A complete, restored issue of Pulp Fiction from 1887 — 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 · 1887

Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 530

1887 · Free to read

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About this issue

The Cowboy Pirates of the Rio Grande by Col. Prentiss Ingraham continues in this issue with the opening chapters of a Texas adventure and romance story. The narrative begins in New York, where attorney Kennard Kemp receives a mysterious client—an adventurer named Keene Kendall with an elaborate scheme to obtain a fortune. Kendall describes how he married a wealthy heiress (now an opera singer) under false pretenses, and proposes that Kemp help him claim an even larger inheritance left by a mining magnate in New Mexico. The plot involves forging documents, ensuring the opera singer's death, and arranging the miner's murder through hired means. Kemp agrees to the criminal compact. The narrative then shifts to San Antonio, Texas, where the opera singer—the heiress—prepares a dangerous journey into the countryside, ignoring warnings about Comanche attacks and outlaws known as the Cowboy Pirates of the Rio Grande.

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Each page has its own page — the cartoon, who’s in it, and what the satire means.