This Lester Dent entry in the 'Doc Savage' series somehow succeeds and fails at the same time.

It doesn't feel particularly coherent as a novel, the MacGuffin at its heart being a vitamin for the second book running. 'Men of Fear' had Vitamin F-E-A-R, which made people afraid. 'The Too-Wise Owl' has Vitamin M for Mental, which makes people intelligent. Well, not merely people. It makes owls intelligent, as we quickly discover when Owasso, an eagle owl, cocks and shoots a gun in Doc's HQ, shattering the window and enabling its escape through the broken glass. And I believed that was bulletproof! Apparently only from the outside.

However, it's full of highly memorable moments, that being one, and some of them are absolutely magic. The owl flies down to a car in the street, driven by a ridiculously precocious fourteen-year-old kid called Jasper Coogle. If that suggests that he's going to be insufferable, he doesn't take a long time to come up with memorable insults for Monk. He calls him "knob-nose", "frightful face", even "octopus countenance". I liked this kid immediately and couldn't wait for him to meet Johnny, given that he recites dictionary entries just because he can. Sure, enough, when the two do meet, he out-Johnnys Johnny.

It's one of those magic moments. Monk is filling in his compatriots about what Owasso can do and is met with disbelief. "I don't believe it," says Renny. "A meandrous arcanum," says Johnny. Renny sputters, "a what?", fourteen-year-old Jasper Coogle responds, "A Hyrcynian annagrammatism, a logogriphic adjuration of labyrynthine rebus" and Johnny's jaw drops as he absent-mindedly puts his dangling monocle into his eye. "Did you get a dose of your own medicine?" asks Renny, who's in fits of laughter. "Now you know what it's like to hear those words you use," says Monk.

But I'm getting way ahead of myself. It all kicks off when the kid from the candy shop downstairs brings Doc an owl, later revealed to be Owasso. A man with one ski pole brought it in, then fled as a man covered in diamonds got out of a Rolls Royce and chased him. Ski pole man dropped the gun and, when Doc takes it upstairs to look at it, the owl uses it to facilitate its escape. It flies down to Jasper, who drives away in a police car, only to crash it when ski pole man tries to kill him and thus run into the subway to escape. Let me remind you, he's fourteen. Let's take a wild stab as to what Vitamin M for Mental does!

Of course, everyone wants the owl. Why they don't want Jasper, I have no idea. Sure, we haven't heard of Vitamin M yet, but quite clearly whatever was done to the owl was done to him too. He's just not as strong a MacGuffin, I guess. Anyway, I should introduce you to everyone, because they have the usual wild names expected in a 'Doc Savage' novel and they each have their backgrounds and quirks.

The man with the ski pole is Jefferson Shair and Jasper appears to be a ward of some sort. I think that translates to guinea pig. Shair is a professional big game hunter and former skiing champion of Europe, both downhill and slalom. That's pretty impressive for someone not born in the Alps. Lola Huttig is a raincoat model, of all things, which is about the only profession Steven Seagal has not yet played in a movie. She hires Shair to shoot a man dead in the street, which he does, in an impressively heroic fashion, given that it's all a setup with the gun filled with blanks.

Except, of course, it isn't and he really does shoot the man dead and gets caught on camera as he does it. The neat added twist is that Lola isn't behind it. She was set up too and so joins the quest for truth. Early, we meet three thugs called Terrence, Sloppy Stone and Harry. Jasper coats them with alcohol and sets it on fire. He's quite the kid! Later, we meet Edwin Quell True, a talent of note in financial investment known as Wild Boy True and Too Good to Be True, on account of his success. And he is successful. He gets one over on Doc that I don't recall happening before.

Of course, Doc is large and powerful and bright and all the things. However, he's also thoroughly well-prepared at all moments. True catches him in a rare moment when he isn't, whirling around and firing four bullets at him. One cuts through his cheek, surely leaving a scar. Doc's alive and okay but shaken by the incident and it takes him quite a while to recover. Given that we're a hundred and nine novels into the series and nobody's done that before, I think it's less the physical trauma of being shot and more the mental acknowledgement that someone managed to do it without the bullet going safely into his chain mail vest.

That's not the only moment of note for Doc here either. Long Tom joins the story late and it falls to Doc to bring him up to speed as to what's happened thus far. "Doc summarized the thing briefly", but "briefly" turns out to mean a monologue that takes up fifteen lines in the paperback edition. I haven't kept a particular track, but it feels like that has to be the longest speech Doc's given over those hundred and nine novels.

So there are definitely moments here. I haven't mentioned the "icicle blackjack" yet, used to stun a butler into submission without leaving any viable evidence. That really ought to become a band name! I haven't mentioned the identity of the victim in the Huttig/Shair setup, but it's Ham's half-brother that he hadn't seen in forever. I haven't mentioned Jasper's successful spitball assault on Monk's ear, leading Ham to call him a "remarkable combination of mental giant and street devil". Talking of Ham, I haven't mentioned how brutal he gets when interrogating a suspect.

And I haven't mentioned that we spend some time at Johnny's place on Lower Max Street, a rough neighbourhood indeed. Apparently the way in "looked as if it might be an opium den, or the back door of a junk shop." Inside, it's what you might expect, a set of "long, large rooms filled with rock samples and dinosaur bones, with maps and volumes on archaeology and geology, with the things that went with Johnny Littlejohn's profession."

In short, there are a heck of a lot of moments here but somehow they don't add up into a novel of equal stature. This is also the sort of novel that relies on a magic vitamin without any substance to its creation. It's the sort of novel that introduces Renny and Johnny in the same breath and their first lines are their catchphrases. It's the sort of novel with multiple revelations of identities that the people who ought to have known didn't. These things drag the book down as much as all those moments elevate it. And thus it ends somewhere uncomfortably in the middle, a book that thrills and charms but ultimately ends up a little disappointing. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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