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. 534

1887 · Free to read

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About this issue

The Way of the Transpressor by Edward L. Wheeler, opening a serial in this issue of Beadle and Adams' weekly, is a western crime and detective narrative. In Red Dog, New Mexico Territory, the town is convulsed following the brutal murder of Alonzo Israel, a respected Hebrew banker and broker, whose burglar-proof safe is simultaneously robbed of a substantial fortune. Sheriff Bill Booth suspects an expert criminal from among the town's floating population of miners, cowboys, and gamblers. A rough, seemingly inebriated man calling himself Old Sly Slater, claiming to be a "Premier Sleuth," enters the syndicate members' hotel room to solicit a detective contract, but is dismissed. That evening at the Jockey Saloon, a well-dressed young gambler named Jolly Johnson loses heavily at poker to the dangerous gunman Hair Trigger. When Johnson stakes his jewelry, Sly Slater abruptly intervenes in the transaction.

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