The Bradys and the Boatmen; or, The Clew Found in the River

A nickel weekly originally published March 14, 1902, number 164 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 well more than a thousand issues had been published—The Bradys and the Boatmen features the Bradys trying to solve a murder which they stumble across one night when they come to the aid of a policeman walking his beat.  At the behest of the beat cop, they chase after a mysterious masked man carrying the severed hand of a woman.  When the man throws the hand into the river and disappears under the docks, the Bradys, in solving the mystery, find themselves at odds with a gang of river thieves.

At more than 24,000 words, this novella-sized work of pulp fiction, besides being an interesting and fun read, 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.