At a mere 86 pages (in the Bantam edition) this is one of those short, taut postwar Docs. It’s also ghost-written by (or sub-contracted to) William G. Bogart - and reads as though he's simply adapted an existing, unsold 'tec novel to be a Doc story. Subsequently it reads well as a semi-noir mystery, but perhaps less well as a Doc novel - at one point Doc's drugged and tied up and it takes him, he estimates, half an hour to undo one knot. This isn't really what one expects of the Man of Bronze from the early/mid-thirties supersagas.
As I've written elsewhere, I rather like the postwar Docs - but they are not the same animal as those 'thirties supersagas like Fortress of Solitude, Death in Silver and The Annihilist. Caveat Emptor.
- | - June 19, 2005 02:47 PM
