Lester Dent was obviously feeling rather colourful in 1941, because he started his contributions to the series with 'The All-White Elf' in March, followed it up with 'The Golden Man' in April and then wrapped up his first burst with 'The Pink Lady' in May. 'The Headless Men' in June wasn't his, but I can happily add that 'The Green Eagle' in July was. The colour here is excellent too, because when we meet the Pink Lady of the title, she's absolutely pink, shockingly pink down to her eyeballs.

We meet her quickly, because this novel starts out with her jumping out of a car into a hotel lobby and promptly being murdered, burned alive with thermite. That's not a pretty way to go. She was Lada Harland, fortunately so named long before the much derided Soviet-era car, but I ought not to use the past tense because she's still alive, surprising few, I'm sure, because there are a whole slew of questions about why she would be murdered in such a manner. Most of all, she was eager to find her way to Ten West Street, where Doc Savage is giving a demonstration at the Museum of Advanced Science, but she came here instead.

Then there's a pink man, as seen leaving the Harland house by a neighbour, and then Doc sets up a meeting with another one, a third pink human, and I should underline that these people aren't pink in the way that I'm pink; they're shockingly pink all over, not merely in skin colour but all the way up to their eyeballs. Of course, there's no shortage of pink people in this novel and just how much being turned a different colour would jar someone is underlined when Monk finds himself suddenly pink after being knocked out during a fight, then waking up to see himself in a mirror, a neat torment by his captors. There's no shortage of those in this book either. Fights, that is. And captors. Not mirrors.

In some ways, this is a fairly typical 'Doc Savage' novel. It involves a strange scientific discovery or invention, which is far from rare, and lots of people want it for their own gain. It involves a major character who isn't remotely who they seem and at least one supporting one too. It involves Doc finding himself and his aides battling not just one gang but two different ones both seeking this new MacGuffin, meaning that we can never be sure who's working with whom and against whom. However, there are differences too.

It unfolds entirely in New York, for a start, rather than shifting to a more exotic location halfway through the book. They do leave the city, but not by much and they do so by car rather than one of the many flying vehicles Doc keeps in his riverside hangar. And it's not afraid to get vicious, which adds a little edge to the story that hasn't been there since a good deal earlier in the series, in the earliest books before Doc was given the remit to never take lives in the pursuit of justice unless absolutely necessary and in gritty classics like 'The Annihilist'.

Here, much of this ties to Doc himself. He survives a tough fight with a couple of villains, only two rather than a crowd but ones who actually know what they're doing. He's able to take them both down but not before one of them disjoints his left arm, causing him a substantial amount of pain during and after the fight. He's also escaping a gang underwater when they decide to hurl three grenades at once at where they believe he's lurking, capably enough that it's fair for everyone to believe him dead, not just those trying to kill him.

Renny shows his power too, when one particularly unwise character decides to underline a point by punching him in the face. He shrugs that off, of course, but then hits him back, only once but in such a powerful fashion that the poor man is knocked senseless, prompting a check to make sure he didn't break his neck either from the blow or from the fall. After all, if your hobby is punching holes in solid wooden doors, imagine what that might do to a human face. These gangs aren't at all reticent to damage or even torture each other too, one scene featuring a character battered and bruised but also missing fingernails and teeth and sporting cigarette burns to his face.

Another difference is that the notoriously publicity-averse Doc actively seeks publicity for once, a stunt with a pink man clearly designed to prompt coverage on the front pages of the papers, as a means to trigger action. This isn't entirely new, because he's done this before, using publicity as a means to an end, but it's rare enough in the series to be notable whenever it happens and to feel unusual and perhaps even a little desperate. Much of this may tie to Doc being gradually turned a little less superhuman, still advanced in every way beyond the rest of us mere mortals but neither impervious to damage or pain nor to the occasional need to do something he prefers not to so as to get a job done.

One further unusual difference is the fact that chapter four features a huge amount of recap for those who might be starting out on book ninety-nine. Dent recaps all five aides, even though only Monk and Ham happen to be there at the time. There's a partial tour of headquarters that serves little purpose and ends up seeming rather counterproductive given to whom it was given. There's even coverage of the Mayan connection that explains how Doc never runs out of money.

In fact, Dent seems to be very interested this time out in fleshing out series details, not only with recaps of what regular readers already knew but also by introducing new touches. Long Tom has a ranch in Wyoming, we're told, a cow ranch in the Jackson Hole area that has its very own brand, a stylised zigzag to represent electricity. Monk has a dental plate because he's lost teeth in earlier fights and there are chemicals within the fake equivalents that he can mix into explosives strong enough to blow a hole in a wall. He's also invented some explosive pellets that blow up with much less impact, designed to be littered across the ground and sound like gunfire when walked on.

Of course, he doesn't forget Doc, whose contribution this time out is a clever door handle that he has implemented on some of his cars that's operated through shock. To open the door, he needs to tap on the handle three times, then pause, then tap again and finally twist it in the opposite way to usual, just to confuse anyone who might luck into the right combination, not that that would be likely. All these details are the sort that sound great but are likely going to be ignored by writers of later books who either don't care about series continuity or, in the case of Dent, forgot that he had ever come with them. Let's see as we go.

And that's about it for this one. It's not a bad entry in the series, but it's not a great one either, a quick and relatively weak ending letting it down somewhat. I'll just mention C. Bodine Rutter as a particularly awkward name in a series that features apparently no end of the things and move on to the one hundredth book in the series, 'The Headless Men', a milestone which was not reserved for Lester Dent, its most prolific writer. Instead it's a return for Alan Hathway, delivering only his second title of an eventual four. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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