The Nick Carter Mysteries began with Ormond G. Smith and John Russell Coryell’s “The Old Detective's Pupil; or, The Mysterious Crime of Madison Square” (New York Weekly, Sept. 18, 1886). Smith (1860-1933) was the son of Francis Smith, the founder of publisher Street & Smith. Ormond Smith succeeded his father as the head of the firm in 1887. Coryell (1851-1924) was a journalist and dime novel writer.

Nick Carter, in his heyday, was one of the most famous detectives in fiction, and his appearances–in dime novels, novels, movies, radio shows, pulps, comic strips, and comic books–number well over four thousand. Although several dozen authors wrote Nick Carter stories, the author who wrote the most Carter stories was Frederic van Rensselaer Dey (1861-1922). Dey produced several hundred Nick Carter stories, starting out on The Nick Carter Library when the magazine began in 1891.

Carter was an all-American detective who was visually modeled on Eugen Sandow (1867-1925), an internationally famous Prussian strongman. In Carter’s first appearance he is described in this way:

Giants were like children in his grasp. He could fell an ox with one blow of his small, compact fist. Old Sim Carter had made the physical development of his son one of the studies of his life. Only one of the studies, however. Young Nick's mind was stored with knowledge--knowledge of a peculiar sort. His gray eyes had, like an Indian's, been trained to take in minutest details fresh for use. His rich, full voice could run the gamut of sounds, from an old woman's broken, querulous quack to the deep, hoarse notes of a burly ruffian. And his handsome face could, in an instant, be distorted into any one of a hundred types of unrecognizable ugliness. He was a master of disguise, and could so transform himself that even old Sim could not recognise him. And his intellect, naturally keen as a razor blade, had been incredibly sharpened by the judicious cultivation of the old man.¹

Nick’s father, the famous detective “Old Sim Carter,” began Nick’s training when the boy was only a child. Old Sim’s goal was to make Nick as great a man as possible, and so put Nick through a wide range of physical and mental tests and brought him up to be a perfect physical and mental specimen. Nick is strong enough to “lift a horse with ease...while a heavy man is seated in the saddle....he can place four packs of playing cards together, and tear them in halves between his thumbs and fingers.”² Carter was schooled in every possible area of knowledge that might conceivably have to do with crime-solving, including the sciences, various languages, art and physiology. He made use of all the latest technology, including cars, monoplanes, and his own yacht, The Gull. And he used gadgets, such as his coat of chain mail, a gift of the Mikado of Japan, and the two small pistols held in spring loaded holsters up each sleeve of his coat.

As an adult Nick was the greatest detective in the country. He worked for pay but was primarily motivated by a desire to see justice triumph and evil thwarted; his goal was to “aim for the right and for righting wrongs.”³ He lived on Madison Avenue and worked out of New York City, but he traveled around the U.S. and the world on cases. Carter was square-jawed, noble and upright, bronze skinned, resolutely honest, and never gave in to temptation. Although he was only 5'4", he was extremely tough. When being tough wasn't enough, he had his revolvers, two of which he kept up his sleeves in spring loaders; one jerk of his arms brought them into his hands fully cocked. He had “little steel tools of the finest temper”⁴ concealed about his body, along with bowpipes, pinchers, and any other tools which might assist him. Nick was a master of disguise and had a few preferred identities, such as Thomas “Old Thunderbolt” Bolt, a shaggy and unkempt country detective who kept an office entirely separate from Nick's.

Carter’s longevity and popularity made him hugely influential. The Nick Carter stories were enormously popular both within the United States and, following the 1905 eruption of dime novels on to foreign markets (see: The Buffalo Bill Adventures), in Europe, Russia, the Near East, and North Africa. Numerous dime novel detectives, both American and otherwise, were modeled on him; Nat Pinkerton, perhaps the second-most popular fictional detective in Europe from 1907 to 1915 and the third-most popular fictional detective in Europe from 1915 to 1933, was a blatant lift of Nick Carter, taking only the Pinkerton name from Allan Pinkerton (1819-1884), founder of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, but in all other respects being modeled on Nick Carter.

Carter’s influence extended beyond his immediate contemporaries, however. Many aspects of the Carter stories are models for characters in the pulps in the 1920s and 1930s. Carter’s origin is remarkably similar to Henry W. Ralston, John Nanovic, and Lester Dent’s bronzed übermensch Doc Savage’s, and several elements of Carter’s approach to detecting, from the guises to the separate identity maintained at another office to the band of agents, were also used by Walter B. Gibson’s crime-fighting vigilante The Shadow. Carter uses a number of gadgets, including super-explosives, which several pulp characters would later use, including Lester Dent’s Click Rush, the Gadget Man. Doc Savage, the Shadow, and Click Rush were all published by Street & Smith, the publisher of Nick Carter’s adventures, and it is clear that the editorial staff of Street & Smith always kept Carter’s success in mind when giving input to later writers on the creation of pulp heroes.

But the most apposite comparison for Nick Carter is Sexton Blake (see: The Sexton Blake Mysteries). Carter and Blake are informally linked and similar in several ways. Like Blake, Carter’s character evolved to match the changing environment. When Carter debuted he was a standard dime novel detective character in the mold of Old King Brady (see: The Old King Brady Mysteries) and Old Cap. Collier (see: The Old Cap. Collier Mysteries). Within a decade, after Sherlock Holmes (See: The Sherlock Holmes Mysteries) had become popular in America, Carter changed and became, like Blake, a Holmesian genius, a brilliant consulting gentleman detective. Carter’s Golden Age preceded Blake’s and ran, roughly, from 1891 to 1913. During the era of the pulps, in the 1920s and 1930s, Carter became more of a pulp detective, moving away from Holmes and toward Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, though never losing the Carter outlook. Like Blake, Carter changed after World War Two and became a more realistic detective, with less colorful and more drab adventures.

As with Blake, the quality of the Carter stories varied considerably. Carter never had writers the level of Gwyn Evans or George Phillips, but Frederic van Rensselaer Dey, the best of the Carter writers, could reach imaginatively pulpish heights which provided excitement, if not literary quality. Carter had a regular cast of supporting characters, like Blake. Carter’s was much larger than Blake’s, however, and changed over time, so that characters grew older, married, and disappeared from Carter’s life in a more naturalistic manner than the Eternal Now of the Blake stories. Nick’s first assistant was Patsy Murphy, a bootblack who became a full-fledged detective and eventually married a beautiful South American woman, Adelina de Mendoza, who became one of Nick’s most valuable agents. Nick later adopts Chickering Valentine, a teenaged Nevada ranch hand who is a double for Nick, and Chickering, later “Chick Carter,” begins helping his adopted father solve crimes as well as working on his own. Chick becomes the Tinker to Carter’s Sexton Blake. Chick’s cousin Cora Chickering appears and assists Nick on a few cases. Nick is also helped by a brilliant schoolgirl, Ida Jones, and Pop-eye, a street waif. Other assistants included Nick’s cousins, Nellie and Warwick “Wick” Carter, and Nick’s butlers Peter and Joseph and his chauffeur Danny Maloney.

The links between Sexton Blake and Nick Carter extend into the real world of publishing. In 1906 the demand for Nick Carter and Sexton Blake stories was so fierce that Street & Smith, the publisher of Nick Carter, came to an agreement with Amalgamated Press, the British owners of Sexton Blake: each company would allow the other to rewrite the stories of their most popular hero. This led to duplicated stories and the occasional bleed over from one corpus of stories to another, as when, in 1906, Nick acquired a Cuban bloodhound named Pedro, just like Blake’s bloodhound.

There were some differences between Carter and Blake, of course. One of the less deliberate was the differing approaches to the ethnic makeup of the individual casts. Blake’s cast was almost entirely white and British, with only exceptions being We-Wee Griff, a racist caricature of a Chinese boy who assisted Blake before Tinker arrived; the French adventuress Mademoiselle Yvonne Cartier; and Lobangu, an African warrior who was a virtual duplicate of H. Rider Haggard’s Umslopogaas (see: The Allan Quatermain Adventures). Nearly every other non-British and non-American character, or non-white character was a scoundrel or villain, from the Chinese Prince Wu Ling to the Egyptian Prince Menes to the Haitian voodoo queen Marie Galante to the “secret Empire of the Blacks” conspiracy.

Carter, on the other hand, had a much more multi-ethnic supporting cast, and the stories presented them in a positive manner. Among his assistants and friends were: “Ah Toon,” the private bodyguard and royal detective to the Emperor of China; M. Gereau, the “acting chief of the Paris secret police;” “Talika, the Geisha Girl,” a Japanese detective (and possibly the first female Asian detective in all of mystery fiction); and Demetrius Rackapolo, a Turkish secret service agent. When Nick founded his “detective school for boys” in 1897, one of his prize students, and someone who replaced Chick Carter for a time, was Ten-Ichi, the son of the Mikado; Ten-Ichi is competent, speaks perfect English, is a master gadgeteer, and is almost as good at jiu-jitsu as Nick. In 1905 Ten-Ichi married June Lamartaine, a French woman, in an act of miscegenation quite remarkable for detective fiction of the time. And in the 1920s chauffeur Danny Maloney was replaced by a series of Filipino characters. In each case the non-American characters in the Carter stories are portrayed far more positively than the non-British, non-white characters in the Blake stories, with Ten-Ichi being nearly as formidable a detective as Nick himself. In one 1907 storyline Nick fell in love with a Bolivian woman of Indian/Old Norse descent, and the story ended with Nick announcing that he would marry her.

Another aspect in which the Blake stories differ from the Carter stories is the latter’s use of an internal continuity. Although the Blake stories acknowledged, in vague terms, that Sexton Blake had fought a particular criminal more than once, the events of earlier stories were not referred to, and Blake and his friends were always portrayed in an Eternal Now. The Carter stories, on the other hand, were conscious of the years and in many cases decades of stories which had preceded them, and referred to previous events on a semi-regular basis. Time passed in the universe of Nick Carter--slowly and sometimes inconsistently, so that some characters would age quickly and others, like Nick, slowly, but time did pass. The most prominent example of this attention to continuity is Nick Carter’s wife, Ethel, who appeared in the first storyline and was a semi-regular for fifteen years before being killed by Dazaar the Arch Fiend, one of Nick’s enemies. This death was referred to in passing several times over the years. Chick Carter’s first wife was murdered by another of Nick’s enemies, Zelma the Female Fiend; Chick married again, and his son grew up and eventually joined Nick’s agency. Students from Nick’s school for detectives appeared for years as Nick’s assistants. And when some of Carter’s enemies died, their brothers or sons would appear, years later, to attempt to avenge their fathers or siblings.

Another difference is their respective approaches to the fantastic. Fantastika was relatively rare in the Blake stories, but the Nick Carter stories made use of it far more often. Lost Race Stories were particularly common: Nick found a Lost Race in a hidden valley in the Tibetan Himalayas, one in the foothills of the Andes in southern Bolivia, and one in a Sacred Valley in Nepal. The natives of the Himalayan Lost City were blond-haired, white-skinned Aryans who were masters of “vibrational science.” They communicated with each other by “specific vibrations” and could kill with those vibrations. The natives had such advanced science that they drew electricity from the air itself and used it to power their transparent aircraft. The Bolivians were Amazons who planned on conquering the world. And the Nepalese were masters of electricity and vibration, controlled “vitic energy” (the life force), and had flying machines powered by the “gaseous residue” of the super-element currieonium.⁵

As with the Sexton Blake stories, much of the excitement (and for the modern reader the enjoyment) of the Nick Carter stories comes from the villains, rather than the comparatively colorless Carter himself. Carter’s Rogues Gallery was, if anything, even more colorful and impressive than Sexton Blake’s. Foremost among Nick’s arch-enemies was the sociopathic vivisector Doctor Quartz (see: The Doctor Quartz Mysteries). Quartz had students who also plagued Carter, most notably Zanoni the Woman Wizard. Many of Carter’s enemies were beautiful, capable, and homicidal women, characters with names like Scylla the Sea Robber, Zelma the Female Fiend, Princess Olga, tiger chief of the Russian Nihilists, the Bird of Paradise, Diana the Arch Demon, and Inez Navarro, the Beautiful Demon. Two of the most memorable were Zanoni and Dazaar the Arch Fiend. Zanoni murdered her own sister, possessed potent hypnotic power, and was a genius at inventing poisons. When Carter told her not to “make love” to him, Zanoni responded, "Have no fear, my pretty man, my cornucopia of driveling goodness. When I make love to you, it will be to your articulated skeleton--to your empty, fleshless skull--to your heart preserved in alcohol and your liver thrown to the dogs."

Dazaar the Arch Fiend was a beautiful criminal mastermind who was capable of throwing a knife across a street and having it land point first in a door lock. She was a master of disguise and had trained six other women to assume her identity while she went her way committing crimes. She was given to inventive methods of killing her enemies, whether by inserting radium into the sweatbands of men’s hats, using the Maiden of Steel, a deadlier version of the Iron Maiden, or simply throwing hand-made knives at them from hundreds of yards away. Sometimes Dazaar claimed to be a Tibetan lama, other times a Russian princess named Irma Plavatski.

There was also the gambler Burton Quintard, Nick’s first recurring adversary; the six Dalney brothers of upstate New York, who were given to vivisection and collecting people’s skeletons by ripping them straight from their bodies; the six Bulwer sisters, three sets of identical twins who were all possessed of an unnatural speed, skill, and accuracy with handguns; the adventuress Mademoiselle Valeria, not dissimilar to Sexton Blake's Mme. Yvonne de Cartier; Captain Sparkle the yacht pirate; Codman the Poisoner; Ordway the Unaccountable Crook; Prince Sang Tu of the Yellow Tong; Madge Morley, the Dangerous Woman; Praxatel of the Iron Arm, dime novels’ first cyborg; “bare-faced” Jimmy Duryea, the “gentleman burglar” (see: The Gentleman Thief); Gaston Dupont, similar to Maurice Leblanc’s Arsène Lupin (see: The Arsène Lupin Mysteries); Gustave Rogler, a genius of crime, comparable to Professor Moriarty (see: “The Adventure of the Final Problem”), and a man who left a symbol of vengeance, a purple spot, on the foreheads of his victims; and hundreds more.]

Finally, like the Sexton Blake stories, the Nick Carter stories featured a number of crossovers with other characters. Several real people appeared in the Carter stories; for almost a decade Carter took orders from Inspector Thomas Byrnes (see: The Thomas Byrnes Mysteries), and Carter met or worked with, among others, Tsar Nicholas, Eugen Sandow, the early anti-Mafia crusader Joseph Petrosino (1860-1909), and Teddy Roosevelt. Carter also encountered the Street & Smith cowboy hero Ted Strong, Munro magazines’ Quaker detective Old Broadbrim, and Charles O’Malley, an Irish detective who is essentially the protagonist of Charles Lever’s Charles O’Malley, the Irish Dragoon (1838).

Print: Frederic van Rensselaer Dey, Nick Carter, Detective: Fiction’s Most Celebrated Detective, Six Astonishing Adventures. New York: Dell, 1965.

Pamela Bedore, Dime Novels and the Roots of American Detective Fiction. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

¹ Nicholas Carter, “The Old Detective’s Pupil, or, The Mysterious Crime of Madison Square,” New York Weekly 41, no. 46 (Sept. 18, 1886): 1.

² Carter, “The Old Detective’s Pupil,” 1.

³ Qtd. in Robert Sampson, Yesterday’s Faces: Glory Figures (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1983), 82.

⁴ Qtd. in Sampson, Yesterday’s Faces: Glory Figures, 86.

⁵ Bleiler, Science-Fiction, The Early Years, 124.