Price:
$0.99
ePublished by
December 2018
Originally published November 27, 1903
Nickel weekly
A nickel weekly from 1903, this is number 253 in the popular “Secret Service” series featuring “Old and Young King Brady, Detectives” which started January 27, 1899, and came out like clockwork every Friday for more than two decades—by which time well more than a thousand issues had been published. The Bradys and Brady the Banker; or, The Secret of the Old Santa Fe Trail begins with the New York sleuths headed eastward for home after a recently-solved case in New Mexico when they are abruptly thrown into another case involving a banker named Mike Brady, who tells them about a long-lost shipment of gold dust hidden somewhere along the Old Sante Fe Trail in the Taos mountains. Because the shipment rightly belongs to the Wells Fargo Company, a client of the detectives, they decide to postpone their trip home and solve the mystery of the missing gold.
At more than 26,000 words, this novella-sized work of pulp fiction, besides being an interesting and fun read, gives the reader a taste of what the masses were reading in the late 19th and early 20th century time period. This particular entry in the series is interesting for its description of the Wild West at the time.