Beadle's New York Dime Library, No. 288

This issue of Beadle's Dime Novels (Vol. XXIII, No. 988, April 30, 1854) features "Electro Pete, the Man of Fire; or, The Wharf Rats of Locust Point," a Baltimore detective tale by Anthony P. Morris. Detective Mark Daniels of the West & Co. agency is summoned to the Mansion House hotel to investigate a jewel theft: a drummer named Dimble has lost a velvet belt containing diamonds worth ten thousand dollars from his locked, bolted fourth-story room. While examining the sealed chamber, Daniels is interrupted by reports of a disturbance in another guest's room. A beautiful young woman named Oriole St. Dyer recounts three nights of mysterious intrusions into her locked quarters—disturbances involving no apparent theft, though she possessed valuable jewelry. Most remarkably, during her final encounter with the intruder, she grasped what became a column of glowing flame shaped like a man and received an electric shock that knocked her unconscious. The narrative introduces both a locked-room robbery and a supernatural mystery involving electrical phenomena.