Just here the other day, when I was preparing the material for this little book, I happened upon an advertisement in a New York paper of an auction sale of a collection of so-called dime novels, dating back to the old Beadle's Boy's Library in the early eighties and coming on down through the years into the generation when Nick and Old Cap were succeeding some of the earlier favorites.I read off a few of the leading titles upon the list:
Bronze Jack, the California Thoroughbred; or, The Lost City of the Basaltic Buttes.A strange story of a desperate adventure after fortune in the weird, wild Apache land.By Albert W. Aiken.
Tombstone Dick, the Train Pilot; or, The Traitor's Trail.A story of the Arizona Wilds.By Ned Buntline.
The Tarantula of Taos; or, Giant George's Revenge.A tale of Sardine-box City, Arizona.By Major Sam S. (Buckskin Sam) Hall.
Redtop Rube, the Vigilante Prince; or, The Black Regulators of Arizona.By Major E. L. St. Vrain.
Old Grizzly Adams, the Bear Tamer; or, The Monarch of the Mountains.
Deadly Eye and the Prairie Rover.
Arizona Joe, the Boy Pard of Texas Jack.
Pacific Pete, the Prince of the Revolver.
Kit Carson, King of the Guides.
Leadville Nick, the Boy Sport; or, The Mad Miner's Revenge.
Lighthouse Lige; or, The Firebrand of the Everglades.
The Desperate Dozen; or, The Fair Fiend.
Nighthawk Kit; or, The Daughter of the Ranch.
Joaquin, the Saddle King.
Mustang Sam, the Wild Rider of the Plains.
Adventures of Wild Bill, the Pistol Prince, from Youth to his Death by Assassination.Deeds of Daring, Adventure and Thrilling Incidents in the Life of J. B. Hickok, known to the World as Wild Bill.
These titles and many another did I read, and reading them my mind slid back along a groove in my brain to a certain stable loft in a certain Kentucky town, and I said to myself that if I had a boy--say, about twelve or fourteen years old--I would go to this auction and bid in these books and I would back them up and reenforce them with some of the best of the collected works of Nick Carter and Cap Collier and Nick Carter, Jr., and Frank Reade, and I would buy, if I could find it anywhere, a certain paper-backed volume dealing with the life of the James boys--not Henry and William, but Jesse and Frank--which I read ever so long ago; and I would confer the whole lot of them upon that offspring of mine and I would say to him:
"Here, my son, is something for you; a rare and precious gift.
Read these volumes openly.Never mind the crude style in which most of them are written.It can't be any worse than the stilted and artificial style in which your school reader is written; and, anyhow, if you are ever going to be a writer, style is a thing which you laboriously must learn, and then having acquired added wisdom you will forget part of it and chuck the rest of it out of the window and acquire a style of your own, which merely is another way of saying that if you have good taste to start with you will have what is called style in writing, and if you haven't that sense of good taste you won't have a style and nothing can give it to you.
"Read them for the thrills that are in them.Read them, remembering that if this country had not had a pioneer breed of Buckskin Sams and Deadwood Dicks we should have had no native school of dime novelists.Read them for their brisk and stirring movement; for the spirit of outdoor adventure and life which crowds them; for their swift but logical processions of sequences; for the phases of pioneer Americanism they rawly but graphically portray, and for their moral values.Read them along with your Coopers and your Ivanhoe and your Mayne Reids.Read them through, and perhaps some day, if fortune is kinder to you than ever it was to your father, with a background behind you and a vision before you, you may be inspired to sit down and write a dime novel of your own almost good enough to be worthy of mention in the same breath with the two greatest adventure stories--dollar-sized dime novels is what they really are--that ever were written; written, both of them, by sure-enough writing men, who, I'm sure, must have based their moods and their modes upon the memories of the dime novels which they, they in their turn, read when they were boys of your age.
"I refer, my son, to a book called Huckleberry Finn, and to a book called Treasure Island."