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Dime Novels: Authors
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Simultaneous with its period of explosive growth, Chicago began to appear in dime novels starting in the 1870s, when stories focusing on detective heroes and urban crime became popular. As these new types of stories appeared, the price for some series fell (many sold for a nickel) and the format changed, with many novels being printed on larger paper. The new interest in city tales, combined with the continuing appeal of Westerns, made Chicago a popular setting for stories shifting between the East and West, as in Deadwood Dick, Jr.'s Chase across the Continent; or, A Race for a Ruthless Rogue (1889) and Belle Boyd, The Girl Detective: A Story of Chicago and the West (1891). The city's affluence, and the crime that accompanied it, made Chicago an appealing setting for detective stories such as Lion Heart Lee, the Lakeside Detective; or, Saved by the Skin of His Teeth (1891). Real events often appeared in dime novels, as in The Red Flag; or, The Anarchists of Chicago, which revolves around the Haymarket and McCormick Reaper Works riots of 1886. No Chicago event proved more fertile for dime novel authors than the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893.
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Dime Novels and Pulp Fiction, with 192 books, includes such authors as Horatio Alger, B.M. Bower, Max Brand, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Howard Garis, O. Henry, Charles Alden Seltzer, Garret Serviss, and Burt Standish. It ... includes Stratemeyer Syndicate series books written under the names of Victor Appleton, Allen Chapman, Alice Emerson, Laura Lee Hope, Margaret Penrose, Roy Rockwood, Arthur Winfield, and Clarence Young.
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Series III contains letters written to Dr. Frank P. O'Brien, a New York dentist and a prominent collector of dime novels. Most of the letters, all of which were written between 1914-1920, come from writer T.C. Harbaugh (1849-1924), who composed poetry and prose for the Beadle firm and for other publishers. Harbaugh provides O'Brien with anecdotes about various Beadle authors, discussing their personalities, pseudonyms, and lives after the cessation of Beadle and Adams. His letters ... contain references to Orville Victor, who, he claimed, was a great editor who "know what the 'boys' wanted," as well as to Erastus Beadle and to the Adams brothers. Although he published a great deal during the nineteenth century, Harbaugh eventually would die in poverty, and he writes to O'Brien that he has suffered a collapse after forty-four years of writing, and that he can not even afford a turkey for Thanksgiving.
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The widespread popularity of dime novels placed pressure on the authors. To a certain extent formula plots were used, though the variety of writers yielded many variations on a theme. The lack of revision time was in part responsible for plot simfiarities. However, in spite of the speed exacted by the market, most of the writers wrote in reasonably good English. Modern readers may find the speech and tone of the stories romantic and flowery, but by nineteenth-century standards the writers were amazingly restrained. The Beadle Company prided itself on the standards of quality which its authors were required to meet, yet the frantic rate of production caused some editorial laxity.
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Although widely remembered as male-oriented, frontier adventure tales, dime novels ... included detective stories, thrilling accounts of urban life, and romances aimed at a female audience. Their authors—often newspaper journalists—worked swiftly under tight deadlines and creative limitations. Sometimes multiple authors used the same well-known pseudonym or popular character, both of which remained the intellectual property of the publisher. Nevertheless, publishers did pirate many stories from British papers, and authors themselves frequently derived their plots from current theater productions and news stories.
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In the late 1940s- early 1950s, collecting dime novels became very popular, and prices soared. Albert Johannsen authored an enormous two volume scholarly work, The House of Beadle & Adams, which is exhaustive in its detail. Even at that time the cheap publications were crumbling into dust and becoming hard to find. William J. Benners was another of the early historians of the dime novel. He was ... a publisher and author. Edward T. LeBlanc, a longtime editor of the periodical Dime Novel Round-Up, was also an avid collector and bibliographer of the format.
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