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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“In this type of story,” Blessingame said, “some person or thing hangs a veil of horror over the characters in this story; we never know when this menace will strike but we do know it will continue to commit depredations until the hero does his stuff and overcomes it in the final climax.” An editor Murray quotes says the figure can be a mystery until the climax or, as in Dracula or Fu Manchu, the heroes know who he is but still can’t stop him from striking.
Dent applied this approach in a number of Doc Savage yarns. in 
Clearly it’s a trope that still works. Which brings me to its presence in my own work. 
(Early morning photograph)
This past Monday, it got worse: he was limping and snapped at TYG when she tried for a closer look at his foot. Fortunately we were going in for his physical rehab check up so we asked the doctor to check out the foot as well. It took her and a vet tech but she managed to find a tiny seed buried in the fur between his pads. A couple of days later, Plushie was back to his old cheery self. Yay!
Lynn Lash was the first and least interesting of the three men, though the stories are still entertaining. He’s one of those millionaires who dabble in crimefighting just because, a common thing in the Golden Age of Mystery. In the introduction, Doc Savage expert Will Murray says Dent probably modeled him on Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective, a fictional criminologist who debuted in 1910. Kennedy’s adventures were hugely popular for a while but according to 
popping out (a hook Dent would later reuse in 
I did get a lot of work done for The Local Reporter but no finished articles. I’m still waiting on responses to emails so I can finish up.
Plus I reread the book Windmaster’s Bane which I’ll be discussing next week.
And on Con-Tinual’s YouTube channel, I’m part of a panel discussing 
Wednesday, I noticed that while the thermostat was set to 72, the temperature on the house, as shown on the thermostat, was 67. Given the temperature outside was going into the high 20s that night, this seemed like a bad thing.
And the other about the debut of the Daily Bugle’s city editor, 
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— but she hadn’t made much effort to resist when the door was open and I even lightly restrained her. But there she was, on the deck, refusing to come in, even when we offered food. She showed up again later, same result, then vanished most of the day. This left me pretty miserable: sure, she made it five years between when we first saw her and when we finally brought her in this summer, but it’s still a risky life to be an outdoor cat. Plus she’s still limping from her leg injury; what if she thought she still had her old speed and ended up in a coyote or hit by a car?
I didn’t get anything done on Let No Man Put Asunder but overall I’m pleased.
While many of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales take place in the same universe (The Moon Maid, the Carson of Venus series, Barsoom, Tarzan and Pellucidar, at a minimum), his only full-on crossover was TARZAN AT THE EARTH’S CORE. In a direct sequel to 
By the grace of god, luck was with me. The lump on the head, a badly bleeding knee, but no damage of any sort beyond that. I’m very much aware it could have been so much worse. Plus my glasses, while bent, were not scratched; my phone flew out of my pocket but landed face up.
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