From the exhibition
Beadle's Dime Library No. 879
· August 28, 1895

"Deuce O'Diamond's Dead-Lock" by Capt. Howard Holmes
This serial, published by Beadle and Adams in 1895, follows detective Falcon Flynn as he meets Manta Kent from the rural village of Fernbank. Kent seeks Flynn's help locating her guardian, the mysterious inventor Hamish Kent, who vanished three months prior after working on strange mechanical devices in his workshop. Kent brings what she claims is one of Kent's deadly inventions—a mechanism capable of delivering a lethal needle into a human heart—connected to the suspicious death of Ramon Rolfe, who collapsed in Central Park with a blood clot discovered at his heart. However, Kent discovers her satchel has been switched during her train journey by a well-dressed widow passenger, replaced with newspaper-filled decoy. Flynn begins investigating both the missing inventor and the mysterious woman who robbed Kent, suspecting connections to a larger criminal plot.
Public domain (pre-1929), restored and presented by comicbooks.com public-domain