This novel is unmistakably a wartime 'Doc Savage' because it embraces the war more than I think any earlier novel had. It starts with Doc in Washington, DC with Monk and Ham, trying once again to persuade the powers that be to let them in on the war effort. They want to go and fight, but it isn't going to happen and, even if they don't realise that, we do. They're too valuable where they are. Later we meet actual Nazis, senior ones too, and there's a strong hint as to which ones, even if it's backed away from by the end and there's still a general bowdlerisation in play. We never get Hitler's name in this context; he's just "Der Fuehrer". Nobody says "Nazi" either, just "German".

However, there's one detail that would work just as well at pretty much any point after the war as during it. In that sense, this is rather ahead of its time, because those senior Nazis here are two in number and we meet them in self-imposed exile in Mexico. This novel was published in September 1943's 'Doc Savage Magazine' and they'd already been there for a couple of months, which is early for an assumption that the Third Reich is about to fall and, before that happens, they need to get out with enough gold and treasure to fund new lives in the new world. The latter has the effect of shocking Ham: "I thought they claimed they didn't steal anything from the Louvre!"

But I'm getting ahead of myself. While in Washington DC, Doc meets Too-Too Thomas, who's also having trouble getting the government to listen to him. Then again, he wants Doc and his men to help him steal a Navy plane with bombs in it and a can of quick drying paint. It's all so they can run a submarine. He's asking a lot given that he doesn't share a lot of information or indeed the why behind everything, but Monk goes with him to acquire a plane, with $112k in cash in his pockets. It turns out to be a trap, but not his, and it's when their captors realise who Monk is that they have to either double down or fold. They go with double down and that means catching or killing Doc.

And so we have a story. They seem to be very capable captors and it isn't long before both we and Doc's men realise that they've had military training. They knock Monk out when he tries Yaqui to talk to Too-Too, though it's the old man who has the harder head. He knows Yaqui better, mostly because Monk mostly used it to chat up girls. We pick up some names—Sam, Willis, Bunny and Pet—but little about who they work for, just two bosses, one fat and one thin. Willis proves to be the most capable because he calls Doc's headquarters using an excellent imitation of Monk's childlike voice. Hey, it shouldn't always be Doc who gets away with impressions!

While Monk has been captured pretty early this time out, he's still portrayed better than Ham. It seems that all the various grenades Doc and his aides use look identical, so they're colour coded to ensure they use the right one in any particular situation. Gas grenades are red, explosive ones yellow and ones with shrapnel white. Complicating things a little, smoke grenades are a checked black and white pattern. Somehow Ham mistakes a gas bomb for a smoke one, which doesn't help them in that moment. Only a chapter later, he fires smoke bullets instead of mercy ones. Twice in one novel is not a good look, Mr. Brooks!

Of course, there's also a woman to add to the mix, because the formula demands it. She shows up on a rooftop to take Doc prisoner, mistakenly thinking him to be one of the bad guys there to do exactly the same thing. Oops! She goes by Lena Carlson and she's shocked when Doc admits that he hasn't heard of her. Not too much later, Doc realises that he does know her, but under her full name of Madelena Smitz-Carlson. She's a wealthy and spoiled heiress but one interesting enough to have offered to kidnap Adolf Hitler before the war began. There have been three attempts on her life recently and she's in DC following the third assassin. Oh, and she's also a partner with Too-Too in the Rancho el Dirty Man.

Now, when Too-Too tells Doc about the ranch in the first chapter, he calls it the Dirty Man Rancho "in the foothills of the Sierra Santa Clara in Lower California". Later, when we actually visit there, we've realised that it's actually the Rancho el Dirty Man and it's in Mexico. I hadn't twigged that Lower California is what we tend to call Baja California, the pensinsular that starts just south of San Diego and extends for almost eight hundred miles further, perhaps because the rancho is in Yaqui country and I also hadn't twigged that the Pascua Yaqui that I've met in Tucson hailed from Mexico originally and fled north to escape state violence.

Given that we're on the west coast, I'm not sure what route the senior Nazis took to get there but get there they did, inevitably by submarine given Too-Too's comments in the first chapter and the cover art on the pulp, on which a U-boat even boasts a prominent swastika. They have a couple of them and the one that spikes Doc's plane is captained by the characterful Adolph von Schwartz, a gentleman of a Nazi who has Pat and Lena change into swimsuits rather than be subjected to the indignities of a body search; after all, it meets the same goal of ensuring they have no weapons. I liked Schwartz's accent, as he's fluent in English but adopts stereotypical diction that he picked up from "your comic papers". It's good to hear "Herr Doktor Savage".

This is an enjoyable novel but it isn't a particularly deep or complex one. We don't learn a heck of a lot in DC and what we do is by proxy from Monk. We shift location on flimsy evidence that seems suspicious from the outset. There are good aspects to the ending, because some of the karma has a delay that we're left to imagine, but it never feels that substantial. I can imagine that Lena was polarising for fans. I liked her unpredictability and she's much better than her initial description suggests, but she isn't as effective as other recent women, like Willie Stevens and Willia Hannah.

Here, if you want an effective female character, you'll get it in Pat Savage. For once, all the aides are in play this time, though Johnny or Long Tom get little to do. Renny gets more but Pat shines over him pretty consistently. In fact, when Renny and Pat fly into a trap, Pat's the one who thinks it's fishy and parachutes out before it's sprung. She even manages to get some sort of tracer into the fuel tank of the plane they're following so that Doc can track it using infra red. She's a decent foil for Lena too, who knows about Pat's salon.

At the end of the day, there are notable moments here but without a lot of meat around them. If I remember this six months from now, it's going to be for those moments. I haven't mentioned Doc using a kite to get a sensitive mike onto the roof of a building, which prompted Lester Dent to add a footnote about ancient kite fighting. I haven't mentioned his ballsy request to borrow a couple of enemy prisoners from the War Department. That's power! And I haven't mentioned a rock that  gets thrown at a particularly crucial moment in time. And beyond those, there's Dent's prescient notion that prominent Nazis would flee their sinking ship for the new world. He just aimed a little high. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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