The emphasis in this issue is the Spanish–American War, just ended two months before the issue was published. The Battle of San Juan Hill (including Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders) and a romanticized telling of the sinking of the USS Merrimac as a block-ship are described or referred to in two stories (they must have been quickly written and submitted): "The Ninth Hero of the Merrimac", by John P. Ritter (complete in the issue) and Col. Aaron Ainsworth Burr's serialized "Through the Blockade" (the least well-written of the issue's offerings).
Most of the rest of the stories take place in exotic lands, tales of heroism and triumph. Frederick (author of many hundreds of Nick Carter novelettes) Van Rensselaer Dey's "The Brotherhood of Silence" takes place in Czarist Russia; Charles Edwards Barns' "A Fair Slave To the Mahdi" is a tense rescue story taking place in the Sudan (and easily one of the best written pieces in the issues). An exciting mail-carrier story takes place in Siberia.
William Taylor Adams (writing as Oliver Optic) has me hooked on his serialized "The Hermit's Secret", another falsely-accused-and-fighting-to-regain-his-name thrillers of the kind Hitchcock built a career on via novelists like John Buchan. I'm eager to get the November '98 issue to find out what happens next.
No comments:
Post a Comment