Traffic in Souls: A Novel of Crime and Its Cure

Ball, Eustace Hale, 1881-1931Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.6
Word count
338K words
Chapters
34

Tags

English Originals Mystery and Suspense Suspense ThrillerSocial ObservationCrime and PunishmentFate and FortuneHuman NatureCriminal PsychologySocial CritiqueMoral DilemmaProblem Analysis

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.Traffic in Souls: A Novel of Crime and Its Cure by Eustace Hale BallAuthor: Ball, Eustace Hale, 1881-1931,Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Jul 19, 2009

Editor's review

Traffic in Souls: A Novel of Crime and Its Cure is a crime novel by Eustace Hale Ball, categorized under American and Canadian literature and presented as a public-domain e-book through Project Gutenberg. The title signals a dual thread: a crime involving trafficking in persons and thoughts on curing this social ill. The work clearly bears the character of a turn-of-the-century social-problem novel, with narrative often shifting between the advancement of the case and moral exhortation, offering both plot momentum and traces of the reform discourse of its time. For Chinese readers, half the pleasure lies in the story and half in the historical material: one can see how early English popular fiction packaged social issues into highly readable narratives. Note that the characterization and value judgments carry period limitations, and some treatments do not match today's readers' expectations. Suitable for readers interested in the history of crime fiction, social-reform literature, or early English popular literature, to be read as a work of contextual value.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the opening chapters first to judge the narrative pace, then decide whether to read closely or skim
  2. Mark the case thread and the discursive passages separately to see how the author balances them
  3. Note the characters' moral labels while reading and consider the period ideas behind them
  4. After reading, compare with common patterns in similar social-problem novels and make brief comparative notes

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
  16. 16
  17. 17
  18. 18
  19. 19
  20. 20
  21. 21
  22. 22
  23. 23
  24. 24
  25. 25
  26. 26
  27. 27
  28. 28
  29. 29
  30. 30
  31. 31
  32. 32
  33. 33
  34. 34

FAQ

Is this a detective novel? Not a typical detective novel. It is closer to a social-problem novel, where crime clues drive the plot and lead to discussion of "the cure," with limited detective elements. If you expect a puzzle-solving experience, the pace and focus may not meet expectations.
The subject involves trafficking in persons—will reading it be very depressing? The work does touch on heavy issues, but its narrative carries the exhortative tone of popular fiction of the time, often focusing on social criticism and moral appeal, with limited direct sensationalism. Sensitive readers may first browse the table of contents and chapter titles before deciding whether to read further.
How difficult is the original English? It is the language of early twentieth-century popular fiction; sentence structures are not complex, but some words and expressions are no longer commonly used today. Readers with intermediate English reading ability can finish it with a dictionary; use an e-reader with a dictionary, and when encountering long sentences, first identify the main clause.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Ball, Eustace Hale, 1881-1931 Author · American · 1881–1931

Eustace Hale Ball (1881–1931) was an American journalist and writer of popular fiction. Public information about him is limited, and the details of his life are now difficult to trace, but his surviving works show that he was active in early twentieth-century American popular literature, chiefly in the detective and adventure genres. Two of his works are held in this collection: the novel Traffic in Souls: A Novel of Crime and Its Cure, which deals with crime and its correction, and The Voice on the Wire, a detective story with an atmosphere of suspense. Both display a popular narrative style marked by tight plotting and rising suspense, reflecting the strong contemporary American appetite for crime and adventure stories. The observational skills Ball developed as a journalist also lent realistic material and narrative energy to his fiction.