I’ve covered dime novels, the forerunners of pulps that existed from the late 19th century to the early 20th century. Dime novels ran many series in several genres, include detective, western, proto-science-fiction, and more.
A collection of five different dime novels was published by Penguin a few years back: Dashing Diamond Dick and Other Classic Dime Novels. It reprints a Diamond Dick (western hero), Franke Reade, Jr (juvenile science adventurer), Frank Merriwell (sports hero), Liberty Boys of 76 (revolution war juvenile adventure), and a Nick Carter (detective) novel, including their covers.
This was edited by J. Randolph Cox, who is an expert on dime novels (he edits Dime Novel Round-Up) and gives a great overview article on them, along with intros on each one.
While I didn’t read all of these novels, I did read some of them. These are my impressions.
I’m not a big western fan, but Diamond Dick has our hero deal with matters in a mining town, which was a common theme in western dime novels. Diamond Dick is not your typical western hero, if you’re expecting a roving cowboy hero. More a gambling dandy, he wears an outrageous outfit like a Spanish hidalgo would wear.
I have previously covered the various early boy inventor heroes, the “Edisonades” in a previous posting, and Franke Reade Jr. is the most well known of them. This story, “Over the Andes,” is from 1894, and tells of Franke’s adventure with a new airship in exploring an inaccessible area in the Andes. Unlike Reade’s other airships, which use large upright propellers to keep it aloft, this is a true airship using a gasbag, but also two pairs of wings and a propeller to push it, with the rudder at the front. With his associates, they find a hidden race of people, as well as deal with an escaped criminal.
Of less interest to me, but who was wildly popular at the time is Frank Merriwell. He is typical of the young sports hero, who is able to tour the world and have adventures. This story has Frank at Yale playing against rival Harvard on the baseball team.
The Liberty Boys of ’76 are a group of boys in revolutionary America, lead by Dick Slatter, who go on missions for General Washington. Over 600 stories of their adventures were published, and this is the first one.
Nick Carter is the hugely popular dime novel detective who had hundreds of stories written about him. I’ve covered him previously. He was revised a couple of times in the pulp era (the last time as a more standard hardboiled detective) and later as a counter-spy during the men’s adventure paperback era. During the dime novel era he went up against an array of bizarre villains, the worse probably being Dr. Quartz.
Quartz first appeared in four stories in 1891-93, when he died. But death never keeps a good villain down, and so he returned in future stores, through sons and other relatives. A second sequence of four stories appeared in 1904-05, and we get the second story from this sequence. There would be 11 more stories before the true final encounter in 1910. though he was brought back during Carter’s first pulp revival in the 1920s, and those stories were reprinted in the third Sanctum Press Nick Carter volume. At the end of this story Carter captures Dr. Quartz, and also frees a young woman he was torturing to turn into another monster like Zanoni.
Because these works had words or phases that it was felt modern audiences wouldn’t understand, these are endnoted and explained.
For those wanting a good overview of dime novel stories, this is a great start.
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