Beadle's Half Dime Library No. 730

# Museum Catalog Note

This issue of Beadle and Adams (July 21, 1891) contains the opening serial "The Crooked Game at Coffin City" by the author of the "Violet Vane" series. In Chapter I, a lynch mob in a mining camp condemns the pale, sixteen-year-old Wallace Kenton for the murder of an old miner named Ole Luckless. A mysterious figure dressed entirely in black velvet, identified as Violet Vane, interrupts the proceedings at gunpoint and declares the boy innocent, forcing his escape on horseback. Chapter II shifts to the scheming "Reverend" Adam Jayne, the boy's hypocritical uncle, meeting with the unscrupulous attorney Elias Slink in Coffin City to discuss his failed plot against the boy and an unnamed girl. The narrative blends Western frontier justice, disguise and revelation, and criminal conspiracy.