The Bradys’ Singular Search; or, The Mystery of the Mississippi Steamer

A nickel weekly originally published June 21, 1912, number 700 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’ Singular Search; or, The Mystery of the Mississippi Steamer puts the Brady detective agency—Old King Brady, Young King Brady, and Alice—on the Mississippi River, chasing after a kidnapped baby and trying to solve the mystery of a long-lost heir. There is also a missing purser from a riverboat, which makes for three related cases at once. And then, after the Bradys are done with their work, there is a bonus story included in this issue: “A Terrible Experience,” about a Bengal tiger attack in rural New York.

At more than 28,000 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.