Missouri-born Lester Dent (1904–1959) is mainly remembered today as the creator of the pulp legend Doc Savage, and was the primary author of the 181 novels that first appeared in Doc Savage Magazine in the 1930s and ‘40s.
Quest of the Spider by Lester Dent
I have just reacquainted myself with six dear old friends. As I mentioned in my FanLit minibio (below), back in high school, this reader just could not get enough of the adventures of Doc Savage and his five faithful associates, eagerly devouring four dozen of the Doc Savage paperbacks that Bantam books released in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. These paperbacks were hugely popular back in the day and are now highly prized collectible items, not only for the stories themselves, but for the beautifully rendered cover illustrations that James Bama created for well over 100 of them. Eventually, though, I tired of reading the Doc Savage novels, as a certain formulaic sameness started to become evident in them (and indeed, years later, I learned that author Lester Dent did have a chart hanging on his office wall, delineating what was to happen by certain points in every book), and after gobbling ... Read More
