Lester Dent took two very different approaches with 'The Time Terror' that probably shouldn't fit as well together as they do. That fact stands out afterwards in hindsight, to the degree that I had to wonder what he was thinking going in. However, the novel itself just flows, so it doesn't feel at all strange while reading. Well, there's one moment. Doc manages to stop a Tyrannosaurus Rex with a grenade, which is a neatly modern approach, but then Dent takes the time to explain to us what a Tyrannosaurus Rex is, which feels utterly bizarre.

As you might imagine from that observation, one of the two approaches is very old school, as Doc and his aides find themselves in another lost world, this one situated in the Arctic, encountering a dizzying mix of cavemen and dinosaurs. The other is utterly contemporary, bringing in a couple of things from the war that hadn't been mentioned in the series before: the idea of a super race as a political goal and, surprisingly, given that, the Japanese rather than the Germans as villains.

Of course, it starts in a far more mundane manner as had become Dent's usual approach. I doubt that he ever studied chaos theory, given that it didn't take its modern form until the sixties, even though it had been floated as far back as the nineteenth century. However, he loved the concept of taking something tiny and meaningless and then extrapolating outwards until it became huge and important. This novel is ultimately about evolution but it starts with Onie Morton tripping on his way to work because there are too many milk bottles outside his house.

While there's no obvious way to connect the two, Dent does progress this particular example very quickly. Tripping over these milk bottles bumps Morton into a salesman who drenches him in awful perfume that isn't removable quickly, so he calls out from work. And work is as a news condenser in the employ of a certain Doc Savage. Apparently there are four of these, handpicked specialists all, who trawl the news for the sort of unusual stories that would interest the Man of Bronze. And, on this particular day, all four of them call out for a variety of reasons. Monk, bizarrely fails to see anything in that beyond coincidence, but Doc rumbles to it immediately. Something's in the news that someone doesn't want him to see.

So he, Monk and Ham spend all day, joined by Johnny at midnight after he gets back from giving a demo at the museum, searching for what it could be. It's Doc who finds it, a story about a mangled plane in Canada that was mangled after its crash, perhaps by werewolves. Ham checks in with the local mountie by telegraph and wireless, waiting an hour between them, and gets contradictory responses, ostensibly from the same person. They're definitely onto something. So they look into the skinny man in a grey suit who was behind all four of Doc's news condensers calling out and, of course, eventually fly out to Trapper Lake on the Northwest Mackenzie.

It's just the three of them, because Long Tom and Renny have left for Europe, presumably on war business, but they're also trailing Pat. She showed up at headquarters the night they were knee deep in news stories but, before leaving to walk into an overt trap to see what happens, Doc locks her in the library to keep her safe. And you can guess how well that went. Next thing we know, the skinny man in the grey suit has a gun on her and she's a prisoner on her way to Trapper Lake. She's a welcome addition to the lost world story.

However, it's Johnny who shines the brightest this time out, because it’s his expertise that moves them towards key discoveries. That starts in Canada, when they reach the mangled plane that's a patchwork affair, half American and half Japanese, because it's Johnny who notices that a cord is a thong of bird hide half an inch thick. That doesn't compute. Later, when they've made it into the lost world in the Arctic, it's Johnny who acknowledges that the various creatures they encounter there don't belong together. Sure, they're all prehistoric but they date to different eras, millions of years apart. The story behind everything is what explains how that's possible.

And while I won't talk through what that is, to avoid spoilers, it's a true MacGuffin because all the characters here care deeply about it but we don't. We're far more engaged with the setting and a whole lot of fun that manifests because of it. In fact, that starts even before we get to the Arctic, because the Japanese bad guys at Trapper Lake have a pet that's six-feet-tall and twenty-wide, a dangerous pet indeed. We don't find out that it's a pterodactyl until we're in the lost world and it doesn't seem quite as outrageous an idea. Monk's chased by a woolly mammoth and scented by a giant prehistoric skunk. And we spend time with To Ga, a wild woman who's as fast and as strong as Doc; she's a welcome addition even if she's an unusual token female presence.

If it wasn't an awful pun, I'd suggest that this is a novel out of time in the 'Doc Savage' series. The world had changed and, as much of a devotee of lost world stories as I am—the wife just received twenty five more of them to give to me for Christmas—there were easily more pressing concerns in 1943. Dent acknowledged that by bringing in the Japanese as villains and building a back story around a master race, something we associate more with the Nazis today, so much so it's hard to even say "master race" without hearing it in a Hollywood German accent.

Maybe what's jarring is that lost world stories are inherently fun, whatever dangers are thrown at the characters, and it doesn't quite seem right to have fun when reading a novel about the Second World War that was written and published while it was still raging. Then again, it's probably fair to say that readers in 1943 likely weren't fully aware of the depth of the horrors perpetrated by both the Germans and the Japanese. While the news was bleeding out, a lot of that didn't come to light until later. So, hey, let's have fun with prehistory in the Arctic! ~~ Hal C F Astell

For Doc Savage titles 1-100 click here
For Doc Savage titles 101 on click here