Created by Lester Dent
(1905-1959)
“The Great Dane just went around with his eyes open and his head working. He saw things. Things other people missed. And he drew quick conclusions from what he saw. A lot of tough breaks had taught him that trick.”
Yikes! Borrowing a page from his Doc Savage yarns, Dent’s “The Whistling Death” involves a particularly nasty way of bumping someone off — victims sweat blood until they die. And Big Apple eye CLEVE DANE is on the case, summoned to Tampa to track down a sleazy money man who vanished, along with five million bucks worth of gold certificates.
Dent of course gives Dane (referred to in the story, unforgivably perhaps, as “The Great Dane”) a few interesting skills. Besides being rough and tough and able to handle almost anything that comes up, he’s super observant and he’s able to throw his voice.
According to James Reasoner, “The case turns into a wild chase through a rainy night after an embalmed corpse that keeps getting stolen. Dent really packs both action and plot into this one; it’s like a condensed novel. And maybe it’s the Florida setting and the fact that Dane seems to be two or three steps ahead of everybody else, but this story really reminded me of a Mike Shayne yarn. Which is a good thing indeed.”
SHORT STORIES & NOVELLAS
- “The Whistling Death” (March 1933, Ten Detective Aces; aka “Hell Wouldn’t Have Him” by Ralph Powers)
COLLECTIONS
- Terror, Inc. (2013) | Buy this book
Contains “The Whistling Death” and five other “fear-wrapped” tales of weird mystery and detection.
RELATED LINKS
- The Pulp Paper Master Fiction Plot
Lester Dent’s sure-fire recipe for writing a successful pulp story. - Lester Dent’s Rogues Gallery
An ever-growing list of Lester Dent’s detective characters.
