CBR: Writer Will Murray on the History of Pulp

[CBR News]

Pulp author and historian Will Murray talks to CBR about new reprints from Sanctum Books, how "The Whisperer" is Commissioner Gordon and actor James Cagney, the new Lester Dent novel and much more.


Full article here.

[vbartilucci]

Lester Dent IS (or rather was) Kenneth Robeson. Robeson/Dent wrote the Doc Savage novels, which Will wrote several of from Dent's notes and outlines. The Destroyer series is a completely separate series, started by Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir, and Will's work for them was entirely original. There's a few poor punctuations in thet paragraph that mistakenly makes it sound like the Destroyer series was by Dent.

Properly edited and punctuated, the sentences should read...

He’s a fiction writer who’s contributed to many anthologies and writtem dozens of novels in the Destroyer series. Working from unfinished plots from Lester Dent, Murray also wrote Doc Savage novels under the pseudonym Kenneth Robeson.

Nice piece otherwise. Happy to see Will getting some recognition.

[Ed Love]

Lester Dent wasn't the only Kenneth Robeson, others wrote some Docs under that byline and the Avenger stories were also listed as being by Kenneth Robeson when Dent was only on the brainstorming session.

Also, the Whisperer HAS been reprinted before and in a nicely done volume in the day when most small press fanzine reprints were done at the local photocopiers. Other than the b/w cover, it was bound with a slick cover much like the current Shadow reprints. Sadly, the one I have contains a couple of pulp stories with only the second part of the Whisperer tale. It may have been only one or two Whisperer tales at most, I don't know how long the reprinter lasted and completely illegitimate considering how jealously protective Conde Nast was over the rights. I think Gunnison has reported that he had tried for years to get the rights to reprint even just some stories from the minor characters like the Skipper and the Whisperer. Lately, they seem to be lightening up on the reins some.

[Libaax]

I buy Hard Case Crime books, i wonder did Dent do crime fiction other than the upcoming HCC book ?

[Ed Love]

I buy Hard Case Crime books, i wonder did Dent do crime fiction other than the upcoming HCC book ?

Dent did two short stories for Black Mask magazine featuring Oscar Sail which have been reprinted and 3 crime/mystery novels: LADY AFRAID, LADY TO KILL, and DEAD AT THE TAKEOFF. The latter is especially interesting as most of the action except for the opening and closing chapters take place on a passenger plane in flight while LADY AFRAID takes place over the course of one night.

These all show a more mature writer than the early Doc novels. He has a breezy, quickly paced writing style but a talent for setting a scene. Where most pulp writers seemed to either get hamstringed by padding word counts with purple prose and short-cuts in plotting due to the grind from years at writing the pulps, Dent's writing became more polished and developed a style and sense of humor. You get this in some of his WWII and post-War Docs as Doc Savage and his aides become more human and their stories take on a vein of espionage thrillers such as The Terrible Stork and Terror Wears No Shoes.