I have previously posted on dime-novel reprints from Darren Németh‘s Giant Squid Audio Lab Co. done via Kickstarter. He has put out three in his Page-Turner Series, along with a reprint of a novelization of a Lon Chaney movie, Outside the Law (1920). Then recently a campaign for another in the Page-Turner Series, as well as a British “penny dreadful.”
Page-Turner Series #4 reprints Fritz to the Front, a dime novel by Edward L. Wheeler that first saw print in 1881 in Beadle’s Half-Dime Library, and has been reprinted several times since. This edition was taken from the last reprint, done in 1920. Interestingly, this story is the sequel to a prior story, Fritz, The Bound-Boy Detective. As I understand it, Beadle’s Half-Dime Library was aimed at boys, rather than the adult readers of Beadle’s Dime Library, even printing in a smaller typeface for the younger reader.
The story is another melodrama, starting Fritz Snyder, a younger European now living in Philadelphia who gets into an adventure on a trip to New Jersey. Fritz is an amateur detective with ventriloquism skills. This will help him in saving the young kidnapped daughter of a rich Irishman, and gives us a strange scene where he makes a severed head talk.
Readers might be turned off by his thick accent. I thought it strange that Fritz’s ethnicity kept changing, sometimes from page to page, being at times a Jew, a Dutchman, or a German. Was this caused by the various reprinting of the story over the years?
In addition to this work, the campaign gave us a reprint from the British penny dreadful series featuring Dick Turpin. Penny dreadfuls were similiar to many American dime novel series, being numbered series with a single character. These included series featuring characters such as Claude Duval, Spring-Heeled Jack, Black Bess, Robin Hood, and others.
Dick Turpin was a real-life English highwayman. The Black Bess series was a fictionalized series dealing with him published in 1866-68, and this volume was taken from a later series on Dick Turpin published by Aldine in the early 1900s, in particular #59, Among the Wreckers. Aldine’s works were comicbook-size, with nice color covers with cheap pulp paper. I’m not sure how long the series ran, but at had least 170 volumes. This story finds Dick Turpin, having been press-ganged on a British ship, now shipwrecked and with wreckers, outlaws who scavange such ships. I would like to see more of this series.
Nemeth has setup a website at MovingPictureReprintSeries.com and makes available the prior volumes from his Kickstarter campaigns. So if you missed out, you can get the past volumes. The next campaign went live for a volume with five-part story arc of the Alvarez Brothers from the Old Sleuth’s Own dime novel series. I’ve pledged and encourage others to check it out and do the same.
