The Bradys and the Girl Smuggler Or, Working for the Custom House

Francis Worcester DoughtyProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 1.8
Word count
141K words
Chapters
15

Tags

English Originals Mystery and Suspense Suspense ThrillerCustoms ChaseSmuggling CrimeDetective AdventureBoy HeroVengeance and GratitudeJianghu FeudCriminal Psychology

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Bradys and the Girl Smuggler; Or, Working for the Custom House by DoughtyAuthor: Doughty, Francis Worcester, 1850-1917,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Oct 23, 2005

Editor's review

The Bradys and the Girl Smuggler is a detective adventure story by Francis Worcester Doughty; the subtitle, "Working for the Custom House," ties the Brady family to the case of a girl smuggler. The work belongs to the American and Canadian literature category and bears the typical features of late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century popular detective fiction: fast-moving plot, dense clues, clear confrontation between good and evil. It is a useful sample for understanding early American popular genre fiction. The Project Gutenberg e-book preserves the public-domain text as it stands, allowing readers to observe how customs enforcement, smuggling cases, and detective narrative were popularized at the time. The book's interest comes mainly from the unfolding case and the characters' actions rather than deep psychological portrayal or social critique, so it is better suited as light reading in genre fiction. While reading, note the division of labor and cooperation among the detective characters, and how the author advances suspense through dialogue and action. For readers studying popular literature, the history of detective fiction, or American mass culture, this is a usable primary text, but one should not expect literary depth beyond the genre framework.

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Reading tips

  1. Read in the order the case unfolds; do not over-fixate on period background details—grasp the main suspense first.
  2. Record the division of labor and cooperation among the Brady family members, observing how early detective ensembles are written.
  3. After reading, compare with detective fiction of the same period, noting this book's features in plot density and character portrayal.
  4. If used for genre studies, excerpt passages on customs enforcement and smuggling for thematic summary.

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15

FAQ

Is this book one volume in a series? Judging from the title and character setup, the Brady family appears to be detective characters the author used repeatedly, and this book is one case in that series. The materials do not provide a complete series list; readers can treat it as a standalone story without affecting understanding of the main case.
Does the smuggling case have a real historical background? The book takes customs anti-smuggling as its subject, reflecting contemporary social concern about smuggling, but as popular detective fiction its plot is shaped by genre conventions. The materials do not identify specific case prototypes; read it as literary narrative rather than historical record.
What if the English original is hard to read? The language is fairly popular and dialogue-heavy, generally easier than serious fiction of the same period. If it still feels difficult, read chapter summaries first to build the case framework, then proceed paragraph by paragraph; look up customs and legal terms in batches rather than stopping at every word.

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About the author

Francis Worcester Doughty Author · American · 1850–1917

Francis Worcester Doughty (1850–1917) was an American popular fiction writer and screenwriter, born in Brooklyn and died in New Jersey. He wrote extensively for the publisher Frank Tousey, producing cheap popular fiction and serving as one of the main authors of the "Old King Brady" and "The Bradys" detective series, with more than 1,500 works to his name. The four Bradys titles held in this collection follow detectives as they trace clues and solve mysteries, often involving Chinatown, swamp mysteries, and customs smuggling; their titles and plots reflect the stereotypical images of Chinese people common in popular literature of the period. Besides fiction, Doughty was also known as a numismatist. Public information is limited and biographical details remain obscure, but the volume and subject matter of his work show how active he was in the American cheap-fiction market of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.