Doc smuggles himself into Moscow on his most daring mission yet! The Man of Bronze tangles with a deadly military secret, some sinister Soviets, and — most dangerous of all — a heroine of the Russian underground who is as treacherous as she is beautiful.
The Doc Savage pulp issue of In Hell, Madonna was not published. Will Murray discovered the manuscript in the Dent files and Bantam Books printed it for the first time in July 1979 as The Red Spider.
one of my least favorite books. Doc seems a little gunshy and not in control of himself or the situation. But the cover’s awesome
I do feel that this story did NOT live up to the hype. But, it was great fun to read of Doc Savage being part of the techno expansion (explosion?) that began after the innovations-under-duress of WW II. Also, it was an interesting piece of the character study of Doc being “de-Supermanned”. Only natural as Clark was now in at least his late 40’s and had been under extreme stress and danger for nearly two decades.
I was glad to see this book and feel thanks should be passed along to Will Murray for digging it up. But it isn’t Doc. It has little action and Doc seems ill-fitted to the Cold War world of Soviet Russia of 1949. The novel itself is hardly long enough to be called a novel, but what’s here is coherent enough to read. But I’d say this should be read only by die-hard Doc fans who want to see a Dent story that got rejected by the editor and ended up in a file cabinet only to be discovered thirty years later. Of historical interest only.
While I agree in part with one or two of the comments made above, I still enjoyed this one. As a straight Doc-as spy/adventurer, rather than a Doc-as-superman, it was pretty darned good. An interesting point, though — in the early pages of the story, when Doc was preparing to enter the missile that would fly him to Russia, Dent states that Doc’s build was that of a physical marvel. Now, this tale was originally intended for publication at the end of 1948 after the editorial decision had been made at Street & Smith to revert The Bronze Man back to his former superman-status. Was this Dent perhaps looking ahead to the following tales? Because nowhere in the story does Doc display any physical ability above the norm (the scene where Doc has his finger nearly broken while driving, AND by a woman, is priceless!) I have often wondered what direction the Doc Savage saga would have taken had he continued into the 1950s, and not been cancelled in ’49. Somehow, I don’t think the stories would have quite been the same… I mean, the majority of his opponents would most likely have been Communist madmen with dreams of world domination, at best, and at worst, independent madmen with dreams of world domination, merely pale imitations of the geniuses that had preceded them during Doc’s Glory Years of the ’30s.