Last month's 'Doc Savage' novel, 'Pirate Isle', seemed to mark a newfound control of the series by Lester Dent. He'd written most of the 111 books up till that point, but others chipped in here and there from relatively early on. 'Pirate Isle' marked the first book in a long four-year period in which Dent would be the only author and he seemed confident enough in that knowledge at the time to do things a little differently. 'The Speaking Stone', which flows effortlessly on from 'Pirate Isle', continues in the same vein.

For one, it doesn't start in New York. 'Pirate Isle' started in the middle of the Pacific and ended up at Jinx Island. 'The Speaking Stone' starts out as that left off, with Doc still on Jinx Island to answer questions from the press. One journalist, wearing an overt red vest, asks to see Renny. He takes an object out of his pocket, shrieks and falls down dead, without a single mark on his body. It turns out to be a rock, Monk's pocket rock, and Renny can hear Monk's voice in it. That sounds insane and he knows it, but he also knows what he heard and so does Doc.

For another, it features a stripped-down cast. Renny's there at the beginning but stays behind when Long Tom is grabbed by the bad guys and Doc sneaks onto their plane to both rescue him and to find out where they're going. For the longest time, it's just Doc and Long Tom. If Johnny appears, it's only in passing, just like Pat, who shows up the very end back in New York, arriving at the very end of the final chapter. Ham and Monk, of course, are most notable through their absence, but they do reappear after their first adventure away. Doc discovers Monk chained to the wall of a cave in chapter ten of fifteen, with Ham far enough away that nobody has to listen to them bicker. When they're reunited, that bickering is background rather than foreground.

For a third, it gets agreeably brutal at points. There's cold-blooded murder in 'Pirate Isle' and there's another instance of that here, on the Galapagos Islands. Most notably, there's a scene in which the villains relish what they're going to do to "that cross between a tadpole, a fishing worm and a bobcat", i.e. Long Tom Roberts. They've already gagged him, using moss secured in place by piercing long thorns through his lips. They've spread-eagled him a yard above the ground by tying his wrists and ankles to four different trees. Now they bring out the knives. Of course, that's when Doc saves him, but it's a tough scene nonetheless.

And finally, it shows that Doc Savage is fallible, even if it's still incredibly hard to get the better of him and even harder to come out on top by the end. His first mistake here comes soon after they land on a lake somewhere in South America, namely to ask a native who's leading a couple of llamas how to get to El Gorrion's. Of course, we soon discover that that native is El Gorrion, Spanish for the Sparrow, even though he and his men turn out to be all American.

Then he underestimates a young lady, who neatly wraps her bolo around Doc's neck without an effort. He falls for a ploy by El Gorrion to show himself in a tough situation so they can shoot at him. Up in the air flying to the mysterious city known as Arriba, the very same young lady, Tara by name, and her elderly compatriot, the Queen Mother of Wisdom, manage to set fire to the plane through clever means. They are dedicated to protecting Arriba, not least by keeping its very location a secret.

All these are believable slips and Doc gets out of the situations they cause alive and moves on through the adventure, but I always appreciate those little moments of humanity. Some of the faithful hate them, because they relish Doc the dominant proto-superman who can never fail. I like them immensely, as those moments of humanity ably show how far ahead of the rest of us he is. Sure, he's always going to survive the book because there's another due next month, so that even the toughest situations are inherently robbed of some of their suspense, but he has to do so as a human being not a god.

And talking of the toughest situations, there's one here in which Dent does a very good job of potentially killing him off, even though that caveat still applies. He's about to walk into Arriba, through some ancient tunnel, but an impeccably balanced stone tilts under his weight and tips him into a downward chute. As we soon find, this originally sent its victims off a nearby cliff to plummet to their death, but there are stakes there now to stop that happening. However, the bad guys see this unfold and promptly send an avalanche down on top of him and it simply isn't possible for him to avoid going over the cliff in those circumstances.

Of course, he isn't dead at all, because he has a clever way out of the situation, but Dent takes care to make it seem like he's gone. Long Tom even looks back nostalgically at uncharacteristic moments like a time when he played a successful prank on Monk. We've also already been cued up for that sort of mindset by the discovery at El Gorrion's of Ham's sword cane, which is likely to be one of the last things he'd let out of his immediate possession. And, of course, we're even more attuned to fearing the worst there because both Ham and Monk had just missed a novel for the very first time.

While the boss villain is El Gorrion, he has dangerous minions, the worst of them known as Bear Cub. He's the one who shoots a man on the Galapagos Islands between the eyes, three times to be sure, so that he doesn't let anyone know that they refuelled there. "I've seen mean ones in my time," says Long Tom, "but that Bear Cub takes the nickel-plated weasel skin." I would have no idea what that means, but the sentiment shines through. Even his fellow bad guys, such as Wilfair Wickard, a quintessentially awkward name for this series, fear him. The typical young man who's fallen for the young lady and may or may not be a bad guy has a similarly awkward name, Terrence Wire.

We learn on the journey to South America that Monk's message that the speaking stone gave Renny was "It's five miles in the sky, Doc. Come prepared." Sure enough, they find themselves at serious altitude, even when they land on that lake. From there, they have to go up and up a long way, enough that everyone not native to Arriba suffers from the altitude, even Doc, who's affected even if he can power through the curious reluctance to go on that afflicts so many at high altitudes.

Just in case we don't buy that in men like Long Tom, Dent adds a footnote that explains that he has personal experience of this while hunting sheep at high altitude, some of the members of his party simply sitting down and refusing to go on, or even to go back, even though they were all brave and steadfast. He calls it altitude sickness, which suggests that it's no character flaw but a fact of life that affects some people but not others so high up in the mountains. Arriba, it must be said, is about as high as you can go, even higher in fact than Aconcagua, the mountain in Argentina that reaches the highest from sea level at 22,838 feet. After all, it's hidden.

I liked Arriba. I liked what Doc and his men found there. I liked how it all plays out. The only bit that I didn't like was the explanation of the speaking stone, which, like so many technological advances in this series, turns out to have far more limited value than expected. In this case, it's not going to work at sea level. Except, of course, that it did and we saw it happen on Jinx Island, which rather defeats that escape clause that Dent shoehorns in at the end. That's the obvious flaw here for me. Otherwise, it's another pretty strong entry in the series. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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