Tue 10 Jun 2025
LESTER DENT – Lady in Peril. Ace Double D-357, paperback original, 1959. Published back-to-back with Wired for Scandal, by Floyd Wallace.
Corruption by food-handlers being investigated by a State Senate Committee could lead very easily to murder, but this is a different kind of mystery story. Well-handled, it might turn out OK, but the writing here is bad, and the dialogue is unbelievable.
The state is (probably) Missouri. Grocer Jones is the Senate’s witness, and his death brings to a head the conflict between the farmers’ cooperative and Senator Abbott, who has a great deal of big business backing.
The Senator is 72, and has gubernatorial aspiration. Not these days. Most of the investigation of Grocer Jones’ accident comes after the big write-up in the paper, which must have had the news before it could have happened. Except for the barest outline, things just don’t fit.
Rating: *½
June 10th, 2025 at 5:12 pm
Evan Lewis, a gent whose reviews I respect, wrote a longer one for this rather short tale (110 pages) a while back on his blog. He didn’t care for it very much either, and he says it better:
https://davycrockettsalmanack.blogspot.com/2015/05/forgotten-books-lady-in-peril-by-lester.html
June 10th, 2025 at 8:44 pm
Other people have said it before, but the BEST stories Dent ever wrote are the two Oscar Sail ones for Black Mask. I’ve tried these Dent Ace and Gold Medal novels and would give them the same rating as this one above received.
June 11th, 2025 at 7:29 am
Paul: Precisely. The stellar Oscar Sail stories make me (misguidedly?) optimistic that there must be other Lester Dent gold out there to be dug.
June 11th, 2025 at 3:30 pm
It never hurts to be optimistic, but it’s way too bad that Dent did so little with Oscar Sail. Top of the line stuff, then and now.
June 13th, 2025 at 10:00 pm
Disappointing after his entertaining Chance Molloy books. I don’t think the rather grim and gritty noirish Gold Medal style was a fit for Dent who was more at home with pulp heroic and slick fiction for the Post and others in this period.
June 15th, 2025 at 7:54 pm
Lester Dent did numerous re-writes on the Oscar Sail stories before Capt. Shaw bought them. At that point Dent probably felt his had proved his point that he could write for Black Mask but it was too much work for so little reward. Sadly, it seems like his years writing Doc Savage had blunted his narrative skills and nothing he wrote outside of the Sail stories really lived up to his potential.
June 20th, 2025 at 8:17 pm
The Sail stories are little gems, but I can not imagine Dent sustaining that savage minimalist voice at novel length. As I said I enjoyed the three Molloy books, but MASK or not I just don’t think GM and Dent, at least Dent trying to do Bruno Fisher, Peter Rabe, or Charles Williams, was a good fit for the work he had been doing in that era.