Once again Lester Dent mixes up his formula a little in unusual ways. I get the feeling that he was having a lot of fun writing the series at this point, the only author behind the house name and so able to experiment. He's almost playful in this one, even though it has such a skimpy plot that we still have no idea what it's about until twenty pages from the end and there's really only one potential suspect. However, he makes Doc notably human, stops Monk and Ham bickering and even swaps a couple of catchphrases into different mouths.

Given all that, it begins traditionally with Lincoln Wilson Washington Smith, an "amiable coloured gentleman" who's working as a porter and baggage attendant on a train travelling from Chicago to New York. He agrees to bring a dog in a travel case on board for a bribe of a single dollar. After he attempts to feed it a hamburger, though, he sees it and runs, hard and fast until he breaks his leg leaping off the moving train and knocking himself out for his trouble. We have no idea what it looks like, I should emphasise, and that holds true for most of the novel. It's a perfect MacGuffin, shifting between different characters, some of whom see it and react in outrageous horror, but it really doesn't matter what it is.

Tom Lewis, a travelling salesman for the Admiration Radio Cabinet Company of Admiration City in the Ozarks, is trying to get the dog to Doc, but he's scared of it and the redheaded man. He makes his way to the office car of the train, which is really cool, and has the train secretary make a call to Doc in New York. She gets Monk and calls him "a little shrimp", which I thoroughly enjoyed. Dent is happy to give women real opportunities in this one, even if he's also happy for bad guys to be able to knock them out with pills afterwards. We haven't even got to Willie Stevens yet.

The next aide to appear after Monk is Ham and they're being civil to each other. It's a delightfully weird situation that's been orchestrated by the other three aides, who have mounted a campaign to end the bickering. They're surreptitiously leaving cards reading "Peace is wonderful" for them both to find everywhere: Ham's pocket, Monk's ceiling, Ham's breakfast plate. I'm on board with this campaign and apparently so is Doc. However, given that it's been a series staple from almost the first page of the first book, what are the odds that it'll stick? Right now though, even the pets are getting along.

Doc is odd from his first appearance, though not in a bad way, just in an uncharacteristic one. He's talking to himself at points, for one, and even with new tech like extra-magnetic direction finders, things don't always work out. It's not that he does stupid things, it's just that not everything does what he intends. The first example is a gas grenade that he hurls at a car only to unluckily bounce off harmlessly, but it's far from the only example. He runs out of gas bombs soon afterwards, the job at hand not complete. He knocks one man down but he doesn't stay that way and he even gets knocked down the stairs himself. The oddest is probably when he runs into a closet by accident, an awkward mistake for a man this capable but still a believable one. Using "fatally killed" isn't.

Perhaps some of it is due to the clear influence of Willie Stevens. He's trailed bad guys so that he can overhear their conversation but a girl suddenly appears with a gun pulled on him and things start to change. She's Willie Stevens, who is Tom Lewis's girlfriend, and she's independent enough that she's actually hunting him herself. Most 'Doc Savage' novels have a token female character but most of them are pretty useless, there to be damsels in distress and occasionally to make life a little awkward by falling for Doc while Monk and Ham fight over them. Willie is more than that, not least because she met Tom while working for the Municipal Opera.

She's incredibly free-spoken for a start and she has some real conversations with the notoriously tight-lipped Doc. In fact, he talks so much with her that he eventually realises it and pulls back on the conversation. She's capable too, successfully trailing the bad guys who were trailing Tom. She even turns out to be an accomplished woodsman too, almost as quiet as Doc. During this scene, I couldn't help but compare Willie to earlier female characters and the only one I could remember being this capable was Doc's cousin Pat, who he tries to keep away from the action. He doesn't try with Willie. There are points where she's almost a sidekick, even if she had a crush on Doc and had his pictures tacked up on her dressing room's wall.

She's one of the characters who borrows a catchphrase, using Johnny's "Holy cow!" in a tight spot. Then again, she doesn't ever seem to struggle among such capable men. She pinches Long Tom to see if he had any biceps and gives as good as she gets to any of them. She suggests Renny and the others should be shot for being a pessimist and tells Long Tom he's behaving like a "kid who pulls little girls' pigtails". However, she's not just being sassy. She knows how to apologise too, as soon happens when she realises that Doc was following one of her suggestions before she ever gave it. She's one of those few supporting characters that I wanted to see return in a future book.

The other character who borrows a catchphrase is Monk, after he opens the case to take a look at the dog. He immediately has a seizure then tries to run away but, after Ham tackles him, borrows "I'll be superamalgamated!" from Johnny. While the pair do eventually start bickering about not bickering, they also start to really work together to cut the other three aides out of their part of the story. That doesn't work so well, but it means that everyone gets something to do. Long Tom, in particular, gets to go undercover in a backwoods hamlet in Missouri to trigger the editor of the local paper (and noted humorist) into reporting a particular story.

It's probably a good thing that all these unusual things happen because they distract us from the fact that there's very little actual story here. Tom has the MacGuffin and tries to get it to Doc but fails. It shifts hands many times. Eventually we end up in Admiration City and discover what it's all about. Given the title, it doesn't even shock us when we finally see the dog out of its case, which is therefore surely the least effective revelation in the series thus far. It's still cool, though, and the far less obvious explanation for it is a sympathetic one. The bad guy believes that he's a good guy, even a patriot, however off the rails he goes.

While the lack of a real plot would usually count as a firm negative, I'll give this one a pass on that front. What I can't excuse is how quickly everything wraps up, even if it ends with serious promise. The ever forthright Willie says she can put those pictures of Doc back up on her wall, leading to an acutely memorable final line: "Which made Doc feel somewhat alarmed." I enjoyed seeing Doc as a human being, not because I want to see him fail but because I like him being believable, even as someone who's better than everybody else at practically everything. Like Superman can't make a mistake? One of Doc's biggest here was simply not storing a fake corpse on his side, because being on his back allows him to snore and give that game away. That's a human mistake.

Conventional wisdom is often interpreted that, regulars aside, nobody ever repeated a visit to a 'Doc Savage' novel, except for John Sunlight, but that's not strictly true. He may well be the only villain to get a second shot at Doc, but there are a few supporting characters who have shown up more than once, the most obvious being the Mayans in the Valley of the Vanished in Hidalgo. I'm unaware of a list so I can't cheat by consulting it, but I bet Willie Stevens isn't on it even though I would very much like her to be. She steals this book and has a lot of fun doing it. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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