Toads and gadgets: Lester Dent’s The Gadget Man

As a fan of Lester Dent’s pulp writing, it was inevitable I’d follow reading his early 1930s detectives (Lynn Lash, Lee Nace and Foster Fade) with reading his most successful, Clickell Rush, the Gadget Man. I’ve been curious about “Click” since long before I needed to do background reading for Savage Adventures.As detailed in the first story, Click’s an inventor who saw potential to both do good and get rich by selling his tech to cops. Anesthetic grenades like Doc Savage’s. Concealed hypodermics for taking down someone in a fight. Small explosives, tear gas bombs, gas hidden in cigarettes, explosives in matches — you get the idea. Click’s strength seems to be chemistry though he has other kinds of gadgetry too.

The cops weren’t interested, dismissing Click as a kook. He’s looking at being dead broke until he finds a papier-mache toad in his apartment with a radio inside it — not wireless, but one that connects to its sibling radio via the electrical power grid (Click has to connect it up to make it work). The mysterious Bufa has not only left the toad but one half of a $10,000 bill (yes, we used to have those); Click will get the other half when he cracks a crime Bufa wants investigated. Bufa, you see, is a toad that preys on slugs and insects of the human species.

After Chick cracks the case, Bufa has more gigs for him, always with the $10,000 bait. Of course, ten grand was a lot of money back then; after a couple of cases Click figures he can afford a vacation. But no matter where he travels, the toad keeps turning up and Bufa keeps getting him into trouble; if Click won’t take a case for cash, there are other levers.

These are a fun set of screwy mysteries variously involving a man slicing off people’s noses, a mysterious shipment of frogs, a madhouse in a center of a swamp and more. However they’re lower-key, lower stakes and more realistic than the earlier adventures, let alone Doc Savage. For that reason I might enjoy them more if they weren’t by Dent as my expectations would be different. I suspect I’d still prefer the earlier series though.

One really odd thing is that the female guest-stars in each story are generic, just pretty girls who (sometimes) know how to shoot a gun. That’s a surprise given that Dent was good about using strong, competent women in the early series or in most of his Doc Savage stories (these three, for instance). Again, that’s disappointment over not living up to my expectations … but I can’t help having expectations.

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