Once again, I find myself at odds with the general fan opinion that 'Doc Savage' novels tail off in quality once they get past the heyday of the first few years. This is a real banger of a novel from ten years into the series, starting out with traditionally weird pulp elements but then diving into one of the most controversial elements of the series deeper than ever before in ways that ought to have been touched much sooner than this.

We start out with the titular devil, which is a foot high and made of metal. More importantly, it's talking to Sam Joseph, who's the office manager for a very rich man named Montague Ogden. He obtained the statue from a Chinaman, to use the terminology of the day. He's Chi Sun, but it was moulded by Co Suan, a friend of the Buddha. Yes, that Buddha. And he imprisoned the King of Evil inside it, so that part of his spirit would give the statue life. This is quintessential Doc Savage.

However, the deconstruction of the Doc mythos promptly follows in the wake of the introduction. Because it's clear that Sam really does hear the statue but nobody else does, Doc diagnoses that he must have a brain tumour and other doctors concur with his opinion. Ogden donates a hundred grand to charity so Doc will perform the surgery personally. And so he does, but the twist is that, after all that buildup, there is no tumour and now Ogden wants half a million in damages. It's all a setup to cast doubt on Doc's abilities.

And then the bad guys, whoever and wherever they might be at this point, double down on that. Suddenly, the papers are talking about the mysterious crime college. What are these operations that Ogden is raging about? What happens to these criminals that Doc encounters and who has a say in that judgement? Ogden's one of the richest people in the country and Doc's headline news on a regular basis, so this is a huge story and could well become an even bigger scandal. Which it does when we discover that some of the college's graduates have returned to crime.

Just as we think that this is going to be an adventure fought on the front pages, we dive into the action portion of the book. Rotary Harrison is an oilman and Sister Harrison, who's his daughter, counter to expectations, is massively accomplished, but they're running for their lives now that Duster Jones has been shot between the eyes. They think they're next, but it turns out that the bad guys want to kill them because they think they're going for Doc Savage's help. They weren't, but they sure are now.

Lester Dent doesn't skimp on the action here, which is non-stop for a long while. Sis can fly, but is forced to land on a river after their plane is shot down. They're met in Millard, Missouri by rifles, machine guns and grenades. Doc gets the bad guys to run and gives chase, courtesy of a chemical that Monk is able to slip into their gas tank to leak a trail in both infrared and ultraviolet. Monk and Doc parachute down to rescue the Harrisons from an old derelict boat and...

Well, Monk gets himself into trouble, as he does, fairly describing one botched confrontation as the nastiest fight he's ever had. Doc has already told him that he's too gung ho. "You've got to be less reckless," he suggests. "You take too many chances." Two pages later, he storms the derelict boat to take on four men at once, promptly falls through a hole in the deck and gets clocked with "an old piece of rusted wire hawser about a dozen feet long". That to the back of the head sends him into a neat one and a half turn over the rail. Maybe Doc has a point!

If we can pause the action for a moment to take a breath, I'll point out that the aides in play this time out are initially Renny, Long Tom and Monk, with Ham joining a few chapters in. Johnny is in Alaska, so plays no part in proceedings. Monk's the most active, as he tends to be, but Ham has a few moments, especially when he throws Ogden and his shyster lawyers out of headquarters and when he's called to secretly take the place of another character. The others mostly keep busy on research, but everybody has their part to play. Eventually, though, we reach the point where the papers print a letter from Monk, who's splitting away from Doc's operation because of the Crime College. This is serious stuff.

There's a lot to like here. I've always seen the Crime College as a troublesome detail within Doc's mythos. Sure, we know that everything he does is with the very best of intentions because he has dedicated his life to doing what's right. We continue to believe that even when schemes like this one throw doubt on his motives or his abilities or whatever. However, effectively kidnapping bad guys and operating on their brains without consent to turn them into productive citizens is hard to support, even if the results are positive. It phrases Doc not only as a vigilante but a judge, jury and executioner, all outside of due process.

It doesn't take much to spin it all as the sort of thing that a supervillain might do and occasionally the series takes a fresh look at it by raising it out of secrecy for a moment. This time marks by far the furthest it's been raised into public awareness and maybe the worst aspect of this book is how easily it's put back into the box once the threats du jour have been addressed. If we're looking at negatives, I'd suggest that Sister Harrison had much more promise than she was allowed to meet and the destruction of the titular statue without any gain still seems odd and underwhelming.

Mostly, though, this is strong. Even apart from the Crime College angle, Doc's tricked into a neat vulnerability. I never liked the superhero approach of the first handful of books and was happy to see him tempered down just a little early in the series, enough to be believable. After all, he has no superpowers. He's just so dedicated and has been so dedicated for so long that he's perfected himself in ways that we could have echoed had we had the same dedication. It doesn't matter how much you work at it, you're not going to jump small buildings in a single bound without some sort of superpower and that's not what this series is. What I like even more is the moments when he's shown to be human and vulnerable, because it ably emphasises all the times he isn't.

Of course, he wins out in the end, because he has another adventure to move on to, but Dent has more vulnerability to scatter elsewhere too. My favourite scene comes very late in the book when Monk dives into another fight. As if acknowledging Doc's warnings about recklessness earlier, he's pretty confident about this one, because he only has one man to fight and he's "slim and pale and delicate looking". And so he boasts. "It's a shame to waste time on a spindlin' little guy like you," he suggests and promptly gets his ass kicked. He has to be saved by Renny stepping in to tap the other guy on the head with a revolver barrel. I'm sure Ham is still laughing about that fight.

Next month, Doc takes on 'The Running Skeletons' and I hope they play a larger part in the story than the talking devil did in this one. I also hope it's just as good as this book, because this is a late favourite. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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