Dime Novels, Penny Dreadfuls

So, I've had a couple of people comment on the style of story I'm writing with the entire Adventures of Black Mask and Pale Rider. First, why I'm doing this. That answer is easy enough. Because I can. Because it's fun, it's entertaining, and it's something a lot of people have said they enjoy.

Second, the question has come up, what kind of story is this? What genre does it fit into? Well, it is a western, with magic undertones. Currently, the stories have touched heavily on the myths that we've all come to hear about, vampire, ghostly apparitions and so on. I'm not gonna give more away, because that'll ruin the Wylde Hunt. But what these emulate the most are Dime Novels.

It's generally agreed the first true dime novel was Beadle's Dime Novel, release on June 9, 1860. Many of these dime novels were reprints of serial series from what was known as story papers. Many story papers were tabloid size right up to full broadsheet newspaper size, eight pages in length, they contained stories and articles. The Dime Novels often collected these serial stories together in one one hundred page book. And they were numbered for the purpose of the series.

A lot of these dime novels have continued publication right up into the 1940's where they became known as pulp fiction. Both dime novels and pulp fiction novels were printed on pulp paper, the latter receiving it's name from that paper process. Dime novels often always had wood cut pictures on the front. The first few released did not have any pictures, but popularity of the style prompted many different competitors to begin this process. Beadle's New Dime Novels broke from trend and produced the first dime novels with colour.

Dime novels were popular in the United States in the late 1800's, and proved to be much like modern day comic books or television. They were cheap to purchase, easy to read and caught on quite quickly, especially with their handy pocket size. A common size for a dime novel was 4 inches wide by 6 and a half inches tall.

Often, the prices of dime novels were not always ten cents. Sometimes they were five cents and even 15 cents. The term became common place with many novels of this type, due to the fact that most were quickly written, and published a week at a time.

In Britain and all of her possessions during the early 1800's and into the 1900's, similar books of similar style were called Penny Dreadfuls or Shilling Shockers. Often times stories written in England were reprinted in the United States as dime novels, and vise versa. At the time there were no royalty issues to deal with, so reprinting stories was not an illegal process. Penny Dreadfuls and Shilling Shockers were often directed to an adolescent male audience, most often those young men who were part of working class families.

The first Penny Dreadfuls appears in the 1830's, originally thought of for the entire working class family, but by the 1850's this changed to the more teenage market. By the mid-1890's Alfred Harmsworth decided to do something that was widely perceived as the corruption of the Penny Dreadfuls. The Half-penny Dreadful was released, producing the same lurid, quickly written fiction, all for the price of half a penny. In the beginning of the Half-Penny Dreadful's life, they published moral, high-minded tales, but eventually gave into the more popular genre of fanciful fiction. These knockoffs, as it were, started the decline of the Penny Dreadful. A.A. Milne once said, “Harmsworth killed the penny dreadful by the simple process of producing the ha’penny dreadfuller.”

There are several characters from both the Penny Dreadfuls and the Dime Novels that survived well into the late 1900's. Nick Carter, Dixon Hawke, Jack Harkaway and Sexton Blake all had successful runs as recurring characters, even receiving their own series at the time. In Britain, many Penny Dreadfuls became British comic magazines.

Until every book becomes digital...

...keep 'em flyin'!