Renny's off for a holiday, because apparently things are slow even though the Second World War is still raging. He's going fishing with Norman Monaghan, the vice president of a bank who he met while designing its new building. He gets quite the sendoff, sharing a limo to the airport with Doc, Monk and Ham, as well as a strange man built like a mosquito but with only one eye. He's also sat next to Renny on the plane and he insults our big-fisted friend's relaxation technique in ways that remind of Chiun in the 'Destroyer' novels.

Apparently he's Cici, the omnipotent, from Kukilcuaca, Mexico, and he's the most completely self-equipped in the Central Council of the Furtherest Inward. Even though he's egregiously offending Renny, he takes offense at Renny's taking offense. Renny closes his eyes to ignore him and, all of a sudden, wakes up in a taxi in Kansas City, Missouri, his fists small and his nails tinted. Somehow, he's become the zoot suited Palsy Gerson. This seems rather familiar, because there was a similar setup in 'Mad Mesa' but it's escalated here to one of Doc's aides.

And it's seriously escalated. Renny hates the zooter he's wearing and the fact that his moll Dolly calls him Snookins and jabbers away in the "clang-slang which swing addicts affected". However, I would bet money that he hates even more the revelation that, while he was apparently in Palsy's body, whoever was in his murdered a man, John Walters. On camera. Leaving Renny's fingerprints behind. His only saving grace is that he's in not in that body but that's fixed by four of his men and a blackjack. He wakes up as himself in a different hotel, having promised the phone girl fifty bucks for an alibi. He's been stitched up good.

At least he's in the right city, so he heads over to Norman Monaghan's place, where he finds both the "imp"—the term used throughout this book rather than the "mystic" the title suggests—and another revelation. Norman invited him fishing because he's in a similar jam. He became a small time crook, Snide Johnson, and murdered L. W. C. Stirling. What's more, Stirling was president of the Stirling Instrument Co. in Kansas City, Kansas, for whom Renny's victim also worked. This is an impeccable way to set up a 'Doc Savage' novel.

If that isn't enough, the imp pulls a fast one on Doc, who is, naturally, investigating. He gets onto a plane for Mexico, so Doc secretes himself on board earlier and watches him. Yet, somehow, in mid-air, the imp vanishes like a magician working a blockbuster trick. Not only does he vanish from the plane, a sort of locked room mystery in the sky, but Anton T. Fay appears on board in his place. It's fantastic to see Lester Dent not only set up a novel this well but then layer on a whole other level. I might have to call it the best first half to a 'Doc Savage' book in quite a few years, even though I got such a kick out of the first half of 'The Spook of Grandpa Eben' just a month earlier.

But wait, as they say, There's more! Fay works as an attorney. Guess which company he works for? That's right, the Stirling Instrument Co., where he knew Stirling himself, but not Walters. He also knows Renny's friend, rather well in fact, given that Norman Monaghan married his girl before he could. And that means that, after Renny and Doc are arrested—which was inevitable, given those fingerprints, and just waited for someone to send them into the FBI—the players left to figure out what's going on are two pairs, both of whom are at each other's throats: Fay and Monaghan, then Ham and Monk.

There's a catch, unfortunately, and that's that the second half can't hold a candle to the first. It's fair enough in most regards, even if it transforms from wild mystery to routine action. However, I don't buy into some of the explanations given for those wild mysteries. They're far too simple for one and they're just not credible for another. I'm pretty sure there are some hefty loose threads left hanging around too. The MacGuffin is pretty decent, at least, and there's a villain boasting a name as glorious as Kapitan Windschirm Kranich. He's the asshole you expect from that, too.

Put together, this is decent enough, with thieves and Nazis and a civil war stirred neatly between them. Ham gets the opportunity to dress up as the imp, bumping into people to insult them so he can get into the paper and thus trawl in the attention of the real Cici, the omnipotent. That's not just fun, it's also intensely dangerous and Doc has to step in before he's grabbed by another crew who think he's Brownie Gecini and plan to drown him in a river. I like that turn of the cards. I don't even mind the MacGuffin, which seems like it could be pretty game-changing.

It's just that the quality starts way up in the roof and, if it doesn't end up in the basement, it finds its way consistently down towards it. The explanations were never going to feel good but, had this started out at the same quality at which it ends, it would still be an OK novel. It's the fact that it's so good early highlights how much lesser the second half gets. Dent gives us all of that, then shifts into generic intrigue and a routine location shift to a vague location off the Labrador coast? That drop is pretty hard to hide.

Perhaps one reason for the quality shift is that this story was originally published in 'Doc Savage Magazine' for January 1944, the month that it changed format. Until the end of 1943, it had been published in the standard pulp size, but this was the first issue in the new smaller digest size. The word count was presumably affected, the Bantam paperback reprint wrapping up in precisely one hundred pages, and there was apparently a lot of editing done. Had the war not been on and the supply of paper not therefore rationed, maybe it would have remained at regular word count and format and felt a bit more cohesive.

Even the title seems clumsy. In the original pulp version, published in the 'Doc Savage Magazine' for January 1944, it was titled 'According to Plan of a One-Eyed Mystic', which seems to be missing the "the" before "Plan". Given how sprawling that is, it isn't surprising that Bantam condensed it down to simply 'One-Eyed Mystic' for their paperback edition, but again that seems to be missing a "the". It's a title that simply can't catch a break and the story seems to follow suit. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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