saw public print through the open-eye trademark of Allan Pinkerton and his detective
agency (motto ‘We Never Sleep’). Pinkerton’s casebook of reminiscences was an early
best-seller and became a plot source for many of the dime detective writers.
First of the new breed of city dicks was ‘Old Sleuth’, created by Harlan P. Halsey for
The Fireside Companion, a family story paper in 1872. Halsey used the pen-name of ‘Old
Sleuth’, and was thus able to write about other detectives he ‘knew’, such as Old Electricity
the Lightning Detective (1885). Old Sleuth, however, was not in fact old. He was a young
detective who regularly assumed the disguise of an old man. The gimmick caught on,
and in 1881 arrived ‘Old Cap Collier’ in a ‘real life mystery’ entitled The Bashful Victim of
the Elm City Tragedy. Not content, as was his predecessor, with one disguise, the Cap
had a repertoire of eighteen, ranging from ‘Fat Dutchman’ to ‘Masked Cavalier’, although
how frequently this latter was used in modern New York is unknown. He was also adept
at turning his clothes inside out in an instant. There would be over 700 novels of the
Old Cap published by 1898.
But the great Master of Disguise was undoubtedly Nick Carter, who made his
detecting debut in The New York Weekly in 1886. The Old Detective’s Pupil was subtitled
‘The Mysterious Crime of Madison Square’, and it was credited, as would be all the Nick
Carter stories, to Nick Carter himself. The author was in fact John Coryell, who wrote the
weekly stories for three years and withdrew into romance. The task was taken on by
Frederick Marmaduke Van Rennsselaer Dey, who proceeded to write one thousand Nick
Carter stories (as ‘Nick Carter’), over forty million words, before shooting himself in 1922.
Dey’s stories began with number one of the Nick Carter Library (1891), which turned into
the New Nick Carter Library (1897), soon to be renamed Nick Carter Weekly. With other
title changes this ran right through to 1915 when publishers Street and Smith turned it
into a ‘pulp’, the current craze, called Detective Story Magazine. Nick Carter was billed
as editor.
Nicholas Carter owed little to the classic English detective, Sherlock Holmes. A
handsome young man, son of one Sim Carter (murdered by gangsters), he is never seen
without his smart bow-tie, unless he is in one of his many disguises. These, arrayed
around the lettering in the title of his Weekly, included that of a hunchback involving a
false hump that lay ‘deeper than the coat or the flowered waistcoat that covered it. It
was deeper than the shirt beneath the heavy, coarse woollen undershirt he wore, in fact,
so that if the occasion should arise to remove his coat, as was likely to happen, the hump
was still there’. Carter, nicknamed ‘Little Giant’ (he was not much more than five feet
tall), was strong enough to tear four packs of cards in half and ‘lift a horse with ease,
and that, too, while a heavy man is seated in the saddle’. Nick is the longest lived of any
fictional detective in the world, spanning radio, films and television with ease, and
entering the James Bond era of Secret Agents in a new series of paperbacks.
In 1882 one, Frank A.Munsey, a telegraph operator, left Augusta, Maine, for the lights
of New York City, with a long-standing ambition to publish a weekly children’s magazine
of uplifting fiction. And on 2 December of that year number one of Golden Argosy went
on sale. It was subtitled ‘Freighted with Treasures for Boys and Girls’, and within its
eight pages carried the opening chapter of ‘Do and Dare, a Brave Boy’s Fight for a
Fortune’. This serial was written by Horatio Alger Jr, an author whose basic theme—if a
poor boy perseveres he will win fame and fortune—would eventually fill 118 books, sell
258 POPULAR LITERATURE: COMICS, DIME NOVELS, PULPS AND PENNY DREADFULS