While the heyday of the 'Doc Savage' series certainly seems to be the few years after it found its feet, maybe from 1934 to 1936, I keep finding myself bumping into later wartime entries like this one that play out much better than they're supposed to for this era. 'The Devil's Black Rock' was first published in December 1942 and it surely benefits from the experience that Lester Dent had built up writing the series for almost a decade. It feels more mature than those early novels and plays out as a non-stop ride with a whole slew of setpiece scenes.

It starts wonderfully with a tasty first paragraph that introduces us to Donkey Sam Davis, who's a grizzled prospector in Mile High, Arizona. He hates whiskey and goes broke a lot. Every time that happens, he just has Wickard Cole bankroll another grubstake, so he can set out and try to make a fortune until the cycle repeats. This time he finds a strange black rock jutting out of the ground, a prehistoric relic thrust up during some past upheaval. His donkey Myrtle wanders off and he goes piblokto, an odd Eskimo term that could have been replaced by "plumb cultus loco" or something more traditionally grizzled, and suddenly a black monster leaps in front of him, tall as a building, before diving into the ground. He calls it the devil of the title.

He knows about Doc because he was in town a year earlier to the day, but he doesn't call him right away. First he goes to get a fresh grubstake from Wickard Cole, who investigates the scene, finds it fascinating and secretly dynamites the hole left by the devil. Then he goes to his jailed brother to put a team together and starts selling all his interests. Donkey Sam trails him and keeps an eye on all that he does. And then, when Doc and his aides get back from 'They Died Twice', they find an ad in the paper in which Donkey Sam floats a cool half a million to find him.

We're a fifth of the way into the book at this point, which is a late arrival for Doc, but everyone is there with him. And they're all united in one thing, curing Monk of the girl habit, which seems fair. They're fed up of him falling for the ladies and "getting us in dutch". Ham nearly died twice after Monk fell for another pretty face who turned out to be trouble and Renny nearly does here. He's given a bomb. Monk's inclined to ignore the lot of them, or more likely fight them over it, but Doc gets in on it too, taking care not to leave him alone with the inevitable beautiful young thing who enters the story, and that makes him think. I liked this angle and found it deeper than the typical banter with Ham.

By the way, that girl here is Paramount Summers, who goes by Para. She's a private investigator working for Judson Potter, who we soon discover is yet another name for Wickard Cole, who goes by Delbert Hayes. She feels like the traditional female presence in this series—young, talented and beautiful, along with many shades of mysterious—but Dent has a few twists to the formula in this one. It seems she has a huge secret, but maybe we can't quite trust that revelation as there's another one around the corner. I do like Dent mixing things up like this.

Mostly, he gets pretty serious about throwing Doc and his aides into trouble. At this point, these novels ran only about a hundred pages in paperback, which is why this was reprinted in one of the later 'Doc Savage' omnibuses by Bantam, but there's enough action for two or three such. As Doc finds Para, a talented marksman shoots at them in order to draw them into a trap. Doc's attacked in a hotel, first by a gunman—taking bullets to his mesh vest so he can get to him—then by a pair of starved dogs with razor sharp poisoned spikes attached to their jaws. And that's just the start!

One man attempts to sabotage a lift carrying Monk, Ham and Long Tom using a sledgehammer, even climbing down greased cables to finish the job. Doc follows and, after a brief scuffle, the bad guy leaps onto nearby cables to escape and finds them even more greased, hitting a hundred-and-fifty miles an hour by the time he hits the ground. Ouch! Meanwhile, outside, Renny's curled up on the ground because another bad guy emptied his gun into his vest at close range. That leaves him with a serious stomachache. Fortunately, Johnny, who had carelessly forgotten to put on his vest, is able to safely hide under a car.

At one point, bad guys even attack headquarters. Initially, that's just with bullets, which pepper a set of little spiderwebs into the bulletproof glass while Doc and his aides stand there looking for a telltale muzzle flash. However, then they escalate to a full-size cannon that not only gets through the glass but wipes out a good chunk of the room. These guys are serious!

Of course, none of them are more serious than Cole, who has no compunctions at all about taking out anyone in his way. That gets to the point where he calmly executes those who have failed him with bullets to the head at point blank range. He's among the bloodiest of Doc's enemies. When they realise what he has in mind, a quartet of his hired thugs quit on him. He uses the black devil to wipe out the neighbourhood, with them in it.

If you're wondering where the war is in this wartime novel, it's there floating in the background for a while but is brought into the foreground towards the end. Yes, there are enemy agents, full-on described as Nazis, all publisher censorship removed at this point of the war, and that renders the traditional karmic ending even more satisfying than usual. All that's left after that are some long overdue explanations and, for once, they ring true. Sure, they're a little wild but they're not outside the realms of possibility. Frankly, they're probably more believable than the 'Mad Max'-esque rescue right before the karma kicks in, but that's as much thrilling fun as everything before it. Dent doesn't mess around with this one and the results shine. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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