The most difficult thing for Habeas was remembering NOT to talk unless Monk was there to explain it with that so-called 'ventriloquism'.

ONE-EYED MYSTIC (Aug 26, 2001) From January 1944, this is only a fair adventure. The initial premise (forced body-switching) is a good springboard but it quickly goes downhill to a simple wartime scam. Only two months later, Doc will be drastically diminished by his concussion in THE DERELICT OF SKULL SHOAL but there are ominous foreshadowings of that humbling here; when talking with the enemy, Doc often feigns not knowing anything to draw out more information but here he seems genuinely clueless late in the game. The original pulp title was ACCORDING TO PLAN OF A ONE-EYED MYSTIC, but the Bantam Double reprint used the shorter form, which fans are more likely to be familiar with. The story gets off to a strong start as Renny (planning a fishing trip) onboard a plane encounters a creepy little "brown imp" with an eye-patch who spews some very awkward and ill-conceived babble about the power of the mind. Renny falls asleep, wakes up in a hotel room and is apparently in another man's body. Even worse, the body he now inhabits belongs to a tough thug called Palsy and it's clear that this Palsy has just committed a murder. Renny promptly comes to again in his own form, but now fears he may be wanted for murder. Complicating things even more, the man Renny was supposed to go fishing with has had the same experience. The story bogs down quite a bit after that, changing into a rather flat Axis spy tale. (If this had been written in 1934, there would be an epidemic of body-switching leading up to a master plan.) There is however one more notable scene-- Doc is observing the imp ("Dr Mystic of Kukilcuaca, Mexico") on a commercial flight when a silver smoke fills the cabin and the eyepatched-seer seemingly has been replaced by another man entirely. Hearing about this, Monk suggests wildly that the newcomer's body is now inhabited by the imp's mind. "Even Doc looked a little startled." The Crime College is mentioned here, reportedly for the final time. In an era of free men fighting against totalitarianism, the mind-wipe of the College must have seemed terribly inappropriate. There's also a hint that Doc is involved with the creation of the new O.S.S. There are a few touches here and there of Dent's dry sense of humour. To disperse a gawking crowd at a crime scene, the bronze man calmly informs the people that they will all be asked to appear in court to testify and the mob promptly avaporates. (Go, Doc!) As Ham is worried that the wrinkles put in his face by a disguising chemical will stay there, Monk helpfully says, "I don't think they will come out either". And it is very pleasing to see Doc, Monk and Ham accompany Renny to the airport where he will be leaving on his vacation. They spend a few minutes standing around, discussing how small the fish are likely to be that Renny will catch. Tiny moments like that (or when the aides meet at a retaurant for dinner) make these guys seem like actual friends and not just members of a crimefighting league. In some ways, 1944 was long enough ago that it seems like another planet. Renny's distaste at finding himself in a zoot suit or hearing a moll speaking Clang slang* ("which swing addicts affected") would have seemed completely natural to a 14-year-old reader back then, but a kid today must be puzzled. He would also wonder why people keep going into drugstores to find a phone. But Nazis (if only from Indiana Jones movies and Captain America comics) still make terrific, recognizable villains. _______________ *Clang slang: "how about a light, blight?" "What's all the hubub, bub?" Annoying jargon is nothing new.

DEATH HAD YELLOW EYES (July 22, 2004) What a dud. This story has all the ingredients to make a first-rate Doc Savage adventure. Mysterious goings-on, a strange superscientific invention in the wrong hands, a sudden journey to a foreign land, a hot redhead named Doris Day (heh) and some suspicious tag-alongs, some action and mayhem.... but it`s all done in such a half-hearted manner that it`s really not enjoyable.Either go for over-the-top wild pulp adventure or settle down to taut suspense drama, but none of this lukewarm halfway stuff, please... it just doesn`t work. DEATH HAD YELLOW EYES was published in February 1944. The very next month featured the infamous story in which Doc suffers a skull fracture which nearly kills him and which indeed leaves him nervous, fearful and indecisive for the next year or so. Yet even before that sad development (which gave an in-story explanation for our boy`s decline)t, Lester Dent had already been working under editorial commands to tone the Man of Bronze down to more normal levels. It shows in this clunker. (You know, it`s a bit late now by sixty years or so, but if they wanted to make our boy seem more human and realistic, why do it by giving him a timid, fearful personality? No one was forcing the guy to go out solving mysteries and fighting crooks, so the idea he was terrified all the time seems just wrong. On the other hand, Doc DID have a temper. There were a number of times in the series where he blew up and either yelled at people or administered a terrific beating. Considering that here`s a man six feet seven inches tall, with muscles where most people don`t even have room for, it would be more believable if Doc reacted to tension and anxiety by getting surly. I think a bad-tempered Doc Savage would be pretty scary and make for some memorable stories.) As it is, most of the traits that gave this series its distinctive flavor have been dropped. The strange scientific upbringing, the daily two hour exercises, the Mayan gold, the wonderful and sometimes whacky gadgets... all gone. A new reader would conclude that this guy was just a famous surgeon with a hobby of fighting crime. Anyway, DEATH HAD YELLOW EYES starts off strongly but quickly takes off in a tedious direction and goes downhill fast. In Ham Brooks' dignified and pretentious apartment overlooking Fifth Avenue, a visiting Monk is badly spooked by the feeling that someone or something is in the gloomy room with him. It`s the same sort of feeling you get when you somehow know that you`re being watched. The fact that he thinks he has seen two faint yellow spots floating in the air like a pair of ghostly eyes doesn`t add much to his state of mind. Shortly thereafter, Monk is conked on the head (he must have scar tissue all over his scalp by this time) and carried off, and the game is afoot. A Spoiler warning would probably be usually required, but this story is so slack and so little is done with the big secret that I don`t think anyone would be miffed by revealing it. We`re dealing here with not a Cloak of Invisibility, but more like a Stealth Poncho. The darn things were devised by the Germans to aid in the war but have too many limitations to be considered really successful. For one thing, they only provide camouflage in dim surroundings; strong light reveals them plainly. Also, the wearer`s eyes show through the two holes needed to peek out (the yellow spots mentioned). Still, even with those drawbacks, the stealth cloth has a lot of possibilities which are never explored. Ten years earlier, the villains would have gone on a rampage that would have the city or the entire country in a panicked uproar (see THE SPOOK LEGION for an effective use of invisible crooks). Instead, the cloth is hardly seen (ho, ho) in this story and mostly provides a hot potato for the characters to chase after. After the first creepy scenes, DEATH HAD YELLOW EYES promptly goes over familiar plot threads. Once more, Doc and his two sidekicks are framed for murder (Rocky voice: "Again?! But that trick never works!" ), escape and tangle with some Nazi spies while trying to figure out which of the secondary cast are on which side. Our heroes are forced aboard a Nazi plane and flown to Roumania but not much is done with that setting either (how I miss the days when Doc had his adventures in exotic places like the Sargasso Sea or Tibet or Chile...). It all unfolds rather disinterestedly. Still, this is not one of those books which are so clumsy or dull that they defy being read. It just suffers in comparison to the creative thrills and excitement of the early Doc stories. And even in this more subdued, less highly charged atmosphere, DEATH HAS YELLOW EYES does provide some nice touches. For one thing, Johnny gets a chance to shine. Entirely on his own initiative, the bony archaeologist sets out to rescue his friends from a sticky situation. Getting together a disguise, preparing a gadget to neutralize a room full of police and reporters, providing protection for his partners, having a series of getaway vehicles ready... William Harper Littlejohn pulls it off beautifully. Even better, he does NOT get caught or stalled by some stroke of bad luck. I always enjoy it when the five aides show they`re competent and deserve to be on Doc`s team. Also, although our bronze man has been taken down a few notches on the superhuman scale, he`s still impressive. Tackling two trained men who are fighting at commando level skill, he holds back a bit at first; but when they start to damage his right hand (essential to his performing surgery), Doc quickly subdues both of them.             At one point, he snaps a question at a Nazi interrogating him and gets an answer. The Nazi says, "You have a manner of authority, haven`t you? You ask a question, and I answer before I think." Then Doc sharply asks another question and the man again starts to reply before he catches himself. (Well, the bronze man is not only physically imposing, fantastically wealthy and successful, with all the confidence this would give, but he`s a genuine doctor as well... and they know how to get information out of someone.)

THE DERELICT OF SKULL SHOAL (July 5, 2001) From March 1944, this is not quite as awful as I had expected, but it is still pretty dismal. If it didn't feature Doc, this story would be very much like the hundreds of stories which used to appear in those sweaty adventure magazines with painted covers, like REAL MEN, TRUE ADVENTURES, ESCAPE, etc in the 1950s. (another lost genre...) Anyway, the actual storyline is reasonable enough. A group of modern-day pirates has been commandeering ships, wrecking them on the coral reefs off the Bahamas so they can be looted. The Nazis are blamed for the missing ships, but the U.S. Navy is suspicious enough to send the Man of Bronze to investigate. In disguise, Doc ships out on the converted liner FARLAND. Also undercover with him are Monk, Ham and Renny. Right off the bat, there's the inexplicable sound of a dog howling at night in the middle of the ocean. A mysterious explosion (supposedly a U-boat torpedo) hits the FARLAND, causing the jumpy captain to order all hands to abandon ship. Then there's another explosion and the thing most Doc Savage fans dislike happens. Doc sustains a severe head injury. He himself suspects a fracture and the concussion is bad enough that he ties himself into a makeshift hammock, delirious for two days. For most of the story, our hero is barely functional. He is dizzy, nauseous, disoriented and weak. After a few days, he starts to recover but by the end of the story, any action still makes him seriously wonder if he's going to die. Now it may be a coincidence, but this novel is set at the beginning of the period where Doc is constantly described as frightened, nervous and indecisive. For at least the next year, Doc is a wreck. This is an era I haven't reviewed in detail yet, but even after the war, when Doc regains much of his competence, he's still much less in control of himself. He spends the postwar years in semi-retirement, acting more like a private detective than a super-hero, taking on only a few cases where he gets drawn in. Maybe this near-fatal injury, coming after all the other times Doc has been smacked unconscious, has really done some permanent damage. (Of course, on one level we know that a new editor decreed that Doc be toned down into a regular guy, and Lester Dent was willing to try new writing styles and approaches. But much of the fun in adventure fiction is approaching the stories as if they are real historical episodes. Ask the Baker Street Irregulars.) Still, even half-dead and foggy, Doc manages to free imprisoned sailors and overthrow the pirates. At his lowest, he's working on the level which James Bond or the Saint normally reach. There is an interesting character introduced here, King Edward Wales Allen, the captain of a trading steamer who has been captured by the pirates. Allen is described as a big, tough Jamaican black man who speaks perfect English. Quite a break from the usual stereotypes of this period. Allen goes with Doc on a dangerous foray, admitting he's frightened but making himself go anyway (This guy reminds me of the captain of the ship from RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK. You know, the one who told the Nazis that Indiana Jones was dead so Indy could escape.) There's also a group of New Guinea natives who have ended up stranded here, carrying on a vicious feud with the derelicts. Luckily, Doc had spent months in the backwaters of the Amazon, making transcripts of their languages. He had given some lectures, written a short book and some scientific papers and he can communicate with them. (Since he converses with a shipwrecked man in Portugese as well, this makes thirteen languages so far that Doc can speak, on my list.) It's worth noting that the original magazine appearance carried by the byline Lester Dent, rather than the traditional Kenneth Robeson. Dent always wanted his own name to be featured, but it's too bad that this one time this happened couldn't have been for a better story.

THE WHISKER OF HERCULES (June 13, 2001) From April 1944, this adventure was better than expected (I thought it would be like THE LOST GIANT with Doc a timid nervous wreck) but it was still somehow flat and disappointing. The theme of the whole story is physical strength and speed. Crooks have a serum made from an Arabian plant called 'the whisker of Hercules' (sharah baqq) which makes a human a literal superman for a short time. As Doc and the aides (only Long Tom sits this one out) investigate, they encounter one startling event after another. A man throws a car against a tree, wrecking it, and flings Renny fifteen feet in the air. He takes off with thirty foot leaps, carrying five prisoners. And he snatches a cadaver from right under Doc's nose, moving too quickly to be stopped. (At first, Doc thinks the crooks are using a gas which slowed his reactions down.) There is a terible price for this period of super-powers: rapid aging. Now by 1944 Lester Dent had remarked how annoyed he was by comic book costumed heroes like Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel. He felt they had taken his ideas and cheapened them, exaggerating them past the point he felt audiences would accept. Of course, since these comic books were enormously successful, outselling the pulps, he must have been even further irritated. I have to wonder if THE WHISKER OF HERCULES was a way for Dent to deal with the nuisance. These enhanced crooks do many of the feats we associate with the early Superman, but they fall apart soon afterwards and of course Dent's own creation, Doc Savage, ultimately outsmarts them. One odd character here is Marvin Western, apparently modelled after the real-life Charles Atlas. Western is a bombastic, egotistical body-builder who leads a wealthy life as head of a cult of physical culture. He's not a phony, though. The silver-haired man is "lean to gauntness,and with muscles which looked like bundles of steel wire covered with a good grade of buckskin." A thoroughly irritating guy, Western threatens Monk and Renny, neither of whom are intimidated. He may be a paragon of muscle, but they're tough, experienced fighters who aren't impressed. I'm sure I'm not the only fan who has read this book expecting a big hand to hand fight between Marvin Western and Doc Savage, only to find it never quite comes to pass. Maybe Dent thought it was too obvious a twist. For a mid-1944 novel, it's pleasant to find Doc and the boys still going at it full blast. Doc still paralyzes thugs with pressure on nerve centers, turns sideways to let a thrown knife go by, gives orders in Mayan, and uses smoke bombs, grenades and black light projectors. He's also quick to figure out what's going on and he does outwit the mastermind with his final ruse. There is an increasing emphasis on the effects of violence at this point. People who get hurt suffer, and when Doc resets Renny's disjointed arm, the big engineer doesn't shrug it off. Monk suddenly decides to clout a suspect with a rock and is criticized by Renny. "Well. it's a wonder you didn't crack his skull," he tells Monk severely. "Someday you are going to kill somebody, picking up rocks and hitting them." The highlight of the story is a four page scene where Monk takes a mild dose of the Hercules serum and gets to see what it would be like to be Superman for a few minutes. Everything slows down around him, he disarms the fifteen gunmen and finds he's crushing guns and breaking their arms without meaning to. And when he leaps up to an aperture, he smashes his head entirely through the ceiling. (Wouldn't it be cool if it had been Ham or even better Pat who had taken the dose?) It's also interesting that Monk does save a vial of the serum for possible use in a future emergency. Again, Will Murray should make a note of that in case he gets to write any more new adventures. And the Bantam back cover blurbs are often exaggerated but this one is downright misleading. "A superhuman god springs from mythology to terrorize and destroy." Not in this book, he doesn't.

Chuck Connors was chosen to play Doc in the film version of THE THOUSAND HEADED MAN, which never got off the ground. Actually, he would not have been a bad choice to play Doc Savage. Certainly tall enough (he did play for the Celtics), rugged but not pretty, he had good screen presence and could be intimidating or heroic as needed. (As fans of THE RIFLEMAN will attest.) With a slight widow's-peak, a deep tan and maybe tinted contact lenses for close-ups, Chuck could have made the never-produced 1966 Doc movie the start of a viable franchise.