Bill Brent (Lora Lorne)

Created by Frederick C. Davis

From the blurb:

“Sweet, grandmotherly advice columnist for The New York Recorder LORA LORNE is actually burly, rough-edged, hard-drinking, broken-nosed, cigar-chomping hotshot newsie BILL BRENT who weighs in at 200 pounds and stands at six feet plus, in his size 11 brogues.”

He appeared in over a dozen short stories in Dime Detective in the early forties. His assignment as advice columnist for the lovelorn was the result of a little, um, disagreement or two with his editor.

But somehow his nose for news would not be denied, and it kept leading Brent back to the crime beat, and some violent murder cases, editors be damned.

Frederick C. Davis (not the similarly named WWII destroyer escort) had a knack for memorable series. He also created the Moon Man, an elaborately costumed crime fighter whose father was the chief of police, for Ten Detective Aces, and wrote about hard-nosed Oke Oakley and his staff of operative at Secrets, Inc. for Dime Detective, and the immensley popular Operator #5, “America’s Secret Service Ace,” who batlted all sorts of weird menaces in 48 novels in the pulp mag that bore his name.

SHORT STORIES

• “Please Pass the Poison” (February 1941, Dime Detective)
• “Let the Skeletons Rattle” (May 1941, Dime Detective)
• “Killer, Stay Away From My Door” (September 1941, Dime Detective)
• “You Slay Me, Baby” (July 1942, Dime Detective; also Hard-Boiled Detectives)
• “Give a Man a Corpse He Can Hide” (September 1942, Dime Detective)
• “More Deadly Than the Male” (December 1942, Dime Detective)
• “Home Sweet Homicide” (May, 1943, Dime Detective)
• “Clinic for Corpses” (October, 1943, Dime Detective)
• “A Stiff in Time Saves Nine” (May 1944, Dime Detective)
• “Boomerang Scoop” (June, 1944, Dime Detective)
• “Thanks for the Lovely Funeral” (October 1944, Dime Detective)
• “Death Wears Red Heels” (December 1944, Dime Detective)
• “The Corpse Takes a Wife” (June 1945, Dime Detective)
• “Death Can Wait” (December 1945, Dime Detective)
• “Some Like Em Dead” (March 1946, Dime Detective)
• “Here Comes the Hearse” (June 1946, Dime Detective)

COLLECTIONS

• The Complete Cases of Bill Brent, Volume One (2016) | Buy this book
• The Complete Cases of Bill Brent, Volume Two (2020) | Buy this book

RELATED LINKS

• Stop the Presses!
  A list of some of our favourite newsroom “eyes.”

Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith. Thanks to Monte Herridge for some help here.