Dime novels were cheap paperback novelettes printed on pulpwood stock and sold for 5 to 15 cents each. They were pure entertainment, with no literary aspirations whatsoever; plots were lurid and melodramatic, characters were clownish and overdrawn, and heroes and villains were painted without shades of gray. Basically, they were pulp fiction before there was anything called pulp fiction.

One of the most famous dime-novel heroes was Deadwood Dick, a roving gambler, gunfighter, and white-hat con artist, very much in the style of television’s “Maverick.” Deadwood Dick was the creation of Edward Lytton Wheeler, a New York native who cooked up the character for his Philadelphia Vaudeville theater and then used him in a series of 35 dime jobs published by the Beadle Brothers.

Now, these old dime novels are hard to come by, and I have not been able to personally inspect all 35 of the Deadwood Dick stories — nor the 100 or so that followed starring our intrepid hero’s only son, Deadwood Dick Jr. But in his wanderings about the American West, Deadwood Dick does seem to have strayed into the Oregon country a few times. (Roseburg, Douglas County; 1887) (For text and pictures, see http://offbeatoregon.com/1805a.deadwood-dicks-danger-ducks-494.html)