Friday Favorites - Daring Adventure Stories

A long time ago, I started a blog which I intended to use for serialized fiction. I serialized one of my novels -- the odd ball "The Wife of Freedom" there -- and then just let it vegetate.

In the meantime, I have been doing a lot of research on old pulp magazines of about the WWI era. There's a lot of material out there on the web, but a lot of it is in very bad shape, at least in terms of readability.

For instance, The Internet Archive has every single public domain issue of The Strand. You know, that's the magazine where all of the Sherlock Holmes stories were published. Unfortunately, the copies they have are image scans and very raw OCR text. The text is downright unreadable.

Unlike Project Gutenberg, the Archive hasn't organized legions of proofers, nor developed an editing process. You get what you get.

I have decided that, even though I don't have time to do whole issues or anything like that, I will make some of the stories in these archives readable and post them over on the Daring Adventure Stories blog. It's very very time consuming, and so I won't do it much. I'll probably "sponsor" each post with an ad for one of my books at the bottom of the post each time.

I may even put in a donate button.

But I don't really expect anything from it. I just think it's fun.

So here, for the first story of the new blog, I will give you "The Tramp And The Tiger" a comic story of adventure on the high seas, in which the crew of a tramp steamer faces off, not so bravely, with a three-quarters grown clouded Manchurian tiger whose tail is in doubt.

This was the lead story in the July 1915 issue of The Strand. It's about 8500 words. I have only put in three of the illustrations.

See you in the funny papers.