This originally saw publication in 'Doc Savage Magazine' in March 1943, even though the Bantam paperback double got that wrong. Months are important here for a peripheral reason. The first issue of that magazine was dated March 1933, so I've been reviewing this series for a decade now. 'Waves of Death' wrapped up the first ten years and 'The Black, Black Witch' starts the next. Well, there aren't that many, I should point out. I'm on target at this odd anniversary, albeit doubling up a few months this year, and I'm aiming to be done by the end of 2030, so I have five years to go. And then maybe I can look at later extensions, by Philip José Farmer, Will Murray and others.

Like 'Waves of Death', this is very much a mixed bag but it's another fascinating entry for a lot of reasons. The most obvious is that, after many months of Doc raring to join the war effort over in Europe (or maybe I should say r'aring, as that's how the word appears here, for no clear reason), he finally gets to go. We start in the air, as a pilot has orders to drop Doc and Monk behind enemy lines in Occupied France. It's something to do with a black, black witch, about whom neither he nor his navigator know anything at all.

We're kept in the dark for quite a while, though we are told that Doc was specifically requested by Harve MacChesney, who was part of the U.S. diplomatic staff in Berlin, until he was taken prisoner and confined in a chateau in France. Doc knows him personally and trusts him. If he's escaped and wants Doc there, so be it. However, the house at which they're to meet turns out to be a trap and they're taken by a serious number of Nazis. Clearly the Germans are aware of Doc's exploits as, at every point, they ensure that they have overwhelming numbers.

My first historical note was that the pilot and navigator did their jobs perfectly. Of course, they're Americans and it's wartime so I expected them to be excellent. However, Dent extends that to his first notable Nazi, which I wasn't expecting at all. Monk tries to one-up a Nazi officer, Col. Rohm, only to find that he's highly educated and knows exactly what a macrocephalus is. PS: it's a genus of warthog. And no, this isn't setup for Rohm switching sides. After Doc and Monk escape capture on his watch, he's executed for his failure; ironic, given that he'd previously executed others when they helped MacChesney escape.

One thing I praised in 'Waves of Death' was the fact that our heroes fail believably on a number of occasions. While that doesn't happen here so much, they do benefit from previous failures, which is just as interesting. After the Nazis have Doc and Monk locked up, they strip them naked and do a serious search of their bodies. What they miss is a tiny box that Doc keeps secreted within a scar pit on his back, a wound received from an oonapik some years earlier, covered with fake skin, so a negative became a positive. That box contains a compound that becomes explosive when moist, a failed experiment that proves useful here when they can add saliva and blow out a door, another positive from a negative.

Of course, they escape, in a fashion that I'd call cinematic—first a car, then a train but out inside a tunnel to conceal their tracks in water—if it wasn't that both Doc and Monk are naked under their stolen caps and greatcoats and remain that way for a good chunk of the story. In fact, I'm not sure when they actually acquire clothes. Maybe it's at the chateau, at which they aim in order to speak with MacChesney to find out what's behind all this. However, by the time they get there he's gone, escaped again, and so they pick up the token beautiful young lady for the book, Sien Noordenveer. She's a Dutch redhead who Monk literally dreamed about the night before. In his dream, she was a witch chasing him on a motorcycle, but he decided to chase her instead. He is incorrigible.

The crucial detail here is that Sien is waiting for them underneath a skylight because Harve asked her to four hours earlier. They'll come through at 9:10 precisely, which they do, even though they didn't even know it themselves until minutes earlier when Doc found rope in a stable. Four hours earlier, they were sleeping in a haystack unaware that the chateau even had skylights, of which it has a few. That's a heck of a mystery and one that echoes an earlier novel I can't currently place, in which the villain knew in advance the precise time ships would be sunk, something that happens here too. However, this has a very different explanation as to how, a more mystical one with roots in the sixteenth-century.

Meanwhile, I have more modern historical and series notes. For one thing, because we start in the air and proceed in France, this is exclusively a Doc and Monk story for forty-seven pages, until the former sends a message back to HQ and other aides can join the story. However, due to the tough circumstances, he has to send that as a radio message using Allied frequencies and ask those who hear it to record it and effectively pass it on to New York. Of course, he uses Mayan and that feels rather like the code talkers utilised by the U.S. armed forces to send messages in Native American languages, most famously Navajo. Of course, they used code too.

Given that Doc was using Mayan from the very outset in 'The Man of Bronze' in 1933, it's not hard to wonder if the series influenced reality here, but it didn't. In fact, the opposite likely applies, as the American military had used Cherokees and Choctaw for this purpose as far back as 1918. What surprised me the most was that the Nazis knew about this and so sent anthropologists to the U.S. before the start of World War II so that they could learn Native American languages. Fortunately for us, they found that non-viable because there are simply so many of them.

A less serious note is that Ham, now in the story along with Johnny and Pat, who are tracking the movements of Harve MacChesney—Renny and Long Tom are in Australia on an army mission—is now only the second best-dressed man in America. He was first the previous year but his place on the throne is now occupied by a Hollywood actor. I wondered who and that rabbit hole turned up a different candidate entirely: Anthony Biddle. Lester Dent likely knew about him in 1943, though his picture wasn't on the front cover of 'Life' until October, seven months after this issue of 'Doc Savage Magazine' hit the stands.

Anthony Drexel Biddle, Jr., which sounds exquisitely like a Doc Savage character, wasn't an actor, in Hollywood or anywhere else, but, like Harve MacChesney, he was part of the diplomatic service. In fact, he was the U.S. Ambassador to Poland when the Nazis invaded in 1939, continued to work for the Polish government in exile in France until 1940 when the Nazis invaded there too, and then shifted back to New York. In 1943, he was in London, as the ambassador to five different European countries, all occupied by the Nazis. And, in 1960, George Frazier, in his seminal essay, 'The Art of Wearing Clothes', described him as one of the best dressed men of all time, probably the best we haven't heard of. Well, I have now! Ham would be jealous.

So far, so fascinating. It's great to see Doc back in Europe, for the first time since the debacle that was 'The Flying Goblin' perhaps, back in July 1940 when Doc oddly prevented the end of World War II on the basis that the man trying to do it was a villain. I like the ambiguity surrounding the Dutch girl, Sien Noordenveer, because we're never quite sure whose side she's on. And I love the title, an oddly phrased one that has meaning in history, going back to the days of Catherine de Medici and her pet alchemists. I believe Lester Dent made up Peterpence—Peter's Pence is something else—but Michael de Notredame was real enough.

More than anything, the gleeful genrehopper in me loves the blurring of a modern day war novel, set during a then raging global conflict, with a mystical weird tale. I doubt it'll work for everyone and it may have been seen as a failure in 1943, as all the genres of the day had their own pulp titles so readers knew precisely what to expect from them. This was 'Doc Savage Magazine' not 'Weird War Tales', a pulp name I just plucked out of my head and should now research to see if it actually existed. I hope it did. The genre certainly existed in comic books of the sixties and 'Adam Eterno' springs quickly to mind for a comparison. I doubt there are more weird war tales to come but I'm rather hoping that there are. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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