{"id":17500,"date":"2026-06-01T10:00:39","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T14:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/?p=17500"},"modified":"2026-03-01T16:19:41","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T21:19:41","slug":"complete-adventures-of-the-gadget-man-vol-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/2026\/06\/01\/complete-adventures-of-the-gadget-man-vol-2\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Devils Smelled Nice: The Complete Adventures of the Gadget Man,’ Vol. 2"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here we have the second volume of Lester Dent<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s \u201cgadget hero,\u201d Clickell \u201cClick\u201d Rush<\/a><\/strong>: The Devils Smelled Nice: The Complete Adventures of the Gadget Man<\/em>, Vol. 2. This one has the next six stories.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>This series was published in Street & Smith<\/a>\u2019s Crime Busters<\/a><\/em> 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\u2019s Showcase<\/em> comic book).<\/p>\n

As a \u201cgadget hero<\/a>,\u201d 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<\/strong>, a large papier-m\u00e2ch\u00e9 toad sitting on half a $10,000 bill (yes, they existed).<\/p>\n

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<\/strong>, who sent Jimmie Dale<\/a><\/strong> out on missions as The Gray Seal<\/a><\/strong>. 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?<\/p>\n

In the previous volume, Click had pretty much fled New York City, working his way south, ending up in Texas in the last story.<\/p>\n

We find Click in Flagstaff, Ariz., in \u201cThe Hairless Wonders\u201d 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\u2019t quickly answered when a little man named Atom Allen<\/strong> 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<\/strong> and Pat<\/strong>, all before he gets to the bottom of things. And Bufa was not even involved, or was he?<\/p>\n

Click heads to Los Angeles after a strange messenger brings him a ticket for a flight in \u201cRun, Actor, Run!\u201d 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\u2019s not clear what is going on, other than they are after something, and the stewardess is involved. It\u2019s not until the end that we (and Click) figure out things and how Bufa is, again, involved.<\/p>\n

Thus, in \u201cA Man and a Mess,\u201d we find him in Los Angeles. He\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019s buried, which the woman, a photographer, has.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Wild Indians\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

With \u201cThe Itching Men,\u201d 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\u2019s hinted that he should move on.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Devils Smelled Nice,\u201d 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?<\/p>\n

I am a bit puzzled that, after having Click go across the country, in the last two stories, we aren\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

With these middle six stories, there are six more in the next and final volume from Steeger Books<\/a>. Will he get closer to who Bufa is? I\u2019m curious to see how this series progresses. And did Dent determine who Bufa was, or just leave it a big mystery?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here we have the second volume of Lester Dent\u2019s \u201cgadget hero,\u201d Clickell \u201cClick\u201d 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\u2019s Crime Busters pulp in 1937-39, which was intended to be a sort of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":22506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_has_post_settings":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Pulp Super-Fan looks at 'The Devils Smelled Nice: The Complete Adventures of the Gadget Man,' Vol. 2.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_wp_rev_ctl_limit":""},"categories":[1,135,14],"tags":[321,310,1712,95,939,224],"hashtags":[],"class_list":["post-17500","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pulps","category-reprints","category-review","tag-click-rush","tag-crime-busters","tag-gadget-heroes","tag-lester-dent","tag-steeger-books","tag-street-smith-publications"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/files\/2026\/02\/devils-smelled-nice-featured.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3eLo8-4yg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17500","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17500"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17500\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22539,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17500\/revisions\/22539"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17500"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17500"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17500"},{"taxonomy":"hashtags","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thepulp.net\/pulpsuperfan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtags?post=17500"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}