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Apaches (III). The Apaches (III) appeared in the German dime novel Apachen - Aus dem Dunkel der Großstadt #1-69 (1920-1921).

These are not the Native American people but rather “apaches” in the Victorian sense: members of a street gang. The Apaches are active in New York and have a series of unusual adventures, fighting Mad Scientist engineers, the Mafia, homunculus-makers, "The Vampire of New York," the Captain Mors-like "King of the Air," the “Hypnosis Institute,” the "Devil of Wall Street," the "Slaves of the Insanity Gas," and the "Sailboat of Death.”

The Apaches appear in stories with titles like “The Elf Dance in the Woods,” “The Invisible Lodge,” and “The Highway Robbers.”

* I've included the Apaches (III) in the Best of the Encyclopedia category because of Apachen - Aus dem Dunkel der Großstadt's ideasplosions, which were not only colorful and imaginative but ran cross-genre to where the Apaches (III) would normally have been. The Apaches (III) were "street apaches," homeless members of a street gang. Traditionally, and especially in German heftroman fiction, the types of adventures the Apaches (III) would have had would be limited according to the borders of the street apache subgenre of fiction. You might get the Mafia, but most often the criminals would be other street gangs, the police, and rich people. Not Apachen, however. Heavy elements of the fantastic were a regular occurrence in the heftroman, as you can see, and the nameless writer(s) of Apachen didn't balk at borrowing tropes from many other genres. You never knew what you were going to get with an issue of Apachen, and that's both laudable and exceptional enough to elevate the heftroman to Best Of status. 

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