Sunday, October 12, 2008
Happy Birthday, Lester Dent!
"It's the birthday of Lester Dent, the American adventure and mystery novelist, born in La Plata, Missouri, in 1904. The Dents moved to a remote part of Wyoming when Lester was two years old. While he was a telegraph operator for the Associated Press, one of his co-workers published a story in a pulp magazine. Dent read it and thought that he could probably write a story that was at least as good, maybe even better. And since he had the graveyard shift, he started writing at work. His first story was accepted by a pulp magazine, so he and his family moved to New York, where he became a full-time writer of pulp fiction."
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3 comments:
Lester Dent seems to have been a pretty cool guy. And if you haven't read THE CHINATOWN DEATH CLOUD PERIL, in which Dent was the hero (along with THE SHADOW writer Walter Gibson), you really should.
I see that Hard Case Crime has an unpublished Dent novel scheduled for 2009.
I have his Gold Medal pb novel (think it might have been his first novel?) in my to-be-read pile. I'll get to it one of these days.
~ Ron Clinton
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