I have a feeling that Lester Dent was eager to try new things in 1942, now that he was the series writer every month again instead of just many of them. And that makes a lot of sense. After all, the world was a different place. The war wasn't just on the other side of the pond; the Japanese had forced the previously isolationist United States into joining the fray and, with the lead time for pulps generally six months, August 1942 was easily enough time for all the pulps on the shelf to have been written after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The war is a clear backdrop here and some of Doc's aides are involved. Renny's in South Africa, working for the British government. Johnny's in London and Long Tim's in Lisbon, presumably also aiding the war effort in some fashion. That crops this new story down to Doc and his most regular pair of assistants, Monk and Ham. Doc also has operatives working in the field all over the world, "operatives" meaning former crooks who have graduated from Doc's upstate clinic. Denzel Bains calls in from Paris, not merely using the words "concentration camp" for the first time in the series but "Nazi" no fewer than three times in one paragraph. Yes, Street & Smith were emphatically acknowledging the war now!

Initially, though, we seem to be no closer to it than we have been thus far. A girl walks up to Doc in a restaurant, where he's dining with Monk and someone called Mustaphet Kemel, and injects him with germs. Doc shrugs it off, because the needle didn't pierce his mesh vest, and she quickly runs away. Monk gives chase, pursuing the girl in both meanings of the word. Meanwhile, Kemel tells Doc about someone in the Baltic who's making a similar mesh vest but for the bad guys. He works for good guys and bad guys, it seems, as a double agent, but he also owes Doc.

Monk is the one who walks into the plot. After discovering that the girl is a crack shot at the fair, she leads him into the expensive neighbourhood around Park Avenue—some restaurants there charge fifty cents for a Coke!—to meet her father, who promptly pulls a gun on him. She's Abba Cushing, her father is Raymond E. Cushing and they're surrounded by very rich people, or in the language Monk uses, ‘they all have more money than Heinz has pickles’. More importantly, they want something done about the three wild men.

Monk hasn't the faintest, because that's the first mention we've had of the titular characters, but they don't believe him and take him to the river, where they draw straws to see who'll drop him off on a yacht because they all get really scared. In fact, Monk gets really scared as well, as does Doc, who's waiting there for him. None of them seem to know why they're really scared but they're really scared nonetheless, becoming one of the principal mysteries in this novel.

After they vacate the yacht and it explodes behind them, Doc follows three wild men who swim ashore and they become another mystery, not least given that they're dressed in leopard skin sarongs and they run around chasing people. The newspapers soon confirm that one of them is Root Too Hooten, a Dutchman who got rich in Borneo, given that he tried to battle a train with a hatchet and inevitably came off dead. Doc's aware of him and that he's been reported missing for three weeks. That was also Hooten's yacht. Abba names all three wild men before the papers, but she also believes that Doc made them that way.

A third is Abba herself, who gets a larger and more mysterious role than the token young lady who's usually little more than a beautiful damsel in distress. Monk saw that she's a crack shot in the early scenes. The injection gag was apparently intended to be seen as unusual enough that it would spark Doc's attention so he'd follow her to her father, but Monk capably served as the backup option. And we know that trap was set by Mr. Adam rather than Raymond Cushing. Her mindset that Doc's behind the three wild men drives much of the story, though that belief gets picked up by a lot more people, not least the United States government.

And that's understandable because there aren't just three wild men. There are a lot more, but they merely happen to show up in trios. There are three in New York, where Doc is. There are a further three in South Africa, where Renny is, and three more in London where Johnny is. You'll be shocked to discover that, before long, there are three in Lisbon where Long Tom is. There's a second commonality in that each trio includes a financier, an industrialist and a reformer. The government is under the conviction that Doc is experimentally illegally.

Regular readers don't get to see Doc emotional very often, but there's a scene here where he's checking in with the Department of Justice using his usual credentials—which we learn are U-93 in Department K—only to be told over the phone that they have been cancelled. "Doc stared at the mouthpiece in blank astonishment." Back at HQ, the FBI explain that they're "not revoked, I was instructed to explain, but merely suspended pending clarification of certain matters." And, bizarrely, it's Abba who frees him, because she's nobody's puppet and she thinks for herself. No wonder Doc compliments her combination of intelligence and beauty, another anomaly, even if it makes him feel awkward.

And so we go. While this acknowledges the backdrop of the war, it plays out more as a detective story with elements of a secret agent story. We do shift location late in the novel, as tradition decrees, but it's very late in the novel rather than halfway and only to the Virginia back woods, the primary location carrying the neat moniker of Dismal Swamp. Most of the novel unfolds in New York, lending it an urban feel. While we certainly spend time at HQ, an exotic location for a detective novel, and on Park Avenue, there are also scenes in hospitals and drugstores, more of what we might expect for characters pounding the streets. We also spend time with an actual detective, Top West by name.

Of course, if we think that the series is about to become more grounded, given the backdrop of war, then that first mystery happily remains in weird science. We learn that there are reasons why people, including Doc and Monk, get really scared in certain situations, just as we learn the reason behind the three wild men and why each batch of them has the same professional make-up. They're not the best of reasons but they work. The way Doc ends it all isn't the best way but maybe that works. I'd call this a weak ending, but it's a decent novel up until that point, with an impressive leading lady for once. I could see Abba Cushing working with Pat Savage.

Next up, a man climbs into a chandelier to hunt a vampire, which suggests 'The Fiery Menace' is another wild one. ~~ Hal C F Astell

For Doc Savage titles 1-100 click here
For Doc Savage titles 101 on click here