Lester Dent

• Born: October 12, 1904
• Birthplace: La Plata, Missouri
• Died: March 11, 1959
• Place of death: La Plata, Missouri

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; hard-boiled; private investigator; thriller

Principal Series: Doc Savage series, 1935-1984; Chance Malloy series, 1946

Contribution

Writing under the publisher-imposed pseudonym Kenneth Robeson, Lester Dent created the Doc Savage character, who, along with the Shadow, became one of the most popular heroes of pulp magazines during the 1930’s and 1940’s. He also wrote seven novels and numerous short stories featuring a variety of detectives. His crime fiction is widely regarded as epitomizing the best of the Black Mask school of writers, although he published only two tales, “Sail” and “Angelfish,” in that magazine. Over time, however, his work on the Doc Savage material, for which he was paid handsomely, seems to have dulled his talent.

Biography

Lester Dent was born in La Plata, Missouri, on October 12, 1904, to Bernard Dent, a farmer and rancher, and Alice Norfolk Dent, a former schoolteacher. In the final stages of her pregnancy, Alice Dent stayed in La Plata with her parents, although she and her husband had been living in Wyoming, where they ran a ranch near Pumpkin Buttes. Lester and his mother returned to Wyoming, and he attended a country grade school until the eighth grade, when, the ranching endeavor having failed, the family returned to La Plata, where the elder Dent began a dairy farm.

An only child, Lester Dent spent much of his early years in Wyoming without playmates, and his return to the little town in northeastern Missouri did not change this situation significantly. He attended Chillicothe Business College in Chillicothe, Missouri, in 1923, intent on banking as a career, but he changed his mind when he discovered that telegraphers made more money. He taught at the college for one semester, and in the fall of 1924, he took a job as a telegrapher for Western Union in Carrollton, Missouri. In mid-1925, Dent moved to Ponca City, Oklahoma, to work as a telegrapher for the Empire Oil and Gas Company. On August 9 of that year, he married Norma Gerling, and in 1926 he and his wife moved to Chickasha, Oklahoma, where he worked first as a telegrapher for the Associated Press (AP) and later as a teletype operator. When one of his coworkers for the AP in Tulsa, Oklahoma, sold a story to a magazine for a large sum of money, Dent decided to try his hand at writing. Because he worked the night shift, he had time on his hands and was soon able to sell novels and stories to several pulp magazines. By 1929, his name had become sufficiently well recognized that Dell Publishing in New York offered him five hundred dollars a month to work as a house writer. Taking a leave of absence from AP, he and his wife moved to New York City in January, 1931.

Dent had limitless reserves of energy and was soon writing on contract for Dell as well as selling stories to various pulp magazines. He read widely and his interests were boundless: He earned a radio operator’s license; he passed electrician’s and plumber’s examinations; he got a pilot’s license; he climbed mountains; he studied aerial photography; he learned to sail, bought his own boat, and spent two years cruising with his wife; he became an expert deep-sea fisherman and swimmer; and he plied the waters of the Caribbean hunting for treasure.

The extraordinary success of the Doc Savage series enabled Dent to retire to a dairy farm in La Plata in 1940. From this base he continued to write, although his production (which at times in the 1930’s approached 140,000 words a month) slowed considerably. It was during this period that Dent produced several well-received mystery and detective novels, four of which were published by the Doubleday Crime Club. A severe heart attack in February, 1959, confined Dent to a hospital. He failed to recover and died on March 11 of that year.

Analysis

Late in his career, Lester Dent lamented the departure from Black Mask of Joseph T. Shaw, who gave up the editorship in 1936:

In my thirty-five years of free lancing fiction, no one stands out so. . . . Here was an editor who thought his writers were truly great . . . and an editor who didn’t pretend his writers were crud-factories was unbelievable. . . . I have never met another like him.

Dent claimed that Shaw had put the magazine many cuts above other pulps for which he himself had written “reams of salable crap.” Over the years of his writing career, Dent produced a tremendous amount of material, publishing stories in a wide variety of periodicals. He also wrote an incredible number of novels (275 by one estimate), and he gained a loyal—if small—following for his mystery and detective fiction. Though he published only two stories in Black Mask, commentators on the genre point to his work as representative of the detective fiction the magazine published.

Dent created several fictional detectives, many of whom were patterned after Craig Kennedy, Arthur B. Reeve’s university professor and scientist. Kennedy solved many crimes using scientific devices such as gyroscopes, seismographs, and lie detectors. Dent gave his pulp audiences figures such as Click Rush, otherwise known as the Gadget Man, who unraveled mysteries and brought criminals to justice using devices he invented. The reliance on science and technology to combat evil came easily to Dent, the creator of Dr. Clark “Doc” Savage, who with his five lieutenants roamed the world in search of adventure. (Adventure tales are classified as science fiction by some, and although the Doc Savage novels of the late 1940’s do involve some elements of the mystery story, they still belong in the fantastic fiction category.)

Oscar Sail, however, was a Dent creation who had much more in common with Race Williams and the Continental Op than he had with the Gadget Man. Dent used the character in his two stories published in Black Mask. An extraordinarily tall man, Sail wears black clothing, smokes a black pipe full of black tobacco, and owns a boat named Sail, which has a black hull and black sails. Sail is a private investigator who is not too choosy about clients as long as they have the money to pay him. Like many of his Black Mask forebears, he relies principally on the use of force to achieve his ends.

“Angelfish”

Dent tended to rely on relatively simple plots, many of them built around variations on the treasure-hunt theme. In “Angelfish,” for example, Sail is hired by a young female geologist who has aerial photographs in her possession that indicate the possibility of an oil deposit. Competitors, who are trying to obtain the photographs, pursue her and attempt to steal the pictures to turn a quick profit. Shootings (faked and real), fights between Sail and the villains, and a wild sea chase in an approaching hurricane punctuate the story. What separated some of Dent’s detective fiction from that of his pulp contemporaries, however, was his ability to arouse his reader’s attention through carefully organized and precisely worded descriptions:

She was a long, blue-eyed girl who lay squarely on her back with the sun shining in her mouth. Her teeth were small and her tongue was flat, not pointed, and there was about two whiskey glassfuls of scarlet liquid in her mouth.

As she turned her head slowly to the side, the scarlet emptied out on the black asphalt walk, splashing her tan columnar neck and the shoulder of her white frock.

Sail stood beside her and kept looking at the gun in his hand. It was a long, black gun.

Opening a story with such a carefully crafted passage reveals to the reader a writer interested in creating mood and tension. Dent was also capable of giving his audience bright, fresh metaphors and similes, such as: “Pain gave Sail’s mouth the shape a rubber band takes when it lies loose on a desk.”

Dead at the Take-Off

In the 1940’s, Dent began to write mystery and detective novels, the first of which, Dead at the Take-Off (1946), introduced a character named Chance Malloy, who owned a small, nearly bankrupt airline. Believing his financial plight to have been caused by a crooked politician, Malloy begins a search for evidence to prove that he is right. A drugged woman, attempts on Malloy’s life, and confrontations on board an airplane figure in the action of the novel. The Malloy character is fairly well realized, and when Dent published Lady to Kill, featuring Malloy, in 1946, readers had every reason to believe that a series character had been born. Inexplicably, however, Dent never used him again.

The writing in Dead at the Take-Off has some of the same sharpness of image and vitality of metaphor that characterized Dent’s work for Black Mask; on balance, however, the novel never rises much above the level of melodrama. Dent did, however, display in Dead at the Take-Off and elsewhere in his detective fiction some talent for characterization, but all too often he relied on stereotypes and conventional plot devices to advance the narrative. Though he produced other mystery and detective novels, his work in this genre was probably never better than in Dead at the Take-Off.

Women

An important characteristic of Dent’s crime fiction—and one that he shares with many other writers in the genre—is that women are often the causative agents of the problem around which the story or novel is built. Titles such as Lady to Kill, Lady Afraid (1948), Lady So Silent (1951), and Lady in Peril (1959) reflect Dent’s use of the femme fatale device. As early as “Angelfish,” for example, Dent used a female geologist to get Sail ensnared in a ruse that almost costs both of them their lives. In Lady in Peril, Mitchell Loneman, another ordinary citizen turned detective, gets involved in a complex of problems in an attempt to shield his wife from trouble. Again and again, Dent gives the reader pictures of women—some strong, some weak—whose machinations lead to violence. In novel after novel, Dent creates protagonists enmeshed in intrigue and life-threatening situations because of the actions of a woman. This focus in his mystery and detective fiction led Dent to become increasingly concerned with the psychology of his characters and with the complex motives that drive them. He was never completely able to distance himself, however, from the pulp-magazine formula with which he was so familiar. In novels such as Dead at the Take-Off and Cry at Dusk (1952), however, he almost succeeded in achieving the promise that informs his Black Mask stories of the 1930’s.

Principal Series Character:

• Dr. Clark “Doc” Savage , a strong, muscular man with superior intellect, has been scientifically trained since birth to fight crime. He is a master of disguise and has a photographic memory. He uses the wealth provided by gold from a Mayan mine to fill a hanger on the Hudson River with a fleet of boats, planes, and cars. He lives on the top floor of a skyscraper in New York City and has a hideout in the Arctic.

Bibliography

Cannaday, Marilyn. Bigger than Life: The Creator of Doc Savage. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990. Scholarly study of Dent’s life and his most famous creation, geared toward the nonscholarly reader.

Farmer, Philip Jose. Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. Rev. ed. New York: Bantam, 1975. Lengthy treatise on Doc Savage that includes a biography of Dent and a bibliography of all Doc Savage’s adventures.

Goulart, Ron. Cheap Thrills: An Informal History of the Pulp Magazines. New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1972. The chapter “Doc Savage and His Circle” discusses the importance of Doc Savage to the success and evolution of pulp fiction.

Haining, Peter. The Classic Era of American Pulp Magazines. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2000. Looks at Dent’s contribution to the pulps and the relationship of pulp fiction to its more respectable literary cousins.

Hutchison, Don. The Great Pulp Heroes. Buffalo, N.Y.: Mosaic Press, 1996. Doc Savage is compared with his equally famous codenizens of the pulps: the Shadow, Tarzan, Zorro, and so on.

McCarey-Laird, M. Martin. Lester Dent: The Man, His Craft, and His Market. West Des Moines, Iowa: Hidalgo, 1994. Biography that looks at the life and works of this man, focusing on his writing.

Widen, Larry, and Chris Miracle. Doc Savage, Arch Enemy of Evil: A Pictoral Reference to the Man of Bronze. Milwaukee, Wis.: Fantasticon Press, 1993. A bibliography of Doc Savage works.