The Man of Bronze ride the mystery trail in a totally new kind of adventure. What is the strange fainting sickness? Who is the shadowy, white-haired McCain? Why would a starving man rather die than eat? And how many men must be brutally destroyed before Doc Savage can solve the riddle of The Green Eagle?
One of the funniest Docs. Dent in high form.
This book came out in tandem with The Devil’s Playground and the editors at Bantam must have thought them of a piece: In The Green Eagle Doc fights cowboys; in The Devil’s Playground he fights Indians. I thought both were weak and not very good examples of the kind of adventurer Doc was. Dent was clearly getting tired of the monthly grind, but I do think he wrote Green Eagle. I suspect that The Devil’s Playground was ghosted, but I don’t know by who.
The Devil’s Playground was ghosted by Alan Hathway.
Although extremely well-crafted by Dent, “The Green Eagle” is neither a particularly essential nor gripping Doc adventure. Written very, very late in the series, it’s basically a minor-key detective story centered in the Old West. Completely skippable. In fact, the biggest mystery here is why Bantam chose to slow down the momentum of the series by publishing “Eagle” immediately after the awesome “Fortress of Solitude.” Talk about buzzkill.
Finished this one today. Although I am more of a fan of the earlier Doc Savage tales, I found this one surprisingly good. By this stage of the game, Dent’s writing skills had noticeably sharpened and his plotting become more tighter. While I agree with the posters above that it lacks the momentum of earlier classics, GREEN EAGLE makes a nice change of pace from the more superscientific sagas. One thing I couldn’t help noticing, though, and that was the fact that Doc seemed less of a superman in this one — toward the end, he slugs a Bad Lad on the jaw and ends up with bruised knuckles. From that point on he continues bopping the villains with the butt of a pistol, because his hand was too painful to hit them with his fist. Come on! Doc with a sore hand?! This is more the Doc of later years, after he had been humanised and stripped of his gadgets. I mean, five issues earlier, in DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND, he was still the Bronze Superman we all know and love! All this aside, however, GREEN EAGLE is still a good read. Highly recommended.