Books: Dimeworthy Writers

DIME NOVELS: Or, Following an Old Trail in Popular Literature—Edmund Pearson—Little, Brown ($3).

“Bang! Bang! Bang! Three shots rang out on the midnight air!”

That was how tradition required the 10¢ fictioneers to begin their lusty shockers. Author Pearson has collected prize examples of this U. S. phenomenon. The matter he quotes is alone worth the price. It is set out chronologically with a running commentary that, oddly enough, sometimes berates the authors, sometimes exalts them by comparison with today’s literary idols.

Dime novels were inaugurated by Manhattan Publishers Erastus & Irwin Beadle who sold the first five million between 1860-64. Who dared say that lordly persons were above them? There was Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan who emphatically admitted that Beadle’s Oonomoo the Huron fascinated him. The man who disliked it, opined the Senator, was unfit to live. In the Civil War the same novels did much to incite soldiers on both sides to deeds of astonishing gallantry. There were, indeed, four phases of the dime novel and its follower, the Nickel Library: 1) innocent stories of the American Revolution and early Indian warfare in the East; 2) similar tales of the great plains and the pioneer West; 3) strenuous stories of New York detectives such as Old Cap Collier and Old Sleuth, of cosmopolitan boys like Jack Harkaway, or rovers like Deadwood Dick; 4) respectable stories of righteous messenger boys, of Nick Carter, Diamond Dick, Jesse James and Yale’s hyper-athlete Frank Merriwell.

Righteousness, peculiarly Nordic chastity, and much bloodletting characterized the dime novels. At their worst they exhibited a style grandiose, bizarre, ornate; at their best they were active with verbs aplenty. They gave Russian and European pre-War children the idea that the U. S. was a land whose dust was completely bitten by redskins. At Manhattan book-auctions certain dime novels now bring between $2 and $22.

Author Edmund Lester Pearson, 49. celebrated his 20th wedding-anniversary last year. Born in Newburyport, a Harvard graduate, he is the result of 200 years of Massachusetts deacons. In 1927 he left a position with New York’s Public Library to write such unusual detective stories as Murder at Smutty Nose. He indulges a live scholarliness, particularly in the investigation and recital of historic murder cases.