This odd entry in the 'Doc Savage' series brings us into the war in ways that it hadn't thus far. We don't go there, though both Johnny and Renny do, because they're somewhere in Europe during the events of this novel doing something undisclosed to do with the war effort. However, Doc is in Washington, D.C. trying to join them and the government doesn't want him to do that. Lunch at the White House is fine, but they want him to stay home because he can have a larger impact there instead.

Of course, what that really translates to is the series acknowledging that the war is happening and important, but it's also real. Doc can't simply find his way into Berlin under one of his usual disguises and take Hitler into custody, because the newspapers tomorrow would say otherwise. Instead, he has to stay Stateside and rail at not being allowed to join the war effort, while also highlighting how easily it could travel here. This story involves a U-boat that sinks a freighter in the seas south of Greenland and some of the characters we meet navigate it to Maine. That's a lot nearer than a continent away, so we should pay attention. It isn't just over there anymore.

We know how things begin, because Bantam were preserving outros from the pulp magazines at this point within their paperback reprints. In fact, 'The Three Wild Men' and 'The Fiery Menace' were published as a double, so we could simply keep turning pages to jump forward from August to September in 1942. And 'The Three Wild Men' ended with a man climbing into a chandelier to hunt a vampire. Here we learn that Betty Free sees him there, dead; Mrs. Murphy knew that he was looking for a vampire; and Millie Gross saw the creature, floating right out of the building. We also know which building from the hints. It's Doc's. He has the 86th floor. Betty works on the 42nd. Oh, and there's a neat little hole in the corpse's head. It's not a gunshot wound and it isn't a pair of puncture marks in the neck.

Given that Doc's in D.C. wanting into the war, Monk and Ham investigate in the lobby, giving an opportunity to Chemistry, who uses the skills he's learned stealing stuff for Ham—like Monk's little black book—to climb up to each of the chandeliers to see what he can find. He retrieves a small package from a different chandelier to the one containing the body, but they whisk that away before the police see it. After all, while the government has happily reinstated Doc after the suspicions of 'The Three Wild Men', the police are still lukewarm about doing likewise. The head of homicide, Chapman by name, actively wonders, with Doc, Pat and Long Tom in custody, what would happen if Doc turned bad, wondering, of course, if he already had.

So far so good, but Monk promptly gets kidnapped by a private detective named Mickey Stool who also viciously beats Ham in the street, before speeding away with Monk. Eight hours later, he's found, a gibbering wreck. Of course, Doc returns soon enough, but the story finds him first in D.C. He's met by a young black boy who says he has something Doc should see and he pierces only part of his disguise. He quickly realises the boy isn't black, but only in the car outside sees that he's not a boy either and is shocked to find that Thyla Abbott is a Mrs. She takes him to her husband Alonzo and brother, Fred Clevenger, only for the tourist cabin to contain another body instead.

That prompts Thyla to run and the best part of the book for me was Doc's pursuit. He allows her to leave but gives chase in able fashion and, for once, we watch it happen rather than learn about how he did it afterwards. It's detective work, which has always been a part of what these novels do but has become more apparent over the last few books. When the three of them fly to New York, he organises a plane of his own that will get there first but also calls Pat to tail them and that's my next favourite part of this book. "Have you been hit over the head?" she asks him, as he consistently tries to keep out of danger rather than throw her towards it.

She helps of course, tailing the trio in one of her vehicles. Apparently she has four of them and names them all. She does this job in Clarence, but there's also Tarzan, Churchill and Adolf Hitler. Now, why she has a vehicle called Adolf Hitler, we have absolutely no idea, but I sure hope that we're let in on that secret at some point. Just seeing the name in a 'Doc Savage' novel is jarring, given how diligently Lester Dent and his fellow authors have avoided using real names that are tied to the war thus far in the series. But hey, the U.S. was in the war now. Times were changing. Hitler gets namedropped later on too, just in an aside, as one man turns up the volume enough on his headset to "hear Hitler walking the floor in Berlin, almost".

I liked this story a lot, at least most of it. It builds really well, with a suitably weird setup. There are plenty of characterful characters to move things along, not just Mickey Stool but Elmer the Great, Albert Lee (not that one), and my favourite, Bullyhide Jones, who's a drunk at the Three Sheets Bar and Grill, where Doc grabs the nose of Joey the bartender, thus prompting a joyous soliloquy: "Nose, you're a celebrity". There's also a new technological angle to the idea of fear that follows a few in recent stories. Not only does Monk spend much of the book as a gibbering wreck but Lee is scared stiff too, even with a trunkful of medals to his name.

Much of the story follows Doc, but Monk and Ham are here as usual; Pat has a part without any need to fight for it, which is refreshing; and Long Tom is given a surveillance job, too. None get a strong focus, because Dent clearly wants to keep that on Doc this time out, as he deals with the frustration of dealing with a small fight when there's a much bigger one he'd rather tackle.

The series mythology doesn't get expanded much, other than the names of Pat's vehicles and a  couple of new chemicals in play, but one's used against Doc and the other rings annoyingly false. The former is a bottle of xylyl bromide, which is broken on his chest; that's an early form of tear gas. The latter is a chemical in which Doc and his aides soak their clothing to prompt animals to avoid them. It works in the context it's used here, so Doc isn't attacked by a guard dog. It works commercially too, as Monk is hawking it as a way to keep pets off couches. However, how does it work generally, given that Habeas and Chemistry are such frequent companions? Monk built in an exception list?

Oh, and there's an odd moment in which I thought Long Tom might be quoting poetry: "After all, there should be a limit to the slips that come 'twixt cup and lip." Apparently, this is an English proverb that's derived in a chain from the French, the Latin and the Greek in the third century BCE. Without Johnny appearing in the story, it's good to have a linguistic note to talk through.

The real problem with the book is how it ends, because, while everything gets explained, it all feels like a disappointment. The MacGuffin is fine, once we realise what it is and how it comes into play, but the explanation for the vampire is outrageously awful and the bad guys turn out to not really be bad guys, at least in the grand villain tradition of this series, merely good guys who were tempted and took the wrong path. Suddenly, I'm wondering why there were bodies. It's almost like Dent ought to have written a completely different ending.

I'm doubling up this month because I have more available time now and, a hundred and fifteen books into my monthly runthrough, I've slipped three books behind my schedule. So it'll be two in July, August and September and I'll be back on track to finish in December 2030 as I'd planned all along. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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