Beadle's Half Dime Library, No. 524

1887 · 16 pages

Catalog Note This issue features "The Engineer Detective," attributed to J. C. Cowdrick. The serial begins with a locked-room murder mystery aboard the Night Express train of the Mansfield, Cranston & Oakvale Railroad. John Gray, a veteran express messenger, is found shot through the heart in his sealed car, which is locked from the inside. The safe has been robbed of its contents—multiple wax-sealed envelopes torn open and emptied. Detective Spottem theorizes suicide, noting Gray's revolver found beneath his body with one chamber discharged, but superintendent Ralph Raymond, a former fireman nicknamed "Redlight Ralph," insists the honest messenger was murdered. Raymond resolves to clear Gray's name. The narrative then shifts to establishing that Gray's twenty-year-old daughter, Ethel, a traveling actress, is unaware of her father's death, having just arrived in Oakvale by train.

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