You know Brian Leno. The guy’s got a competitive edge.
He’s already duked it out mano a mano with Kevin Cook a few times with samples from their autograph collections, notably the Cornell Woolrich face-off back in August.
When Kevin snuck in another Woolrich auto on the last day of the year, I’m sure it was like a stinging slap in the face with a gauntlet.
“No Black Mask cheque in my collection,” Brian sadly concedes, “but here is the lighter once owned by Lester Dent.”
Brian isn’t going down without some kind of fight!
I remember Brian mentioning he’d nabbed this item awhile back. In my mind’s eye, I saw it as a pocket cigar lighter — not as a table lighter.
Brian snapped a blurry pic — hey, good enough for rough and ready Up and Down These Mean Streets — and he’s taking charge again on the first day of the New Year. As he says, he enjoys thinking of it as “one of the lighters Dent used when he was in the thick of writing a Doc Savage story, or perhaps one of the two Oscar Sail yarns in Black Mask.”
Light ’em if you got ’em — and Dent had ’em.
