Dropping a dime

What exactly is a dime novel? According to a fascinating new book, “Dashing Diamond Dick and Other Classic Dime Novels” (Penguin: 344 pp., $15 paper), the form had its roots in the 1860s, when publisher Irwin P. Beadle developed a series of short, lurid fiction titles called Beadle’s Dime Novels. The genre hit its stride in the late 19th and early 20th centuries  as America became a mass culture with the technology — including “advances in printing methods and papermaking” and “the development of communication and transportation systems” — to produce books that were disposable and cheap. Dime novels were mostly potboilers, short (around 100 pages) and full of action: westerns, detective stories, love sagas and novels about sports.

“Dashing Diamond Dick” features five dime novels, all originally published between 1894 and 1904. Edited by J. Randolph Cox, the book includes a Frank Merriwell baseball novel (“Frank Merriwell’s Finish or, Blue Against Crimson”) and a Nick Carter mystery (“Dr. Quartz II, at Bay; or, A Man of Iron Nerve”), as well as a handful of other less iconic efforts that give readers the flavor of the form.

It ain’t literature, but it is fun, and not just for the adventures (which — let’s be frank — don’t all age well). No, it’s more the sense of catching a glimpse of American popular culture while it was still in a nascent state, in the process of becoming, and, as such, more than a little bit weird and wild. What these novels offer is a look at another America, at its fascinations and entertainments. They also laid the groundwork for 1930s pulp fiction, which — much like the blues and baseball — ultimately rose above disposable status to become a quintessentially American popular art form, a throwaway genre that transcends itself.

David L. Ulin