A complete, restored issue of Pulp Fiction from 1877 — all 16 pages of painted-cover fiction magazines that launched science fiction, horror, and hardboiled crime, free to page through at ComicBooks.com.

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A complete issue · 16 pages · 1877

Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 11

1877 · Free to read

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About this issue

The Two Detectives; or, The Fortunes of a Bowery Girl by Albert W. Aiken (1877) opens with two parallel scenes. In a basement saloon called "The Dive" on the Bowery, a sixteen-year-old orphan girl defies Giacomo (called "Jocky"), the Italian proprietor who has raised her, refusing his demand that she steal. When he attempts to strike her, she fights back, striking him under the ear before he draws a knife. Simultaneously, uptown in a mansion on Thirty-first Street, wealthy retired merchant Obadiah Ollkoff confronts his feeble nephew Algernon about mounting debts, informing him this is the final time he will pay them and that Algernon will not inherit his considerable fortune. The narrative juxtaposes the violent struggles of street life against the mercenary calculations of the wealthy.

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