Unlock The Secrets Of Honey In His Mouth Penned By Lester Dent File Format Publication Copy

smalltime grifter who's a lookalike for a South American dictator gets dragged into a plot to steal the despot's illgotten wealthwith the help of the man's beautiful mistress.
Original. After a close call with an angry man he swindled, photographer and con man Walter Harsh is approached by people in the employ of the ruler of an unnamed South American country.
It seems Walter bears an uncanny resemblance to El Presidente, which fits nicely into their schemes to get access to the sixtyfive million dollars El Presidente is known to possess.
. .

I'll be real honest with you, Lester Dent's writing in the Doc Savage tales never really floated my boat, Maybe it's because he was writing for a penny per word, That being said, I liked Honey in his Mouth a lot, The writing was lightyears ahead of what Dent did in the early Doc Savages,

The plot moved along at a fast pace, Walter's a scumbag but still likeable, The people plotting against El Presidente are a diverse crew, including El Presidente's psychotic castrado brother, Brother.
The subplot involving Harsh trying to break

into a safe at Brother's estate keeps the story moving while everyone's trying to determine El Presidente's whereabouts.
The ending surprised me and pretty much everyone got what they had coming to them,

In short, Lester Dent proved me wrong, This is a worthy addition to any Hard Case Crime fan's collection, Read this because Ive long loved Dents Formula sitelink paperdragon. comden but realized Id never read his fiction, Frankly, I could have lived without, The formula is good. Dents writing itself, less so, It has aged poorly. There are better uses for your time, The Lester Dent plot formula executed to perfection! Youd think that a pulp crime story by the creator of Doc Savage would be filled with all kinds of outlandish action, but while the plot is a bit on the outrageous side, this is actually a pretty solid noir story.


Walter Harsh is a smalltime con man who gets injured while fleeing from one of his marks.
Hes recruited by a small group of conspirators who have been stealing from an unnamed Latin American country through a complicated scheme that involved pinning the thefts on the local dictator.
Harsh is a dead ringer for the guy, and hes soon flown to an estate in Florida where he can begin training to pretend to be El Presidente so the gang can use him as cover for their crimes once the real president leaves office.
Unfortunately for the thieves, Harsh is one of those guys who is about halfsly and halfstupid and all greed so when he gets fixated on trying to get the,hes been promised thats locked in a safe in the estate, it turns into way more trouble than they bargained for.


Best part of this story was the character of Walter Harsh, His smalltime greedy nature makes him completely incapable of considering the bigger picture, Hes so obsessed with the,in his safe and the beautiful mistress of the real El Presidente that he never thinks to wonder about how much more money is involved.
His need for constant instant gratification is a great little character study about a stupid greedy guy in way over his head.


Not too shabby, Lester Dent, Not too shabby at all,
Honey in His Mouth is the first nonDoc Savage book I've read by Lester Dent, He's the godfather of Pulp and his method for how he churned out so many books in his prolific career is well studied by fans and authors, yet this is the first nonSavage book of his I've read unless, of course, I read something he wrote under a pseudonym and didn't realize it was him.


I tore through this book, Excellent quick story with an excellent pulp ending,

I want to find more nonSavage Dent books, Anyone have suggestions This is a return to old school Noir, where nobody is heroic and fate is going to mess with everyone in the worst way.
I enjoyed it.

As I remember, the copyright page said it was written though not published in, which explains the gritty, classic feel.


The cover tagline is something like: "They shared the same face, Could they share the same woman" Like they've replaced her regular coffee with Folgers and will she taste the difference Be warned the book is nowhere near that sleazy and the women are way smarter than that.
: A grifter and an attractive accomplice become embroiled in a scheme to impersonate a South American president, Apart from a overtly graphic arm break as a result of a car collision, the opening passage was so dull it felt like trudging through quicksand to get through it.
That said, once I did, the story heated up with the introduction of three major players responsible for concocting a scheme for financial gain by murdering the president and replacing him with a lookalike.
I would've like to see more of Miss Muirz who had an air of danger and mystery surrounding her and a decent back story to boot however, grifter Harsh held the majority of the spotlight not a bad thing, I just wanted a slightly different focus.
The ending is what saves this book from an otherwise uneventful tale in which plenty of blood is spilled and our grifter comes a full circle.
Not great, not good, not bad, but ok,stars. Despite the clunky writing, this manages to be just offkilter enough to work, though the synopsis might make you think it's more than what's inside.
.stars
Enjoyable but with some highly improbable plot devices, Also very dated now./stars. I love Hard Case Crime, and this one is good pulpy fun, It'd make a boffo movie, Pulpy fun, if all kinds of contrived, If you've seen the movies "Moon Over Parador" or "Dave," you know the general plot of Lester Dent's "Honey in his Mouth.
" Terrible title, by the way, Not at all representative of what goes on in the book, But it was, so you get what you get,

Lester Dent created the action/adventure character Doc Savage, who had some serious fame back in the day.


Bad title aside, this is a pretty decent noir novel, The protagonistWalter Harshis basically a scummy loser in way, way over his head, He's a smalltime con man with a lot of greed and not a lot of brains, just a good line of bull and a cute equally vapid and greedy girl on his team.


Harsh is recruited by a bizarre group of conspirators for a singular purpose, Harsh happens to have the same face and blood type as a South American dictator, The conspirators, all from the dictator's inner circle, want to stealmillion dollars that the dictator has hidden away all over the world.
They need Harsh to do so, once they've done away with the dictatorwho is just about to be removed from office by his unhappy populace.


Harsh, is, of course, too greedy and dumb and suspicious to just go along with all the plotting and planning.
He has to play his own game to try and outsmart the conspirators, Harsh is only being paid a small amount of money to impersonate the dictator, Yet he's obsessed with the relatively small sum he's being paid, as it's the most money he has ever seen.


And, yes, it is tiresome how Harsh is such a moron and so obsessed with the money he will earn for the impersonation of the dictator.
I get the feeling there is some element of satire in how greedy and horny and dumb and brutish that Harsh is.
But the conspirators aren't much better,

"A swell lot of thieves," as Sam Spade would say with a sneer,

I will say that the story did not end like I thought it would, The ending reminded me of a "Twilight Zone" kind of thing, without being supernatural, There were a few obvious twists in the latter half of the book that anyone could see coming.
Yet there were also a few story shifts that I didn't expect,

If you've read my other reviews, you won't be surprised that I think the story would have been better with more sex and violence.
Yes, it was, but come on, Not that there is no sex or violence, but it's fairly tame and restrained,

Overall, I liked "Honey in his Mouth, " I have certainly read worse from the many Hard Case Crime novels I've consumed in the last year or so.
If you're feeling like a classic noir novel, this is not a bad choice,

This book is an absolute masterpiece of noir fiction, It is the Mona Lisa and Sistine Chapel all rolled into one, It is as good as anything Day Keene, Orrie Hitt, or Gil Brewer has written, Who is Lester Dent I
have no idea, but he knows how to tell a story, Our hero is a small time conman in the Midwest getting out of one jam and into another.
He bears an incredible resemblance to someone else and is convinced to take that mans place, Who is the conman and who is being conned Pretty good crime caper novel that goes awry, Plenty of coincidences, but some fun surprises to be found in this tight book, I enjoyed the first third and the ending which turns out a lot darker then I anticipated the most.
There is a very good reason for unpublished manuscripts to be unpublished: More often than not, they suck.
Exhibit A right here. One star for being written by Lester Dent, Because he was cool. One star for a surprise but totally contrived ending that I didn't see coming, Out side of that, astoundingly bad, When reading this book, I couldn't help but think of all those Bgrade action movies from the's and's about some Average Joe who happens to look like a famous crime lord and is tapped by the US government to pose as said crime lord and infiltrate his organization.
Think Aidan Quinn in THE ASSIGNMENT or Lorenzo Lamas in MASK OF DEATH,
It's the sort of plot I've grown very tired of, Which is why I was so impressed with HONEY IN HIS MOUTH, a book that utilizes this general conceit without wallowing in all the tiresome cliches we've come to expect from this sort of thing.
Not that it's particularly deep or anythingafter all, it was written by the guy who created "Doc Savage.
" But, as a vehicle for pure entertainment, it rarely eases up on the throttle, The sultry cover and sleazy title earned me a questioning look from my wife, but rest assured this isn't some dumb erotic thriller.
This is a solid effort from a gifted storyteller, Thank God for Hard Case Crime, which somehow unearthed this manuscript after it had been sitting around in a drawer collecting dust for the pastyears.
A kind of fun little crime story, this one suffers from the fact that the main character is just really stupid.
I mean, it makes him unlikable, but also you know all the time that he is screwing things up for himself.
These guys hire him to impersonate someone, and instead of just doing it and making a lot of money, he keeps trying to escape, or otherwise botch their plans.
Dummy. The cover makes a big deal about the femme fatale character of this novel, but she doesn't really even do all that much, and certainly never wears anything like on the cover.
But, it's amusing the way all the little parts fit together, and it's nice seeing Vera Sue get her revenge, in any case.
The sixtieth h novel completed honeyinhismouth by lesterdent originally written in, A great premise and a solid start, The first half has a good set up, The second half went in a different direction than I anticipated and the ending was bleak and brutal in the best way.
Given that it was a previously unpublished novel, I suspect if Dent was alive at the time of publication and had a decent editor this could have benefited from a bit of adjustment.
Remove a little of the fat and replace it with getting closer to achieving the goal to crank up the tension a bit more and then have the same ending it could have been a real gem.
A great cover from ronlesser
Not exactly the pulp crime book I expected it to be, This one mostly takes place on the coast of Florida where a smalltime con man is being prepared to impersonate a military dictator in an unnamed banana republic.
Every character is unlikable and the main character is the worst of all, He's is just plain stupid and in over his head, The ending really gives all characters what they deserve, Almost gets an extra star from me for the great title, Lester Dent's plotting skills are well showcased here in a heist adventure with lots of twists and turns.
Lester Dent lived in a small farming community about ten miles from my hometown, A gentleman I worked with in radio was a close friend of Dent and a fellow ham radio operator.
I've read biographies and some Doc Savage pulps as a kid but this was my first delve into other works by Dent.
He didn't disappoint my hopes of including locations I've known all my life, as the town where Brother finds Harsh in the hospital at the start is my hometown.
I didn't care for how Harsh treated Vera Sue, but after all, this is noir, right Not somest century politically correct novel.
All in all, a decent little story with a familiar premise, It makes me want to find more of his nonDoc Savage writings, .