While I've been enjoying these wartime 'Doc Savage' adventures more than I expected to, this is a strange one. When it's good it's very good. It's more noteworthy than usual for a host of reasons. And yet it's also often routine, reminding us of earlier stories. In the end, I guess it's a mixed bag, one that oddly seems much better than it is because it delivers on so much of its promise.

It gets right down to business for one thing. There's been a tidal wave in Lake Michigan. Two dead. No seismic activity whatsoever. Monk lets Doc know. And that's page one! As much as I appreciate the longer intros with subtle builds that don't bring Doc in until chapter three or four, I kind of like this no-nonsense diving right-in mindset too. Doc calls Ham and they research the mystery for two hours on the phone. They don't learn much more except that it was a fifteen-foot wave and a fake newsman showed up in Nahma, Michigan, on the Upper Peninsula at Bay de Noc at the top end of Green Bay.

They head out to investigate, of course, but it's just Monk and Ham with Johnny. Doc follows on in disguise, as an old man with a pot belly, while Renny keeps going as him before circling back to get Long Tom. Everyone's in play here, including Pat, though it takes a little while. Renny's initially at an Army planning-board meeting, where he breaks a table by literally hammering his point home. Long Tom's at headquarters working on a cyclotron. That's where Pat shows up, prompting them to describe her as "excitopsychic", a word they've invented to mean psychic to excitement. When something kicks off, she hones in on it like magic. She calls them Grumpy and Grouchy. I like.

And there's a lot more that comes out of that paragraph.

When the first three aides fly north, it's Monk at the controls and he's all set to simply land at the Nahma airport when Ham suggests dragging it first, a precaution that Johnny echoes. So they fly over at low altitude and drop a flare to see that it's been mined with iron fence posts and barbed wire. They're fine, of course, and they soon land nearby but that's a brutal trap to set, especially this early in a novel. It does indeed set the stage for a couple of other brutal moments.

One mentioned but not dwelt on is the fact that Renny and Long Tom are tortured, something we feel without description because of what went before. Most notably, Doc, Monk and Johnny, with a supporting character called Two Gun Sidney Atz, investigate a mysterious cabin belonging to an unusually calmly named character, Dave Clay. Two Gun Sidney Atz is a routine name for this series, but Dave Clay? That may well be the least outrageous name thus far and this is novel one hundred and twenty.

Anyway, Doc and Monk go in and Stub, the most prominent bad guy, blows it up. And I mean blows it up big time. Johnny is quite some distance away and he's still blown off his feet and knocked out for three hours, eventually coming to and hobbling forty miles back to town on his sprained ankle, all the time mourning his colleagues. He knows there's no chance for Doc and Monk and, while we have no doubt that they're still alive and they'll be back in action promptly, we can't see how and neither can Johnny. This is probably the most believable "Doc's dead" instance thus far.

That's two instances of hyperbole I've used already and I have two more to come. One is that Pat's given some real opportunity for once, which I'm all for. She isn't just eager for action and, courtesy of being excitopsychic, right there to join the fray, she does her best work thus far, almost leading the way like Doc for a while. We're told that she's learned Mayan again, which seems to be new on everyone except us, given that we know Monk taught her only six books earlier in 'The Three Wild Men'. And, while the muffler that quietens their plane engine is Doc's invention, Pat adds one of her own, to make the remaining sound appear to be an automobile. Now she's an inventor too!

Oddly, after setting Pat up for her best and most successful involvement yet, Dent promptly yanks the rug out from under her feat. She faints twice here, the first time an impressive hoax to escape a tough situation, but the second time for real, when Doc inevitably shows back up from the dead. And, shortly afterwards, when Doc has to drive at high speed, she finds that she's actually scared. Neither of these things seems right at all, so we go from wondering if Pat is being bulked up in the series to wondering if she's on her way out. That's an odd feeling.

My final use of hyperbole is to suggest that there are more footnotes in this book than any other thus far. There's one in the first chapter, for a start, and some long ones late on, but chapter five alone has more footnotes than some textbooks I've worked through. This novel was collected into the tenth omnibus by Bantam and there's a footnote on page 142 to kick off this chapter, running four lines below only three of actual text. Then there's another on page 143 that continues over, taking up a full half of page 144. And then there's a third on page 145. Chapter five only runs seven pages but the footnotes amount to at least one of them.

The most important one is a look back at Doc's early life. We know much of this already but not all of it and it's rare to see it delivered in this much detail. Doc's mother died soon into his life and he was put into the hands of scientists from a very young age. This was his father's sole purpose for a lot of years and he used up his fortune in the process, flying him out to be taught by experts, not just to Yale and Virginia to learn about atomic energy and "supersensory phenomena" but also to "a Yogi practioner from India" and "a jungle chief and tracker in Africa". And, after all the detail, Dent reveals that even Doc never figured out why his father chose this life for him.

Meanwhile, there's a story going on, much of which isn't actually worthy of much comment. It's an example of the "Yojimbo" effect, albeit twenty years earlier, with the MacGuffin being sought by two separate gangs and Doc coming in between them to play each against the other. The location feels familiar too. We haven't strictly been here before but we've been to similar places and often enough for it to seem like we have.

What matters are a whole slew of details, which make this book more noteworthy than perhaps it ought to be. There's a great scene when the bad guys get Ham and Doc actually knocks out Monk, so that he can't rush back in a vain attempt to save him. If anyone else had done that, he'd create mayhem, but, after he comes to, he accepts it from Doc. There's another when they notice a trap and effectively undo it. There are seven men concealed within the bucket of a Cat. They're going to talk too, until Lawyer Plate shows up with a machine gun.

There are also a couple of instances of the good guys failing in believable fashion, which is rather refreshing. I've never been a fan of Doc being utterly infallible. Sure, he's trained and disciplined far better than any of us, so he ought to have a pretty damn good track record at being right, but that doesn't mean a hundred per cent of the time. Here, he does one of his impressions, this time of Two Gun Sidney Atz, but it doesn't work because he's "out of breath, wrenched with fatigue". At another point, Monk neatly stows away in the boot of a car before Atz steals it, only to nearly die because he drove it into a lake to dispose of it.

And so this is a mixed bag but a mostly good one worthy of a lot of comment. It's still a good book but it had the potential to be a great one and it falls short even if it's only through Dent settling into a routine occasionally rather than pushing each aspect to be unique.

Some linguistic notes. There's even a word used that surprised me, in this instance "honkatonk". I hadn't seen that spelling of "honky-tonk" before but apparently it's completely acceptable, as is "honkey-tonk" or simply "tonk". Oh, and I really like the name of chapter three, "The Scared Clay". It's subtle but evocative, even if it only refers to a person, Dave Clay. I like it anyway and it's now my second favourite chapter title after the delightful '’Corpus Delicti' in Glass' in 'Murder Mirage' seven years earlier in January 1936. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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