William Jerome "Bill" Keeley is particularly eager to see Renny but it's not happening because his old colleague is out of the country, building a highway for the U.S. Army. An unnamed location, the super-receptionist tells him, though we later learn that it's somewhere in Africa. Instead, he gets to lunch with Doc Savage, which is a heck of a consolation prize. Doc recommends the cornbread at this restaurant, though it's also unnamed, albeit presumably for a different reason. Bill works as an engineer for the Black Pagoda Company and is deemed indispensible to the war effort. For his part, Doc sympathises with the lack of action into which that translates.

His story regards a strange white bird, which promptly flies around the restaurant. Bill goes next door for something to catch it but then jumps into a taxi and vanishes. Doc catches the bird, then calls Johnny and Long Tom to leap into research; find out all they can about the Black Pagoda Co., Bill Keeley, his girlfriend Carole Evans and a gentleman named Franklin, who is apparently dead. Then he figures out who let the bird loose and visits him at his table. He has blue eyes but resists revealing his name, which he says Doc wouldn't believe. Spoiler: it turns out to be Lewis Gordon. The bird is the size of a sparrow. In fact, it is a sparrow, merely one dyed white for reasons not as yet determined.

Doc walks with this gentleman and they don't get far before he's turned upon, not just by his new companion, who pulls out an eight-inch tie-pin but by four of his cohorts whom he calls into action. Doc dives into a nearby drain to escape but they fire down into it with pistols and something big explodes. The explosion must have sent flame a mile down the pipes. Doc doesn't stand a chance. So they all leave for a farm in New Jersey, where Old Joe faints at their news and the first man to hear it leaves for good. This man with blue eyes reports in to a metallic voice hidden inside a four-poster bed with a black canopy.

Of course, shock horror, Doc's not dead. He's right there at the farm to read lips and tap phones, checking in with Johnny as he does so. The Black Pagoda Co. is based in Kentucky and Bill's one of their executive vice presidents. Franklin was its president and major stockholder; he was lost and presumed killed in a car accident. Carole's a mountain girl with a temper and soon demonstrates that by swinging a fencepost at Doc. She's right there at the farm too and, after that prompts an awful lot of attention, she apologises to him.

I've skipped over a few things here, so I'll pause to fill you in. Doc's escape from the drain wasn't accidental, for a start. This was part of an escape strategy that Monk designed and put into place at a number of locations around the city. The explosion was deliberate and carefully controlled. I do like these glimpses into how prepared Doc and his aides are for future trouble. However, I will keep an eye open for this particular strategy being used again, just in case it gets forgotten. And, talking of forgotten, we're five chapters in with Monk and Ham conspicuous only by their absence. They're usually the first aides in play. Here, Johnny and Long Tom are researching and Renny was the trigger for the plot, even if he doesn't actually show up.

Doc has attempted to contact Monk and Ham, but they're consistently unreachable. One chapter later and neither are Johnny and Long Tom. Renny's in Africa and Pat isn't answering either. Doc is suddenly and unusually on his own, which is especially frustrating because he's just sent Johnny and Long Tom into a trap. Now, they do reappear soon enough and eventually Monk and Ham do as well. They finally show up just after the halfway point, which must be a record for this series. It soon becomes clear that they had a pretty good reason for not responding to Doc's messages.

Another departure from the norm is the fact that the traditional shift in location halfway into the book doesn't happen to schedule. Eventually we do travel to Kentucky but the second half blisters past because it's really the fourth quarter in a relatively short book. In the Bantam paperback, it doesn't quite reach the hundred page mark and it's the lead in an omnibus of four novels that are just as short. At least, there's a good setup waiting for them in Kentucky in the form of a group of sixteen men, honest ones for once but ones who still want to hang Doc and his men. You see, they were set up with plenty of fake evidence against Doc before he ever got there. Let that be a good lesson to him for showing up later than usual in the book!

There isn't much else that I can talk about. Monk apparently owns the entire building in which his penthouse lab is situated. I'm not sure that's been mentioned before. With Lewis Gordon hardly a traditionally imaginative name, that's left to Bus Franklin, who earned that nickname because of an expansive real one: Benjamin Union Samuel Franklin. Yeah, Bus is easier. The other characters of note include Royal Bond and Brandis York, who were holding guns on Monk and Ham to at least try to persuade the pair to take them to Doc.

Bond is a consultant off 5th Avenue and Brandis is a capable female character, if not remotely up to the standards of Willie Stevens or Willia Hannah, the equivalents in the prior two books, 'The Running Skeletons' and 'Mystery on Happy Bones'. Carole Evans comes much closer, especially as she isn't only what she's introduced as, but she can't match Willie and Willia either. I do hope that they weren't just a phase that Lester Dent was going through in mid-1943. They lit up those books and this one is a little quieter for the absence of another character like them.

If there's a newish trend that Dent continues to work in this book, it's his burgeoning fondness for footnotes. They pop up throughout the novel but proliferate towards the end. In the last but one chapter, there are two on one page (in the Bantam paperback), with a third on the next one and a fourth on the previous spread. That's four footnotes over just five pages, which seems to me to be a little excessive. Then again, they're interesting, Dent expounding forth on underwater breath control, commando knot training, electrical currents to diagnose epilepsy, and the principles of lie detectors.

At the end of the day, this is another decent novel from Lester Dent's wartime period, contrary to my expectations, albeit ones that were based entirely on fans generally seeing the heyday of the series as long over by this point. However, it's underwhelming compared to its two predecessors for reasons I've already mentioned. I wonder whether next month's book, 'Hell Below', will gift us with another kickass female supporting character or follow the lesser example of this one. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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