The Bradys’ Desert Trail; or, Lost on the Deadman’s Run

A nickel weekly from 1905, number 318 in the popular “Secret Service” series featuring “Old and Young King Brady, Detectives” which started January 27, 1899, and came out like clockwork every Friday for more than two decades—by which time more than a thousand issues had been published—The Bradys’ Desert Trail takes place in the general vicinity of Reno, Nevada, as the two famous New York detectives, hired by a Wall Street mine owner to track down and recover a hijacked shipment of gold bullion and two kidnap victims, are forced to cross a dangerous desert at a place called Deadman’s Run.

At more than 25,000 words, this is a novella-sized work of pulp fiction that gives the reader a taste of what the masses were reading in the late 19th and early 20th century time period.

Preparing old books (or, as in this case, weekly magazines) for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.