Nick Carter, in Nick Carter, in
"Zanabayah, the Terrible, or, Nick Carter's Struggle With the Vitic King"
Those of you unfamiliar with the redoubtable Nick Carter can be forgiven for not understanding his place in popular culture. He is the most published character in American literature--yes, even more than Superman and Batman--and the second-most published character in world literature, behind Sherlock Holmes. (Bold words, I know, but it's the truth).
Carter first appeared in a dime novel (New York Weekly) in 1886, a year before Holmes. He was an immediate hit, and over the next sixty-nine years appeared in over 5000 stories in dime novels, pulps, comic books, and radio shows. (From 1964 through 1990 he appeared in over 250 paperbacks as "the Executioner" and "the Killmaster," but those aren't the real Nick Carter). Carter was not the first recurring detective in American or British literature, nor the first dime novel detective, nor even the first dime novel or story paper detective to be a hit with the readers--that would be Old Cap. Collier, from 1883--but Carter was far and away the most popular of the dime novel and story paper detectives. For roughly thirty five years he was the iconic action figure in American popular culture, on a scale scarcely imaginable today. (Imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak. Now imagine weekly stories being churned out about him for forty years, across multiple magazines, with innumerable imitations, both American and international). (I have more on Nick Carter at the zombie version of my old Nick Carter page).
Carter is a major figure in the history of American popular culture. He provided the first significant pop culture supervillain, Dr. Jack Quartz, years before Arthur Conan Doyle created Professor Moriarty. Carter's upbringing--he was raised by his father to be a physically perfect human and the ultimate crime-fighter--was the model for Doc Savage and for Philip Wylie's Gladiator, which was the model for Superman. Carter, with his innumerable gadgets, was the model for that aspect of Batman. As the first popular culture hero designed by his publishers to be permanently ongoing without an end, Nick Carter was the model for the major pulp heroes like Doc Savage, the Shadow, and the Spider, and for every comic book hero, past and present. As the first detective character to mix in the fantastic with the mimetic, Carter was the model for all manner of genre-busting heroes, across media.
Carter was important, is what I'm saying.
So I've scanned one of my Nick Carter issues, to make it publicly available, so everyone can enjoy it, much as I did with Electric Bob's Big Black Ostrich. It's a dime novel from 1907, written by dime novel story machine Frederic van Rensselaer Dey (who was Lester Dent before Lester Dent) so the prose is dated, to say the least. But I think "Zanabayah, the Terrible" is interesting a (very) early science fiction/detective story--not the first in the Carter canon, btw--as well as a glimpse at what the dime novels and Carter were like at their peak.