The Weird Adventures of The Blond Adder

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Lester Dent used to boast that his true claim to fame rested not as the creator of Doc Savage, but in the fact that he had scored nineteen consecutive cover stories in Ten Detective Aces. Strictly speaking, this is a wild exaggeration. The number was closer to ten. But looking at the record, it’s understandable why Dent would remember it that way.

Ten Detective Aces started off as an early Harold Hersey gangster pulp, The Dragnet Magazine. It debuted in 1928. Two years later, gangster stories were on the way out, and the traditional detective tale of clues and ratiocination was considered old-fashioned. Action and melodrama were what readers craved. So in 1930 the title became Detective-Dragnet and metamorphosed into Ten Detective Aces in 1933.

By this time, the publisher was Aron A. Wyn, later to start Ace Books. The A. A. Wyn school of pulp writing was a revival of the 1920s melodrama which had just begun to cool in its literary grave before it was exhumed and made to dance, like a captive puppet, on new strings.

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