You Should Read This: The Forest of Forever by Thomas Burnett Swann

Cassy, in the process of shedding a box of Doc Savage novels, found out I loved them and passed them along. I remember Doc and his men fondly; while at my grandparents for a Kansas summer when I was twelve or thirteen, I found my uncle’s old books, which included a pretty complete run of the Bantam reprints and reveled in them for years to come.

I’m going back and rereading while making notes because I loved and still love these books; my hope is that I’ll start to notice some patterns as I move through the books and that I’ll be able to talk about pulp tropes, gender assumptions, reading fiction aimed at a gender other than your own, and writerly techniques in an entertaining and (maybe) useful way. I’ll go consecutively by issue date of the ones I have; I will go back and fill in earlier ones as I run across the books. I don’t envision doing a post of this kind more than once a week; this one turned out close to six thousand words.

So let us begin.

Some facts about the books. The stories in Doc Savage Magazine, which ran from 1933 to 1949, were written by Lester Dent under the pen name Kenneth Robeson. Dent, who had a specific formula for the books, was paid $500 per novel, which later increased to $750. $500 dollars in 1933 had the same buying power as about $9k current dollars. After Dent’s death, his literary agent Will Murray sold the books to Bantam and someone made a lot of money off that series.

The earliest book of the bunch that I have, Quest of Qui, was originally printed in 1935 in Doc Savage Magazine and reprinted by Bantam in 1966. It’s marked as number 12 in the series. The cover does reflect the story but not any actual scene that occurs: Doc, clad in natty Arctic winter wear, kneels in an ice cave, clutching a spear, while a dragonboat’s worth of Vikings approach.

We launch our journey into the text with a moment of kludgy splendor:

There was no wind, and the authorities later decided this accounted for what occurred, for had there been a wind, many things would doubtlessly have been different.

This sideways narrative strategy doubles down in the next paragraph, while simultaneously kneecapping itself with qualifiers like probably and might have:

Had there been a wind, a baffling mystery might never have come to the notice of the world, and to the attention of Doc Savage. A number of men might have gone on living. And a scheme of consummate horror would probably have been executed with success.

Well, thank goodness there wasn’t a wind, we can all agree, and keep moving on in the hope that something will happen soon. A power boat, the Sea Scream, is introduced. For a minute we think action is imminent, and then we hit another dead spot:

But neither the Sea Scream nor her wealthy owner not her guests were of special importance to the world that day, as far as news was concerned.

Finally, after enough not-important, yes-important, no-not-really-important back and forth to get whiplash, things start happening. Or sort of happening: they spot a vessel odd enough to elicit this unlikely nautical expression from the helmsman, “I hope to swab a deck!” We find out a number of guests are aboard, “one a lady.” What this woman is doing out at sea with a gang of men is anyone’s guess, but I remember Doc Savage’s world as being oddly innocent at times and this material was aimed at young boys, so we’ll presume everyone’s just enjoying the nice ocean breeze.

Around this point I was sidetracked from wondering about the lady by the scene breaks, many of which followed no logical order that I could discern. For example:

More to be polite than anything else, for his job depended on that to an extent, the skipper asked, “What would you call the craft, miss?”

“A Viking Dragon ship,” replied the woman.

and then a scene break occurs followed by us still being in exactly the same moment.

The men laughed, for the idea was, of course, a little preposterous, Viking dragon ships having gone out of style shortly after the days of Eric the Read and other noted Norsemen.

After thinking about it much longer than I should have needed to, I realized these are actually relics from being serialized in a magazine, which is interesting, because you can tell Dent always wanted to end a section with a bang. That mystery solved, I could move on, eying the gender stuff in the passage warily and yet refraining from comment for now. A crewman is killed by a spear that is “ponderously cast.” “Ponderously” is not an adjective I would normally think to use in describing the action of a spear. Maybe it’s a very big spear.

At any rate, this man, whose leg has just been impaled by the aforementioned spear, “upset on the deck and lay there making faces.” The faces are not described; the ones that sprang to my mind were probably not what Robeson intended.

A lot of action occurs, most of it told in passive voice with an insistence that reminds one the writer was being paid by the word. A girl glimmers offstage briefly, described by the men as beautiful and the lady as “homely as sin,” which leads us to believe she must be beautiful indeed. I do feel compelled to point out that the narrative “women hate any other women prettier than themselves” is not really my experience and certainly does effectively hamper women trying to work with each other. Damn your hegemonic urges, Lester Dent!

The men are leading the girl around by a thong around her ankle, which seems to me like a method prone to a lot of tripping. Various things happen, and the guests end up on the dragonboat while the Vikings drive off in the power boat, which sounds like a scenario out of a Geico commercial.

Once the sailors, guests, and lady manage to get ashore, Johnny, one of Doc Savage’s men, becomes involved. Here’s the precís of him delivered earlier: William Harper Littlejohn, the bespectacled scientist who was the world’s greatest expert on geology and archaeology. (Between them, Doc and his men cover every possible field of knowledge.) He pronounces the dragonboat authentic, using the patented Johnny “I only use big words” schtick and its origin the fleet of Tarnjen, “one certain ancient Viking freebooter.” Googling on Tarnjen would suggest the name was plucked at random from the ether.

Johnny flies off solo to investigate. He finds a wounded man in the snow. In one of Dent’s favorite devices to build tension, we have a scene ending “Johnny now made one of the biggest mistakes of his life. He landed his plane.”

In the next scene, we’re told:

Had he known exactly how much trouble he was going to have, the knowledge might conceivably have turned his hair white.

“Might conceivably,” it should be noted, is already being applied to an entirely hypothetical situation. Over the next few chunks Johnny finds the dying man, hears clues, and then has to hide when a plane appears and strafes him. He hides; the plane lands and a prolonged chase ensues. Johnny does leave behind something important: a live radio transmitter turned to the special channel Doc and his men use.

Johnny is captured and almost killed but is recognized:

“This guy is William Harper Littlejohn,” said the other.

That apparently meant nothing to Kettler.

“And who,” he queried, “might William Harper Littlejohn be?”

“One of Doc Savage’s five righthand men,” announced the other. “Glory be! And I almost shot him!

I’m pretty sure the “Glory be” is intended to mark the speaker as Irish, but I got distracted from that by wondering if Doc has five “righthand men,” who stands where. At any rate, Johnny is captured, and we leave him in dire peril, about to be frozen into the ice by the sadistic Kettler.

An excellent time to switch to the Man of Bronze as he listens to the radio and realizes that something is wrong. Gentlemen and ladies, I present Clark Savage Jr.:

“This is strange,” he said. His voice was a remarkable one — controlled, a voice that had undergone much training.

Unusual as it was, the voice was hardly as remarkable as the man. Doc Savage was a giant. One did not realize that until comparison with ordinary objects, for his muscles were evenly developed; he did not have the knotted shoulders of a wrestler or the overdeveloped legs of a runner. Rather, his whole great frame was swathed in sinews that were remindful* of bundled wires.

More striking was the bronze of his skin, a hue which might have come from many tropical suns, and the slightly darker bronze of his straight, tight-lying hair. His eyes were a little weird, being like pools of fine gold flakes being always stirred by tiny, invisible gales.

I’m a little weirded out by the straight hair; it never occurred to me until now that Doc Savage could be read as mixed race, and this seems like Dent making sure we don’t. Huh.

Doc summons another of his righthand men, Renny. Renny is described as a man with massive fists that he likes to use. Like all of Doc’s men, he is also a genius.

We get to witness one of Doc’s trademark quirks here.

Doc Savage was still in front of the radio. There now came into being a sound so soft and eerie that its presence was at first unnoticeable. It was a trilling, low, indescribably mellow, a sound so fantastic that it defied description. The fantastic note seemed to filter from everywhere; it was as if the very air were saturated with it.

The trilling was the sound of Doc Savage, a small, unconscious thing which he did in moments of mental stress. He did not do it wilfully. He had made it always, since he could remember. And now he seemed to realize what he was doing, and the unearthly note died away.

You’d think Doc would train himself out of that tell, but even the Man of Bronze has limits. An alarm clock rings and a knife appears from nowhere and hits Doc in the back. At this point, we discover that he habitually wears a fine chainmail undergarment. The material of the undergarment isn’t specified. Neither Renny nor Doc can figure out where the knife came from; at least, Renny can’t. Doc’s a cagey dude and you’re never really sure what he knows and what he doesn’t. The knife is an ancient Viking relic.

The phone rings; it’s another of Doc’s men, Monk, aka Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair (“Only a few inches over five feet tall and yet over 260 pounds. His brutish exterior concealed the mind of a great scientist,” the frontispiece helpfully informs us) What’s new, pussycat, he asks Doc, only not in those words. An alarm clock just rang in my office and then there was a knife out of nowhere, Doc retorts. Of course the phone goes dead at this point.

We switch to Monk’s point of view. He’s in the middle of a chaotic darkroom:

There had been a red light burning. That had gone out “” very mysteriously. Something had fastened itself around Monk’s feet unexpectedly. In his excitement, he had tried to jump, howling at the same time, and had gone down. Absent-mindedly keeping a clutch on the telephone, he had torn it loose from its wires.

“Ye-o-o-w!” Monk roared. “Leggo me!”

He struck savagely with the telephone, hit nothing, and suddenly discovered the thing around his ankles was a cord. It was hard, stiff, slick. A thong of some kind of hide.

Monk gets around the hindrance of the thing by walking on his hands for the rest of the scene, pretty much. I like to think about the many tweens and teens over the years who have inspired to try to develop this vital skill as a result of reading this. Also, love the punctuation in “Ye-o-o-w!”

An alarm clock sounds, and this time the weapon from nowhere is not a knife but an ancient Viking spear. When he manages to get the light back on, there is no one there.

Enter Monk’s secretary:

The secretary who came in was as near being the prettiest secretary as Monk had been able to achieve after interviewing some hundreds of applicants. She was excited, but that only made her prettier.

Despite hiring practices that nowadays would seem less than efficient, the woman has “brains as well as beauty,” although the evidence of this is simply that she’s sure no one has come in from the outside.

As one often does, Monk goes to fetch his pet to help with the investigation.

Monk opened a mahogany door and entered a room which was undoubtedly the most expensive pigpen in the world. The floor was marble and covered with mats, and there was a trough of chromium, and various chromium self-feeders holding viands dear to the porker family. There was a stack of clean straw at one end. In the middle was a wallowing box perhaps ten feet square. The mud in the wallow was perfumed.

The pig, Habeas Corpus, is a pawn in the ongoing feud between Monk and another of the men we haven’t met yet, Ham, who happens to be a lawyer. The devotion that both men devote to the feud is the sort of storyline that often leads to people falling into bed together. I will point out many, many examples of the interesting subtext created by this dynamic throughout these readings.

Habeas turns to be of little use, but luckily Doc and Rennie enter to fill Monk in. They decide that someone’s trying to kill them all, and check in with the only other one of Doc’s men in town: Ham.

Ham is “Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, slender and raspy, he was never without his ominous, black sword cane.”

Ham, it turns out, has disappeared from his swanky New York apartment, located in a building “so exclusive that a great many Park Avenue residents did not themselves know it existed.” There’s signs of a struggle, and none of his twenty-four sword canes are gone, a sure tell that he’s gone unwillingly.

Investigation reveals blood under a window. Monk reacts strangely to the possible sign that something has befallen his longtime foe, at first so overcome he can’t speak. Out in the alley, they find a corpse, and then a cop, holding an exquisitely-cut jacket that they immediately recognize as Ham’s.

All police in the city, it turns out, are under order to cooperate with Doc Savage. Asked where the coat came from, he replies that it “‘Twas thrown out of a car.” Heading along the street, they find more of his garments. Retrieving them, they find Ham has left a message in one, written in the invisible chalk they all carry as part of their gear. The cryptic drawing mystifies Monk and Renny, but is easily deciphered by Doc and they head off to the location indicated, Diamond Point.

Monk confesses he’s worried about Ham en route and praises his smartness in getting the message to them.

“First time I heard you admit Ham had anything on the ball,” Renny boomed.

“That overdressed little shyster “”!” Monk began belligerently, then colored and sighed. “I hope he’s all right. If he’s gotta die. I want the pleasure of killing’ him.”

“You’d be lost without him,” Renny said.

At Diamond Point, they find the car. Gazing at the river, Doc abruptly strips down in a scene that if I wrote it would have a whoooooole lot more detail and goes in, turning out to be a remarkable swimmer. Underneath the water is the abducted yacht, now scuttled. More invisible chalk inside the abandoned car turns yields another clue decipherable only by Doc, pointing them to Carleth Air Lines, which belong to Thomas Carleth, a rich dilettante. Off to the Carleth flying field they go.

The air field is apparently pretty different from our current day ones, and you get the impression each air line had their own. Its wharf holds a tender from the stolen yacht and the field itself backs onto a mansion that they surmise belongs to Thomas Carleth.

There’s an unexpectedly and nicely cinematic moment here provided by infrared technology:

It was a grotesque world through which they moved, this one lighted by the infra-red beam. It was as if they were part of a pale motion picture, a picture filmed through off focus lenses, or through a heavy cheesecloth, for the infra-red light did not by any means furnish an illumination that could compete with them.

Something strikes at them that they can’t see, and they are doused with a phosphorescent liquid. By the time they all recover, this is the only sign left behind:

There were indentations in the ground in the ground, perhaps sixteen inches long, wider than a human foot at one end, and tapering. They were deepest at the wide end.

The hair-raising part, though, was the gashes edging the marks. Gashes which might have been made by enormous, razor-sharp claws.

Seriously, Dent never met an instance of passive voice that was not embraced by him. As Doc and the two right-hand men explore further, a smaller glowing creature appears, leading them to an ultramodern (by 1933 standards) plane. Renny captures the creature, which turns out to be Habeas, doused with the same liquid.

Automatic gunfire leads them to the house, where we get a trademark moment:

“Before you come in, gentlemen,” said a voice from inside the house. “I must warn you that at present it does not seem likely you will ever leave the place alive.”

The voice turns to come from Mr. Peabody**, manservant to Thomas Carleth. He takes them to Carleth, who explains the situation:

“Don’t mind me,” he said. “I’m rattled. I’m liable to say anything. You see, I am not accustomed to being held a prisoner in my own house by an infernal hoodoo?”

It turns out his infernal hoodoo throws the same sort of Viking memorabilia as whatever’s plaguing Doc, and he and Peabody have also faced invisible foes and glowing liquid. The conversation is interrupted by more knife throwing action, and in the course of the action Doc ends up in the basement, finding a radio transmitter and encountering someone. He catches the person and we end the chapter with this moment:

A small, shrill whisper came from the captive’s lips.

“Let me,” the whisper said, “tell you something.”

It was strange, that whisper. It might have been a man “” or a woman.

New chapter, and everyone reconvenes upstairs, where Doc says nothing of his epicene encounter. They look around so more, and Monk pulls Doc aside when he notices that the knife thrown earlier is the same one from Doc’s lab. Yep, Doc says, I threw it so I could distract everyone and go look around. Naturally, Monk asks what he found. Doc pretends not to hear. Doc can be a bit passive-aggressive at times, in my perception.

Carleth proposes they check his planes, where they find one missing, along with charts leading to Greenland. Renny and Doc swiftly connect this with what they’d learned of the location of Johnny’s transmitter. Peabody suggests to his master that he propose joining forces with Doc and his men, and Carleth does so.

Doc swipes left and says yeah, we, uh, need to go look for Ham, but I’ll call you. They head back to the car, and find the unconscious Ham beside it, wearing a gunnysack and snoring.

Enraged, Monk is about to kick him in the ribs for sleeping on the job. My bad, Doc says, explaining he’s actually responsible.

Doc demonstrated an ingenious mechanical device which had previously completely escaped discovery by Monk and Renny in their previous use of the car.

“When the switch hidden under the dash is thrown, it completes a connection so that, when the car doors are disturbed, an odorless, colorless gas is released from a container under the chassis,” Doc explained. “The gas produces unconsciousness. Thinking someone might visit the car while we were gone, I turned it on.”

“Don’t he look pretty in that oat sack?” Monk says in an observation that we may read as sarcastic or fond, depending on how much we want to subvert this text. Viva la homoerotism! I say, and plunge even deeper into the exploration.

Ham is awakened, and the subversive reading is reinforced by (IMO) the cattiness of Ham’s threat to Monk at the end:

Ham said nothing more until he had full control of his faculties. Then he addressed Monk clearly and with a great deal of feeling.

“You bug-faced ape,” he said.

Monk glowered in a manner which was in marked contrast to his earlier expressions of concern over Ham’s welfare.

“What happened to you?” Doc Savage asked Ham. “Start explanations with your apartment.”

“I heard a vase break,” Ham said. “I turned toward the sound. I did not see anything. Then something whacked me on the head. I went down. I was stunned, but not out. Before I could see what had hit me a black cloth of some kind was thrown over my head and held there. I fought. It was funny “””

“Ha, ha!” Monk said. “I’d like to have seen it.”

Ham said, “I’ll poison you some day!” and went on with his story.

Ham doesn’t really add much to what we know. They head back into the city to Doc’s airplane hangar, which turns out to be on fire when they get there, giving them little choice but to call Thorpe back.

Off they go. Along the way, Monk mixes chemicals in preparation for trouble while Ham studies Peabody, coveting him:

It had long been Ham’s ambition to acquire for himself a manservant who left nothing to be desired. In Peabody, Ham believed he saw the fulfillment of all his dreams. Earlier in the long flight from New York , Ham had spoken with Peabody and discovered the efficient Peabody knew his business.

Peabody was the sort of a valet who would be horrified at wearing a black bow tie with full dress, the black bow being reserved for tux. Ham was half inclined to entice Peabody from his master by offering a larger salary.

Reaching the site of Johnny’s signal, they find a wrecked plane, and the body of the man Johnny stopped for earlier. Carleth recognizes him and confirms with Peabody – he’s a mechanic that had worked for Carleth two years early. The plane, as it turns out, is Carleth’s missing one. They spot another body frozen into the ice, but while investigating, hear an approaching plane. Doc jumps into the plane they arrived in and takes off.

The other plane’s shooting, so those on the ground hide in the snow. Doc’s doing well shooting at the other plane, when a stray bullet hits Monk’s chemical kits, releasing fumes into the cabin that threaten to overcome Doc. He smashes a window, bringing fresh air into the cabin and shoots at the other plane with special bullets which are charged with a chemical that turns its fuel inflammable. The other plane spirals downward but is lost in clouds; Doc finds no trace of its landing. Back at the camp, he’s told that it wasn’t Johnny’s body in the ice: just his parka.

A new chapter starts with Johnny missing that parka: he’s trapped in an ice call, dressed in red flannel underwear and two flimsy blankets. Kettler, it turns out, was aboard the plane Doc rendered useless earlier; landing, they’d pulled white tarpaulins over it to render it invisible. It turns out they’ve kept Johnny for his knowledge of the ancient Viking language and they’re looking for some place called “Qui”. Someone is brought in for Johnny to act as translator for: the girl.

Johnny looked at her, widened his eyes and made a silent whistle of amazed appreciation. This came, despite the fact that Johnny was about as impervious to feminine charms as they came. The exaggerated newspaper stories, growing out of the glimpse those on the yacht had had of her aboard the Viking dragon ship, did not even do her justice.

She was not the tall, slim type. She was rather husky, in fact, but her curves were entirely pleasing to the eye, and she had features that were a pleasant relief from the doll-faced types popular in the motion pictures at the moment.

Well, props to Dent for a husky heroine and going against the time’s beauty norms. Maybe. Johnny speaks to her in the language identified variously as ancient Viking, old Norse, and “the Viking tongue.” He manages to create a diversion; he and the girl, whose name is Ingra, flee. They split up and we find out that it’s a good thing the pursuers have chosen to follow Johnny. In a way that will become familiar over the course of these books, he’s perfectly suited to the situation, having been a long distance runner in college.

Unlike most college athletes, Johnny was now in better condition than during his scholastic days; some freak in his make-up “” Doc Savage had diagnosed it as an unusual glandular condition “” had endowed him with muscles that were more like violin strings than those of an ordinary man. The bony archaeologist’s endurance was fabulous.

There’s some ambiguity there as to whether his muscles resemble a violin string’s more than they do an ordinary man’s muscles or whether they resemble a violin string much more than an ordinary man’s muscles resemble a violin string. Sometimes looking at Dent’s sentences too closely can cost you sanity points. Johnny’s race is cut short, however, when he falls into a crevasse. His pursuers arrive and can only see his parka to indicate where his form has fallen. They empty their clips into it and presume him dead.

Back with Doc Savage and company, they cover their plane and Doc packs his gear, loading up on accoutrements but leaving out one item:

One piece of equipment which another would certainly not have neglected, Doc Savage did not carry. He took no gun. This was in keeping with a policy which he had long ago formulated, that of having nothing to do with firearms. For this he had a reason: the thorough conviction that one who comes to depend on a gun is the more helpless than without the weapon.

I mention this mainly because Doc is a total hypocrite and shoots someone later on page 84. He strikes out into the snow, apparently either without objection from the others or without their noticing. He encounters Ingra and they tangle, resulting in this passage:

Doc laughed. He released her. The laugh was not because there was anything funny. It was to reassure the young woman.

Maybe I’ve just been watching too many episodes of Criminal Minds, but this does not actually seem like a reassuring act. Nonetheless, it does the trick, particularly when Doc Savage reveals he speaks the Viking tongue better than Johnny.

Questioned, Ingra declares, “I am one of the slaves of the Qui.” She’s been kidnapped from Qui by men who thought she’d be able to lead them back there since she knows enough astronomical navigation to do so. The conversation’s notable because there’s not a hint of flirtatiousness about it. I remember Doc having to fight women off (there will be so much more on Doc as ace character over the course of these posts). The plane shows up; Ingra is recaptured while Doc eludes pursuit by hiding in a snowdrift.

At the camp, Ham and Monk are doing what they do best, fighting, this time over Ham’s plan to hire Peabody, which falls to bits when it turns out Peabody’s a bad guy, and what’s more, a bad guy who has gotten the drop on them. Peabody’s actually pretty unhappy with Ham over the valet offer; he reveals “I’m a big shot, still, even if I been having my troubles like everybody else.”

“Gonna give me a job as your valet, huh?” he snarled, and slapped Ham as hard as he could.

Then he went and sat back down.

Monk squinted and saw Ham had not been knocked entirely senseless by the blow, but only dizzy, after which Monk rolled his small eyes and added insult to injury.

“I wish you did have a valet with manners like that,” he said.

Why manners is stressed is anybody’s guess.

Peabody and Kettler are reunited, along with their captives. Ingra is in the mix, and being tormented to lead everyone to Qui, which she refuses to do. Kettler decides to kill Ham to show her they mean business, but she agrees before he can carry out the threat. They head off to Qui. They think they spot Doc along the route, but can’t find him.

Doc, who has resorted to the by now familiar strategy of hiding in a snowdrift, emerges after they have moved on and starts after them on foot, accompanied by Habeas. He picks up Johnny’s trail and finds himself in a hidden area with cultivated trees and fields. Exploring further, he is captured by the denizens of Qui: men the size of small boys.

They were amazing little fellows, possibly not as small as it had seemed at first.

Doc had once visited pigmies in Africa. These fellows were about the same size, although a bit broader and with round, butterball faces “” the young ones. The old ones were walking masses of wrinkles.

Doc decided they were ordinary North American aboriginal stock, who had been stunted by some freak of heredity or environment.

I can’t even begin to untangle some of that, so I’m going to silently point and then move on. There turn out to be a number of slaves of Qui, all various wayfarers who have stumbled on Qui over the centuries, including more than one dragonboat’s worth of Vikings. Doc is reunited with Johnny, who turns out to be one of them. Doc fills Johnny in on events so far, and reveals that he’s aware that Peabody and Carleth are not on the up and up. This is because of the long ago basement encounter, which Doc starts to describe in detail. Unfortunately, he’s interrupted halfway through by the sound of approaching airplane engines.

The planes contain Kettler, the villainous Peabody, their gang, and their captives. There’s a fight, and Doc and his folks manage to free the other righthand men. The maddened Qui destroy the planes. Doc gets Ingra to negotiate a truce between his party and the Qui. She’s impressed when he manages to do so and informs him, “Your tongue is the mightiest of your weapons.” Here I silently wiggle my eyebrows in a salacious manner and toast to unintentional double entendres.

Ham and Monk vie for the attention of Ingra as a prolonged siege ensues. Pressed to the brink, the Qui folks agree to give Kettler and his men the treasure of Qui and also the privilege of killing Doc and his men.

The treasure of Qui turns out to be a bit lackluster:

Kettler’s crowd was not satisfied with all they brought up. There was, for instance, much copper, which of course was hardly worth packing back to civilization, and which was the more aggravating because Kettler’s men had difficulty telling it from the gold in some cases. There were old ship’s kettles, binnacles, railings, mostly of copper, bus some of brass.

It was obvious that the small men of Qui, having learned yellow metal was prized by men of the outer world, had failed to distinguish between gold and brass and copper. Also between silver and lead, it developed, for they found a number of tons of ballast lead taken from some ship.

I did look back in the text at this point to see if I could find any tiny women of Qui, but they seem to be lacking. I like to think they rebelled a few weeks ago and struck off on their own, and that why the men seem particularly directionless at time. This addition to the text has absolutely nothing to support it.

Kettler is about to shoot Doc and his men, when Carleth betrays him and shows up with a machine gun. Various alarums and excursions occur, particularly after Carleth’s eyeglasses fall off. Doc and his men escape, along with Carleth, heading through an ice cave towards the coast. It’s revealed that Carleth was the man in the basement from much earlier. Kettler pursues with his men; the entire group is drowned while trying to cross a stretch of water as Doc and his men watch.

There was no beach now. Waves were piling in. Offshore, there was a tide rip, and this tossed up waves that came lunging in furiously. The man who had shrieked was in the water, being lifted, battered against the stone, carried back, flung agains the cliff again.

A moment later, another man was off his feet. Then Peabody and Kettler went almost together, as they turned and tried to fight their way back.

The water was cold enough to chill the strongest swimmer into a near paralysis, and even had any of them been able to keep afloat, the waves would have driven them agains the rocks. It became certain that they were to drown, to the last man.

“If we could save them” Doc Savage said slowly, “we would,”

Monk looked at Carleth.

“Doc would,” Monk said. “He’s funny that way.”

At this point things are wrapped up with blinding speed in a passage that begins “Four months later.” We find out Doc’s back but before leaving Qui, he freed the slaves, negotiating a truce between them and the tiny men. Most of the former slaves, including Ingra, have elected to stay there. We end with:

There was some talk in antique circles during the next few months about certain very valuable and undoubtedly genuine Viking items which had come on the market.

The money from the antiques, Doc Savage employed to purchase a shipload of commoner conveniences of civilization, and this was delivered to Qui by men who knew how to keep their mouths shut. The first shipped did not take all of the money; there was more for the years following.

I do wonder what the Qui will sell once they’re out of antiquities yet still hooked on the “commoner conveniences of civilization.” Perhaps they’ll open up to tourism at that point.

Some takeaways. The scene break stuff actually was useful. It reminded me of Don Maass’ writing advice to have something kicky every page or so, and showed a number of possible strategies for doing so, some of which I was fonder of than others, but certainly gives hints for writing serial fiction.

Along the same lines, some of the holes and gaps never get filled in, yet that serial nature may help keep the reader from noticing in a serial. For instance, remember the glowing liquid and giant claw marks from earlier? Never explained.

Next time: The Spook Legion

*This is an actual word, not a mistake. I checked.
**If Carleth’s name were Sherman, this would be delightful.

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Our cover is mainly green, depicting Doc poling a log in what have to be anti-gravity boots because there is no way he would maintain his balance otherwise, towards an abandoned ship. As always, his shirt is artfully torn and his footwear worthy of a J. Peterman catalog.

In this read, book eighteen of the series, we finally get to see another of Doc’s men, electrical engineer Long Tom. I do want to begin with a caveat that this book starts in Alexandria and initially features an Islamic villain, Pasha Bey; while I will call out some specific instances, this is the first of these where the racism is oozing all over the page and betrays so many things about the American popular conception of the Middle East. I just want to get that out of the way up front, because it is a big ol’ problem in the beginning of this text.

We begin, therefore, with the incredibly problematic Pasha Bey:

An American man of letters once said that, if a man build a better mousetrap, the world would beat a path to his door.

Pasha Bey was like that. His output was not mouse traps, but it was the best of its kind. Being modern, Pasha Bey had become president of a vast organization which specialized in his product. The fame of Pasha Bey was great. From all of Egypt, men beat a path to his door, which was likely to be anywhere in Alexandria. They came to buy this product, of course.

Pasha Bey’s product was murder!

Pasha is directed by an unseen man to give a note to Long Tom, in order to lure him off and kill him, for the sum of around $200 American dollars. Whether this accurately reflects the 1933 Egyptian murder market is anybody’s guess; it’s around $3700 in contemporary dollars. En route, he encounters the man of bronze.

One look at the big, metallic American scared Pasha Bey. There was something terrible about the giant Yankee.

Pasha Bey turned to watch the bronze man across the lobby. He was not alone in his staring; almost everyone else was doing the same thing. Alexandria was a city of strange men, but never had it seen such a personage as this.

The American was huge, yet so perfectly proportioned that his great size was apparent only when he was near other men to whose stature he might be compared. They seemed to shrink to pygmies alongside him. Tendons like big metal bands wrapped the bronze man’s hands and neck, giving a hint of the tremendous strength which must be harbored in his mighty body.

But it was the eyes that got Pasha Bey. They were weird orbs, like glittering pools of flake gold. In one casual glance, they seemed to turn Pasha Bey’s unholy soul inside out, see all its evil, and promise full punishment. The effect was most unnerving.

Pasha Bey heads on up and we are introduced to Long Tom Roberts, one of Doc’s five right-hand men who we haven’t happened to hit yet. He is described thusly:

The man who soon opened the door was rather undersized, pale of hair and eyes, and somewhat pale of complexion. In fact, he did not look at all robust. He did, however, have a very alert manner.

Long Tom was always my least favorite of the group. He’s very money driven and Pasha Bey plays on this with the note he gives him from one “Leland Smith.”

Long Tom showed pronounced interest. It was true that he had never heard of Leland Smith. But he had himself perfected a device for killing insects. The thing would be a boon to farmers, and Long Tom expected to make a fortune out of it. If some other inventor was likely to cut in on the profits, Long Tom wanted to know about it.

Long Tom hurries off, but leaves a note for Doc and the others. Pasha Bey sends a hireling named Homar to get the note and meanwhile Long Tom gets in the car and settles “luxuriously on the cushions, entirely unaware he was riding to a death trap.”

Homar gets the note, but is followed by Doc, who’s noticed him picking the lock to Long Tom’s room. Off they go to Pompey’s Pillar, a part of Alexandria holding ancient catacombs. Doc’s surprised enough by the sight of Long Tom’s bloody handprint that he makes his usual sound: “a low, trilling, mellow note, which might have been the sound of some weird bird of the jungle, or a wind filtering through the piled stone of ancient ruins around about.”

The surroundings are appropriately gruesome:

…there were many casket-shaped niches cut in the rock, and in these were stacked arm and leg bones, spinal columns, ribs. It was a macabre, hideous place. Compared to these catacombs, a walk through a graveyard at midnight was no more awesome than a stroll through a town park.

Doc finds Pasha Bey, who is swearing first by Allah’s left eye, then by both eyes, that if Long Tom signs over his travellers chequesm, he’ll be set free. Long Tom is understandably dubious. He makes an escape attempt, and in the chaos Doc enters, “a mighty genie of bronze,” and subdues everyone. Terrified, the criminals flee, swinging a rock slab shut to trap Doc and Tom, along with all of the criminals Doc has knocked out.

Doc and Tom compare notes and question Homar, who had been knocked out by Doc earlier. Doc hypnotizes him and finds out a meeting has been arranged for later that day. They escape the vault, using the explosives Doc has hidden about his person in two back molars.

Generally the stuff in Alexandria is clearly drawn from a guidebook that included a number of Arabic phrases, which are scattered through the text like malformed lumps of seasoning salt. Accompanied by piquant phrases like “Wallah” and “Imshi bil’ aga”, Pasha Bey’s conversation turns to betraying the man who has hired them. Off they go to report to him first.

The man, in characteristic Dent fashion, is not shown, thus letting us know we will be surprised by his identity later on. He is described as having a powerful, ringing voice and “capable of speaking good English,” an ability which is not precisely showcased:

An explosive curse blasted through the bars.

“I’m not after any diamonds! I don’t know anything about the gems, except the talk that’s been going around this stinkin’ burg. I ain’t after ice!”

which is followed by a passage I have underlined in red in my copy for reasons which I believe are fairly apparent.

“You do not speak with a forked tongue?” Pasha Bey muttered suspiciously. He thought he detected a falsehood.

He has little time to think about this, though, because he and his remaining men are killed after finding out they were hired to keep Doc and his men from boarding the ship Cameronic that night. Doc and Long Tom arrive only in time to find the corpses, including Pasha Bey clutching an object torn from an attacker:

Doc picked up the belt and inspected it. The thing was perhaps three inches wide, and made of soft leather. Upon the leather was sewed, side by side, more than a score of circular, braided insignia. Each of these bore an embroidered name.

Doc glanced over some of the names.

Sea Sylph, Henryetta, U.S.S. Voyager, Queen Neptune, Gotham Belle, Axtella Marie.

Long Tom and Doc ready to board the Cameronic with the rest of the men: Renny, Monk, Ham, and Johnny. They also learn that an American bank clerk involved in transferring Doc’s diamonds to the Cameronic has been murdered.

On the Cameronic, they find Monk and Ham pursuing “three fleeing brown villains,” who have been meddling with Doc’s luggage. The criminals leap overboard and swim away “briskly.” There’s the obligatory round of insults exchanged by Monk and Ham and Doc hastily heads off hours of verbal fun by suggesting they go check in on the others and Doc’s diamonds, which are destined to fund hospitals and philanthropic projects.

Down below, Renny and Johnny say a suspicious character has been hanging around, a man with a flowing white beard who looked like Santa Claus (presumably not an early incarnation of Mike Glyer). They loiter in the vicinity waiting for him to reappear, but he does not, and the ship launches. Doc sends a radiogram addressed Chief Inspector, Scotland Yard, asking about the name on the belt. The ship plows silently on through the night, accompanied only by a strained metaphor: “Somehow, it had the aspect of a shiny, new coffin fitted with lights.”

Early the next morning, Doc goes above deck to do his exercises, clad only in a disappointingly undescribed bathing suit.

These exercises were the explanation of Doc’s amazing physical and mental powers. They lasted a full two hours. Every second of that time he was working out at full speed. He had done this sort of thing daily from childhood.

He made his mighty muscles tug, one against the other, until all of his mighty bronze body glistened under a film of perspiration. He juggled a number of more than a dozen figures in his head, multiplying, dividing, extracting square and cube roots…

He employed an apparatus which created sound waves of frequencies above and below those audible to the normal ear. Thanks to his lifetime of practice, Doc was able to hear many of these sounds. His hearing was unbelievably keen.

While exercising, Doc spots a fellow gymnast, the aforementioned man with a white beard:

The stranger was balancing expertly on his hands and raising and lowering himself. This was no mean feat, but he was doing it easily. And he did it innumerable times.

He had a regulation exercise of spring cables. Five such cables were all an ordinary man could handle Yet there were more than fifteen strands on this apparatus. After working out with that a while, the man turned a score or more of handsprings, flinging himself high into the air.

Doc hails the man, who immediately leaps to another deck, leaving behind only his false beard, whose adhesive has apparently been loosened by sweat. Puzzled, Doc takes the beard and then takes a dip in the swimming pool to remove that film of perspiration. Returning to his cabin, he finds it’s been ransacked. Only one thing is gone: the curious belt of cap insignias. We discover at dinner discussion that the thief didn’t get the decoy note originally sent to Long Tom:

“He missed it by about half the length of the ship,” Doc replied, and showed where he had been carrying the message, inclosed [sic] in a waterproof, flat box, secured under his bathing suit with a strip of adhesive tape.

(Here, for reference purposes, is what men’s bathing suits looked like in the 1930s.) Johnny offers to bet that the mysterious Santa Claus was the searcher; no one takes him up on it since he’s known to never bet except on sure things.

Checking the writing on the note against the ship’s register, they match it to a name: Jacob Black Bruze. Bruze occupies Cabin 17 on B deck, but investigation finds nothing there, not even fingerprints. Doc visits the skipper of the Cameronic, one Ned Stanhope, at this point in order to get his cooperation, implying they’re been breaking into people’s cabins previously without it.

Captain Ned Stanhope, his name was. He was a little old grandma of a man. His hands were roped with blue veins, and shook at intervals from some nervous affliction. He looked less like a doughty sea captain than any of the species Doc had ever seen.

Captain Stanhope did have the whopping voice of a windjammer master, however. He was very affable.

A reply from Scotland Yard confirms that the names of the ships are all ones lost at sea in the last fifteen years, each having vanished in the Atlantic ocean. Doc and his men scrutinize and search, noticing something off about the first-class passengers.

“Have you noticed what a bunch of mugs are booked in the first-class cabins?” Monk grunted.

“I’ll say!” agreed Long Tom. “First-class passengers are usually prosperous business men and their families. But not these eggs! There’s thirty or forty who look like they had been jerked out of some penitentiary!”

That night they find the belt back in their cabin. An insignia from the Cameronic has been added to it. A little later, a missing life boat leads Monk to declare Bruze has fled the ship; Doc is not so sure.

The journey continues; the ship, passing through the Strait of Gibraltar, encounters soupy fog. Monk, as well as many of the passengers, are admiring a “very comely” young woman dancer, and not noticing the hardboiled mugs casually slipping out of the room. Our omniscient viewpoint, however, does notice, and follows them to the room where all fifty have gathered in order to plot. Bruze is there, and boasting that he can defeat Doc Savage “with my bare hands” while flexing. Nonetheless, he resorts to other means, giving his men six glass bottles, one for each of Doc and his men, and the meeting is adjourned.

Doc, returning to his cabin post-cabaret, pours out a glass of water from his room carafe but upon sipping it, finds it too cold: “His vast knowledge of the human physique had taught him it was unnecessary, if not unwise, to shock the system by drinking excessively cold water.” He pours out the water, but it encounters a chemical already in the sink, and “foul, brownish vapor” fills the room “with ugly speed.” Doc exits, and rushes to Monk’s cabin, then the rest of the men. Monk and Ham are dead; killed by the vapor:

Doc grasped Monk’s wrist, feeling for a pulse. And as he felt, a strange cold fixedness of expression came upon his face. The metal of his mighty body seemed to freeze in a wintry blast of horror.

Monk was dead!

But this is Doc Savage, after all. His remaining men watch with “a sort of incredulous hope”.

There on the corridor floor, under the none-too-bright ship lights, they were witnessing one of the miracles of modern surgical skill.

The hearts of both Monk and Ham had stopped, Respiration had ceased. To all appearances, they were lifeless.

The thing Doc Savage was doing had been accomplished before by other great surgeons. But probably never under such conditions! To the three watchers, who knew but little of such things, what happened smacked of the touch of a supernatural being.

For Doc Savage, introducing adrenalin and other stimulants with a long hypodermic needle, which actually reached the hearts of the two men, caused the pulse to start once more. With a respiratory pump he cleared the residue of the poisonous vapor out of their lungs, and got breathing under way.

An hour, he worked! Two! three!

Revived, Monk and Ham immediately begin quarreling again. Armed with their compact machine guns and their somewhat contradictory vow not to take human life, the group readies themselves.

It turns out other things have developed during the night. The ship’s radio operator has smashed the radio, then killed himself and the other operator. Upon investigation, Doc realizes it’s not a case of suicide…but murder. Doc apprehends the two first class passengers who committed it, and goes to tell the captain. Stanhope also seems to have gone crazy; he orders Doc out of his cabin at gunpoint, saying that the man of bronze has caused all the trouble. The two murderers mysteriously disappear; all evidence points to them having been killed and thrown overboard.

The ship sails on, with most of the passengers somehow able to avoid thinking about the multiple murders, mayhem, or the fact that the ship has no way of communicating with the outside world. This continues for seven days: “Seven years, it seemed! Seven ages in a fantastic world where there was only a dark, sinister sea and clouds and rain.”

Something’s clearly going on with the skipper and his officers, who are holed up in their cabins and refuse to talk to Doc or his men. A brief moment of sunlight allows Doc to figure out where they are, which turns out to be thousands of miles off course. They decide it’s time to take over the ship.

This involves gun battle, while the other passengers who’ve been oblivious to the plot action flee in terror. Doc enters Stanhope’s cabin and finds his mysterious behavior’s explanation: he’s been captive all this time. The captain finally tries to break free and is killed by gunfire in the process.

The criminals break out submachine guns of their own; gun battles rage across the Cameronic. Doc and his men free the other officers but are unable to prevent an explosion that disables the ship’s engines. Luckily Doc is able to quench the fires and prevent further damage.

Above decks, they find themselves in a fantastic setting:

“Blast it — look!” Monk leveled a furry arm at the sea.

Or was it a sea? Certainly, the flat waste which stretched to the horizon had none of the aspects of an ordinary ocean. It looked more like a vast, dead prairie of strange, sapphire hue. Here and there weird, whitish spots lent a mottled appearance.

There were no waves. Instead, the expanse seemed to bend with the swell, not unlike a flexible mirror*.

The Cameronic still moved, for the engines had not been stopped long. In her wake was a short lane of intense indigo. Farther back, this wake was slowly filling with the jaundiced substance which colored the sea in all directions.

This can’t be the real Sargasso Sea, Renny declares, having sailed through it previously. Doc points out this could be the true source of the Sargasso Sea legends: “a great weed bed to which derelict ships are carried, to be entrapped and float through the ages. The actual location of the Sargasso might vary from time to time, as the weed bed is moved by the ocean current.”

Johnny offers to bet it’s the real Sargasso Sea; in case the reader has forgotten, Dent reminds us Johnny only bets on sure things.

Bruze and his men have barricaded themselves in the rear of the ship; negotiations with them proves fruitless. They’ve got a dozen hostages, and if Doc and his men don’t surrender within two hours, the killing will begin.

Up on deck, all is chaos:

The wild confusion among the passengers was increasing instead of abating. White-faced tourists, looking over the rail at the dead, hideous expanse of weed-filled sea, became even more pallid.

Every individual who had the slightest informaiton on the Sargasso Sea was broadcasting it at the top of his** voice. Every book on the subject had already been taken from the library.

Other passengers are trying to escape in lifeboats or insisting this is all part of the shipboard entertainment. Doc gathers everyone for a meeting on the forward sun deck and explains things “in a powerful but unexcited voice.”

Monk and Renny assist Doc in his plan; they’ve created a fake bomb, which turns out to be a ruse furthermore involving fake gas. Bruze and his men agree to release the hostages if they’re given the lifeboats. Post negotiation, they free their captives and head off in the lifeboats, which turn out to work pretty well in the sea due to equipment that the criminals have brought with them. It turns out Bruze has set a fire before leaving, but it’s quenched. Monk reveals he filled the water kegs on the boats with salt water.

Bruze and his men come to a stop, “just out of range of a high-powered rifle” and make themselves comfortable: “They were like birds of carrion, hovering within sight of the helpless hulk of the Cameronic as if waiting for it to die.”

The passengers debate and decide to ask Doc “to serve as dictator for the duration of our present difficulties.” Doc gives various facts “calculated to allay fear” about the state of the ship’s supplies and directs the orchestra to play, since he’s “well aware of the cheering effects of music.”

Time passes, described as “Monotonous days followed.” Doc states they are being carried to the center of the sea. Morale efforts continue, mostly involving that orchestra. A rain shower provides Bruze and his men with water, much to Monk’s disgust.

Doc and Renny construct boats and cutting machinery similar to Bruze’s. They chase Bruze. Bruze retaliates by starting to take long distance rifle shots at night, only to be repelled by the “reasonably efficient muzzle-loading cannon” that Doc and his men cast out of engine parts.

Days drag into weeks and then “one sun-gloried morning,” Doc (who has apparently skipped his exercise routine that day) is awakened by “the hysterical screaming of a woman passenger”. The cause of alarm is a wreck, covered with weed. When they explore it, it turns out to be the Sea Sylph, which has clearly been robbed, its safe blown open. No survivors are aboard.

Soon afterward, they arrive at the center:

Ships were before them. An amazing fleet! they seemed to date from all ages. Some were comparatively spic and span, craft which had been here only a matter of weeks or months. Others were older. Centuries older, if their strange construction was a guide.

Many of the craft floated high in the water. More were half-hull deep. Not a few were water-logged and practically submerged — little more than mounds in the repellent, yellow weed. Some were canted on their sides. Here and there, one had capsized completely.

Monk started counting, but speedily gave it up. The number of the derelicts was bewildering. Their masts were like a naked jungle on the horizon.

The hulks had been brought together by the push of ocean currents from all sides Nor was the strange forest composed of ships alone. There was everything that would float — sticks, planks, hatches, logs, bottles, metal barrels, and wooden barrels! Every conceivable kind of trash!

Bruze and his men disappear into the jungle of wreckage and are not seen again that day. Doc decides to find out where they’ve gone, taking one of the small boats “shortly after darkness fell like a dank, black blanket.” Picking his way slowly through the morass of the “yellowed, dying sea,” he hears someone sending signals upon a “giant Oriental gong.” Following the sound, he finds two ancient barges lashed together and turned into a floating fortress.

Uncharacteristically, Doc trips an alarm and is plainly revealed by “a full dozen searchlights.” Shots are fired, and Doc flees. He lands on a battleship that Bruze and his men apparently fear and will not follow him onto. They depart; Doc investigates the ship, where he is encountered and attacked by someone’s pet monkey and then snared by unknown attackers:

An avalanche of forms struck Doc. Clutching hands gripped at his arms, his neck. They were puny, these hands, compared to the bronze man’s great strength. By striking about, he could no doubt have escaped.

But he made no effort to do so.

These were women! The sharp cry had told him that.

Doc allows himself to be captured by “several pairs of soft feminine hands.” The crowd of women seems to be made of many nationalities. A lantern is lit, revealing the crew of Amazons.

The women were of all ages, races, and varying degrees of beauty. Several of them were pretty enough to be considered entirely entrancing. All were strangely clad, with no two ensembles alike.

The most striking of the lot was their leader — she who spoke so many languages.

She was a redhead. In height, she would have topped Doc’s shoulder a but. Her eyes were a dreamy South Seas blue; her nose was small, with a suspicion of snubness; her lips were an inviting bow. Altogether her features could hardly have been improved upon.

The women appear angry, but that emotion is swiftly quelled by Doc’s charms. The leader identifies herself as Kina la Forge and demands his story. They exchange information; it turns out Bruze has been capturing ships for six years now. Doc asks to be turned loose, but Kina doesn’t want to do it. One of Bruze’s men, it turns out, infiltrated years ago and slew all their men. Kina tells Doc she has lived there all her life and that Bruze, who she calls the Sargasso Ogre, is a recent arrival. The sea had actually hosted a small civilization, which Bruze has done its best to destroy. It’s revealed at this point that the battleship holds six or seven million in treasure. Doc asks to be freed again; Kina says no and has some women start to drag him away. Doc escapes, saving Kina’s life from one of Bruze’s men in the process and starts making his way back to the Cameronic, which he finds in the process of being attacked.

Doc joins the fray, noticing that his righthand men are not there. Bruze rushes him and there is an epic battle between “two leviathans of bone and flesh.” The fight is fierce: “so terrific was their clutch that when their fingers slipped, skin came away as if scalded.” Bruze and his men are repelled; Doc finds his own men have been lured away to a nearby caravel, where there’s supposed to be a treasure chest.

Bruze gets on the boat with the treasure chest and is disappointed to note that his trap has apparently been unsuccessful: the chest is rigged to explode when opened. They leave, Doc appears, and of course immediately begins to open the chest, it being the last sentence of the scene. Fade to mysterious black.

Why did Doc’s men not fall for the trap? They overheard the shots from elsewhere and have gone to investigate and discovered the warship/fortress. If the criminals are watching it, there must be someone they fear on board, Doc’s men decide, and over the protests of the others, Monk moves to board it:

Before there could be more argument, Monk bounded forward. His simian physique was just right for this sort o thing. He simply doubled over, using his hands to help maintain a balance, and hopped from one piece of floating wreckage to another.

He reached the warship — and was temporarily baffled. There was no climbing those sheer steel plates. Monk carried no silken line and grapple, such as Doc had employed.

He wandered along the hull, hoping to find a dangling line. He made a complete circuit of the vessel without looking one.

Then, in a spot where he thought certainly that he had looked on the first trip, he saw an inviting Manila hawser***.

It is, of course, a trap. Monk is nearly captured by the Amazons but after gawping at them a bit, he escapes by jumping back overboard. Ham mocks him for the escapade, but the banter is cut short when more shooting begins, initiated by Bruze’s men. Monk and the others contemplate seeking refuge by going back to the fortress; a well-aimed bullet from Kina dissuades them and moments later, there’s another distraction: the caravel. They realize Doc has set off the trap. Searching for his body, they cannot find it and assume him dead, which would seem to imply less knowledge on their part than the reader, who’s pretty sure he’s not. They set siege to Bruze and his men, only to realize that he’s summoned aid. They begin working their way back to the Cameronic, and en route they are surprised to find Doc, “a mighty bronze statue in the moonlight”.

He explains how he escaped the trap. In the course of the conversation, Renny realizes Doc probably could have taken Bruze and asks what’s up. Doc explains that Bruze is the only person who seems to know the way out of the Sargasso Sea. They go back to the Cameronic, while Doc heads to Bruze’s hideout. There, listening, he realizes Bruze has launched some new trap.

They’ve also destroyed his boat, he discovers when he tries to leave. He’s forced to swim back to the Cameronic. After a long nightmarish trip, he finds the Cameronic, which has been taken by Bruze and his men and is now vacant:

Doc moved from spot to spot, inspecting the scene. Huge and expressionless, he might have been a robot man of tempered metal. Tendrils of seaweed dangled like strings from his form. At intervals, he popped, between thumb and forefinger, one of the tiny bulbs which, air-filled, gave the sargassum buoyancy.****

Searching the boat, he locates an undamaged boat and stocks it with supplies. While he’s going back for a second load of supplies, the lurking Bruze sabotages his boat and machine gun, and lets his gang know that Doc’s boat will break the first time he tries to speed. Doc plunges underwater again and makes his way laboriously through the sargassum. He tries to get back to the Amazons and finally encounters a foe he cannot deql with: Kina.

Doc studied the charming picture she presented. Along with his other training for his perilous career of hunting trouble, he had taken a course in feminine psychology. Sometimes he wondered if he had learned anything after all. The intricacies of the feminine mind were beyond any psychologist.

He boards despite her saying she’ll shoot him. She does not. “Her only objections, it dawned on him, had been feminine contrariness only.” Bruze appears and tells Kina l Forge he’ll kill the three hundred hostages from the Cameronic. Bruze threatens to do it in front of Kina; she tells him to go for it. Bruze departs; Doc stays with the women where he tells “them all the latest news, including the newest in feminine styles. When he saw how pathetically eager they were, he used crayons, which someone produced, and sketched the summer dress models from Paris and New York.”

The women, including Kina, begin mashing on the man of bronze pretty early on:

She did not know it yet, but she would have done well to save her gentle wiles. Doc was woman-proof. In his life, with its constant peril and violence, there was no place for the fairer sex.

Consequently he disregarded them.

Kina resigns herself to Doc’s a-romantic nature and gives him more information about the Sargasso Sea, including the fact that the western side is heavily guarded by Bruze. Doc surmises that the way out must be located somewhere there. Doc decides to go see if he can locate the hostages. Making his way to Bruze’s boat, he witnesses a disturbing sight:

Bruze sat crosslegged on rich cushions. Before him was a case, the lid pried off. Into this, the hawk-faced, over-muscled man dipped his hands. His little eyes were sticking out of his head like glass marbles, and he was so gripped by hysterical delight that he was sweating.

For he was handling Doc’s uncut diamonds. A wealth untold!

About the room was stacked other treasure — gold bullion, gold coin in sacks, trays of jewelry, and cheaper trinkets in mounds on the floor. Loot from the ships named on the scalp belt! Ransom of a score of kings!

And in the midst of it sat Bruze, a gloating fiend, with thews and sinews draping his great body like coiled snakes.

The Sargasso Ogre! At the moment, no other name could have fitted him more aptly.

Doc uses ventriloquism to lure Bruze out, making the sound of a distant motor starting up. He trails Bruze to a freighter where Bruze upbraids the occupants for starting the motors and possibly alerting Doc Savage to their existence. The criminals rightfully insist they haven’t been doing so; Bruze goes in to touch the engines and see if they’re warm. Doc searches the freighter and discovers the hold is steel-plated and he can’t get in.

Bruze calls his men inside, telling them not to mind watching the door. Doc suspects it’s another trick but enters, only to find gunmen. The following fight has the sort of weird poetry that Dent sometimes achieves:

Close to his right ear hung a rust scale as large as a spelling book. There were many others like it. Too, the hull flared in such a fashion as to make it difficult for the men to lean out of the side hatches at bow and stern — they could not sight him. In the murk, his bronze skin blended with the rust somewhat.

One of the men started to shoot, regardless. The other, thus encouraged, did likewise.

Rust scales fell like big snowflakes. Timbers in the raft splintered, split, and jarred as if invisible horses were galloping upon them.

Doc emerges unscathed but finds himself in a tiny room furnished with loophles for people to shoot into it. Doc employs a smoke bomb and disappears, much to the frustration of Bruze. He sends off his men; he plans to make a final effort and finish Doc off once and for all.

There are seventeen pages left to the book at this point and Pasha Bey — or someone very like him, now nicknamed “Big Sheik” — reappears.

Seven evil-looking men now appeared in a group. They were chuckling at the expense of one of their number. This fellow was very fat, judging from the flabby bulges which stuffed his garments. If his appearance was any criterion, he would weigh at least three hundred pounds.

His skin was a brownish color. He wore a flowing burnoose of fine silk, and had curly black hair. He was a half-caste white.

His face was swathed partially in bandages. He carried one arm in a sling.

“Wallah!” he gritted with a strong Arabic accent. “By the beard of my father, I will stick a knife into the next man who makes what he calls the wisecrack!”

The varied group assembles. Bruze tells them he believes Doc is hiding up on the warship with the women, and he wants to get rid of the latter group once and for all, even if it means loosing the treasure the women are guarding. Off they go, but Big Shiek lags behind. In case it’s not apparent, he is Doc Savage in a disguise, which he swiftly doffs once out of eyesight. Making it to the warship before Bruze and his gang, he manages to repel their attack.

Bruze reveals his last-ditch plan: he’s got a tanker full of gasoline, which he plans to dump into the ocean around the women’s ship and set on fire. They begin to put this plan in place, unaware Doc’s already moved everyone on the warship somewhere safer.

Kina and her women appear at the criminals fortress, offering to surrender and saying they’re tired of fighting. The criminals shepherd the ladies into a small enclosed space, where the women release gas that Doc has provided them with, concealed within the masses of their hair, knocking the others out. They free the hostages. Doc reappears, says good job, and takes all of his men except Monk back to the fight. Monk, who’s been told to stay behind and defend the freighter, is indignant until he realizes this means time with Kina.

Bruze’s plan is his undoing; when he and his men shoot at the oncoming Doc and his men, they set off the gasoline all around themselves. In the aftermath, Doc and his men find the seaplanes that Bruze and his men have been using to get in and out of the Sargasso Sea.

The ending is abrupt enough to make you wonder if a chapter got left off: They fell to examining the craft.

Notes and afterthoughts: this book feels initially scattered in a way that some of the others don’t, and I have a strong suspicion Dent started it intending to put it all in Alexandria, and then found he just wasn’t able to sustain that atmosphere. Once we get to the Sargasso Sea, things feel a lot more coherent, but boy that ending is so fast it leaves the reader reeling.

* ‘Not unlike x’ is a construction I find peculiarly charming; look for it to be heavily used in an upcoming work of fiction.
** I like to pretend Dent is deliberately using a gendered pronoun here and making a sly comment on mansplaining. This is undoubtedly not actually the case.
*** Google search informs me this is a thick rope used in shipping.
**** Not unlike a primitive form of bubblewrap.