Happy Birthday, Lester Dent
The Man of Bronze
Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche Pulp fiction author Lester Dent, born October 12, 1904, died 1959, was better known by his pseudonym of Kenneth Robeson. Under this pseudonym Dent wrote 170-ish novels featuring his most popular character, the "Man of Bronze," Doc Savage -- a character he didn't actually create, but adopted from the publisher and an editor at Street & Smith, one of the big pulp publishing enterprises from the time.
Doc was a two-fisted adventurer and brilliant scientist who was the model for a zillion later heroes -- most notable among them, to modern readers at least, being Indiana Jones. Doc became the star of radio, movies and comic books.
Born in Missouri, Dent became a telegraph operator in 1924 and later, while working as a telegrapher for the Associated Press, found out one of his coworkers had sold a story to a pulp magazine. It paid $450 -- a strong incentive for Dent, who already read a lot of pulp fiction, to try his hand.
After a small number of sales, Dent found himself solicited by Dell Publishing for a $500 a month job writing exclusively for Dell publications. He and his wife Norma moved to New York. But it was Street and Smith who later poached Dent to write a novel series, a gadget-driven take-off on The Shadow, for $500 per novel. The resulting character was Doc Savage, who became the lead character in a series that would run from March, 1933's The Man of Bronze to July, 1949's Up from Earth's Center, and beyond.
Dent also wrote for Black Mask, the legendary pulp magazine where the hard-boiled style was all but invented. His book Honey In His Mouth, is a grifter-thriller I have not yet had the pleasure to read; it came out recently from Hard Case Crime. Dent's also one of the characters in Paul Malmont's pulp meta-novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril.
Though I love the idea of Doc Savage and many of the influences he wrought, every early Doc Savage novel I've read is a gooey, pulpy, likable but ultimately bewildering mess -- like first season Buffy, writ lantern-jawed and steel-thewed. Dent was really cranking them out in those years, and I understand the later books have a certain charm that's missing from the early ones I've read.
My very favorite Doc Savage book is not a Doc Savage book at all -- it's the fictional biography, Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, in which Philip Jose Farmer both reminisces about his experiences reading the series as a youth, and treats it as if it's all bloody real. It's a wonderful pulp study, and the most fun I've ever had with Doc Savage.
That said, Dent is still one of the originals, an architect of the pulp landscape. Remember him with reference, and while you're at it, Friend him on MySpace.