Cover Date: March 1936
Volume 7 #1
Copyright Date: Friday, February 21, 1936
Author: Lester Dent
Editor: John Nanovic
Story Length:  42,464 words
WHMC: The collection contains nine folders for this story, f. 351-359
Recurring Characters. The entire Iron Crew are all present in this story.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
“The Metal Master” by Kenneth Robeson
“Judd Hukin’s Knife” by Edwin V. Burkholder
“Traitors Must Die” by Beech Allen
“Gray Gold” by Milton Burns
The Doc Savage Method of Self-Development
Doc Savage Club
-…Without Loss of Courage
-Hunting Grizzlies
-Ghost Airplanes
-New “Forty-Niners”
From Our Members

In the sleety night outside Doc Savage’s 86th-floor headquarters, elderly laboratory assistant Jonathan Seevers meets Nan Tester, the striking red-haired sister of scientist Louis Tester. Seevers is terrified: he has discovered that a mysterious “Metal Master” intends mass murder by means of a device that can melt solid metal without heat. Louis, working in South America, cables confirmation and is already flying north. Moments later, Seevers is seized; his body is later found grotesquely embedded in a cold, once-molten mass of metal that had been an automobile. Nan is left poisoned outside Doc’s door.

Doc revives her with adrenalin and medical skill, then follows ultraviolet-reactive footprints left by the abductors. The trail leads to the discovery that the Metal Master’s weapon liquefies metals by altering their molecular structure, rendering them useless for ordinary purposes yet devastating as a weapon. The trail stretches from New York to Havana and finally to a remote Caribbean island where the gang has established a barge hideout containing the metal-melting apparatus.

Among the criminals is the loud, punning “Punning Parker,” who is in fact Doc’s electrical wizard Long Tom Roberts, operating undercover after Doc ordered him aboard the schooner of smuggler Tops’l Hertz. Long Tom has already sown discord within the gang. When the final confrontation occurs, Doc and his aides—Monk, Ham, and Renny—are trapped inside the sand-covered barge. The Metal Master’s men prepare to collapse the barge by melting its fastenings.

Doc, however, has tricked the gang into bringing a sealed box from New York. Inside it is a glass phial of acid mounted against a sounding board. Doc’s distinctive trilling note, held on a single pitch, shatters the glass; the acid releases a non-lethal but agonizing gas that mimics mustard gas. The gang panics and flees; several are killed by sharks or each other. Tops’l Hertz accidentally shoots the true leader of the organization.

That leader is Louis Tester himself. Seevers had never known the identity of the man he feared; Long Tom discovered the truth from papers in Tester’s plane and destroyed them. Nan Tester is told only that her brother died fighting for his liberty—a merciful half-truth. The metal-liquefying devices, too imperfect for industrial use, are secured so they cannot fall into other criminal hands. The Metal Master’s threat ends.

Gadgets and Gimmicks
– Headquarters alarms: Sensitive system that triggers buzzers and indicator lights if anyone approaches the reception-room door.
– Thermostatic secret panel: Concealed wall lock opened only by the heat of a hand applied in a specific pattern.
– Ultraviolet projector: Compact device that causes a special sticky chemical to fluoresce blue, revealing footprints.
– Chemical tracking mat: Gray sponge-rubber mat outside the elevators coated with a substance that sticks to shoes and glows under ultraviolet light.
– Metal-liquefying device: Alters the molecular structure of metal so it liquefies without heat; the resulting metal is crystalline and too brittle for normal use, but devastating as a weapon. 
– Sealed trick box: Contains a glass phial of acid mounted against a sounding board. Doc’s sustained single-note trilling shatters the glass; the acid opens the case and releases gas.
– Non-lethal “mustard” gas: Developed by Monk; produces intense pain and unconsciousness while imitating the odor and effects of real mustard gas.
– Medical revival gear: Rapid chemical mixtures, hypos, adrenalin, and a mechanical breathing device used to bring Nan Tester back from clinical death.
– Fake radiogram: Used by Doc to trick the gang into transporting the sealed gas box from New York.
– Armor-plate headquarters door: Melted into a cold puddle by the metal-liquefying device.
– Private high-speed elevator and other standard Doc headquarters features.

Chapter 1 introduces a cable operator: “Hardly three minutes later, a stranger walked into the cable office. He was a lean fellow whose clothes looked as if they had been slept in. He wore a rubber apron and a green celluloid eyeshade was over his eyes.”

My personal opinion is that Lester Dent is poking his friend Harold A. Davis with this description.  Davis was known for wearing a green eyeshade.

Harold A. Davis

Dent has the villain shoot the operator’s brains out.  Davis appears to have returned the favor in “Merchants of Disaster” where a character who resembles Lester Dent is stabbed in the heart.

JANUARY 1946
Superman 38 pits Superman against Lex Luthor who has invented a ray that will cause substances to liquefy. This idea previously appeared in “The Metal Master” in March 1936. Luthor has improved on the idea and can set the frequency of his ray to particular substances.  In this instance, all substances are changed, except human flesh!