This enjoyable but relatively inconsequential episode in the 'Doc Savage' series, the one hundred and tenth, nonetheless marks the end of an era. 'Doc Savage' was created and initially written by one man, Lester Dent. The first fifteen novels in the story were his, even if they're all credited to a house name, Kenneth Robeson. However, in June 1934, another writer joined the fray and penned an entry himself. Dent continued to write most of the stories but other hands chimed in here and there, until April 1942 when William G. Bogart wrote this one, 'The Magic Forest', from a synopsis by Dent. It would be the last 'Doc Savage' story by another hand for over four years. The next fifty stories would come from Dent's typewriter.

It's another confusing story, in which weird things happen and we're not likely to make heads nor tails out of it until Doc lets us in on what he's figured out. That's only partly because those at the heart of the mystery which Doc and his men inevitably take on turn out to belong to two separate sides. It's the sort of book I feel like reading again just to see if that was clear from the outset and I simply didn't notice. I don't think it is, but you never know. It's certainly happened before!

While the table of contents is a little depressing because it promises an infuriatingly generic set of chapter titles, the story actually starts pretty well. For once, it's Renny in play first, because he has been invited onto a flight of a new stratospheric plane by a colleague, Clarence Faulkner. He's just joined the International Society of Master Engineers, where Renny is a charter member, and he appropriately thinks that he might enjoy the experience.

The catch is that it's promptly hijacked. All the passengers are taken down with hypodermic darts and, while Renny puts up a good fight, he's overwhelmed. Monk and Ham, typically the first aides in any 'Doc Savage' novel, are waiting for him at the airport but the plane doesn't return. It's last seen over Philadelphia heading south and some quick investigation highlights that the mechanics were replaced an hour before the flight. Back at HQ, they keep track of it south to Texas, then the Gulf of Mexico. It appears that we're in for a Central American adventure.

The only clue they have is a small totem pole, apparently lost by one of the hijackers at the scene of the crime and it soon proves to be a powerful symbol. Nome Dale soon shows up carrying news about Renny but he balks when he sees the totem pole. When the hallway outside HQ explodes, he runs and they give chase only to lose him. Returning upstairs, they find a girl in furs, Georgiana Lee, daughter of Homer Dale the lumber king. Apparently he's disappeared and so have his three sons, one of whom is Nome. When they all visit Homer's partner, Howard Bullock, they find that he has also vanished. And there's another totem pole, left in their car while they were distracted by an attacking force.

The break comes when Anderson Bullock, Howard's father, is taken on a trip. He's unconscious for all of it, but it takes two days to get there, where he sees his son alive, and another two days back. Next thing we know, Doc takes the same trip, in disguise, and unobtrusively counters the jab so he can learn where this adventure is really taking them, which is up Glacier Inlet in Alaska, naturally in the magic forest of the title. Hilariously, Renny, a prisoner at this point, is tasked with carrying Doc, not that the bad guys have any idea who either of them are.

And, once Doc gets a message back to HQ, no fewer than two weeks later, the rest fly out to help and we're in motion. That means Ham and Monk, of course, plus Long Tom, who flies in from the electrical engineering convention he's attending in Chicago. Johnny is absent this time, but the explanation is surely the weakest of the series thus far: "He was temporarily in South America on some sort of expedition is all Bogart wants to give us.

There are good scenes here, the best happening in the forest itself, highlighting why it's seen as magic. Monk, Ham and Long Tom are attempting to follow other characters, for reasons, but only manage to lose themselves in the process. It's not ineptitude, it's that the trails seem to change on them. It's a hallucinatory scene and Bogart doesn't do a bad job of getting that feeling across. The story would have been much more effective had more of it carried that atmosphere.

Other moments are cheap, including another quick but magically effective disguise for Doc and a round of corrective surgery that he does on the bad guys at the very end, given that they're so far from his upstate New York clinic and they can't just ask a local agent to whisk them away to return as constructive members of society. None of that feels particularly believable.

Everything else falls in between, enjoyable enough but either feeling like filler there to pad out a more substantial page count or gradually unwrapping one side into two. Most of the characters in the story thus far that we've either met or heard of belong to one or the other: Clarence Faulkner, Homer Dale, Howard Bullock and Georgiana Lee, for a start, who shows back up in Alaska with an Indian guide, Skagway Willie. So much of this being middling, the book ends up that way, hardly a standout even in 1942 and arguably the weakest thus far for the year.

Let's see how that changes next month when Dent retakes complete control of the series, with his first of fifty in a row, 'Pirate Isle'. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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