Dime Novels (February 1956 | Volume: 7, Issue: 2)

Dime Novels

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Authors: Mary Noel

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February 1956 | Volume 7, Issue 2


His sentence was finished in a ringing shriek, for Calamity had drawn a revolver and shot him, even while his sarcastic words left his lips, and he fell to the ground, wounded through the breast.

“ ‘So much for your lyin’, you miserable whelp!’ the girl cried, wrought suddenly to a high pitch of anger. ‘If I was dishonored once, by one such as you, no man’s defiling touch has reached me since …’

“Now she dashed away through the narrow gulch, catching with delight long breaths of the perfume of flowers which met her nostrils at every onward leap of her horse, piercing the gloom of the night with her dark lovely eyes, searchingly, lest she should be surprised; lighting a cigar at full motion …”

Attracted by the glowing panatela, four desperadoes leap from ambush, Colts Hashing, but this vintage cover girl simply rides them down, amid “howls of pain and rage, and curses too vile to repeat here,” and gallops off unscathed, whooping like a Comanche.

Here, in capsule form, we have the prototype of the classic dime novel scene, with a lair sampling of its normal ingredients—action and sudden death, virtue preserved and ambush outwitted, rough talk and high-flown writing. For those who appreciate the rarer spices in this vanished literary cupboard, there are finer points—the complicated syntax, delivered at a dead run by the leading character; the anticlimactical epithet (“whelp̶;); the new twist on the fate-worsethan-death; the totally unexplained villains; the note of pious forbearance by the author (“curses too vile to repeat here”); the difficult but admirable teat (“lighting a cigar at lull motion”). That Calamity can do this while also bending both nostrils to the heady prairie flora only goes to show that the killer behind the gun is really a girl at heart. Characterization in the dime novel was terse. This, for example, is the entire description of one Silas Rodgers: ”… a man honest and upright alter the fashion of frontiersmen. He was brave, and had shot two or three in brawls, but was not regarded as quarrelsome.”

During the hall century of the popularity of the dime novel, from 1860 to about 1910, millions of boys, vigorous parental opposition notwithstanding, luxuriated in this imaginative world. They took their reading straight, without benefit of “comics,” and in the closest, dimmest, smallest possible print—although even this could be reduced in size if, at the end of the yarn, the cascade of words outran the space, so that the final episodes might well be visible only to those equipped with magnifying glasses. The only visual lure was the cover picture.

The problem of the age, apparently,