I picked up the Bantam paperback edition of the Doc Savage novel Death in Silver not long ago at a used book store, having forgotten that I already owned it as part of the Nostalgia Ventures reprint series. As soon as I started to read it, I realized I'd read it before. But Doc Savage novels are more fun than a barrel full of former criminals who have had experimental brain surgery, so I read again anyways.
But I swear I hadn't just read it, but also written about it.
Death in Silver begins when an industrialist, whose businesses include a shipyard, is killed by a massive explosion that takes out his office, located near the top of a skyscraper. Monk Mayfair (one of Doc's companions) has a lab in the same building, so he is joined by his frenemy Ham to investigate. After one more murder, the pair are kidnapped. That brings Doc into the case. He soon figures out that someone had managed to fire a 3-inch artillery shell into the dead man's office. How this was done in the middle of the world's busiest city without anyone noticing is a mystery.
The shenangigans involve the Silver Deaths Head gang, which is behind a violent crime wave and whose members always manage to get away whenever the cops are chasing them, with the trail always vanishing near the waterfront. Doc, as usual, is soon hip-deep in battles, death traps, narrow escapes and the other events that general define a typical day in Doc's life. Monk and Ham are soon rescued, but Doc's cousin Pat and another lady involved in the case are soon kidnapped also.
Doc as soon deduced that the bad guys are using a submarine to pull off their capers. This leads to a wonderfully exciting action sequence involving an underwater battle between diving-suit-clad combatants, which in turn leads to a climax in which Doc has inflitrated the gang aboard the tramp steamer being used as a submarine tender by the villians.
The action is literally non-stop, but throughout the story, author Lester Dent expertly drops in clues to the identity of the gang leader, clues to their means and motives, and clues to how he is going to outsmart them in the end. It is another great entry in the series.
But the reason I thought I remembered not just reading it, but also writing about it, is that there is a part of the novel I'm a little bit critical of. The motivation of the main villain involves a plot to do away with business rivals and then pull off some stock manipulations to score big in the market.
This, by itself, is a perfectly sound motive for murder. But it seems building a submarine and forming a bizarrely dressed gang is a little extreme, even if you are planning to rake in millions. There has to be easier ways to arrange a few murders.
I'm convinced that at some point, I mentioned this story in context of pointing out this arguable weak point. (Arguable because the book is so much fun otherwise and this is the sort of complex plan that villains in the pulp universe commonly employ.) So I checked the chapter in my book Storytelling in the Pulps, Comics and Radio about single-character pulps. No, not there. I checked the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Doc Savage that I wrote. No, not there. I checked previous Doc Savage posts in this blog. No, not there.
Darn it. I KNOW that I wrote about this novel at least once before. But I can't find any proof of this anywhere.
It's a problem that only Doc Savage can solve. Maybe I ought to give him a call.
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