallen for his trickery. Later, Ham uses a low frequency shocker attached to Habeas to shock Monk. The latter is played up considerably, with Habeas rescuing him at a particularly crucial moment and both pets stopping a police commissioner from walking into an imminent minefield. Hathway also adds a clever detail to explain that they're trained to make themselves scarce whenever gunfire erupts around them.
I liked how the mindless monsters, true to their name, are incredibly focused on a particular task that they've been given. That focus is how Doc is able to cure one, but it also raises other ways to mitigate their power. I don't know how this would have played to readers in September 1941, when this issue of 'Doc Savage Magazine' hit the streets, but today it plays like computer programming. If you don't craft your program with the precise instructions needed, then it doesn't work, and if a complicating factor is thrown in, you have to cater to that too, because the program isn't going to figure out what you mean on its own. That holds true to the mindless monsters. There's a pivotal scene where Monk, Ham and Renny escape the mindless monsters by simply falling into a pit, the pursuers unable to fathom the sudden change in parameters.
I liked the location, because Hathway sets some of the action in the Sunken Forest on Fire Island, which might sound like typical pulp fare but is actually a real place. It's one of only a few maritime forests on the eastern seaboard and it still covers over forty acres even today, many of the trees estimated to be over two hundred years old. It's also very close to New York City, separated from Long Island by a narrow bay. It includes the only federally designated US Wilderness area in all of New York state. What it means here is an exotic location that's shockingly close to the bulk of the action that takes place in New York.
I also liked how Doc was able to contribute substantially to this adventure, on the ball quickly and making consistent progress in combatting the menace du jour, but also able to vanish from it for a long period of time. This is because he becomes a mindless monster himself, at which point we pull back to hear about whatever he's got up to at a distance and see what his aides can do about it in his absence. This time, that doesn't just include Monk and Ham, but Renny, who's working where a number of men become mindless monsters; Johnny, who mysteriously disappears only to reappear at HQ in time to see Monk arrive disguised as a charwoman; and Long Tom too, though he doesn't play a huge part in proceedings.
Ever eager to cement his own contributions into series lore, Hathway adds plenty of gadgets too. We've seen Doc and his aides use "deaf-and-dumb language", clearly American Sign Language, in previous adventures, but here they use a custom version that only needs one hand, given that the other may not be accessible in all applicable scenarios. Doc gets to use custom diving helmets that are both entirely transparent and notably strong and parachutes that are both transparent and dissolvable on contact with water. We learn that Doc's aides check in whenever they unexpectedly change location via the automatic message machine at HQ.
Whether all these are beneficial to the story is a matter of personal taste. I didn't have much of a problem with any of these additions, the parachutes in particular being a particularly neat idea. I had far more of a problem with Hathway once again having Monk and Chemistry swap places, that idea overused in the series as a whole and especially in his contributions to it. And that's about it. I had a heck of a lot more problems with Hathway's previous entry, 'The Headless Men', so this is a substantial improvement, which bodes well for his final effort, 'The Rustling Death', the first Doc Savage novel dated 1942.
And so to that one word, used during the traditional explanations during the finalé. This book was dated September 1941, so World War II had been underway for two years already, even if the U.S. wouldn't join for another quarter. Probably because it was still neutral, the various writers found all sorts of ways to avoid mentioning the war at all and, if they had to, to avoid taking sides. With a sort of feigned ignorance, occasional acknowledgements that something was going on were made but it was way over there and it isn't our problem, mentions kept vague enough that nobody who only ever read 'Doc Savage Magazine' would even be able to figure out who was fighting. However, the word "Nazi" shows up here and it felt rather surprising. It's only in passing, but it's there. ~~ Hal C F Astell
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