Lester Dent’s weird mystery stories

Black Dog Books has recently put out a series of five books in the Lester Dent Library, which are focused collections of pulp stories by Lester Dent written before and during the early time he was writing Doc Savage.

These are a good series of works that show Dent’s versatility. For this posting, I am looking in particular at volume 5, Terror Inc., which is a collection of his “weird mystery” stories. But first, let’s take a look at the overall Lester Dent Library.

The library consists of:

• Dead Men’s Bones (air adventure)
• The Skull Squadron (air war)
• Hell’s Hoofprints (western)
• Fist of Fury (Curt Flagg)
• Terror Inc. (weird mystery)

This includes a good chunk of Dent’s earlier works. Left out are the works still copyrighted by Street & Smith (Doc Savage, Click Rush, Ed Stone, etc), and the gadget heroes reprinted by Altus Press (Lynn Lash, Lee Nace, and Foster Fade) which I covered in a prior posting.

But there are other works by Dent left out, like some of his very earliest works. And certainly his post-Doc mainstream novels are missing.

Terror Inc. collects six weird mystery detective stories that all appeared in Ace Magazines‘ Detective-Dragnet/10 Detective Aces pulp. They appeared in between the Lynn Lash stories and after, but before the Lee Nace stories, which also appeared in this pulp. So we can see some of the development of Dent’s work.

And we had mentioned “weird mystery” in the past. For those who don’t recall, it’s where the threat or mystery is weird, not your standard criminal, but usually an over-the-top mad scientist or the like or the threat is of a strange or weird nature, though the hero is usually (not always) an ordinary detective.   This should not to be confused with “weird menace”, tho, which goes a step beyond that into the shudder pulps.

Each of the six stories are standalone, with a new detective in each one going up against a new weird threat. In “Terror Inc.,” the detective, with the help of a cab driver and an actress, goes up against the mysterious Spark who is terrorizing Los Angeles and Hollywood. I saw some of the similar elements of villains from Doc Savage in The Spark.

“The Devil’s Cargo” has the detective hero pulled into a strange mystery between rival groups after something, he’s not sure what. “The Invisible Horde” presents a threat of a murderous group of apparently invisible foes, but for what purpose?

A detective is in Tampa after a CEO who has made off with company funds and must deal with “The Whistling Death” and bleeding corpses. The head of a detective is sent to his office in a case that includes “The Caverns of Heads.” Dead workmen are found within “Murder Street.”

In all the detectives are not always gadget heroes or science detectives, though there are a few hints of those. By and large, they are private, or “agency,” detectives. But each have some unique characteristic. In one, the hero carries two different guns, including one that shoots tear gas. In another the hero uses the paraffin wax test to determine who killed someone. One character is a former Secret Service agent, now working as a scientist. Another has the habit of plugging the guns of bad guys he encounters.

Most of these stories were featured on pulp covers, and all the covers are included in the back of the book in black and white, along with the artwork that leads off each story.

There is also a good introduction from Dent expert Will Murray on these stories, that puts them into context with Dent’s career. Like all the Black Dog Books, it’s a top notch collection, and I am sure the rest of the Lester Dent Library are just as good. I plan on getting a few more of them.

Whether you are a Dent fan or someone who likes weird mystery, check out this collection.