Doc Savage teams up with Gabby Hayes (what?)
From July 1946, this short thriller was written by William G Bogart, with Lester Dent evidently doing some revision and polishing. It was reprinted in Omnibus 6, with three other Bogart novels featuring Doc.
For a murder mystery that packs many of the classic ingredients into its 70 pages, FIRE AND ICE reads as sort of bland, matter of fact and uninvolving. There is a little twist in that the action starts in an exotic locale and heads back to Manhattan for the finale, instead of the usual reverse. As a story, the explanation and resolution at the end seemed very rushed to me, with not enough clues and hints given earlier. It felt as if the ending to a different case had wandered onto the final pages. (And what's with the title? I imagine the 'ice' refers to the Alaskan setting but the story takes place in mild summer weather. That old Pat Benatar song kept inappropriately getting in my head while reading this.)
This was during the period when Doc seems to have taken a short retirement from the adventure business. We first see him flying his plane over the new Alaskan highway, making plans for his airline company's tourism service. After the wild 1930s and World War II, Doc seems tired of it all. He is concentrating on his business enterprises and charitable foundations, improving society and working to make life better in a general way.
Of course, he happens to see a plane in trouble, going down for a forced landing in the wilderness and when he rescues the pilot (a heroine named Patience), he finds that her plane has signs of sabotage. And once again, he heads into a mystery.
On a basic level, this is still the bronze hero we have read about for so long. He has his headquarters on the 86th floor back in NYC, he still has five aides involved in his cases, and he is very much used to getting shot at and chasing gunman in the dark. As he strips to shave and take a shower, his friend Yukon's "eyes popped as he saw the tremendous muscular physique of the bronze man."
The problem is that Doc never gets to show what he's capable of. He quietly investigates the mystery around the woman called Patience and he does it competently enough....but it's nothing James Bond or Michael Shayne couldn't have accomplished just as well. There's no startling physical feat or flash of deductive genius in the whole case. When someone shoots in the window of his hotel room, Doc crawls across the room, gets a gun out of his travelling bag and snaps off two shots that scare the man away. It's an ordinary .45 that Doc sticks inside his shirt. Come on, Doc, what are you trying to pull?
At a critical moment toward the end, our hero does crash a gangster hideout with a combination of smoke bombs and his anesthetic gas, which works as well as it always has. Monk and Ham participate in the second half. Their dialogue doesn't sound quite right somehow, but aside from that, they're their usual selves.
A secondary character called Yukon acts as Doc's sidekick for most of the story. His 'voting name' is Timothy Michael Kelly. Yukon is a hardbitten, wiry little old man who spends his time in a saloon or driving a broken-down taxi. Doc had met him by chance when the character was stranded in NYC, gave him enough money to get home, and now trusts him instinctively. He's comic relief, someone for the hero to explain developments to, and a convenient assisstant in driving cars and taking messages.
I pictured Yukon as looking like Gabby Hayes from the old B Westerns...an impudent coot with a good heart. To tell you the truth, it sure seemed like Bogart intended him to be a new sidekick for Doc in the toned-down post war stories. Did he appear in any other stories?