After 'The Goblins' proved thoroughly disappointing last month, I hoped that the series would get back on course again with 'The Secret of the Su'. I'm now happy to report that it did, so much so, in fact, that the two books feel like different authors writing different series. Other than the series characters, the only thing that the two novels share is a well-written Native American character. I liked Cedric in 'The Goblins', not that he got a heck of a lot to do, and I like Slow John even more.

We start out in Logantown, Georgia, where Dr. R. W. Wilson is scared enough that he puts in a call to Doc Savage in New York. Unfortunately, he only reaches Monk and doesn't want to deal with an assistant. Slow John has been his servant for three decades, after Wilson saved him and his family from certain death during a hurricane in the Florida Everglades. All that time, the doctor believed him to be a Seminole, but he's now confessing that he's really a Su and was duty bound to serve in return for Wilson's services to Su elders. Who are the Su, you might ask? How do they fit into the ethnographic map of North America? Well, Atlantis; which Slow John says was between Africa and South America.

This is a great way to kick off a 'Doc Savage' novel, but then Parker O'Donnel seeing a little green man in his apartment on his birthday was similarly great and that novel went downhill from there. This one doesn't and the first reason why is that there's a surprisingly sprawling cast of characters in play. It's been a while since I've enjoyed so many diverse characters in a 'Doc Savage' story, but Lester Dent keeps them coming. Dr. Light, the other doctor in Logantown, is only the first, but he isn't the friend Wilson thinks he is, as the loaded gun he wields underlines.

There's Kate in Honesty Flats, Snuffy Gonner in Logantown, and Bill Cox the draft dodger. There's Corny Cornman, fresh out of prison for kidnapping, and Jake Davis, who's a murderer. There's the carnival knife thrower called Frenchy and the deserter called Bancroft. And there's Schlitze, over in Atlanta, who knows Dr. Light as Herr Doktor Friedrich Licht. We might feel safe in assuming the sides are starting to become clear, but that's not remotely what Dent has in mind, even when he has Wilson escape and have Andy the taxi driver find Bill Rones to fly him to New York.

There have been plenty of 'Doc Savage' novels with good guys and bad guys. There have also been plenty with the good guys having to deal with two sets of bad guys who don't like each other. This may be the first to feature a whole slew of different people teaming up in different ways, all with their own interests at heart. The only safe bet is that Doc's side remain the good guys and all the crew is in play this time out, including Pat. That's because Wilson figures he won't make it all the way to the Empire State Building and so aims at Pat's salon instead. It's a good idea, especially as she apparently has a direct line to Doc's headquarters, so they can listen in.

All that said, Doc's aides don't constitute a particularly coherent unit in this particular adventure. By the time we shift location to the Everglades, none of them are with Doc, who's in disguise with Dr. Light and Slow John. The latter is guiding them to the Su, who aren't easily found or reached. Behind them is Schlitze, who's been Edward Hungerford Schlitze, Jr. for twenty years now. He has a bunch of Doc's team under his thumb, most obviously Renny, but also Pat, Johnny and Long Tom. Further back are Snuffy Gonner and Dr. Wilson as followers of the followers. And, further back yet are Monk and Ham, who wait for the signal to join the trail, which eventually comes, making them the fourth group following the same path.

Given this rather complex set of characters in this complex configuration, most of the traditional elements for a 'Doc Savage' novel go out of the window. Sure, there are bad guys but they're easy to rank in levels of badness. Sure, there are good guys too, but there are also characters who feel a lot more morally ambiguous than tends to be the case in this series. The most complex such has to be Slow John, as the book's representative of the Su. He's surely one of the good guys, as we're conditioned to appreciate from the three decades of service he's given for a perceived debt. That doesn't mean that he's necessarily on the same side as Doc and the two do clash at points. He's an awfully sharp cookie too, who sees through a lot of what Doc does that gets by Dr. Light.

We do get the traditional mid-novel change of location, with the Everglades appropriately exotic, but we don't get the traditional token female character, even though those have been strong in a lot of 1943 novels. There aren't a lot of gadgets in play, Doc's most successful such being as simple as dropping peanut shells to form a trail. OK, we do get some direction-finding by radio, which has a sizeable footnote to explain that it's being used during the current war after being pioneered in the pages of 'Doc Savage Magazine' as early as 1933. Long Tom demonstrates his bumblebees, too.

Mostly what we get is a detailed setup to a story in hearsay and then a deep immersion into it in setting as the various sets of characters follow Slow John's obscure trail into the Everglades. And here I should return to how I'm reading these books. For the past ten years, I've been reading the Bantam paperback editions, albeit in pulp publication order. Last month, though, I didn't do that because the pulp edition of 'The Goblins' was cheaper than the paperback, so I read that instead. Now, that paperback was a double with 'The Secret of the Su', but I already had a copy of that in a Sanctum reprint edition, so that's what I read this month.

The Sanctum reprint editions are doubles, presented in a large format with plenty of extras. This one is 'The Mental Wizard' and 'The Secret of the Su', plus a whole slew of articles by experts like Will Murray and Anthony Tollin. It's Murray's 'Intermission' that helps explain why this feels deep in ways that 'The Goblins' totally didn't. Dent was fascinated enough by the Atlantis myth to have written it into a number of earlier 'Doc Savage' novels, only for those sections to be cut out. Also, he spent three weeks at sea while writing 'The Mental Wizard' in 1937, cruising the islands off the southern tip of Florida and gathering stories from the locals. His editor, Charles Moran, says that he revisited his notes six years later when he wrote 'The Secret of the Su'.

Dent's writing always felt more real when he'd been to the locations he was writing about and it's hardly a bad thing that this combined that with one of his pet subjects. Sure, he added a whole lot of intrigue, as well as a slew of pulp devices, like heliograph signals and hunting birds with poison on their claws, not to forget the crucial plot detail of killing Doc's aides with a slow painful poison. That's resolved, of course, and by what could arguably be called the MacGuffin of the piece, if we don't prefer the existence and location of the Su to be the MacGuffin. I guess the one comes with the other. However, while there are typical 'Doc Savage' components to be found here, it really is a very different 'Doc Savage' novel and that's not necessarily a bad thing. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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