It starts with a strange Indian running from Doc Savage’s office building. Then rich and powerful men begin to disappear. Doc and his men follow the trail to the Amazon jungles where they must contend with man eating fish, deadly jungle cats, an unknown tribe of Indians, and, worst of all, New York gangsters willing to do anything to obtain the secret of Jaguar Valley.
This novel is a fix-up of the William Bogart novel, The Crazy Indian. That novel was known to have been Bogart’s attempt to turn a Doc Savage novel into one using his own character names.
In his afterword to Jaguar Valley, author Howard Wright writes of his process turning The Crazy Indian back into a Doc Savage novel…
“…Will Murray suggested that by simply changing the names back, “you would have a Doc Savage novel at least as good as The Disappearing Lady, Death in Little Houses, Target for Death, or any of Bogart’s other late Doc novels.”
…
“It was this last sentence that planted the seed that eventually germinated into Jaguar Valley. I have thought about TCI off and on for years and have often thought that it would be fun to convert the novel back to a true Doc novel. Finally, in late 2009, over twenty years after I first read the story, I decided the time had come.”