Last year I’d planned to put out a Doc Savage history, Savage Adventures, but other projects took precedence. This year, hopefully it happens. As a side effect of the project I’ve been reading other pulp work by Doc Savage’s main author, Lester Dent. This post (reposted from my own blog two years ago) looks at some of them. Hell in Boxes and The Weird Adventures of the Blond Adder cover three gadget-wielding heroes Dent introduced in 1932, 1933 and 1934 (the later and more successful Gadget Man will have to wait).
Lynn Lash was the first and least interesting of the three men, though the stories are still entertaining. He’s one of those millionaires who dabble in crime-fighting just because, a common thing in the Golden Age of Mystery. In the introduction, Doc Savage expert Will Murray says Dent probably modeled him on Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective, a fictional criminologist who debuted in 1910. Kennedy’s adventures were hugely popular earlier in the century. According to Thrilling Detective they faded away partly because Kennedy’s cutting-edge forensic science became old news.
Not a problem for Dent, who didn’t let real-world science restrain him. Working out of his skyscraper lab (much like Doc), Lash deals with “The Sinister Ray” that induces blindness in victims, the work of an unnamed Asian nation plotting to conquer America. In “The Mummy Murders,” the murder method withers its victims in minutes; in the unpublished (until this collection) “The Flame Horror” the villains deploy a super-powerful form of thermite that burns anything it touches.
Will Murray’s introduction details how Lash appeared as pulps were rejecting Agatha Christie-style stories of detection in favor of “menace” yarns where heroes battled sinister villains whose constant threat overshadowed every page. I can see the menace aspect in all the stories I’m discussing here, as well as a lot of Doc Savage.
Despite the excitement and his gadgetry (such as a briefcase that contains a miniature gun), Lash is less interesting as a character than Ricky, his tomboyish secretary who speaks seven languages. 1933’s Lee Nace, AKA the Blond Adder, is much more entertaining and much more evocative of the Man of Bronze.
Like Doc, Nace is a polymath, having completed both law school and medical school and written a chemistry textbook. He doesn’t carry a gun (like Doc he thinks it makes you dependent on the weapon) but does have an arsenal of gadgets including a bulletproof vest of his own design, a metal skullcap that looks like his own hair, and cufflinks holding tiny darts dipped in knockout drops. He also has the quirky details common to characters in the Doc Savage series: a snakelike scar on his forehead (hence his name) and a habit of biting through the bakelite stem of his pipe under stress. He’s much more human than Doc, though. A shot to his bulletproof vest will knock him down and hurt like hell. There’s no antidote for his knockout darts so in one story he’s stuck waiting the full two hours until the men revive. In another story he gets into a brawl over a baseball game.
Nace’s menace stories involve a green skeleton apparently killing people, men turning up dead with their eyes 
popping out (a hook Dent would later reuse in The Annihilist) and in the final story an apparent meteorite containing a human skull and a diamond. My first thought was that it would be a variation of the super-heated gas the villains want control of in The Red Skull. After reading the unpublished Lash story “The Flame Horror” it feels more like Dent recycled that heat weapon. I suspect after Nace’s adventures ended (according to Murray, Dent simply couldn’t keep up with them on top of his Doc Savage duties) Dent also recycled the Blond Adder’s female cousin — a capable woman, she becomes Nace’s sidekick/apprentice — into Doc’s cousin Pat Savage. This makes me wonder again if Dent wanted Pat to join Doc’s team but the editors overruled him.
The Blond Adder’s stories are probably the strongest but Foster Fade, the Crime Spectacularist is the most interesting character. The publisher of the Planet, the world’s most sensationalistic and successful tabloid, has decided that since readers crave bizarre, colorful crime stories, he’ll hire an in-house investigator to solve bizarre, colorful murders (an Aroma Killer who murders with scents, a mysterious Something that turns people to brittle stone) in colorful style, with lots of Doc-style gadgetry. Platinum blonde reporter Dinametra Stevens then writes up the case. Her style is too lurid for tasteful women’s-interest pieces but it’s perfect for this kind of blood and thunder. While “Din” is no fan of seeing dead bodies, she shows herself capable in a fight.
I love the Crime Spectacularist concept and how Dent develops it. Unlike Nace and Doc Savage, Fade would love to pack a gun but his editor won’t let him: readers think it’s cooler if he wins without one. Where Lash and Nace are admired by cops, the Planet has written so many pieces showing Fade’s superiority to the bumbling cops that the cops loathe him. Unlike Doc, Fade doesn’t invent his own tech: the paper has a staff to take care of that.Alas, we only got three Fade stories, possibly because of overwork again, or possibly conflicts with the editor.
If you’re a Doc Savage fan, or a pulp fan both books are worth reading.
Did the Blond Adder have a servant named Baldric? That would have been an interesting premise for a 5th Black Adder series.
Glad to see you didn’t include the Avenger, as that was credited to the house name, Kenneth Robeson, but Dent did not create the character and did not write any of the stories.
Yep, he was the work of Paul Ernst.
I will probably post about some of Dent’s other Doc-adjacent pulp adventurers down the road.