Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 815

This issue of the Beadle and Adams dime novel series (No. 815, March 7, 1898) features "The City in a Big Haul" by J. C. Cowdrick, author of the Broadway Billy novels. The story opens with detective Broadway Billy and his team—Happy Harry and the Silent Shadower—accepting two simultaneous cases. The first involves locating Hickman Shyrock, a merchant mysteriously absent from home for two weeks, supposedly in Philadelphia but never actually there. The second case involves a robbery at the private banking house of Gaffner Stiverson: twelve thousand dollars stolen from an unopened safe, accessible only to chief clerk Vance Willey and the ailing Mr. Stiverson. Billy investigates the bank, discovering a skeleton key beneath a basement grating and noting the safe's combination-lock mechanism. Suspicion falls on Willey, though Billy believes him innocent. Billy plans to inform Mrs. Stiverson of the robbery while investigating the Shyrock case simultaneously.