Here's another interesting 'Doc Savage' novel for a few reasons. For one, Lester Dent varied his formula yet again in this new era where he was once again the only series author. Everything is about deception, so we have to keep sharp to see through what's presented. Characters aren't always who they claim to be, including some we know well. Machinery isn't always what it seems to be. A key plot gimmick is both exactly what it seems to be and not at all what it seems to be. And the villains of the story provide a lot of that by having done far more homework coming in than any villains in any previous novel.

However, the most notable departure from the norm was the cover. This novel, which was #113 in the series, was first published in the July 1942 issue of 'Doc Savage Magazine' and, unlike the first hundred and twelve, didn't feature either Doc Savage himself or any member of his team. It wasn't even the work of Emery Clarke, the one and only cover artist since March 1938. Instead it featured a huge American flag waving over a small American town, with the stars and stripes echoed by a sun rising or setting behind clouds. Instead of the usual title of the novel within, it boasted a simple motto: "United We Stand".

It was painted by Charles deFeo and it didn't just appear on this issue of 'Doc Savage Magazine' but on every single issue of every Street & Smith pulp published in July 1942, under the expected header for each title. Similar covers appeared on what would have seemed like every magazine published that month. In all, over five hundred publications boasted some variation of a Stars and Stripes as the Magazine Publisher's Association's "patriotic conspiracy" or "united front", from 'Time' and 'National Geographic' to ' 'American Druggist' and 'Poultry Tribune'.

The reason, of course, was Pearl Harbor, acknowledged six months after the Japanese attack on Hawaii for two reasons. The most obvious was to celebrate the Fourth of July, with the nation at war with a foreign enemy once more, as a deliberate patriotic reminder of independence. A far less obvious one was that six months was the lead time for content for most pulps, so the novels within the covers were among the earliest written after Pearl Harbor. Certainly, this novel has plenty of acknowledgement of the war, with both British and German spies and a carefully built plot against the United States.

The central gimmick is introduced immediately, with Rod Bentley falling up into the sky out of a tall green building in New York City. He's fifteen floors up when he's shot and he falls out of the window but upwards rather than downwards. Witnessing this weird event is Tottingham Strand, his friend, who promptly brings the matter to Doc Savage, or at least to Ham and Monk, who he meets in that famously unnamed skyscraper. Everything seems to be green for a while, not just the green building but a mysterious green chest and a green fog that blankets the entire city.

Doc isn't there because he's off performing surgery, as we learn when Pat arrives to say that he has been hurt. That's not typical. She then leaves in the face of danger. That's not typical either. Monk fashions a charade to keep Doc safe. Doc faints twice in quick succession. He grabs Ham by the throat too. None of those are typical. These are some wildly offbeat opening chapters. And, of course, we get another man falling up, this time Strand himself, who's fallen prey to the very same weirdness that he came to report.

Now, given my first paragraph above, I should point out that most of this isn't what it seems. It isn't right, we know that, but we don't know why it's wrong and that keeps us on the hop right from the outset. It doesn't take us long to start figuring some of it out, because there's no way that Monk is going to hang out with a cohort called Stinky and crash an armoured truck into the plane on which Renny, Johnny and Long Tom are about to depart. They kill the pilot. Clearly, it's not Monk and so it doesn't shock too much when we discover that it's not Ham either.

I won't spoil much more than that, but whatever scheme is in motion that features a fake Monk and a fake Ham, enough to fool us and perhaps enough to fool Doc, is clearly no trivial effort. It must have taken an enormous amount of research and planning and naturally we're incredibly eager to figure out what it is and who's behind it. As Dent lets us in on the secrets I'm not going to tell you, we learn a number of things that are worth mentioning in isolation.

For one, Ham—the real Ham—has a knife scar on his back, which the villains didn't know about, however well-informed and prepared they might be. For another, Doc maintains an apartment in the same building as headquarters, just a dozen floors down. The villains didn't know about that either, but then neither did we and, most surprisingly, neither did his aides. That's a great use of a deus ex machina that actually makes sense. For a third, Pat now understands Mayan, a detail easily explained by the fact that she's had Monk teach it to her.

Monk is often worthy of note here, one surprising moment being when he appropriately uses a rather atypical word twice, entirely correctly, in front of Johnny, who's impressed. That word is "syzygy". Johnny gets his moments too, not least when he explains that he can't see the green fog that's deluged the city, even though Monk and Doc can. And there's a graduate of the crime college, Bob Caston, working inside that famously unnamed midtown skyscraper, always ready to be put to use. He runs the newspaper stand in the south lobby.

In keeping with the "United We Stand" cover's acknowledgement of what had become a world war rather than what the series had often dismissed as some sort of nonsense going on over in Europe, the story ties specifically to the war effort. This is an international plot orchestrated by enemy agents, but there are allied agents on the case. I won't tell you which are which because you should discover that for yourself, but, of course, Doc figures it out before we do. Naturally, a character name like Erica Ambler-Hotts might skew the mystery, but they're not all obvious. I liked a background detail that the international wire is often inaccessible because the military uses it heavily.

Overall, this is a pretty strong 'Doc Savage' novel, but it has its flaws and unfortunately I'd call out the central gimmick as one of them. It's not that it's a bad idea, because it isn't, and I got a kick out of the involvement of a mysterious substance called Compound Monk—a name that's explained with neat irony at the very end of the book—; it's that it doesn't live up to its billing as the central gimmick of the book, right down to the very title of the novel itself.

Next up for the series is 'The Three Wild Men' and, because Bantam was preserving the leads into the next month's story by this point, we're set up for that with the final paragraphs of this one that reminds of the movie 'D.O.A.'. A woman walks up to Doc's table at a restaurant, where he's dining with Monk and an as yet unnamed friend, and injects him with some sort of germs, as an incentive for him to help her solve the mystery of three wild men. See you next month! ~~ Hal C F Astell

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