Here we have the second volume of Lester Dent’s “gadget hero,” Clickell “Click” Rush: The Devils Smelled Nice: The Complete Adventures of the Gadget Man, Vol. 2. This one has the next six stories.
This series was published in Street & Smith’s Crime Busters pulp in 1937-39, which was intended to be a sort of tryout pulp to highlight characters who could be spun off into their own pulp magazines (kind of like DC’s Showcase comic book).
As a “gadget hero,” Click is quite different from the others, necessarily, what with Doc Savage around. Click has invented many gadgets to catch crooks and went to New York City to interest the police in them. They declined his offer. Then he meets Bufa, a large papier-mâché toad sitting on half a $10,000 bill (yes, they existed).
A mysterious individual uses Bufa as a radio receiver to give Click instructions to solve crimes and, if he does so, will get the rest of the $10,000 (the same fee for each crime he solves). This is similar to the mysterious woman, the Tocsin, who sent Jimmie Dale out on missions as The Gray Seal. Unlike the Gray Seal, Click does this very unwillingly, and there is no hint of a romance. This, plus the madcap humor of the series, is what sets Click Rush apart from the rest. He (and we) never figure out who is behind Bufa. Did Dent himself work that out?
In the previous volume, Click had pretty much fled New York City, working his way south, ending up in Texas in the last story.
We find Click in Flagstaff, Ariz., in “The Hairless Wonders” when a red-haired woman in a mink coat gives Click a package in his hotel lobby and leaves. All he knows is there is something alive in it, a small hairless rodent of some kind, and he has no idea who the woman is. And the mystery isn’t quickly answered when a little man named Atom Allen shows up, who can bend half-dollars just with his fingers (hmmm, who else can do this?). He accuses Click of wife-stealing. Then Click has to deal with a couple of monosyllabic men, Mat and Pat, all before he gets to the bottom of things. And Bufa was not even involved, or was he?
Click heads to Los Angeles after a strange messenger brings him a ticket for a flight in “Run, Actor, Run!” Things get strange when, after getting on the plane, he sees the messenger get on himself. And then two men hijack the plane, and they make a crash landing in the snow near a cabin. It’s not clear what is going on, other than they are after something, and the stewardess is involved. It’s not until the end that we (and Click) figure out things and how Bufa is, again, involved.
Thus, in “A Man and a Mess,” we find him in Los Angeles. He’s heading to the detective agency that seems to be working for whoever is behind Bufa in the last couple of stories. And, boy, does he get a reception when he arrives. Hustled off in a hearse, he is able to get out of it thanks to one of his gadgets, only to be grabbed by a strange woman. After strange encounters with a ship’s captain and his first mate, Click slowly figures out what is going on. The captain and his crew stole the wealth from their sinking ship, but lost the photo showing where it’s buried, which the woman, a photographer, has.
“The Wild Indians” finds Click in Oklahoma, a place Dent is also knowledgeable about. But on orders from Bufa, he came disguised as an Indian. Strangely, someone seems to be trying to bump him off, or at least the Indian he is pretending to be. Much later, he figures it all out. Someone is trying to bump off their family so they can inherit it all. And we learn that Bufa was there, disguised as a woman.
With “The Itching Men,” we have Click in the capital of an unnamed state. He is there to try to help a man condemned for murder. But, as usual, there is more to it all. He runs into a girl who turns out to be the daughter of the murdered man. Click eventually learns the murdered man was a deposed president of a South American country, and that the condemned man was his bodyguard and innocent. He is able to solve it all, but it’s hinted that he should move on.
In “The Devils Smelled Nice,” we find Click using one of his inventions to eavesdrop on the phone line of a former police commissioner because Click knows that Bufa will call him. Bufa sets up a meeting with the commissioner, and Click heads out to finally expose Bufa. But instead, he arrives at a house with four perfumed men, who take him prisoner. Then the commissioner also arrives. Soon, we learn what is going on: A girl has been kidnapped, and the four perfumed men are behind it. Can Click expose them? And will he be able to figure out who Bufa is?
I am a bit puzzled that, after having Click go across the country, in the last two stories, we aren’t told what cities he is in. Maybe Dent dropped that aspect of the stories. And oftentimes, he solves the mysteries more by accident, as he seems to be trying to figure out who Bufa is, rather than getting the bad guys.
With these middle six stories, there are six more in the next and final volume from Steeger Books. Will he get closer to who Bufa is? I’m curious to see how this series progresses. And did Dent determine who Bufa was, or just leave it a big mystery?
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