Tag Archives: Action

Red Harvest

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett | Vintage | 1972 (first published 1929) | 199 pages

“This damned burg’s getting me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.”

An unnamed operative from the Continental Detective Agency arrives in the small mining town of Personville (derisively nicknamed “Poisonville” by its residents), only to find that his prospective client has been murdered. 

The dead man’s father is Elihu Willsson, Personville’s patriarch and owner of the powerful mining company, who single-handedly controls the majority of the business interests in town. “Poisonville” gained its nickname due to the widespread corruption after Willsson imported criminal gang members in an attempt to break a crippling miner’s strike at his company. Nominally to solve the murder, the Continental Op quickly expands his role to take down the many criminal factions and clean up the town.

Originally serialized in Black Mask magazine in the twenties, the story surges along at a rapid pace. The original murder is solved early on in the proceedings, but the Continental Op continues to wage his war on the town’s gangs and its corrupt police force. Rigged boxing matches, bank robberies, staged suicides, gunfights, and more murders all unfold in episodic fashion. The Op himself is eventually framed for murder when he wakes up next to a woman with an icepick buried in her chest.

Colorful and dangerous characters abound in Personville, a town filled to the brim with gamblers and bootleggers like Pete the Finn and Max “Whisper” Thaler. Everyone is corrupt, including the Op, who switches sides with ease depending on his current needs or circumstances. As the body count increases, he finds himself enjoying the carnage, leading to some considerable rumination that the town’s poison is working its toxic influence on his system.

Make no mistake, “Poisonville” is a violent place. At one point, the Op reflects upon the string of killings in the town and quibbles with an agency associate upon the exact number of murders. A chapter titled “The Seventeenth Murder” does not exaggerate, as the grim total–however enumerated–easily exceeds the ability to count on the fingers of both hands.

Even as the criminals (and crooked cops) begin to fall, the Op notes the general futility of battling against such an inherently corrupt system by remarking to Willsson, “You’ll have your city back, all nice and clean and ready to go to the dogs again.”

The original serial format shows as many smaller mysteries are self-contained and scattered throughout the greater narrative arc. Although the who-dunnits are all solved along the way, Red Harvest emphasizes two-fisted action as much as detection. The bruising, morally-gray violence paints the Continental Op as less an upright hero than an enthusiastic agent of chaos who brings everything (and everyone) tumbling down around him.

The Black Abbot

The Black Abbot
Edgar Wallace | Hodder & Stoughton | 1959 (first published 1926) | 192 pages

Harry Alford, 18th Earl of Chelford, is obsessed with the legend of a buried treasure hidden somewhere on the grounds of Fossaway Manor. His search for the cache of gold bars–not to mention a bottle containing a magical elixir granting immortal life–is thwarted by his fear of the Black Abbot. This ghostly specter is rumored to restlessly stalk the estate, the reputed site of his murder two centuries earlier, and protect the treasure from discovery.

Although an early encounter with the Black Abbot is reported by a second hand witness, nearly a dozen chapters elapse before the sinister figure is directly spotted in the ruins of the old abbey. The bulk of the early novel revolves around a series of schemes and extortions to secure the engagement of Leslie Gine, Harry’s fiancée and sister of the Alford family attorney, Arthur Gine.

Arthur has accumulated a series of gambling debts, fueled by theft from his sister’s inheritance and from the Alford family trust. However, his plan to wed Leslie to the Earl of Chelford is thwarted by his colleague, Fabrian Gilder, a shady character who has his own romantic designs for Leslie. Complicating the romantic landscape is Richard Alford, Harry’s brother and penniless “second son” of the Alford family, who is Leslie’s secret love.

Leslie seems to be more of a prize than the buried treasure, with a spinning wheel of characters determined to win her affections. The unfolding of various plots to win Leslie’s hand in marriage easily supplants the hunt for the buried treasure. The Black Abbot remains mostly a background figure until deep into the book, when the murder of a figure in a black cowl sends the narrative into a more action-oriented mode.

Although mixing elements of blackmail, extortion, and murder, the obsessive search for treasure–whether buried or married–also manages a more lighthearted tone, although perhaps it could simply be a result of the book’s vintage or melodramatic machinations. Strip away the mystery elements and play up the slapstick, and the single-minded pursuit of treasure could eventually sink into It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

After Leslie is kidnapped, the chase is on through the subterranean labyrinth sprawling beneath the ruined abbey. The atmosphere is evocatively gothic, and although the villain’s reveal is not particularly unexpected, the lagging narrative finally gets some punch. Some of the other characters who were initially teased as potential villains show an unexpected willingness to assist in Leslie’s rescue. They remain morally dubious, but the shift in allegiance is curious.

However, the essence of Leslie’s attraction remains stubbornly vague, with her character finally reduced to a kidnap victim repeatedly screaming for the aid of her beloved, would-be rescuer, “Dick! Dick!”

The Vampire Murders | The Phantom Detective #1

The Vampire Murders: The Phantom Detective #1
Robert Wallace | Corinth Publications | 1965 (originally published 1940) | 159 pages

The Phantom, a pulp hero who would comfortably fit into a shared universe of crime fighters including the Shadow or Secret Agent X, attempts to unravel a murder mystery with a supernatural twist—the killer may be a legendary local vampire!

A small group of prominent academics and industrialists share a remote cabin–located on the slopes of the forthrightly named Vampire Mountain–for a getaway vacation. While out for a hike in the woods, two of the men encounter a strange caped figure emerging from the grave of Count Mattopikyi, an eighteenth-century Hungarian emigrant reputed to be a vampire. Hurriedly returning to the cabin, they find that a colleague has been brutally murdered, his throat ripped out as if by a wild animal.

Although the group, fearing for their reputations, collectively bribe a local coroner into covering up the details of the death, one member makes an anonymous phone call for help to the one person who may be able to apprehend the killer and save their lives: the Phantom Detective.

Richard Van Loan was a wealthy playboy who eventually tired of his empty existence and dedicated his life to fighting crime. The book forgoes much else in the way of an origin story, except that Van Loan developed many advanced crime fighting techniques in his transformation into the Phantom, including fingerprinting, blood analysis, and ballistics. Most notably, he honed an uncanny ability for crafting perfect disguises and wholly mimicking human voices. 

Paired with Frank Havens, his old friend and publisher of the Clarion newspaper, the Phantom arrives at the mountain cabin sporting a severely cringe-inducing disguise as Havens’ Chinese chauffeur, Wang. Investigating the scene, “Wang” discovers that the victim’s room was not only drenched in blood, but also shut and locked from the inside, with no discernible means of entry or escape. Fortunately, Van Loan retires the chauffeur getup fairly quickly, sparing contemporary readers from prolonged wincing at the character’s pidgin English.

However, The Vampire Murders has no intention of being an intricately plotted, locked-room mystery. In short order, the Phantom runs afoul of a group of gangsters on the hunt for hidden treasure, fights a caged mountain lion barehanded, and stealthily impersonates a thug before engaging in a full-blown shoot-out with the gang. 

Although short in total pages, the overall feel is that of a serialized men’s adventure, with the hero moving from one dangerous escapade to another. The shallow characterizations, most notably the loutish criminals and their talk of  “buried treasure,” also produce some generic comic book vibes.

The Phantom eventually returns to the realm of Golden Age mysteries by assembling the involved parties in a room together and enumerating his trail of deductions. While the individual clue gathering easily takes a backseat to the action in the case, the unusually mundane assortment of items–scratches on a keyhole, mothballs, and a pair of safety pins–ultimately provides the Phantom with his culprit.

Probably a good choice after you have already gone through all your old Doc Savage titles, or if you prefer your vintage pulp adventure stories with a light mystery flavor.

Dracula Returns!

Dracula Returns!
Robert Lory | Kensington Publishing | 1973 | 189 pages

Robert Lory’s first installment in his nine-volume Dracula series reads more like a thirties pulp men’s adventure than a seventies horror, with the fabled Count (like an attack dog on a short leash) weaponized and employed in service against the criminal underworld.

Professor Damien Harmon, academic of the occult arts, is a former criminal investigator with a grudge against the street gang whose vicious near-fatal attack left him confined to a wheelchair. Harmon’s pursuit of the weird sciences has led him to develop a number of unusual tools to use in his fight against crime, including a keen personal telekinetic ability. 

Joined by Cameron Sanchez, a brawny ex-policeman, Harmon fights gangsters and hoods populating seedy rough streets and seedy waterfronts, an old-school world of crime in which Dick Tracy or The Shadow wouldn’t seem out of place.

Approached by Ktara, a strange woman with the ability to shapeshift into the form of a cat, with an unusual proposition, Harmon eventually travels to Romania on a mythic quest: revive the slumbering remains of Count Dracula. 

Harmon has his own agenda, however, and will not be made the pawn of the vampire and his familiar. Before resuscitating the legendary figure, he implants a small device near the vampire’s heart. It contains a sliver of wood that Harmon is able to trigger telepathically, ensuring that Dracula follows his instructions or be struck down with a tiny stake to the heart.

Dracula’s hunger for blood, coupled with the restrictions created by Harmon’s device, essentially forge him into a violent weapon to be used against the crime organizations running the city.

Dracula Returns! reads very much like the first volume of a series, establishing the characters and setting up the basic premise. The tenuous truce between Dracula and Harmon is the central tension of the story, threatening to come undone if the professor’s device ever fails. Although Dracula is essentially a secondary character, when he is let loose by Harmon, violence and mayhem follow–usually against a group of rather unlucky thugs.

A few ruminations on the nature of evil are sprinkled throughout, along with a tease on the origins of Dracula. Ktara suggests that he is much older than the Transylvania myths, incarnating through various forms back over the centuries to a civilization currently lost to history. 

Perhaps future installments will reveal another potential genre mash-up, answering the question, “Is Dracula actually the Man from Atlantis?”

Who Killed You, Cindy Castle?

Who Killed You, Cindy Castle?
Kirby Carr | Canyon Books | 1974 | 190 pages

Vietnam veteran Mike Ross is a private investigator by day, a masked avenging angel of justice by night. Disturbingly, his hooded costume and propensity for extreme violence position him closer to the Zodiac killer than to Batman.

Ross is contacted by Vivian Taylor, a potential client concerned about the whereabouts of her missing roommate, Cindy Castle. Upon arrival for their first meeting at Vivian’s apartment, Ross discovers her body, badly beaten and drained completely of blood. 

Attempting to trace the identity of the person who referred Vivian to his services, Ross tracks down the location of an old army buddy suffering from substance abuse and post-traumatic stress issues. Ross eventually discovers his body, also badly beaten and drained of blood. Using his police contacts, Ross uncovers a series of similar killings, along with a mysterious rash of blood thefts around the city.

However, Who Killed You, Cindy Castle? is not really a mystery, nor is it a horror story. Although references to vampirism and an easy acceptance of the legitimacy of the Dracula legend are sprinkled throughout the story, Ross’s investigation into the potential vampire killings takes a back-seat to the blunt violence of his alter-ego, the Hitman.

Hitman doesn’t really perform any skills of deduction, he simply uses the excuse of finding Cindy Castle to launch a series of brutal attacks against the crime family supplying the drugs that addicted his old army buddy. He goes in–guns blazing–to the nests of the mafia thugs, leaving few alive. A self professed judge, jury, and executioner, Hitman embodies an adolescent male power fantasy, the unstoppable hero righting wrongs in a corrupt society. When he confronts a penultimate villain over their murderous nature, it’s hard to look past the hypocrisy of an avenging hero who is himself addicted, and arguably pleasured, by the act of killing.

The action is key here, however, not the underlying social messaging of the men’s adventure genre. There are a few key action set-pieces to keep the story moving, including Hitman working his way up a fifteen-story hotel, eliminating thugs floor by floor to reach the chief mafioso in the penthouse. Even that solution is not particularly deep: Knock, knock. “Room Service.”

Like much of the genre of its era, the book’s attitude towards its female characters is cringe-inducing by contemporary standards. There is also baked-in racism, with descriptions of the inherent barbarism of the enemy in Vietnam. Hitman’s martial arts master speaking in pidgin English is an even older groaner, a stereotype throwback all the way to Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu.

But for genre readers capable of overcoming these arguable large hurdles in the service of some cheap vintage thrills, there is also a Transcendental society in an old Venice Beach mansion full of naked, or nearly naked, hippie nymphomaniacs—who may or may not be addicted to blood sacrifice.

Jaws

Jaws
Peter Benchley | Bantam | 1974 | 309 pages

Too young to dream that my parents would ever take me to the screening of Jaws when it opened in theaters in the summer of 1975, I nevertheless managed to persuade my mother to buy me the Peter Benchley novel. Presented in a wire-mesh basket at the supermarket (possibly a Piggly Wiggly) check-out next to the impulse tabloids that shoppers browse while waiting in line, the Bantam paperback drove itself into my consciousness like the apex predator surging upward on the book’s cover. Since I couldn’t see the movie, I simply refused to be denied the book, which I consumed greedily (and somewhat haltingly, since it was clearly above my recommended reading level, if for content and subject matter rather than vocabulary) in a few sittings over the weekend.

How does the book hold up upon rereading after forty-plus years?

First, an obvious but critical disclaimer: This is not Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. However you feel about the director, his lack of subtlety or ham-fisted sentimentality, Spielberg’s consummate skill as a filmmaker and mastery of the techniques of the medium are fully on display in the film, even though he was only in his mid-twenties at the time of production. Jaws, the movie, not only established the foundation (for better, or for worse) for the summer blockbuster, but detonated a full-blown pop-cultural phenomenon.

Benchley’s novel lacks the bullet-proof construction and expert pacing of the film, allowing ample time to wallow in the melodrama of resort town life, with its perpetual tug-of-war between the tourists and the townies. The strained marriage between Chief Martin Brody, an Amity local, and his bored wife, Ellen, a former summers-only tourist who now longs for her lost lifestyle, occupies the emotional core of the novel. Even Matt Hooper, the ichthyologist from Wood’s hole, serves more as a catalyst for rekindling Ellen’s past life than as an agent for the study and capture of the shark plaguing the waters off Amity. 

Not that the book lacks suspense. The early chapters involving the fateful skinny dipper, Christine Watkins, and a doomed young boy on an inflatable raft deliver thrilling, visceral sequences. Lean, economical prose details the movements of the shark, signalling the fateful outcome of the encounters long before the victim becomes aware of the threat. Another attack, in shallow water barely at wading depth, is described via a third-person account, but still resonates with a primal horror, as the victim is repeatedly hit while onlookers attempt to pull him from the surf.

In contrast to the contemporary environment of “Mega”, “Super”, or “Ultra” prefix marketing hyperbole, it’s interesting to note that the monster shark terrorizing the swimmers of Amity is referred to simply as “the fish”.

The middle chapters tend to drag, including a long dinner party that underscores the tension between the Brody, his wife, and Hooper, but at the expense of further stalling the narrative. The overall pacing suffers another blow with the subsequent chapter, detailing Ellen Brody’s affair with Hooper. Awkward at best, their illicit encounter degenerates into wince-inducing territory as Ellen reveals some regressively outdated and offensive (by today’s standards) erotic fantasies to Hooper during their seductive tête-à-tête. The specifics surrounding the application of spray-on deodorant and the logistics of Ellen’s panties are probably not the best subjects for rumination while waiting for the great fish to resurface.

The story is completely transformed in part three, however, after Brody hires Quint, a laconic local fisherman, to catch and kill the shark. Although the melodrama from the mainland continues in the onboard tension between Brody and Hooper, the focus intensifies as the intrepid shark-hunters set out in Quint’s boat, the Orca, setting the stage for an epic struggle for the bragging rights atop the food chain. Quint is a compelling character, although his seemingly sudden obsession with the shark becomes a shorthand substitute for Captain Ahab from Moby Dick, a reduction that culminates in a haunting, even if overly familiar, image of his final demise.

Incidentally, I would return to that supermarket a few years later, age 11, and beg for the purchase of yet another impulse checkout display: Alan Dean Foster’s movie tie-in novelization of Star Wars. That one I took home and immediately read cover to cover, twice.

Damnation Alley

Damnation Alley
Roger Zelazny | Berkley Medallion | 1970 | 157 pages

“He raised his goggles and looked at the world through crap-colored glasses….”

Unlikely antihero Hell Tanner races across a post-apocalyptic American landscape to deliver a supply of vaccine to plague-stricken Boston—and clear his own criminal history—in Roger Zelazny’s two-fisted action tale.

The now independent nation of California, mostly spared from the nuclear hellstorm unleashed on the world a few decades prior, recruits biker Hell Tanner to drive a weapon-enhanced car cross country to transport a plague vaccine to the only other pocket of civilization remaining in North America. The car’s high-powered cannons, grenade-launchers, and flame-flowers, along with its armor plating and radiation shields, are needed to combat the dangers of the wasted landscape between the coasts.

Like Robert Mitchum’s character in Night of the Hunter, Hell Tanner has a defining tattoo inked across his knuckles. Instead of “Love” and “Hate”, however, Tanner’s is more fundamentally narcissistic: “Hell Tanner”.

Explosive bands of wind and radiation now swirl around the globe, prohibiting air travel and raining down rocks, boulders, schools of fish, and other debris picked up over the surface. Tanner’s car, along with two others, set out from California and are quickly met with giant swarms of cyclones,electric storms, volcanoes and other environmental hazards, along with attacks from giant mutated creatures.

Gila monsters the size of cars, giant bats, and gargantuan spiders capable of weaving webs across entire roadways now define the new fauna of “The Alley”. Soon, Tanner’s car is the only one remaining, and he encounters the additional threat that has now become a standard in post-apocalyptic fiction of all sorts: other humans.

Breathless action is the main hallmark here, with exposition describing Tanner’s progress and—usually violent–action against the threats encountered in Damnation Alley. However, a few pauses allow for breathing room to reflect upon the personal and societal nature of this new world, as Tanner interacts with vestiges of a lost humanity (with characters that are not overtly trying to kill him). Tanner hears the story of a former biologist, driven mad by his role in the violent overthrow and destruction of academia, thought to be responsible for the world’s destruction, and muses with a young boy on the inevitable disappointment of childhood dreams.

A rather short, poetic chapter on the nature of the new environment–under assault from  global windstorms–stands out from the singularly straight-ahead action of surrounding chapters, with their deadly rifleman attacks and the relentless pursuit of a biker gang.

The world building doesn’t always make sense, but the foot-on-the-accelerator pacing along with Tanner’s bad-guy-doing-the-right-thing attitude, but without a secret heart of gold, make Damnation Alley a run worth taking.

Conan | Conan the Barbarian #1

Conan | Conan the Barbarian #1
Robert E. Howard, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter | Ace Books | 1967 | 221 pages

The Thing in the Crypt (Carter & de Camp)

The introductory tale to the collection reads like a single scene, brisk and to the point, with a hair-raising payoff that prefigures the choices presented in choose-your-own-adventure stories or D&D campaigns.

Fleeing a hungry pack of wolves, Conan discovers the remnants of an ancient high altar hidden deep in a cave. The mummified corpse of a long forgotten king is seated upon the throne, with a gleaming sword held across its lap. The fantastic blade beckons Conan to pick it up. What could possibly go wrong?

The Tower of the Elephant (Howard)

The second story plays like a heist, only Barbarian style—without anything remotely resembling meticulous planning, but featuring plenty of run-right-in-and-take-it action.

Scaling a bejewelled tower to plunder the Elephant’s Heart, a fabled gemstone imbued with magical power reputedly hidden inside the walls, Conan battles against a pack of guardian lions and a pig-sized spider before ultimately facing off against an evil wizard. However, the reveal of the gem’s namesake infuses the simple attempted theft with an unexpected sense of melancholy, and throws open a window on an entirely new cosmology.\

The Hall of the Dead (Howard & de Camp)

Joined by the sole survivor of a team of soldiers ordered to capture him, Conan plunders the ruins of the fabled metropolis of Larsha. 

Once inside the walls of the cursed city, Conan tracks through a sticky trail of ooze on the ground, leading him into battle against a fantastic creature — or a simple, gargantuanly grown, garden pest — that puts the musclebound Cimmerian unexpectedly on the run. 

The treasure room scene treads on some more overly familiar ground (and precipitates another action sequence) as Conan discovers seven brilliant gems on a low altar, with only the sightless gaze of seven seemingly dead guardians to view the theft—-until he drops the gems in his pouch. 

The epilogue in the tavern provides a satisfying reversal of fortune, as Conan attempts to spend the spoils of his pillage. Although he perhaps fails to recognize any greater moral to his tale, Conan does display a good-natured allegiance to the phrase, “Honor Among Thieves”.

The God in the Bowl (Howard)

When a guard stumbles across Conan standing above the body of the slain master of the house, a murder mystery of sorts ensues with the local constabulary standing off against the muscular Cimmerian.

The inquisitor’s focus eventually shifts to an unusual item of interest: an ancient burial urn now standing open in a chamber adjacent to the murder room. Comparable to a suspenseful chamber piece, tensions among the group ebb and flow, ultimately being released with the sudden beheading of a pompous young aristocrat. In the wake of this violent act, the former occupant of the sarcophagus-like object reveals its otherworldly nature, setting the (now cleared) stage for a horrific climax.

Rogues in the House (Howard)

Conan descends into the murkiness of palace intrigue after agreeing to assassinate Nabonidus, a corrupt high priest, in exchange for being released from prison.

All does not go according to plan, however, as Conan ultimately finds himself trapped in the sewers below Nabonidus’ manor with the young nobleman who hired him, and —- unexpectedly —- his intended victim. Seemingly, the priest’s strange ward Thak, a hairy beast akin to a missing link in man’s evolution, chose this night to run amok and kill everyone in the great house. The unusual threesome strike a new alliances to evade Thak’s murderous rampage, and escape the rooms above—-rooms set and loaded with diabolical traps blocking their route to freedom.

Although capable of fantastic violence and possessing little understanding of the complex rules of society, Conan’s actions illustrate the barbarian’s unwavering internal moral compass, set in stark contrast to the duplicity of the highborn classes.

Plus a brutal creature fight.

The Hand of Nergal (Howard & Carter)

While engaged in some battlefield carnage as a mercenary, Conan witnesses a nearly apocalyptic attack by ethereal, bat-shaped beings. Awakening after the onslaught to discover himself alone in a sea of corpses, he is recruited by a young girl to aid the local king in his battle against a powerful sorcerer. It seems the dark magician has gained possession of a legendary ancient artifact, giving him control over unimaginable forces of darkness.

After building a bit of lore surrounding the Hand of Nergal, and its opposing talisman, the Heart of Tammuz, Conan sets off for the throne room to confront the mage and destroy the evil object.

Ultimately rescued by the girl from the immediate threat of the shadowy demons released from the Hand, Conan essentially stands back and watches the battle of opposing cosmic forces, reduced to a light show playing before his eyes. 

The City of Skulls (Carter & de Camp)

While escorting Princess Zosara to her betrothed in a distant land of Khan nomads, a swarm of savage attackers descends upon the wedding party. Along with Zosara, Conan and his fellow mercenary Juma are the only survivors. The trio of prisoners are led across the rugged Talakma mountains to the remote kingdom of Meru. Once inside the capital of Shamballah, a sacred city festooned with images of skulls, they are brought before King Jalung Thoma to learn of their fate.

It’s all stage setting for a few action pieces, including Conan and Juma making a particularly bone-crushing escape from a slave galley. Later while stealthily working their way through passages under the city, they —quite fortuitously—emerge in the high temple during a ceremony with the captured Zosara. Conan unexpectedly discovers the true nature of the power held by the “toad-like little god-king”, battling yet another monster-come-to-life-by-wizardry, and confirming the understandable rationale behind the barbarian’s superstitious fear of the uncanny.

Brand of the Werewolf | Doc Savage #5

Brand of the Werewolf | Doc Savage #5
Kenneth Robeson | Bantam Books | 1975 | 138 pages

Taking a transcontinental train to his uncle’s remote Canadian cabin (for a brief respite from his adventures in fighting against evil), Doc Savage and his gang of super-scientist companions are the target of a strange, silent attack. An odd trio of other passengers—the “swarthy” Señor Oveja, his ravishingly beautiful daughter Cere, and the “girl-faced” El Rabanos—set a trap to frame Doc for a similar attack, and subsequently, for the murder of the train’s conductor.

Disappointingly, this entry in the action series does not settle into a parlour mystery set aboard a speeding train. Soon, Doc and his friends are off the train, following Oveja and company to uncle Alex’s cabin, where the senior Savage has recently died under mysterious circumstances. Overseeing the remote estate is Doc’s cousin Patricia, a beautiful young woman who shares the bronze hero’s statuesque build and metallic coloring. 

Unfortunately, Patricia’s Native American household staff falls victim to the cheap stereotyping so common in the Doc Savage series. Patricia’s handyman, Boat-face, speaks almost exclusively with offensively bad retorts of “Him bad medicine” or “Him heap big coward.” Patricia actually punches him in the eye for being insolent, toppling him out of their canoe. Meanwhile, Boat-face’s “squaw”, Tiny, is a rotund woman who constantly chases him around with a raised rolling pin.

Patricia herself is also a sadly underdeveloped character. Sharing few of her cousin’s superhuman traits, she mostly seems to exist in order to provide a victim in need of the occasional rescuing. In one sequence, Doc incapacitates her with a specially applied nerve pinch, and bodily carries her to safety tucked under his arm.

The story is replete with the expected action sequences, as Doc eventually battles a criminal gang in a race toward an unlikely pirate treasure. Monk and Ham trade quips, and compete to win over the attention of Patricia (whose notable physical resemblance to Doc may posit an unintentional question surrounding the true object of their attraction). Doc’s other team members produce an unexpected amount of gear from luggage intended to support a fishing trip, while all paths finally converge on a shipwreck in an underground cavern.

The resolution relies too much on a multitude of actions performed by a key character, but the circumstances of his death ultimately defy the very logic of those actions.

…and most unforgivable of all, Doc never wrestles a werewolf, as promised on the cover.

The Polar Treasure | Doc Savage #4

The Polar Treasure | Doc Savage #4
Kenneth Robeson | Bantam Books | 1965 | 122 pages

A map tattooed on the back of a blind violinist leads Doc and his crew on a chase for lost treasure in the frozen wastes of the uncharted Arctic.

After attending a concert (featuring a classical piece he wrote anonymously), super crime-fighter Doc Savage thwarts an attempt to assault the orchestra’s blind violinist, Victor Vail. The criminal ringleader spouts enough nautical gibberish (“Sink ‘im, mateys! Scuttle ‘im! Well, keelhaul me!”) to his henchmen during the attack that Vail recognizes the voice from his tragic past. 

Fifteen years previously, Vail was among a handful of survivors aboard the Oceanic, a passenger ship that was lost among the arctic icefields off the coast of Greenland. Although his wife and daughter were purported casualties, Vail himself mysteriously had no recollection of the actual sinking. Unaccountably blacking out just prior to the disaster, he awoke afterwards with a strange, stinging sensation on his back, carried away with a small band of the surviving crew members. Vail recognizes the salty voice of his attempted kidnapper as belonging to a leader of an opposing faction of that crew, whose men instigated a violent internal struggle before splitting off from the others.

After Doc discovers the Oceanic carried a wealth of gold and jewels as its cargo, he embarks on a race against two rival gangs in order to beat them to the treasure, and uncover the true fate of the ship and its passengers. Although Doc’s five super-genius companions disappear for a time, they have enough time to engage in the trademark adventures of the series: plentiful instances of fisticuffs, gunfights, and gadgetry that propel each short burst of a chapter to the next. 

Long Tom (the electrical wizard) fiddles with the radio set, Renny (the engineer) beats down doors with his gigantic fists, Johnny (the archaeologist) assesses the group’s chances with the local terrain and population, while Monk (the chemist) and Ham (the lawyer) exchange enough corny insults to put an old married couple to shame. Ham and Renny even engage in a brawl with the walrus-like captain of a polar submarine that prefigures Doc’s own fight with an actual polar bear. 

SPOILER: he virtually punches it to death.

The implicit racism of the era that unfortunately informs many of the characterizations in the series is also demonstrated in this installment. The eskimo fighters are almost universally referred to as fat, greasy, or foul-smelling, and one attacker is specifically derided as a “greasy eater of blubber.”

Doc’s abilities and goodwill are nearly limitless, and he even takes time to perform a miraculous surgery on Vail, completely restoring the sight the violinist has been without since birth. However, an offhand remark suggests that his surgical skills are also directed to more dubious concerns, at least to modern sensibilities. Rather than sending his apprehended criminals to the police, Doc admits to sending them to a secret, extralegal installation in upstate New York, where advanced brain surgery modifies their behavior and facilitates a medical restraint from future criminality.

As Renny would say, “Holy cow!”