While Lester Dent had increasingly given way to other authors to keep up Doc Savage Magazine's monthly publication schedule, he still wrote the majority of these novels, including four of the first half of 1940, but this marks the beginning of a five-month break for him. William G. Bogart steps in again to knock out two, before tagging in Harold A. Davis for two others and then returning again for a fifth. Dent wrapped up the year with 'The Men Vanished' but that was a long way away at this point and let's see how much we're yearning for him when we get there.

The good news is that this is the best Bogart novel thus far, which means that it's better than four earlier ones. 'World's Fair Goblin' was gimmicky. 'Hex' was underwhelming. 'The Angry Ghost' and 'The Spotted Men' were hyperactive, constantly leaping around from location to location, and this one follows suit, but at least the shifts here are primarily back and forth between a pair of nearby locations, thinking on a grand scale, rather than to every other town on a large map. Eventually it shifts to a more exotic location much further away, as per the traditional template. In other words, we may rack up a lot of air miles here, but we never feel lost.

One location is New York, mostly Doc's 88th HQ with one scene at the waterfront hangar, but also at the Crime College, because that's where we start out. A couple of men creep up to an unnamed building upstate and throw a rock through a third-floor window with a note wrapped around it. It's to tell Birmingham Jones that he's going to be sprung in five minutes. Sure enough, the flying goblin of the title takes out a corner of the building precisely then and Jones is a free man, ready to be a new member of Patrick Valentine's gang.

We learn relatively quickly that this building is Doc's upstate college where his team of doctors do the work needed to cure the crooks he sends them of their criminal tendencies, with that result of turning those crooks into decent, productive members of society. For reasons that fans can happily debate, this process isn't fully working on Jones. It's stripped his memory of all the bad things he's done, and a whole lot more besides, but he still likes to kill people. That makes him a rather unique character, the patient who got away in more ways than one, who now functions capably but is still a little foggy about who he is and how he got there.

The other location is New Jersey, one state away, and we find our way there in the second chapter, accompanying Ham and Monk on a drive into Sleepy Hollow. Yeah, that one. Apparently, an artist named Honey Sanders has seen an apparition of Ichabod Crane, though the bad guys know that it isn't Crane but Oscar, whoever or whatever Oscar is. What matters is that she saw it and that's why Birmingham Jones is being sent to grab her. We find her soon enough, when Ham investigates her cottage on Shady Lane where she paints landscapes, but we have some fun first.

On the drive in, Monk sees something weird whizzing overhead and carving a path through the trees. He thinks it's the Headless Horseman riding a barrel. Ham sees it, too, on its return trip and they crash into a gas station, where Monk has a brawl with the owner. It takes four cops to calm the fight down and the constable, Sandy Gower, will have Monk up before a judge in the morning. And that's why Ham gets a shot at the pretty girl in the story first, because, while she's been missing a while, she's actually hiding out in her house. She knows who Ham is, so they team up and go out to look for trouble. She knows that the flying goblin comes from the Hudson river and she also knows where the men talk.

Of course, they're captured and, in so doing, start a recurring theme. Bogart seems to be happy to get Doc and his men into trouble, demonstrate their prowess by taking multiple men down against serious odds but not quite manage to defeat everyone. Ham takes down two. Later, Monk matches him. Doc, of course, knocks out many more. However, all three are taken in their respective scenes and have to figure out escape. Another recurring theme is the trap, not uncommon in Doc Savage novels, but used rather liberally here by Bogart. It gets to the point where, if anyone tells anyone anything, we promptly assume that it's going to be a trap. And that doesn't help the finalé, which is supposed to be a little more opaque but is really just another trap that Doc sees through.

I wonder what anyone reading this back in July 1940, when this issue of 'Doc Savage Magazine' hit the newsstands, thought of the flying goblin. Even though some of the action unfolds in the exact Sleepy Hollow that Washington Irving used for his famous short story and there are references to it early on, we never buy that there's any supernatural element. Bogart definitely went there in a previous novel, 'Hex', which reached its readers right before Hallowe'en 1939, but he's not fussed here, even though he could easily have followed suit with echoes of 'Hex'.

Today, of course, anyone seeing the flying goblin isn't going to see the Headless Horseman riding a barrel, they're going to see a missile. That may have been a spoiler back in 1940 but we're all going to see it today as early as chapter two and we're never going to doubt it. The fact that we have the benefit of hindsight and the first thing that any of us would think of whenever someone says 1940 is World War II. Something strange is flying through the air and blowing up buildings during a war! What could it possibly be? Even our kids aren't going to think flying goblins.

Now, the sharp-eyed among you will be saying, hang on a minute, Doc Savage is an American hero and the United States hadn't joined the war yet, and you'd be absolutely right. However, that just means that what Bogart does here is particularly interesting. Being English, I think of the war as starting in September 1939 and so, as I've approached that in my Doc Savage runthrough, I've kept my eyes open for mentions of what was going on back in the old world. With a couple of exceptions, the tendency was to not mention it at all, until the point where it seemed ridiculous that it wasn't being mentioned, so started to be mentioned as something happening over there. Action shifted to South America or even deeper into the U.S. rather than get tangled up in something that might backfire, especially when America was being isolationist.

However, Bogart took a giant step towards changing that policy here. The war is first mentioned in chapter one as an analogy when Oscar hits the Crime College. "It sounded as though a part of the war in Europe had suddenly been moved to the wilderness of upstate New York." The aides in play this time are Ham, Monk and Long Tom, so we expect a typical comment at some point; that Renny is in Venezuela supervising construction of a hydroelectric dam and Johnny is digging through the newly found archaelogical site in Outer Mongolia. When it comes, in chapter twelve, it simply says that Renny and Johnny are "somewhere in Europe". In July 1940? People weren't building a lot of dams or excavating archaeological sites in Europe in July 1940. What is Bogart suggesting?

Eventually, he comes clean because Cornelius Duval, owner of a cellulose plant and a paint factory that are blown up by Oscar in New Jersey, has mysteriously done a runner for Europe, and all our major players set out on the Sea Queen, the fastest transatlantic vessel afloat. That's Doc, along with Monk, Ham and Long Tom, plus Honey Sanders, her boyfriend Tod Smith who shows up out of nowhere in chapter thirteen, and even Sandy Gower. Lester Dent and the other names behind the Kenneth Robeson house name have conspicuously avoided the entire continent ever since war was declared, but Bogart promptly decided that that's where we're all going in the traditional second half location shift.

Now, he does take some care to not mention who's actually fighting. Renny and Johnny are at the hotel in Paris that Doc has set up, which is a little awkward because France doesn't appear to be at war in this book, which, let me remind you, was originally in 'Doc Savage Magazine' and dated July 1940. Instead there are only two nations at war and Bogart is careful not to say which. Of course, in hindsight, we know that the Wehrmacht invaded France in May 1940, Paris fell to the Nazis on 14th June and the French signed an armistice with them only eight days later, meaning that when this issue hit newsstands, the Nazis were in the streets and France was a puppet state governed by the Vichy government. It didn't look remotely like what Doc finds when he arrives in Paris.

The action in France takes place near the Swiss border in an area called Breakneck Pass, but only a select few characters are named and they're all Americans who have travelled over for this finalé, whether because they're good guys or bad guys. And, for a change, I'm going to kinda sorta spoil this one. I'm not going to tell you the bad guy is the secret identity of Patrick Valentine, because you can have fun working that out (it isn't hard). What I will provide is the reason that he's doing what he's doing.

He doesn't believe in war. He wants to end the war that's started in Europe. And so he's developed a secret weapon and used it, not just in New York to retrieve Birmingham Jones and New Jersey to threaten Cornelius Duval, but presumably elsewhere in Europe. The result is that those two pesky countries are paying serious attention, because they each think that the other is the one using the secret weapon. "It says here that those two nations that are havin' a war are sure raisin' plenty of hell!" Monk reports from the front cover of the paper on the way to the pass. Honey answers, "It's terrible. All of Europe will be involved shortly!" But no, Patrick Valentine has scared both warring parties into signing a truce. His deception ends the war.

Now, let's look at that with our magical hindsight. What happened in Europe after July 1940? Yeah, we can come up with a whole heck of a lot of stuff that everyone beyond a select group of racists is absolutely convinced shouldn't have happened. We have alternate history novels to allow us to use an undo button, because we can't go back and do that ourselves. Now imagine if some whackjob in July 1940 had figured out a way to end the war, however dubious, however illegal, however morally problematic. What would we think of the dude who shows up and ends him? Yeah, Doc might have looked good to readers at the time but he doesn't to us reading in the far distant 21st century.

And that, my friends, underlines precisely why 'Doc Savage Magazine' had been so careful to avoid mentioning Europe for the previous year and change. It seemed a bit of a cheat to me, but Bogart trod on a landmine here and he didn't even realise it. Now, I wonder what August 1940's issue will bring. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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