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Doc Savage (Bantam) #24
The Green Eagle
WHO IS DOC SAVAGE?
To the world at large, Doc Savage is a strange, mysterious figure of glistening bronze skin and golden eyes. To his amazing co-adventurers - the five greatest brains ever assembled in one group - he is a man of superhuman strength and protean genius, whose life is dedicated to the destruction of evil-doers. To his fans he is one of the greatest adventure heroes of all time, whose fantastic exploits are unequalled for hair-raising thrills, breathtaking escapes and bloodcurdling excitement.
DOC SAVAGE OUT WEST!
The Man of Bronze rides 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?
To the world at large, Doc Savage is a strange, mysterious figure of glistening bronze skin and golden eyes. To his amazing co-adventurers - the five greatest brains ever assembled in one group - he is a man of superhuman strength and protean genius, whose life is dedicated to the destruction of evil-doers. To his fans he is one of the greatest adventure heroes of all time, whose fantastic exploits are unequalled for hair-raising thrills, breathtaking escapes and bloodcurdling excitement.
DOC SAVAGE OUT WEST!
The Man of Bronze rides 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?
114 pages, Paperback
Published May 1, 1968
106 people want to read
About the author
Kenneth Robeson
917 books134 followersKenneth Robeson was the house name used by Street and Smith Publications as the author of their popular character Doc Savage and later The Avenger. Though most Doc Savage stories were written by the author Lester Dent, there were many others who contributed to the series, including:
William G. Bogart
Evelyn Coulson
Harold A. Davis
Lawrence Donovan
Alan Hathway
W. Ryerson Johnson
Lester Dent is usually considered to be the creator of Doc Savage. In the 1990s Philip José Farmer wrote a new Doc Savage adventure, but it was published under his own name and not by Robeson. Will Murray has since taken up the pseudonym and continued writing Doc Savage books as Robeson.
All 24 of the original stories featuring The Avenger were written by Paul Ernst, using the Robeson house name. In order to encourage sales Kenneth Robeson was credited on the cover of The Avenger magazine as "the creator of Doc Savage" even though Lester Dent had nothing to do with The Avenger series. In the 1970s, when the series was extended with 12 additional novels, Ron Goulart was hired to become Robeson.
William G. Bogart
Evelyn Coulson
Harold A. Davis
Lawrence Donovan
Alan Hathway
W. Ryerson Johnson
Lester Dent is usually considered to be the creator of Doc Savage. In the 1990s Philip José Farmer wrote a new Doc Savage adventure, but it was published under his own name and not by Robeson. Will Murray has since taken up the pseudonym and continued writing Doc Savage books as Robeson.
All 24 of the original stories featuring The Avenger were written by Paul Ernst, using the Robeson house name. In order to encourage sales Kenneth Robeson was credited on the cover of The Avenger magazine as "the creator of Doc Savage" even though Lester Dent had nothing to do with The Avenger series. In the 1970s, when the series was extended with 12 additional novels, Ron Goulart was hired to become Robeson.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
October 5, 2025
Although published under the author house name of Kenneth Robeson this one is known to have been written by Lester Dent. It stands out form many of the others that I have read in that Doc and his companions don't come of as totally infallible. In this book they make some mistakes which makes the book more readable. Hopefully I can find more attributed to this writer.
September 20, 2024
The general consensus amongst fans is that the best 'Doc Savage' stories were written early in the series by its creator Lester Dent and it gradually went downhill from there, for a bunch of reasons. Some talk about the other writers behind the Kenneth Robeson house name. Some talk about the war and how it shifted the writing into being more realistic. Some talk about the humanisation of Doc, who stopped being an unstoppable superman. Some talk about a late shift from 'Doc Savage' to 'Doc Savage: Science Detective'.
I've been keeping my eyes open for reasons and I can buy into much of this. Certainly, my favourite novels thus far, like 'The Phantom City', 'The Annihilist' and 'The Thousand-Headed Man', arrived between late 1933 and late 1934, while 'The Green Eagle' didn't come out until July 1941. However, there was much that impressed me with this one, enough that I'd call it the best story in a number of years. It's not perfect, partly because I could see through the mystery behind the chief bad guy immediately and partly because the pace is slower than I'd like, but Dent did so many things right here to my way of thinking that I'm now wondering if I'm going to like the later novels more than fans tend to do.
For instance, one reason fans might not like this one is that it takes a long while to introduce Doc and his aides, but that wasn't a problem for me at all. All five of them show up this time out but we're not introduced to any of them until well into the second third of the book, surely the longest wait of the hundred and one novels thus far. Now, I should add that Doc is technically in the story in the first third too, but we don't know that at the time, because Dent does a good job of hiding him.
Usually, when this sort of thing happens, I tend to see through his disguise quickly. Here, I didn't, assuming instead that the persona he adopted to go undercover at the Broken Circle dude ranch somewhere in Wyoming was really a minor villain, even given the clues Dent dropped. I rumbled him a little later during a telling desert scene, so a little way before he's introduced but not by a lot. To me, this was a way for Dent to substantially ground his story before having to dip back into the expected series tropes such as Monk and Ham bickering at each other.
The setup is particularly strong. We stay in Wyoming, except for a brief section back in New York, because something mysterious is going on there. It may not be centered on the Broken Circle but it's certainly centered on the vicinity, where a cowboy, Ben Duck (who hates being called Donald), stumbles on an old-timer, later identified as Pilatus Casey. He's dying and soon dead of starvation and dehydration, even though his pack is full of food and water, setting up one mystery. Another is that he wants Ben to get the other item in his pack to his niece Mira Larsen and it's a puzzle, quite literally. It's a hand-held puzzle with a short verse on it, tasking its handler to manouevre feathers onto a green eagle. Why it's important, nobody knows, but people seem willing to kill for it.
While Ben Duck is the first character we meet and he would usually be the one to solicit help from Doc and his men, in this instance he can't because he's kidnapped by the bad guys. Instead, it's an interesting choice of character who does it on his behalf, because it's a fake Mira Larsen, Johanna Hickman by name, who goes by Hicky. She's a New York actress who's paid to fly out to the Broken Circle, pretend to be Mira Larsen and bring back the puzzle. Neatly, she escapes a mysterious man in the desert and successfully makes her way to Doc's HQ in New York, only to find that Doc is the very same man she escaped!
I like Hicky, who's one of a handful of characters I'd like to have seen return for a future adventure. As far as I'm aware, she doesn't, because nobody does, but we can still wish. Long Tom would very much like to see her return because he notably likes her, enough that Dent has to call out that he doesn't react this way often, not like notorious skirtchasers like Monk and Ham, so when he does, it means something. Unfortunately, he's disappointed at the finalé because she's already fallen instead for Ben Duck.
I also like everyone else this time out, which ought to be a given because most of them are aides, but Dent sharpens them up here. There's some bickering between Monk and Ham of course, but it's done well, even with another in a long line of examples where one temporarily appears to be dead, thus upsetting the other considerably until they realise otherwise and double down on the bickering. Other than that, they're all highly efficient here, as they really ought to be, being the top men in their fields, but so often aren't, stumbling around and setting off traps and the like. Ham is notably efficient here, proactive and self-motivated, which is highly refreshing.
And that extends to a whole slew of other details that elevated this novel for me. There's a bomb planted that's thoroughly realistic. Doc's believably rumbled at one point, prompting him to fall into a trap, through no fault of his own. The bad guys set a lot of capable traps and also find a neat way to avoid being trailed at a crucial moment, namely to cause a stampede and ride inside it. The Green Eagle puzzle is well-hidden and well-found. There's also use of a telephone code, of the type that's been used before for things like telegrams, only to be completely forgotten about in future stories. Here, it's a question about Elmer that has a standard response to confirm that nothing is untoward. Any other response constitutes alarm bells. I wonder how soon Elmer will be forgotten this time.
Perhaps Dent takes this a little too far, given that Doc hurts his hand punching one bad guy and so has to use guns instead, albeit throwing them or clubbing with them rather than firing them. That said, he also punches a villain so hard that his jaw breaks in multiple places, requiring a surgeon of notable skill to reattach the pieces back together in a functional way. I wonder who that surgeon might have been! Well, Dent doesn't tell us, though he does highlight that a bunch of bad guys at various points will be picked up for transportation to Doc's upstate clinic.
There's one other series note to make here that seems oddly out of time. This story originally saw print in July 1941 in 'Doc Savage Magazine' and I'm reading a Bantam paperback edition from May 1968, but both those crucially predate the notoriously camp feature film, 'Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze', which was released in 1975. Fans have many complaints about that movie, but one of the most common is that everything Doc has is branded with his name, even the most secret stuff like the Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. Sure, it's a secret retreat in a location that nobody else on the planet knows, but it's got 'Doc Savage' stamped on it anyway.
Here, Dent counters that complaint thirty-four years before it was needed by explaining that Doc used to paint all his planes "a distinctive bronze color", as his plane in the movie would inevitably be painted, but had discontinued the practice after discovering that it made him too conspicious. Well, duh. Now I may well have not been paying close enough attention over the previous hundred novels, but I don't recall Dent or anyone else ever saying that he was painting his planes bronze. I guess this was a way to underline that he did but it was stupid and he's never doing it again. Until 1975, of course.
Oh, and there are a couple of new uses of slang that I hadn't seen before. The first is "mazuma", a word that clearly means money from the context—"Heck, no. They wanted what mazuma me and Henry had, was all!" It turns out that it derives from a Yiddish word, "mazume" or "mezumen", in turn from the Mishnaic Hebrew. That's telling because, early on the very same page, a watch gets attention because it "cost a lot of shekels". I looked up "dornick" too, which means a boulder, but I must have mentioned that before, given that the Wikipedia page on the word handily references the second Doc Savage adventure, 'The Land of Terror', where Dent used it long before here.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in June 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
I've been keeping my eyes open for reasons and I can buy into much of this. Certainly, my favourite novels thus far, like 'The Phantom City', 'The Annihilist' and 'The Thousand-Headed Man', arrived between late 1933 and late 1934, while 'The Green Eagle' didn't come out until July 1941. However, there was much that impressed me with this one, enough that I'd call it the best story in a number of years. It's not perfect, partly because I could see through the mystery behind the chief bad guy immediately and partly because the pace is slower than I'd like, but Dent did so many things right here to my way of thinking that I'm now wondering if I'm going to like the later novels more than fans tend to do.
For instance, one reason fans might not like this one is that it takes a long while to introduce Doc and his aides, but that wasn't a problem for me at all. All five of them show up this time out but we're not introduced to any of them until well into the second third of the book, surely the longest wait of the hundred and one novels thus far. Now, I should add that Doc is technically in the story in the first third too, but we don't know that at the time, because Dent does a good job of hiding him.
Usually, when this sort of thing happens, I tend to see through his disguise quickly. Here, I didn't, assuming instead that the persona he adopted to go undercover at the Broken Circle dude ranch somewhere in Wyoming was really a minor villain, even given the clues Dent dropped. I rumbled him a little later during a telling desert scene, so a little way before he's introduced but not by a lot. To me, this was a way for Dent to substantially ground his story before having to dip back into the expected series tropes such as Monk and Ham bickering at each other.
The setup is particularly strong. We stay in Wyoming, except for a brief section back in New York, because something mysterious is going on there. It may not be centered on the Broken Circle but it's certainly centered on the vicinity, where a cowboy, Ben Duck (who hates being called Donald), stumbles on an old-timer, later identified as Pilatus Casey. He's dying and soon dead of starvation and dehydration, even though his pack is full of food and water, setting up one mystery. Another is that he wants Ben to get the other item in his pack to his niece Mira Larsen and it's a puzzle, quite literally. It's a hand-held puzzle with a short verse on it, tasking its handler to manouevre feathers onto a green eagle. Why it's important, nobody knows, but people seem willing to kill for it.
While Ben Duck is the first character we meet and he would usually be the one to solicit help from Doc and his men, in this instance he can't because he's kidnapped by the bad guys. Instead, it's an interesting choice of character who does it on his behalf, because it's a fake Mira Larsen, Johanna Hickman by name, who goes by Hicky. She's a New York actress who's paid to fly out to the Broken Circle, pretend to be Mira Larsen and bring back the puzzle. Neatly, she escapes a mysterious man in the desert and successfully makes her way to Doc's HQ in New York, only to find that Doc is the very same man she escaped!
I like Hicky, who's one of a handful of characters I'd like to have seen return for a future adventure. As far as I'm aware, she doesn't, because nobody does, but we can still wish. Long Tom would very much like to see her return because he notably likes her, enough that Dent has to call out that he doesn't react this way often, not like notorious skirtchasers like Monk and Ham, so when he does, it means something. Unfortunately, he's disappointed at the finalé because she's already fallen instead for Ben Duck.
I also like everyone else this time out, which ought to be a given because most of them are aides, but Dent sharpens them up here. There's some bickering between Monk and Ham of course, but it's done well, even with another in a long line of examples where one temporarily appears to be dead, thus upsetting the other considerably until they realise otherwise and double down on the bickering. Other than that, they're all highly efficient here, as they really ought to be, being the top men in their fields, but so often aren't, stumbling around and setting off traps and the like. Ham is notably efficient here, proactive and self-motivated, which is highly refreshing.
And that extends to a whole slew of other details that elevated this novel for me. There's a bomb planted that's thoroughly realistic. Doc's believably rumbled at one point, prompting him to fall into a trap, through no fault of his own. The bad guys set a lot of capable traps and also find a neat way to avoid being trailed at a crucial moment, namely to cause a stampede and ride inside it. The Green Eagle puzzle is well-hidden and well-found. There's also use of a telephone code, of the type that's been used before for things like telegrams, only to be completely forgotten about in future stories. Here, it's a question about Elmer that has a standard response to confirm that nothing is untoward. Any other response constitutes alarm bells. I wonder how soon Elmer will be forgotten this time.
Perhaps Dent takes this a little too far, given that Doc hurts his hand punching one bad guy and so has to use guns instead, albeit throwing them or clubbing with them rather than firing them. That said, he also punches a villain so hard that his jaw breaks in multiple places, requiring a surgeon of notable skill to reattach the pieces back together in a functional way. I wonder who that surgeon might have been! Well, Dent doesn't tell us, though he does highlight that a bunch of bad guys at various points will be picked up for transportation to Doc's upstate clinic.
There's one other series note to make here that seems oddly out of time. This story originally saw print in July 1941 in 'Doc Savage Magazine' and I'm reading a Bantam paperback edition from May 1968, but both those crucially predate the notoriously camp feature film, 'Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze', which was released in 1975. Fans have many complaints about that movie, but one of the most common is that everything Doc has is branded with his name, even the most secret stuff like the Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. Sure, it's a secret retreat in a location that nobody else on the planet knows, but it's got 'Doc Savage' stamped on it anyway.
Here, Dent counters that complaint thirty-four years before it was needed by explaining that Doc used to paint all his planes "a distinctive bronze color", as his plane in the movie would inevitably be painted, but had discontinued the practice after discovering that it made him too conspicious. Well, duh. Now I may well have not been paying close enough attention over the previous hundred novels, but I don't recall Dent or anyone else ever saying that he was painting his planes bronze. I guess this was a way to underline that he did but it was stupid and he's never doing it again. Until 1975, of course.
Oh, and there are a couple of new uses of slang that I hadn't seen before. The first is "mazuma", a word that clearly means money from the context—"Heck, no. They wanted what mazuma me and Henry had, was all!" It turns out that it derives from a Yiddish word, "mazume" or "mezumen", in turn from the Mishnaic Hebrew. That's telling because, early on the very same page, a watch gets attention because it "cost a lot of shekels". I looked up "dornick" too, which means a boulder, but I must have mentioned that before, given that the Wikipedia page on the word handily references the second Doc Savage adventure, 'The Land of Terror', where Dent used it long before here.
Originally posted at the Nameless Zine in June 2024:
https://www.thenamelesszine.org/Voice...
Index of all my Nameless Zine reviews:
https://books.apocalypselaterempire.com/
June 26, 2023
It's been perhaps three decades since I've read an original Doc Savage book, but I picked up a bagful of them with the James Bama cover art to help round out my collection. I was wondering how they would hold up to a reading with slightly more jaded eyes.
Robeson's style is terse and straightforward unlike fellow pulp luminary Robert E Howard's prose which tended toward the poetic and descriptive. I most fondly recalled the Doc Savage stories that dealt with super-science and pseudo-mystical enemies, but the criminals in this book are fairly mundane, and there is little in the way of the incredible.
The green eagle which Bama so ably depicts on the cover is nothing but a game that somehow depicts a map when assembled correctly and the riddle is solved. I've still got a stack of these to read and I'm hoping the others capture my imagination a little more readily than this one.
Robeson's style is terse and straightforward unlike fellow pulp luminary Robert E Howard's prose which tended toward the poetic and descriptive. I most fondly recalled the Doc Savage stories that dealt with super-science and pseudo-mystical enemies, but the criminals in this book are fairly mundane, and there is little in the way of the incredible.
The green eagle which Bama so ably depicts on the cover is nothing but a game that somehow depicts a map when assembled correctly and the riddle is solved. I've still got a stack of these to read and I'm hoping the others capture my imagination a little more readily than this one.
June 24, 2025
From Wyoming to New York City then back to Wyoming, this is the trail of the story. What a yarn. A western adventure for Doc and his men. The whole gang is along except not as much interactions with Doc’s crew. It’s more like a formality to give mention to Doc’s five cohorts. Monk and Ham barely have a disagreements nor do either of them fall for the girl in this book. Long Tom falls for the dame this time. Unrequited love, poor Long Tom. He never falls for the girl. This is his first during a Doc Savage caper. I’m really impressed. The writing seems to get better as the Doc Savage adventures come along. Now well over one hundred stories written and published. The core of the book, that is. As mentioned previously, the interactions between Doc’s men are more sparse.
This book was written by Lester Dent and published July, 1941.
This book was written by Lester Dent and published July, 1941.
August 5, 2017
A drab, dull Doc adventure. Not the first time Lester Dent wrote the series as a pulp adventure that just happens to star Doc, nor the first time Doc and Co. aren't visible for the opening chapters, but this is the weakest of them. A cowboy comes into possession of a children's puzzle that's actually a valuable McGuffin. Trouble follows.
March 7, 2021
I wasn't expecting this to be one of the better Doc Savage titles because I thought the title was kind of lame. But I was pleasantly surprised. This one takes Doc and his helpers out west to solve the mystery of a mysterious death and a small puzzle the man had been carrying before he died. A good mystery/adventure story.
September 22, 2023
I really liked the first 40 pages set in Wyoming, but the book goes off the rails when the action moves to New York and does not right itself when the action goes back to Wyoming. The cover painting is a great big lie.
June 21, 2017
Not a bad Doc Savage tale. It sort of reminded me of an old Bill Bixby Hulk episode in parts, but with Savage instead of Banner.
December 25, 2018
Interesting plot that had me guessing all the way to the end.
September 25, 2016
The first Doc Savage story appeared in 1933 and the series ran in pulp and later digest format into 1949. Bantam reprinted the entire series in paperback with wonderful, iconic covers starting in the 1960's. Doc was arguably the first great modern superhero with a rich background, continuity, and mythos. The characterizations were far richer than was common for the pulps; his five associates and their sometimes-auxiliary, Doc's cousin Pat, and the pets Chemistry and Habeas Corpus, all had very distinctive characteristics and their byplay was frequently more entertaining that the current adventure-of-the-month. The settings were also fascinating: Doc's Fortress of Solitude, the Hidalgo Trading Company (which served as a front for his armada of vehicles), and especially the mysterious 86th floor headquarters all became familiar haunts to the reader, and the far-flung adventures took the intrepid band to exotic and richly-described locations all over the world. The adventures were always fast-paced and exciting, from the early apocalyptic world-saving extravaganzas of the early days to the latter scientific-detective style shorter works of the post-World War Two years. There were always a few points that it was difficult to believe along the way, but there were always more ups than downs, and there was never, ever a dull moment. The Doc Savage books have always been my favorite entertainments... I was always, as Johnny would say, superamalgamated!
April 28, 2023
Another OK adventure for Doc. This is like Gunsmoke meets Doc Savage. Lots of people pretending to be other people and cowboys. I will tell you that I've never read a more detailed case study on the subject of Donald Duck in my entire life.
This adventure did give us some fine lines, such as:
'An intense inward rage really led Ben Duck to go riding.' (was he inwardly raging became he had a dumb name?)
"I know women. That's why. That woman is a deceitful hussy." (Woah, saucer of milk, table 2, meow!)
"I am going to give you an order in English," the bronze man was saying. "Ignore it. Pretend to follow the order, but actually ignore it." (OK, so ignore the order that you pretend to give that I'm supposed to ignore in English.. Er.. What?)
"It ain't guns we need. It's foxiness." (So we need foxy guns, got it!)
Because you (no one) demanded it, this adventures Superamalgamated count was zero again, but this books Holy cow count came out to 7.
Oh well, on to the next one..
This adventure did give us some fine lines, such as:
'An intense inward rage really led Ben Duck to go riding.' (was he inwardly raging became he had a dumb name?)
"I know women. That's why. That woman is a deceitful hussy." (Woah, saucer of milk, table 2, meow!)
"I am going to give you an order in English," the bronze man was saying. "Ignore it. Pretend to follow the order, but actually ignore it." (OK, so ignore the order that you pretend to give that I'm supposed to ignore in English.. Er.. What?)
"It ain't guns we need. It's foxiness." (So we need foxy guns, got it!)
Because you (no one) demanded it, this adventures Superamalgamated count was zero again, but this books Holy cow count came out to 7.
Oh well, on to the next one..
September 18, 2011
This is one of my favorite Doc Savage novels so far! Without giving too much away, this is simply pulp action in the Old West. There's a standard pulp mystery, some science fiction elements, and Doc and his aides all acting up like normal. I'm currently reading the entire series, off-and-on, in order, and I have to say that The Green Eagle is one of the most enjoyable pulp adventures of the series.
February 10, 2016
Of all the pulp era heroes few stand out above the crowd, Doc Savage is one of these. With his 5 aides and cousin he adventures across the world. Fighting weird menaces, master criminals and evil scientists Doc and the Fab 5 never let you down for a great read. These stories have all you need; fast paced action, weird mystery, and some humor as the aides spat with each other. My highest recommendation.
August 4, 2015
An okay Doc Savage tale. It's a bit different in that Doc and the guys don't show up until about halfway (kinda.) Not horrible, but there are better Doc Savage books out there.
Read
January 9, 2016Good old rough and tumble Doc adventure. Out West this time. I was with him and the guys!
January 18, 2017
probably read in spring 1968
June 21, 2012
One of the weakest entries in the series. Rambling story with little intrigued and a lame-o reveal.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews