Beadle's New York Dime Library, No. 408

# Catalog Note

This 1886 issue of Beadle's dime novel features the beginning of "The Vendetta of Death" by Albert W. Aiken, author of detective serials including "Wolves of New York" and "Joe Phenix, the Police Spy." The narrative opens in Shantyville, the squatter district near Central Park, where a dying woman named Mary Bull summons her estranged daughter—a young woman she hasn't seen since childhood. The daughter, now twenty-two, arrives cloaked and mysterious, having spent the past decade in Europe in a tumultuous marriage to an Italian con artist and adventurer. She recounts a checkered life: fleeing her convent education at twelve, eloping with the fraudulent nobleman, then wandering Europe in poverty, supporting herself variously as a musician, needleworker, actress, and street singer. After her husband's death in a London brawl, she answered her mother's newspaper advertisement and crossed the Atlantic. The deathbed reunion culminates in Mary Bull commissioning her daughter to execute a vendetta of revenge. The issue also contains brief reference to "Doc Grip, the Sporting Detective."