Steve Harden

Created by Lester Dent
(1905-1959)

In his only known appearance, “The Devil’s Cargo,” gray-eyed private eye STEVE HARDEN of The Harden Agency doesn’t have to tangle with any of the super gruesome stuff many of Dent’s other private dicks had to deal with, or use any ahead-of-their-time gadgets but, according to James Reasoner, “it’s still a good detective action yarn, with… Harden negotiating his way through a maze of violence involving three rival groups who are after some sort of secret. Each of the groups believes that Harden is working for one of the others, and Harden has no idea what’s going on and just wants to find out the truth and stay alive. This one moves like a rocket until the end.”

You might even say it’s (literally) a shipload of gas.

SHORT STORIES & NOVELLAS

• “The Devil’s Cargo” (July 1932, Detective-Dragnet)

COLLECTIONS

• Terror, Inc. (2013) | Buy this book
  Contains “The Devil’s Cargo” and five other “fear-wrapped” tales of weird mystery and detection.

FURTHER INVESTIGATION

• 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.

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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