There aren't a lot of writer milestones left in the 'Doc Savage' series, especially as Lester Dent was responsible for all but one novel for the next four and a half year, but this is one of them, the final contribution of Alan Hathway. He was a late arrival, all four of his entries confined to the thirteen-month span between January 1941 and January 1942, but I found his work interesting. They're of a variable quality but this fits very well with the others, strong on setup but over-reliant on the use of gadgetry. What's more, Hathway was clearly the writer most keen to acknowledge the real world at the time. When this issue of 'Doc Savage Magazine' hit the streets, the U.S. was at war.

That setup starts with Ham for once and a false assumption. The dapper lawyer is in Washington, DC to plead a case before the Supreme Court (is that really how that works?) but Fox Strang sees him and jumps to the conclusion that Doc Savage is onto them. Therefore, when Ham wanders off for an evening walk to the edge of town, there's an eerie rustling noise outside a weird shack and a "virago of vengeance" overpowers him and knocks him out. He wakes up to discover a cop dead nearby and another corpse inside the shack, which looks like a tornado hit the place. The only man alive is Tester Lyons, an electrical engineer who works for Jan Vanderlee.

It's here at the very beginning of the book that Hathway acknowledges the war, as Vanderlee is an inventor who has come up with something that will revolutionarise warfare, coincidentally having some peacetime uses too. As we move forward, we learn that the villain of the piece is Krag, who "sounds kind of foreign-like" to go along with his brutalist name and is soon described as an enemy agent, like the bad guys in Hathway's first 'Doc Savage' novel, 'The Devil's Playground'.

He doesn't go so far as to use the word "Nazi" here, as he did in 'The Mindless Monsters', but he's happy to provide directions. Krag works for someone he repeatedly calls "my leader", the English translation of "der führer". One of these enemy agents speaks gutturally, stands ramrod straight and wears a monocle. Hathway was clearly drawing a picture, utilising every stereotype he could think of, and it's pretty obvious what the end result looked like. Presumably Street & Smith, who published 'Doc Savage Magazine', were still a little reticent to take sides, but they weren't averse to heavy hints.

It's pretty clear from the outset that this new invention of Vanderlee's is some sort of death ray, a pretty typical device for this era of pulp fiction, and it's ironically one of the least interesting of an array of new gadgets that Hathway introduces this time out. He liked his gadgets in all four of the 'Doc Savage' series he wrote but may have conjured up more this time than any of the others. He's happy for Doc to flout a bunch of attacks through a mirror direction scrambler, to make it seem as if he's closer or further away than he actually is. Monk has flat tubes of chemicals in his shoe soles and Ham has a shortwave radio communicator built into his tiepin. There's a new refraction gas, a Tesla coil and a chemical sheen that can be secreted from the floor outside Doc's HQ to enable an easy pursuit of someone leaving. There's a second security check on the Hidalgo Trading Company entrance that uses a shortwave impulse. Hathway doesn't hold back.

He doesn't hold back from trying something new too, which I rather appreciated. Much of this one adheres to the standards of the series. There's a villain, Krag, and a prominent henchman, Strang. There are characters with wild names, this time politicians: Senator J. Wyndham Weatherton and Representative King Cortlandt. There's a gorgeous young lady, Nada Merrell, with connections to multiple characters, as Weatherton's niece and Vanderlee's fiancée. There's the customary shift in location midway, this time to the southwest, where Krag is blackmailing the politicians to pass bills for a dam project. Almost everybody gets kidnapped, often more than once. Yeah, this follows the standard template.

However, one of the tasks we 'Doc Savage' readers are given every month is to figure out who that villain really is. We know that Krag is going to be a fake name that allows another character we've surely already met to hide in plain sight, so we have to figure out who it is from an agreeably large cast. Is it Lyons or Vanderlee? Weatherton or Cortlandt? Strang or one of the other many minions, such as Ward Hiller or Flathead Simpson? Maybe it's Nada Merrell? We know our job and we go to it, but Hathway has a trick up his sleeve this time out that, if memory serves, marks a first for the series, one hundred and seven novels in. I won't tell you Krag is but I will tell you that it's not only one person for a change. I appreciated that.

Another cool moment may be there as a counter to fan criticism. It's well-known, of course, that in all of pop culture, the good guys tend to be far more capable than the bad guys, especially when it comes down to the minions. Who hasn't shouted at the screen during a 'Star Wars' movie because the Stormtroopers couldn't hit the side of a barn with a rocket launcher? Who hasn't rolled their eyes at how easily legions of extras in the uniforms of the enemy are mowed down without effort? It's no different in 'Doc Savage' books, because, however often Doc and his aides are kidnapped or taken captive, they have to win out in the end. Well, Hathway has Strang explain why: "Always pick 'em dumb enough so that they don't get ideas," following up with, "Dumb guys follow orders best and don't ask any questions." Needless to say, it doesn't work.

All in all, I rather liked this. It gets down to business quickly and throws a huge amount in over just two chapters: everything with Ham in DC, introductions to a host of characters and the MacGuffin of the piece, multiple uses of the titular death ray, Monk teasing Ham over shortwave radio, and a cliffhanger for Doc and Long Tom when the Rustling Death nearly kills them outside HQ. It doesn't really slow down much either, though Hathway has the action shift awkwardly from New York to DC to Weatherton's ranch in the midwest like a yoyo. Krag is suitably villainous, providing a "sneering chuckle" on a hijacked phone call, and Doc loses his mind at one point. There's a lot to enjoy, even before a surprising use of the word "font" for "typeface" in 1942.

Alan Hathway hasn't got a lot of love from the fans, but I've enjoyed all of his four entries, three of them in particular. Maybe 'The Devil's Playground' is the best of them and this ranking behind 'The Mindless Monsters' in third, leaving 'The Headless Men' easily bringing up the rear, but they all feature excellent setups, neat locations and moments of notable praise. None are perfect, his over-reliance on gadgets particularly frustrating, but there's more than his acknowledgement of what was happening in the world outside the pulps to be thankful for. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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