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."

3 comments:

Graham Powell said...

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.

Anonymous said...

I see that Hard Case Crime has an unpublished Dent novel scheduled for 2009.

Anonymous said...

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