April 1943's adventure is an unusual one. I don't mean unusual in the way of plot, because it's one more example of a madman trying to take over the world through substitution. I mean unusual in how Lester Dent went about it.

It starts with an absolute gem of an opening line: "They killed Doc Savage on Saturday". Of course, they don't, but Francis and Percy, a pair of impeccably polite gentlemen, believe they do, which is what Doc wants. He's apparently set up a way to trigger the projection of any one of a number of different scenarios at will whenever he feels the need coming out of his private elevator and this one does the trick. The simultaneous release of a gas allows him to trail the killers, using a litmus cane that changes colour as he follows to indicate whether he's getting closer or further away.

I'm never sad to see something new to the Doc Savage mythos so early in a book, but I have to ask how easy it wasn't to move Doc's private elevator. To make this setup viable, it had to be shifted from the regular bank of them to the end of a narrow corridor. That's a no trivial feat when it has to reach the 86th floor. More importantly, how did they accomplish it without everyone noticing? Regardless of how great an engineer Renny is, I'm not buying this one.

Talking of Renny, he's not in this one. He's over in Europe with Johnny doing something secret for the war effort. Similarly, Long Tom is in England working on plane detection, so Doc has to rely on Monk and Ham only this time out. All three of them spend the bulk of the novel in disguise, none of them in traditional ones. The perennially bickering pair join the villain's crew as an outrageous couple of Hispanic hoods, Cuerpo and Cabeza, or Body and Brain. It beggars belief that they don't get rumbled sooner because their accents keep lapsing, something Francis notices within a mere couple of minutes, but when they're working to full effect, it sounds like this:

"Keel them what with, Cabeza? Keel them weeth the knife? The rope? The gun? The hand around the throat? The leetle capsule with the poison in it? What with, Cabeza?"

What's more, these caricatures of personae don't prevent them from continuing their bickering. Cabeza's answer to Cuerpo's dialogue above is "They weel die of old age if you do not get busy." Fraulino Jones, the token female presence this time out, calls them "fugitives from good sense", which is as good a description as any.

However, Doc has an even more outrageous disguise, namely himself. To avoid being killed while in captivity, he has Monk and Ham fake proof that he isn't the real Doc Savage, merely a fake Doc Savage sent by the real Doc Savage to spy on the bad guys. Eventually, Abraham Mawson, the bad guy boss, hires him to be a fake Doc so they can take over Hidalgo. Until that point, he spends the vast majority of the novel as a captive, patiently waiting for the right information to escape and act. He certainly gets important things to do here, but I'd suggest that there are fewer of them than in any recent adventure.

Between Doc's surprisingly passive turn, Monk and Ham's wild Hispanic theatrics and the pair of polite gentleman assassins, there's a surreal comedy to this book that I found engaging. This isn't ever going to be seen as one of the more realistic adventures in the series, but it's a heck of a lot of fun even before we meet Dr. Ernestine Fuquet, a batshit crazy loon of a plastic surgeon, who's glorious fun in all the wrong ways.

Lester Dent's description is "crazy as a March hare" because he has cyclic insanity. Sometimes he's lucid and, in those moments, he's an unmatched surgeon, except presumably Doc, but, "When the spell was on him he liked to do little things like cutting throats or taking hearts out of people, cutting a hole and taking out the heart and holding it in his hand to feel the beat of it." That's pretty dark for a 'Doc Savage' novel.

There are three other things worthy of note, all of them affecting Monk and only occasionally the others.

One is that something weird keeps happening without explanation, but to a number of different characters. It happens to Monk, who walks back into a cabin and then gets off the floor and walks back into the same cabin. It's like they're losing brief amounts of time without reason. It happens again when they arrive on an island, then suddenly arrive on a different one. As strange incidents go, this one's delightfully strange. It doesn't seem to cause any damage whatsoever, but it has an important effect, namely to mess with people's minds and make them doubt their own sanity.

The second is another strange incident that happens to Monk. Right after Doc makes a discovery of crucial importance, about which I'm going to tell you nothing, Monk tells him that he just met Winston Churchill, who recognised him and asked him quietly to keep secret the fact that he's on this volcanic island in the South Pacific. And Monk knows Churchill, because he met him in England four months earlier, while working on a chemical warfare mission, and cannot find fault with this ridiculous notion that he's undercover on Po Piki.

The third has to do with Monk as well, but not in the same way. Fraulino Jones is wondering about whether she can trust a couple of American naval officers or not. One is called Handsome Mayfair, a sixteenth cousin or some such of Monk, and he has the sheer temerity to get the girl in front of his famously homely relative. I liked him and Bill Adams and wished they had more to do.

The explanations are pretty solid, though not particularly surprising, and they fail to extend what feels like a very quick ending indeed. So this is a decent enough entry in the series, but one that's able to stand out from the crowd because of how offbeat it is. I wonder why Lester Dent took that approach but I'm not going to complain about it. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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