A melodramatic paperback novel; SYN. penny dreadful.
Melodramatic paperback novel of a series started in the us in the 1850s, published by Beadle and Adams of New York, which frequently dealt with Deadwood Dick and his frontier adventures. Authors included Edward L Wheeler, E Z C Judson, Prentiss Ingraham, and J R Coryell. The “Nick Carter” Library added detective stories to the genre. Like British “penny dreadfuls”, dime novels attained massive sales and were popular with troops during the American Civil War and World War i.
Today's mass-market paperbacks continue to serve readers of Westerns, mystery, science fiction, romance, and detective fiction that grew out of the dime-novel concept.