(One of the few times Bama decided the original was perfect as it stands and just did his own version)
DATELINE – NEW YORK CITY/…PROSPER CITY, NEW JERSEY? – In an insalubrious roadside diner, Alice Cash, her brother Jim, and the woman they call Aunt Nora huddle over their sandwiches, watching the thick, oily raindrops fall.
(No, you can’t convince me I’m wrong)
A few terse words pass between the three, words of terror and haunting “back home.” Suddenly, a bell tolls on the radio, a bell that strikes the trio utterly still with fear. And yet, they are far from Prosper City, the bell could not be tolling for one of them…could it? Nevertheless, they pile into their jalopy, which Jim assures the ladies is full of gas. As they take off for New York City, a sinister berobbed figure, all black except for the green bell emblazoned on his chest, emerges with a recently used hose and a newly-filled ten gallon tank of gas…
The jalopy breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and as Jim sets out, the women arm themselves with a pair of blue-steel revolvers. And well they should, more hooded figures of the Green Bell emerge from the woods, murdering Jim on the electrified third rail of a nearby track.
In New York, a serpentine man name of Slick Cooly meets a rotund, multi-chinned industrialist with the improbable name of Judborn Tugg. They exchange the standard Doc Savage exposition, as well as some more: they’re in league with the hooded figures who killed Jim Cash and threaten Alice and Aunt Nora, they work for a mysterious figure called the Green Bell, and they are plotting to overthrow him to secure his organization for themselves. And to do this, they are approaching Doc Savage first. No sooner said than done, Tugg solicits Doc on the eighty-sixth floor as Slick guards the lobby should the girls appear. His attempt to frame them are foiled by Monk (always out to help a lady in need), and he escorts them upstairs as Tugg departs, disappointed in Doc’s uprightness. Monk takes Slick’s money roll and donates it to the Unemployed Fund. The other four trickle in as Aunt Nora explains the situation:
A year ago, Prosper City was a thriving cotton mill town in New Jersey, but after Judborn Tugg switched his biggest mill in town to poverty wages, everyone else followed, under the sinister influence of a man calling himself the Green Bell. Outside agitators, led by Slick Cooly, pushed the workers to strike, with robed figures assaulting and killing workers that tried to scab, or, worse, driving them to gibbering madness! Yet the two are thick as thieves, and Chief Clements is none the wiser. Aunt Nora’s Benevolent Society has tried to help as she can but she’s exhausted her savings, so she, the Cash siblings, and a playwright living in her boarding house, Ole Slater, are out of options. Someone needs to take out the Green Bell and restore harmony between the bosses and the workers. But no sooner does Aunt Nora finish her grim tale when two men enter the office: Ole Slater, who’d followed out of his puppy-dog love of Alice Cash, and Ham, who brings dire news – Doc Savage stands accused of the murder of Jim Cash!
Leaving Ham behind to do actual lawyer stuff for once, Doc and the rest make a quick exit to Prosper City. Doc sneaks past Chief Clements to Aunt Nora’s boarding house, where he hands Aunt Nora a fistful of dollars to provide food for the hungry and store credit to the most generous grocers and tells her to organize an event in the abandoned circus tent just outside of town. One falls to his knees and weeps. The “skinflint merchants” get nothing. He sends Renny to make a big fat deposit in the local bank, saving it from insolvency. Despite Slick’s agitators and Chief Clements’ detectives (both real and just-sworn-in-from-the-bad-part-of-town), the event goes on and everyone in Prosper City shows up for the free food.
Well, almost everyone. The Green Bell summons his men, reveals he knows Doc is at Aunt Nora’s house, verbally castigates Tugg, and dispatches Slick Cooly to drive Doc insane using the strange device by the old barn. Slick tries to perforate the Green Bell after the meeting, but hits only air. A bundle of sticks over a tile drain! But where would it lead? Slick isn’t keen to find out. He plants the device in Doc’s room.
Meanwhile, under the circus tent…
Doc, speaking over the PA, promises he is not “insulting” those who’ve taken clothes, loans, and food with charity – he’ll be expecting it to get repaid. He promises they’ll be drawing pay and able to repay inside of two weeks, and calls up all the industrialists and bosses. However, instead of guillotining them (as we might expect in 2023), Doc offers to buy them out, lock stock and barrel, at fair market value and sell them back at the same prices in a year. His only provision is that the new wages and work-hours must be maintained when they’re bought back. The bank he deposited at is happy to extend all the loans necessary as Doc’s deposit more than covers the minimums. Needless to say, the bosses bite.
Now turning to the workers, he asks for all the ex-servicemen to come onto his payroll as guards, a fighting force against the Green Bell’s berobed minions.
“The family of any man who dies in the line of duty will receive a trust-fund income of two hundred dollars a month for the balance of life.”
Doc savage, being reassuring
The tent event is a rousing success, and Doc’s thought are on the Green Bell’s retribution as he heads back to his room.
He finds the box, and explains to Long Tom that it uses specific sonic waves (which he can detect thanks to his two-hour daily exercise) that deactivate brain centers. Everyone piles in to the room to watch it tick, and Doc got both fingerprints and blacklight video. Blacklight – is there anything it can’t do? They uncover Slick Cooly (of course), and Doc lights out to find him…at Chief Clements’ office!
Ambushing Slick, Doc informs him
“You’re going to die,” He said, neglecting to mention the mortal date.
lester dent, being clever
Doc demands the Green Bell’s identity, but Slick truthfully tells him he doesn’t know. He tries to cut a deal with Doc, but Doc worms out of him that he and Tugg killed Jim Cash…which is all Chief Clements needs to hear. No sooner have Doc and the chief shook hands than a shot rings out! Slick Cooly lay crumpled on the cell floor, having started to gibber in madness, and a stricken deputy stands there with the gun! Sadly, their alliance lasts just long enough to drive to Judborn Tugg’s and for Tugg to pull a holdout heater on the chief. Doc jumps him, and Tugg is out of ammo – but not out of friends! Green Bell minions rush Doc with roscoes flashing, and Doc is forced to retreat as fresh murder accusations fill the night air. He retreats back to Aunt Nora’s to plan, only to find out his room has been bombed. Worse, the bomb had been planted from inside the house, from the garrot of the late, lamented Jim Cash.
Said cold body has just arrived by train, and Doc and Monk join the rest of the town thence. Hiding behind a fat guy, Doc gooses Renny into expositing while threatening the cops (no mean feat!). Doc lights some firecrackers as a distraction and examines the body, finding the hidden message: IN MY FACTORY LOCKER.
Doc makes a hasty escape and crosses the train yard to Collison McAlter’s Little Grand Cotton Mill (he’s one of the good bosses). “The rods lipped flame” as the Green Bell’s men open fire. Doc manages to sneak past as they shoot each other, finding the name plate JIM CASH. Empty! Collison sticks a snubnose in Doc’s back, mistaking him for a hooded Green Bell man. He says he came to the plant in the night and hid from the Green Bell mooks as they took up arms and positions. He speeds Doc back to Aunt Nora’s in his limousine, as bosses do.
From New York, Ham confirms the suspicions of the last few chapters as the rest (Monk, Renny, Ole Slater, Aunt Nora, Alice Cash, Long Tom, Jonny, and various hangers-on, who are reproducing at an alarming rate in this book) arrive. After getting fooled by a clever and frankly hilarious ruse involving an old barrel and fake fire, the Prosper City Police suffer a couple of murders as they search the house for Doc. They don’t find him – but they do find the gun that shot Chief Clements in Monk’s spare suit! Alice manages to slip a message to Doc before her arrest…and his.
They give him the usual strip in Aunt Nora’s basement and cart him over to the station, but are interrupted by the tolling of the green bell! Someone is to die or be driven mad. Doc takes the chance to escape as they cross the Prosper City bridge and heads back for Aunt Nora’s. He watches Tugg get himself kicked out of the house (courtesy the thick boots of Monk and Renny), and follows him to an abandoned barn where “the Green Bell’s pack” is assembling, dressed in their color-reversed Klan robes. Doc instantly discerns the underground pipe gag as he listens in. Tugg reveals a bottle of cyanide near Aunt Nora’s home and the Green Bell tells him to poison her well just as Doc opens a hole in the pipe outside. Collecting cigar butts and a match, he lights a noisesome bundle of tobacco and buries it in the pipe, trusting his well-trained nose to recognize the smell when, and where, it emerged from the pipe. His search is ended, however, by the meeting breaking up and Judborn Tugg himself headed home.
Tugg finds the Green Bell in his home, roscoe in hand, furious that Savage had tailed him and rescinding his orders regarding the cyanide. The mystery man fades into the shadows, leaving Tugg trembling in his huge, empty house.
Doc, back near the barn, pops some holes, sounds some pipes, and makes an unexpected discovery. The pipes that the Green Bell used to communicate with his men ends in an old coal shaft, going down “more than tenscore feet.” He makes his way back to Aunt Nora’s, and nearly springs the Green Bell’s Fallout death-trap, but recovers the bottle and replaces its contents with dirty water. Adjusting the tree-sitting machine gun, Doc heads for the house and summons Johnny with his eerie trilling, explaining himself using sign language through Johnny’s binoculars. Johnny passes a package, and Doc greets Judborn Tugg just as he walks in his front door.
For Doc is dressed in the peculiar dress of the Green Bell himself!
Doc orders Tugg to resume the poison plan, and swiftly escapes despite Tugg’s inept attempts to follow. Tugg’s paranoia starts to get to him, the more when he hits the tripwire on the machine gun and only Doc’s careful adjustments prevent him from getting perforated! This is too much for Judborn Tugg, and he makes for Aunt Nora’s house, offering to clear Doc’s name in exchange for a minute to appeal to the Man of Bronze. Monk calls Doc in, and a shot rings out!
It’s only a distraction, and Tugg is suddenly keen to vacate the premises. Tugg does not disclose the message the Green Bell whispered to him through a crack in the wall: “I will dispose of Doc Savage, but if I fail, I will need you as bait for the trap!”
Doc summons the boys for a meeting, and doles out each man his assigned task: Johnny to acquire geologic maps of all the myriad coal mines, Monk and Renny to protect Aunt Nora, Alice, and the house, and he himself works with Long Tom to triangulate the secret radio transmitter that jams all Prosper City signals to sound out the green bell tolling. They discuss who the Green Bell might be, and though Doc knows, he offers no confirmation without proof, and proof he has not. They also discuss public opinion and which way the police will tumble, for or against Doc. The Green Bell himself emerges to tamper with Long Tom’s car, and finds himself face to face with Doc on the other end of a flashlight. But he makes good an escape as his minions fall before Doc’s honed combat skills.
The police tear off hoods and arrest the minions, with Ole Slater declaring “just bums from around town!”, but they give no chase to Doc. Clearly, the police are tumbling Doc’s way. Long Tom gets a secret message from Doc in the trunk of his car, to play along with the Green Bell’s attempted assassination. He tosses his roadster over Prosper City bridge and into the river after emptying it of all his equipment.
Doc, meanwhile, cooks up a ruse to interrogate the prisoners stashed in Aunt Nora’s parlor, along with like half the town. Monk’s methods (mostly hairy fists) have produced nothing, so Doc looks deep into his eyes. The man can’t reveal who the Green Bell is (of course), but he coughs up Chief Clements’ real killer and the Green Bell’s murder of the hanging cop. Satisfied, Doc pays off the ambulance to run them up to the Crime College in upstate New York. Johnny returns, and Doc distracts by playing up the one shattered piece of the bombed madness-box, loudly announcing that the finger prints will damn the Green Bell! The villain kills the lights and throws the evidence in the fireplace…covering his fingers in “a certain chemical” that will turn his guilty fingers yellow…in like a week or so.
Ham arrives, with good news: “The murder charge against you in New York is all washed up!” He’s desperate for action, and gets none. In, er, a couple of ways. The factories throw open their doors and Renny dives joyously into organizing crews and ordering their miniature army to their garrisons and patrols. Doc spends his time in medicine, studying the madmen, and declares they can all be cured – in time. Alice Cash cottons that Doc is progressively “Prosperizing” his forces, retreating himself and bringing the Fabulous Five behind him out of day-to-day operations, and asks him to stay. He gives her the Spider-Man spiel about his romantic prospects, then does his daily two-hour regimen.
That night at nine is another meeting at Aunt Nora’s – a last meeting.
At eight forty, the Green Bell tolls!
Monk holds down one radio set, as Long Tom triangulates the other – to Aunt Nora’s house! The calls are coming from inside the house! But Doc doesn’t buy it, and lights out with the transmitter after a glance at Johnny’s maps. He finds an abandoned coal mine the black hoods file into, and quietly and quickly follows. In the underground cavern, with
Pillars – coal left standing to support the roof – were a forest before his eyes. In this forest, black-cowled men were clustered.
The Green Bell is present – in person! He orders his men to unmask, and all the good guys are not present, and all the bad guys are. Handy. He outs Tugg as a traitor and exposits: he planned to ruin every owner in town and buy him out for a song! Doc, of course, is unsurprised. The Green Bell further exposits that he is a millionaire from selling stocks since the Depression started. His plan will make him the unthinkable – a possessor of a billion dollars, a billion-aire, if you will. As he offers Tugg the single dollar for which he purchased every stick of Tugg’s property, he slithers a blade into the rotund industrialist’s heart! Expositing yet farther, the Bell explains that his powerful radio transmitter is in a hidden chamber directly under Aunt Nora’s house! Also the room is full of nitroglycerin. He’s got it connected to a seismograph and a smaller portion of nitroglycerin ready to cause just the earthquake needed – on the dot! It will destroy all evidence, and Aunt Nora in the bargain!
Doc quietly unsheathes his transmitter, and transmits the exposition to Monk’s rig up in Aunt Nora’s living room. But the men split early, and Doc is spotted! Some idiot fires a bullet, heedless of the nitroglycerin that the Green Bell literally just explained to them. Doc is thrown into the stone lining the tunnel as the Green Bell, the czar of fear, and every one of his men are consumed in the underground fireball. Emerging bruised and battered, Doc encounters Monk, who explains that everyone got out of the house in time thanks to Doc’s broadcast, and Alice Cash reveals, with the very last line, the true identity of the Green Bell.
AN EERIE TRILLING SOUND – This being a ’33, Doc does not have most of his toys or more exotic superpowers. As a result, he relies a lot more on the tradecraft and woodcraft, which is marginally more grounded. His command of dead drops, secret codes, tracking, tailing, and traps is as impressive here as his toe-torn shrimp-ties would be later in Fear Cay and his full The Shadow befogging of men’s minds would be in The Mental Wizard.
But it’s Doc’s benevolence, and one of the few cases of his employing his money and status as an actual power, that steals the show here. The one-man New Deal cleans up Prosper City the way Dent hoped FDR would clean up the nation. He puts not only the Fabulous Five, but Aunt Nora, Alice Cash, Colliston McAlter, the ex-servicemen, and the poor and destitute of Prosper City to use, each according to their particular talents and dispositions. Almost unique among Doc Savage novels, we see Doc here as an exemplary leader, putting everything in motion and retiring to his own wacky hijinx.
FISTS OF GRISTLE – Renny is the hidden power of today’s adventure. He acts as Doc’s first officer, getting blankets and boots distributed, work-crews and servicemen into place, depositing checks and running shows. Those fists come into play, but Renny really shines as Doc’s open palms.
SUPERAMALGAMATED! – Johnny contributes his unique eyewear to signaling Doc in the dark, and his expertise to acquiring and interpreting the geological maps of the area, identifying the coal mine near Aunt Nora’s house where the Green Bell operated.
“YOU SHYSTER CLOTHES-HORSE!” – Ham gets to be a lawyer today! And it realistically takes a long time to get the four crumbs to crumble and get Doc cleared of murder accusations in New York.
“YOU MISSING LINK!” – Monk is the heavy here, and Doc consciously uses him so. Not only does he guard, rough up, and act as Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair to the army of ex-servicemen deputized into Doc’s service, he unintentionally plays Bad Cop to Doc’s Good Cop. And makes an ass of himself trying to one-up Ole Slater for the affections of Alice Cash (politely oblivious in her pining after Doc’s Apollonian energy).
WIZARD OF THE JUICE – Long Tom is in fine form here. His triangulation of the signal is what leads directly to the climax, and the improvisation of tossing the car in the river is spectacular in a book chock-full of cunning tradecraft. He also Johnny’s bit to give us the amazing curse “Jersey curiosities!”
WHERE DOES HE GET THOSE WONDERFUL TOYS? – Aside from the superfirers and blacklight flashes, Doc has a paucity of wonderful toys here. As noted, he relies mainly on tradecraft and ordinary items (and a few next-Sunday-AD items like the miniaturized radios and the micro-TV in the car). You could plausibly believe a wealthy man of Doc’s status and accomplishments in 1933 could have access to almost all the toys Doc deploys here.
CRIME COLLEGE MATRICULATES – The Green Bell is the textbook example of the stock Doc villain – insinuated secretly in with Doc by chapter 2, controlling his minions from behind a hood, mask, or Wizard of Oz works, unmasked like a Scooby-Doo villain by a smug Doc on the second-to-last page. “And I woulda got away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling gentlemen adventurers!” It’s notable that Republic serials would lift this type of villain wholesale, even as Dent abandoned it as exhausted by the end of the thirties.
Other, savvier readers had the exact perp fingered by about the halfway point, but I myself was left guessing until his final reveal, and had great pleasure in guessing who among Prosper City’s residents might be the Green Bell himself – if indeed there was only one of him!
Aside from the Bell himself, all I can say is that of Slick and Tugg, the wrong one got plugged.
AGED LIKE FINE MILK – Oddly enough, I think it’s Doc’s treatment of the industrialist class of Prosper City. Doc rolls into town like a one-man New Deal, and aside from giving Tugg and the other Green Bell minions justice, he treats the likes of Collison McAlter like misled, frightened fellow adults. Chief Clements, too, is not only capable of human speech but as the authority of Prosper City is well-intentioned, just dim and misled by Tugg and the Green Bell. Any author willing to tackle this kind of story, this kind of setup, in 2023 would have portrayed all of the industrialists as on the Green Bell’s payroll (assuming it wasn’t a conspiracy by the bosses in the first place, and there was no Green Bell). Doc’s (and Dent’s) portrayal of the industrialists as victims of the Green Bell just as much as their workers, and just as eager to get back to work if only they had a little help, definitely dates the work.
And I have no doubt that most of Twitter will demand an apology from Dent and try to SWAT his house for his class copaganda.
BACK MATTER – Why not explore the back matter yourself? Courtesy of The Eighty-Sixth Floor, here’s an organized collection of all the back matter available here on Al Gore’s Internet!
THE VERDICT – This is my favorite Doc Savage book ever. Doc rolls into town like a one-man New Deal, sets up lines of credit for workman and capitalist alike, infuses his own cash into the proceedings and takes over the stunted capital of the town to put everything back in motion. As fun as the Scooby-Doo antics of the Green Bell and his color-negative KKK are to watch, the capitalist tent revival (because what else do you call it?) is the real heart of the book. Just like with The Munitions Master, Dent channeled his own fears and the fears of his country and his times, gave them a face behind the photos in the papers, and sent Doc and the Fabulous Five down there to fix ‘em but good. I feel this is where Doc shines brightest as benevolent force of nature, “lending [his] assistance to all who need it” and getting the town on its feet…by putting things in motion and walking away.
Crime College aside, this is the book where I most admire Doc. And I think there’s a lot to admire here. This is an odd one (no exotic locations, no Wonderful Toys, more digression than would ever appear again) but a good one. I hope you agree with me – even if Czar of Fear doesn’t turn out to be your favorite, too.
Doc Savage at 90
Introduction – The Man of Bronze
Bonus post: The Doc Savage Method of Personal Development
I need to to thank you for this good read!! I certainly enjoyed every little bit of it. I have got you book-marked to check out new things you postÖ