With Links of Steel Or, The Peril of the Unknown

Nicholas CarterProject Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 2.4
Word count
289K words
Chapters
29

Tags

English Originals Mystery and Suspense Suspense ThrillerRisk ControlJianghu FeudCriminal PsychologyPopular Narrative

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.With Links of Steel; Or, The Peril of the Unknown by Nicholas CarterAuthor: Carter, Nicholas (House name),Language: English, Class: PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature, Release Date: Nov 19, 2004

Editor's review

With Links of Steel; Or, The Peril of the Unknown is one of the English popular novels published under the name Nicholas Carter and made available as a free ebook by Project Gutenberg. Carter was in fact a house name shared by several publishers, and that background alone tells the reader something: this is a product of late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century American dime novel or detective serial fiction, built for plot momentum and suspense rather than literary experiment. The title's "links of steel" and "peril of the unknown" suggest a story turning on machinery, confinement, or some industrial-age fear, and it is best read as a period specimen. For readers studying popular genres, the prehistory of the pulp magazines, or the history of American mass reading, this short book offers a text worth close reading; for those simply after entertainment, it moves briskly and runs short, well suited to commutes or bedtime reading in installments. One caveat: the original is in English and dates from an early period, so its language habits and narrative conventions sit at a distance from contemporary fiction. Readers should approach its character types and plot coincidences with historical context in mind rather than judge them by today's literary standards.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the first two chapters first, noting how the author sets up suspense and character relationships within a limited space.
  2. Treat it as a genre specimen, noting recurring images and conventions as you read.
  3. If English is a struggle, read alongside the public-domain ebook's formatting, one chapter at a time.
  4. After finishing, look into the publishing background of the shared pen name Nicholas Carter to understand its production mechanism.

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

FAQ

Is Nicholas Carter a real author? Carter was a house name shared by several publishers, not the real name of a single writer. This practice was common in American popular fiction publishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, aimed at keeping a series brand consistent while different writers supplied installments. Readers need not expect stylistic unity from a single author.
Is this a detective novel or an adventure novel? Judging by the title and the Carter series as a whole, it is closer to popular adventure fiction with suspense and pursuit elements than to strict fair-play detective fiction. The plot moves through crises, chases, and reversals; read it with genre-fiction expectations rather than measuring it by the rigour of a puzzle.
Is the original English hard to read? The language itself is not especially difficult, but the book dates from an early period, so some vocabulary, sentence structures, and narrative pacing differ from contemporary English. Readers with intermediate English can work through it in sections with an e-dictionary; those who only want the gist can read the openings and endings of chapters to grasp the main thread.

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

Nicholas Carter Author

Carter, Nicholas is not a real individual but a shared pseudonym created by the American publisher Street & Smith for its detective-fiction lines. The name appeared chiefly in Nick Carter Weekly and the New Magnet Library series, and more than twenty authors wrote under it over time, so the body of work is large and its style shifts with each contributor. Three titles are held here under this name: The Crime of the French Café and Other Stories, With Links of Steel Or, The Peril of the Unknown, and A Woman at Bay Or, A Fiend in Skirts. They center on detective pursuit and suspenseful puzzles, with tight plotting typical of early popular detective fiction. Because the name was shared, public information on the actual writers of individual stories and on publication details is limited and difficult to clarify one by one.