Lester Dent

During his thirty year career, Lester Dent created several outstanding characters, starting with the immortal Doc Savage, but also including Black Mask's Oscar Sail, Genius Jones, and others. One of the most successful was the Gadget Man, who appeared exclusively in the pages of Street & Smith's Crime Busters magazine between 1937 and 1939. After Doc Savage, the Gadget Man was the longest running Lester Dent series. And, like Doc Savage, it was a mixture of gadgets, mystery and screwball shenanigans.Click Rush is an inventor. But the ingenious crime-fighting gadgets he's invented are not wanted by police agencies, who consider them too outlandish and impractical.Enter Bufa. Who is Bufa? No one knows. Not even Rush. But when a papier-m ch radio transceiver appears in his hotel room sitting on one half of a $10,000 bill and the voice emanating from the toad promises the other half if Rush uses his gadgets to solve a crime, the nearly broke inventor could hardly say no.The problem was that every time Rush solves a mystery, Bufa wants him to do it again. And again, and again. And he won't take no for an answer Over the course of eighteen screwy stories, the war of wits between the anonymous toad-shaped tormentor and the beleaguered inventor-turned-detective rages.Where will it all end? Not even Bufa knows....This volume of Gadget Man stories-most never before reprinted-includes the final six stories. Many restored from the original manuscripts. Including a revealing Introduction by Will Murray.

During his thirty year career, Lester Dent created several outstanding characters, starting with the immortal Doc Savage, but also including Black Mask's Oscar Sail, Genius Jones, and others. One of the most successful was the Gadget Man, who appeared exclusively in the pages of Street & Smith's Crime Busters magazine between 1937 and 1939. After Doc Savage, the Gadget Man was the longest running Lester Dent series. And, like Doc Savage, it was a mixture of gadgets, mystery and screwball shenanigans.Click Rush is an inventor. But the ingenious crime-fighting gadgets he's invented are not wanted by police agencies, who consider them too outlandish and impractical.Enter Bufa. Who is Bufa? No one knows. Not even Rush. But when a papier-m ch radio transceiver appears in his hotel room sitting on one half of a $10,000 bill and the voice emanating from the toad promises the other half if Rush uses his gadgets to solve a crime, the nearly broke inventor could hardly say no.The problem was that every time Rush solves a mystery, Bufa wants him to do it again. And again, and again. And he won't take no for an answer Over the course of eighteen screwy stories, the war of wits between the anonymous toad-shaped tormentor and the beleaguered inventor-turned-detective rages.Where will it all end? Not even Bufa knows....This volume of Gadget Man stories-most never before reprinted-includes the next six stories. Many restored from the original manuscripts. Including a revealing Introduction by Will Murray.

During his thirty year career, Lester Dent created several outstanding characters, starting with the immortal Doc Savage, but also including Black Mask's Oscar Sail, Genius Jones, and others. One of the most successful was the Gadget Man, who appeared exclusively in the pages of Street & Smith's Crime Busters magazine between 1937 and 1939. After Doc Savage, the Gadget Man was the longest running Lester Dent series. And, like Doc Savage, it was a mixture of gadgets, mystery and screwball shenanigans.Click Rush is an inventor. But the ingenious crime-fighting gadgets he's invented are not wanted by police agencies, who consider them too outlandish and impractical. Enter Bufa. Who is Bufa? No one knows. Not even Rush. But when a papier-m ch radio transceiver appears in his hotel room sitting on one half of a $10,000 bill and the voice emanating from the toad promises the other half if Rush uses his gadgets to solve a crime, the nearly broke inventor could hardly say no. The problem was that every time Rush solves a mystery, Bufa wants him to do it again. And again, and again. And he won't take no for an answer Over the course of eighteen screwy stories, the war of wits between the anonymous toad-shaped tormentor and the beleaguered inventor-turned-detective rages. Where will it all end? Not even Bufa knows....This first volume of Gadget Man stories-most never before reprinted-includes the introductory six stories. Many restored from the original manuscripts. Including a revealing Introduction by Will Murray.

On the strength of having sold only two stories to the legendary Black Mask magazine, Doc Savage creator Lester Dent is today hailed as one of the foremost practitioners of the Hardboiled School of detective fiction fostered by Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and others. But what stories they were Employing his personal experiences treasure hunting in the Caribbean, Lester created Miami's boat-dwelling private detective Oscar Sail, a clear forerunner to John D. MacDonald's Travis Magee and Miami Vice's Sonny Crockett. This definitive collection brings together both much-anthologized Oscar Sail exploits, as well as a variant draft of "Sail" featuring a strikingly different version of the Florida sleuth. Also included are related stories featuring similar characters and settings.

Arabian thieves led by the diabolically clever Molallet set one fiendish trap after another for Doc Savage and his mighty five. Only "Doc", with his superhuman mental and physical powers, could have withstood this incredible ordeal of endurance which led from the cavern of the crying rock through the pitiless desert of Rub' Al Khali and its Phantom City to a fight to the death against the last of a savage prehistoric race of white-haired beasts.

It was all a great mystery. Who was this man called Dan Thunden who claimed he was one hundred and thirty years old? Did he really have the secret of the fountain of youth? What was this island called Fear Cay that spelled horror and death? What was the strange thing that turned men to bone? These were the mysteries that Doc Savage and his fearless crew had to solve at peril of their very lives.

High above the skyscrapers of New York, Doc Savage engages in deadly combat with the red-fingered survivors of an ancient, lost civilization. Then, with his amazing crew, he journeys to the mysterious "lost valley" to search for a fabulous treasure and to destroy the mysterious Red Death.

Two new Doc Savage novels in one volume Prospecting in the Wyoming badlands, Patricia Savage spies a man swimming in circles-high in a cloudless sky After he falls to his death, the dead swimmer is discovered soaked to the skin. Who is he? How did he manage to swim through thin air? These are the questions Pat sets out to answer when her cousin, the famous scientist-adventurer Doc Savage, diagnoses her account as a hallucination caused by altitude sickness. But when the bronze-skinned girl vanishes, the Man of Bronze is forced to take action. From the Bighorn Mountains to Devils Tower, Doc Savage and his mighty crew race against time to avert an impending tragedy created by a nebulous devil in human form who calls himself Mr. Calamity. Plus, The Valley of Eternity. A letter from Doc Savage's long-dead father thrusts the Man of Bronze into a personal quest that will change his life. And only Pat Savage can guide him.

The greatest American detective magazine of all time is back with an all-new story by the creator of Doc Savage, Lester Dent. Also featuring classic hard-boiled detective stories by Horace McCoy, Wyatt Blassingame, Day Keene, Herbert Koehl, Kent Richards, Stephen McBarron, Dwight V. Babcock, Hugh B. Cave, and Edgard Franklin, all from the golden age of pulp fiction. With vintage brush illustrations by Arthur Rodman Bowker, as well as a previously-unpublished interview with the author of Donovan's Brain, Curt Siodmak.

The deluded ravings of a madman and the absence of all sea life around a New England fishing village lure Doc Savage and his crew to an obscure island bristling with gunmen. The trail of terror leads to the ravaged coasts of Occupied Japan. There they fall into the clutches of an evil genius long believed dead, a shadowy figure who masterminded World War II... and who now seeks to plunge humidity into a fresh Armageddon.Trained by the same teacher, both processed of a similar genius, Doc Savage and this malicious mastermind have fought before. And now, as the world lurches toward another global war, the Man of Bronze must defeat his most loathsome adversary yet....

A desperate plea for help plunges Doc Savage into a maelstrom of horror aboard the Hong Kong-bound liner Mandarin, where the depraved minions of the phantom predator, Quon, hold sway. As innocent passengers succumb to the insidious Jade Fever, and ghostly talons pursue Doc's beautiful cousin, Patricia, the mighty Man of Bronze races to solve a riddle that defies reason.For deep in the spider-haunted ruins of faraway Cambodia broods a twisted, armless gargoyle with a cold face of jade--The Jade Ogre--whose power to project his deadly, disembodied arms to any place on earth makes him the most dangerous foe Doc Savage has ever confronted