Luck: The Complete Black Mask Cases of Oscar Sail

by Lester Dent, John Drew (Illustrator), Will Murray (Introduction)

On the strength of having sold only two stories to the legendary Black Mask magazine, Doc Savage creator Lester Dent is today hailed as one of the foremost practitioners of the Hardboiled School of detective fiction fostered by Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and others. But what stories they were! Employing his personal experiences treasure hunting in the Caribbean, Lester created Miami's boat-dwelling private detective Oscar Sail, a clear forerunner to John D. MacDonald's Travis Magee and Miami Vice's Sonny Crockett. This definitive collection brings together both much-anthologized Oscar Sail exploits, as well as a variant draft of "Sail" featuring a strikingly different version of the Florida sleuth. Also included are related stories featuring similar characters and settings.

224 pages, Paperback

Published July 30, 2021

About the author

Lester Dent (1904–1959) was born in La Plata, Missouri. In his mid-twenties, he began publishing pulp fiction stories, and moved to New York City, where he developed the successful Doc Savage Magazine with Henry Ralston, head of Street and Smith, a leading pulp publisher. The magazine ran from 1933 until 1949 and included 181 novel-length stories, of which Dent wrote the vast majority under the house name Kenneth Robeson. He also published mystery novels in a variety of genres, including the Chance Molloy series about a self-made airline owner. Dent’s own life was quite adventurous; he prospected for gold in the Southwest, lived aboard a schooner for a few years, hunted treasure in the Caribbean, launched an aerial photography company, and was a member of the Explorer’s Club.