For some reason, 'Peril in the North' is a tough book to get hold of nowadays, as the second half of a Bantam double with 'The Golden Man'. However, I'd suggest that it's well worth tracking down. I have a few minor issues with it, like promising plot elements vanishing as unimportant, but it has much to recommend it as well. It's an acutely action-filled adventure, with one especially powerful sequence to rival any in the series thus far. It's a complex web of intrigue that kept me guessing to the very end. And, while Ham and Monk are marginalised in this one, which is no bad thing, Monk gets a lengthy speech that carries a serious amount of weight.

As that previous sentence might suggest, there's much that's different here to the norm and that becomes apparent immediately with Doc in a hurry on the very first page, bundling people out of his way to get into the Ritz-Astoria Hotel. He's talkative too, even while Lester Dent suggests that he isn't, trying to figure out what a strange man named Snooker is talking about with rats in jars. When Snooker gives him a message from Bill Browder stating that he's reversed arteriosclerosis in diabetic rats, Doc ditches his responsibilities to investigate.

And Dent piles escalation on escalation here. Browder is a fraud, but there is a mystery. There's a blue dog that appears every night at 10pm. As they wait for it, there's a girl with a gun. Another is able to swap places with her without Doc noticing. There have been three attempts on Bill's life. A man barks like a dog to sucker them into a trap but walks into one himself. And everything is about two hundred and fifty people in serious danger. There's a heck of a lot going on in the first couple of chapters and we have no idea what any of it is about or where it's likely to go. Dent has us well and truly on the hop from the outset.

Something else that's new is that, Doc aside, the first of his aides to appear isn't one of his aides. It's Pat, who's in headquarters because she stole Monk's keys. The others are all uptown throwing Doc a birthday party, another plot detail that goes nowhere because they're soon all too busy to focus on something so trivial. Renny is next. Then Long Tom and Johnny, who finds that Thomas J. Eleanor, the central question mark in the story, has a vocabulary to match his. Monk and Ham are very much bringing up the rear here, even with Monk's speech still to come, and I have to say that a hundred books into the series, I didn't miss their bickering here at all. It shows up in a couple of scenes and that's it.

There are new characters, of course, and it's probably fairer to talk about them than the way that the story keeps on the hop. No synopsis could do that justice. Snooker vanishes but Bill Browder is a constant. We just have to figure out whose side he's on. Is he working for Thomas J. Eleanor, the powerful boss of World Zone Airways, or against him? Certainly Eleanor wants Bench Logan, but is he a good guy or a bad guy? He certainly used to work for Eleanor but does he still? Nicky Jones is Browder's girlfriend, who thinks he's making a big mistake, and her fat friend Fern Reed is fat. It's not clear what she has to do with anything but she's fat. It's like a mantra that's all the more clear in 2024 when people are supposed to be more than their physical attributes.

There's also a lot of talk about Mungen, a recently assassinated European dictator, which means a lot of talk about the war. Dent even calls it a war at points and has characters do likewise; "War in Europe!" cries a newsboy. Other times, he falls back on traditional euphemisms; "Readers familiar with the foreign situation," begins one of a slew of footnotes. This one's intent is to acknowledge a crucial detail: Mungen is fictional and so is Monrovia, the country that he led until recently with a brutal fist. "Because of the parallel between actual events and certain happenings depicted in this story, the author wishes to point out that it is his policy to deal with fiction only in these stories."

Now, to be fair, it's very possible that Bench Logan assassinated Mungen and, contrary to Dent's policy to deal with fiction only, has English, French, Italian, German, Yugoslavian and Monrovian passports. It would be easy to see Mungen as an avatar for Hitler, as if Dent was simply wishing a fictional end to the Second World War, which in March 1941, had run long enough that he couldn't ignore its existence any longer. However, the details are all wrong. He's a bit more like Mussolini but that doesn't really fit either. He's more of an amalgam of all the attributes Dent saw in real dictators: brutal, intelligent, charismatic and, above all, utterly ruthless.

And ruthless is where this goes. The MacGuffin of the story is quickly revealed to be two hundred and fifty or so people, who are in mortal peril, but we don't know who they are or where they are, except that the title gives away that they must be in the north, however many suggestions there are to the contrary. Sure enough, we eventually go north, a little later than tends to be the norm for the traditional location change. Most of this story unfolds in New York City, from that opening scene at the Ritz-Astoria Hotel to the ruthless battle on Ark Street, with bombs and grenades and gunfire. Doc "had expected trouble, but nothing on the scale of this." I appreciated that scale. It's why this is the grittiest, most palpably dangerous scene in the series since maybe 'The Annihilist'.

It's when the ruthlessness behind it shifts to those two hundred and fifty people in the north that Monk steps in to explain the mindset that Doc and his aides share. It's certainly overblown but it's passionate and heartfelt too and it works. Again, this feels like Dent taking a stand against what he sees as happening in Europe, however much he couches it in euphemism and translates it into fiction. It isn't really about Doc and Monk and two hundred and fifty people. It's about the United States, not yet part of the Second World War, and a continent across the sea. It's a warning to the Mungens of the world. And so I'll quote it verbatim, right down to Monk's poor grammar utilising "less" instead of "fewer":

"Doc, shall I tell this guy what I think you're thinking?" he asked.

The bronze man nodded almost imperceptibly.

Monk shivered, flapped his arms.

He said, "For some time now, we have made a business of righting wrongs and punishing evildoers. It sounds kind of silly when you say it in so many words, but we haven't found it that way. In fact, we're proud of what we’ve done; we're proud of Doc Savage and glad we have had the privilege of working with him. We've liked taking chances, and we've taken plenty of them. We've always known what we were doing. We haven't gone into anything blindfolded. Puzzled, maybe, but never without knowing that there would be risks. We have accepted those risks as part of the game."

Monk glanced up at the grimly circling plane.

"Always in our minds, I think, has been the knowledge that we would have to accept death sometime," he continued. "And I think we will do just that without hesitating. I know that's the way I feel, and I know the others see eye to eye with me. You take Ham, up there; Ham has insulted and browbeaten me, told my best girl the awfulest lies, and we've had our spats. But I wouldn't be afraid to have Ham speak for me, even if the word was death. I know I can speak for Ham the same way. And for the others, as I say. And so I'm saying for them—we ride straight ahead! There are two hundred and fifty people yonder on the ice. We may save them; we may not. But we will try. The trouble Pat, Long Tom, Renny and Johnny and Ham are in, up there in the plane, and the trouble Doc and I are in down here, is all part of the bargain. We won't welsh. So—and maybe I should have just said this and nothing else—to hell with any trade for our lives.”  

Doc had remained silent through the speech. which was one of the longest Monk had ever made.

The bronze man extended a hand. There was a hint of dampness in his eyes.

"I'm glad you made that speech," he said.

Monk snorted. "It's what you'd have said, isn't it? Maybe you'd have used less words."

Doc nodded.

~~ Hal C F Astell

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