Mon 16 May 2022
Pulp PI Stories I’m Reading: LESTER DENT “Angelfish.”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[4] Comments
LESTER DENT “Angelfish.†Oscar Sail #2. First published in Black Mask, December 1936. Reprinted in The Hardboiled Dicks, edited by Ron Goulart (Sherbourne Press, 1965).
Miami-based PI Oscar Sail thinks his latest case is a screwy one, and it surely is. His client is a pretty girl named Nan Moberly who needs him to fake an attack on her, complete with gunfire, phony blood and a doctor who’s ready to swear she’s been shot. Sail complies, but stunts like this one seldom work out as planned.
What follows is a complicated melange of stolen aerial photos, lots of bad guys after them, a cab driver with a wooden leg named John Silver, several deaths, Nan’s kidnapping, and a race by small boat through the wind-raged fringes of a hurricane to save her – one of the most detailed such voyages I’ve ever read.
This is by far the most hardboiled story in all of Ron Goulart’s anthology. Dent always had a way with words, and he’s at his absolute best in this one. The ending in particular is as chilling a conclusion to a story you will read anywhere. It really is a shame hat he wrote only the two tales of Oscar Sail.
Note: I first wrote a review of this story in 1967, and I posted it on this blog a few weeks ago. Follow the link and you can read it here.
May 16th, 2022 at 8:40 pm
Reading this I always think of Chandler’s comment about Hammett and a McGuffey’s reader. Dent absolutely stripped the language of the hardboiled story down to its leanest and purest elements. It isn’t surprising he only pulled it off in a couple of stories, but it is amazing he did it even once.
I enjoy his slicker novels of the Fifties too, but he really was at his best here proving whatever he felt he had to prove as a writer.
May 16th, 2022 at 10:23 pm
Later, Dent admitted that he simply couldn’t spend the amount of time that Shaw wanted revising and working on the stories. Dent had a living to make as a free lance fiction writer which meant he had little time to revise and change and go over and over a story like Shaw wanted.
May 18th, 2022 at 7:13 pm
The two Dent stories in BLACK MASK are as good as
Hammett, Chandler and Paul Cain’s appearances. Now
Dent has said that he couldn’t afford the time to rewrite his stories to please Joe Shaw. It would cost him too much lost revenue, but he wanted to crack that elite title that BM was, and he had the chops to do it. What I still don’t get is, how come Shaw couldn’t get C J Daly to do it as well. Good friends of mine (Walker Martin and Ed Hulse) have both said that the writing Daly did for Popular Pub. is MUCH better than anything he wrote for BM. They feel the editor really helped Daly write better. I guess we’ll never know, but it does make one wonder!
May 18th, 2022 at 10:58 pm
My feeling is that Lester Dent was capable of working with Shaw for a couple stories to crack Black Mask but Daly did not have to revise and rewrite his work in Black Mask. Why?
Because Shaw once said Daly’s name on the cover increased circulation but I don’t believe Shaw really liked the Race Williams stories. He accepted them because the readers liked them but he wanted his writers to use Hammett as an example.