Just finished this late Doc book...I was surprised how GOOD it was,
for a late story anyway.
Dent really does a good job with local color in this book, showing us
scenes of Florida, then really getting some pleasure in telling us
about the different parts of a sailboat. It's obvious Dent was a
sailor, and the 'rhetoric of detail' really puts this story in almost
a class by itself--without the obvious Doc part of the story, this
could have easily been well received story in a mid-brow adventure
short story anthology. For once, it actually gets better (the story)
after the tease of the first chapter.
I think Dent had a great gift for short-handing character detail--in
this story we have two or three characters that come alive, such as
Clark, and Lucky. Seems strange he was able to do this so well, and so
rarely did he use characters from one book to the other. Wonder if
this was an order from above?
And Ham and Monk really seemed to work well in this story. Monk even
has some extended scenes involving a question of chemistry reactions--
this happens so little in most of the other stories, it almost seems
strange to read that Monk really IS a chemist.
So the ending poops out a little, but it hardly seems to matter,
because Dent seems to be enjoying writing this story, not what you can
say for a lot of his later work.
I wonder if this was written on a Florida holiday? That would be my
guess.
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