Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Story At Daring Aventure Stories

This week on Daring Adventure Stories, we have a tale from Top Notch  Twice-a-Month Magazine, March 1, 1913.  It's the tale of a greedy shopkeeper and his comeuppance:


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I started Daring Adventure Stories to publish some of my own fiction, then I changed my mind an abandoned it (or at least put it on hold for later).  It seems to work much better to put my fiction on this blog where people can find it.

So that blog was just on hold, until this spring, when I was researching pulp fiction of the WWI era -- partly in preparation for writing "The Serial" (AKA The Misplaced Hero). I kept running across magazines on The Internet Archive which were barely readable.
The original scans were good, but the text versions either didn't exist at all, or were horrible, uncorrected, raw OCR work. It's better to skip those and just read the original scans in an image viewer like Preview or Photoshop.

I decided I wanted to make some of these stories available in a more readable format.  Just one story at a time.  So I started typing them up.

Yeah, typing.

See, even the best OCR sucks, and proofing is a painful process.  I type faster than I correct OCR.

These stories tend not to be polished classics.  They're from the earliest pulp magazines; titles like The Popular Magazine, and Top-Notch, and Detective Story.  Also Railroad Men's Magazine (which eventually became Argosy and All Story).  I also have some classier stories from The Strand, now and then.

Pulp in those days was not the hard-boiled stuff we associate with the name now. They were stories of every genre; romance, childrens' fiction, puzzler mysteries, westerns, slice-of-life.  The world was not quite as cynical as it would be just a decade later.  (Although the irony was often a little more heavy-handed.)

Some of the stories, like the previously published one "The Letter In The Mail" are prototypes of later Noir stories, just more moralistic, more innocent.

This month's story, "On The Rocks Of Success," is more of an everyday life sort of story, about a greedy grocery store owner, and his comeuppance. 

I plan to post stories on DAS on the fourth Tuesday of every month.

See you in the funny papers.

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