Beadle's Dime Library No. 932

Museum Catalog Description This issue contains "Detective Gordon's Grip; or The Shadowed New York Swell," a serialized detective narrative by Albert W. Aiken. The story opens in a Fifth Avenue mansion where narrator Alexander Gordon, a fallen lawyer turned detective's clerk, confronts his former college classmate Richard Livingstone. Gordon has discovered incriminating evidence: Livingstone's late father fathered an illegitimate child with Salome Percy, whom he later married. The girl, also named Salome, lives in New York and threatens the Livingstone inheritance. Gordon attempts blackmail, demanding fifty thousand dollars and Olive Livingstone's hand in marriage. Livingstone counters by revealing a will that minimizes his sister's claim. The narrative culminates as Gordon plans to forge documents with an Irish forger's assistance, demonstrating the central conflict's reliance on documentary evidence and moral corruption among the genteel classes.