Cover Date: May 1938
Volume 11 #3
Copyright Date: Friday, April 15, 1938
Author: Lester Dent and Ryerson Johnson
Editor: John Nanovic
Story Length: 38,921 words
WHMC: The collection contains eight folders for this story, f. 491-498
Recurring Characters. Monk, Ham, and Long Tom are present. Patrica Savage is also a prominent character in the story.  Renny is in South Africa on a job and Johnny is in the South Seas on an out-of-the-way island doing research.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
“The Motion Menace” by Kenneth Robeson
“Deep-Sea Danger” by Alan Hathway
“Enemy on the Wheels” by Laurence Donovan
“Murder in his Heart” by Norman Daniels
Doc Savage Club
-A Pat on the Back
-Explosive Air Blankets
-Unusual Phenomenon
-On the Beach
-For Sand Hogs
-Strange Cargoes
Doc Savage Award
Free Doc Savage Picture

A luxury clipper identical to one of Doc Savage’s own planes is brought to a sudden, impossible stop in mid-air and crashes into a Chinese bay. Pat Savage, traveling in the Orient under an assumed name, narrowly escapes the same fate and telephones Doc with her suspicions. She is immediately seized by a group of white-bearded men who take her to a hidden canyon fortress in the mountains.

The captors are an organization of former Russian aristocrats led by a man known only as “His Highness.” Their weapon is a device invented by the Swedish-American scientist Captain Cutting Wizer: an electromagnetic field that multiplies the inertia of matter. Inside the field, all motion ceases—airplanes halt, bullets stop, sound dies. The group intends to sell the machines to warring governments, then use them to seize the Soviet Union and loot other nations.

Doc and his aides locate the canyon. In the final confrontation they discover that the portable inertia generators have been disabled by the removal of key vacuum tubes. Using one of his own atomic guns, Doc blasts open the stronghold, scatters the defenders, and forces the surrender of most of the gang. The two leaders, Ky Halloc and Viscount Herschel Penroff, flee into a tunnel and are killed by a bear that had been kept as a pet. Captain Wizer, realizing the danger of his invention, agrees that the inertia devices should be locked away among the world’s most terrible secrets.

A classic Doc Savage tale of a new physical force that can freeze the world, and a race to keep it from the hands of those who would use it for conquest.

Pat Savage’s alias, Enola Emmel, is “lemme alone” turned around. Doc himself points this out in the novel: “Took the words ‘lemme alone’ and turned them around. Not especially good.”

Captain Cutting Wizer has an unusual name. The intent, if any, by the writer is unclear. Wizer may be a play on wiser. Wizzer is also a wrestling term also known as an overhook. In “The Man of Bronze,” Monk is tricked into coming back upstairs and complains someone pulled a whizzer on him. During the 1930s, “cutting a whzzer” referred to a pickpocket thief fleeing the scene of his crime.

The story takes a few liberties with the Trans-Pacific clipper routes. The China route ended at Hong Kong, not Shanghai. The route was covered by the China Clipper not the China Rocket.The China Clipper was Sikorsky S-42 flying boat. The story mentions that the China clipper that was destroyed is identical to the plane Pat Savage was using and belongs to Doc Savage. The plane had four engines and a range of 1,200 miles. Its maximum speed was 182 mph.

The Munchen is something of a swan song for the rigid airships – zeppelins and dirigibles.  This story was submitted to Street & Smith in 1936 but was not published until 28 months later in 1938. The destruction of the Hindenburg in 1937 killed the rigid airship. 

A repeat of this type device again appears in “The Spook of Grandpa Eben” (December 1943).