From 1936, a classic era, and the Bantam (#21) has the classic, DOC-
riding-on-top-of-a-locomotive cover.....
This starts out with DOC. No four chapters of bumping around and
proxy heroes, but somebody slipping a secret message into DOC's pocket
as he walks along the street. The action starts right away. The
message contains a phone number andf instructions to call, but when
DOC calls, the place blows up. DOC traces the call, and gathers clues
at the site of the mysterious explosion. You'll be wondering why DOC
didn't find the location of the phone beforehand, but the action gets
complicated, there's a mysterious voice from "Vare" claiming
responsibility, and everybody starts getting captured and put into
various death-traps.
There's more capturing, very short chapters (a total of 25, in 121
Bantam pages), and the prose reads like it has been pretty heavily
edited. And suddenly your on page 50, and you realize that there is
not going to be any sort of rational explanation, and that you just
have another 70 pages of capture/rescue to drag through, because this
is a crummy, Donovan ghosted DOC
Dave
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