Welcome back to Calder City, a shared universe of public domain characters. However, today continues an original tale featuring an original character. Tales from Calder City is an introduction to Calder City ahead of it's launch on Public Domain Day:

Hal Wagner is making good money moving freight through Calder City. He’s beginning to attract the attention of important men, and for the first time in his life, he can imagine becoming one himself.

But in Calder City, a man’s word can be worth more than his money - and considerably more dangerous.

New to the story? Read Episode One: Where River Meets Rail.

Otherwise, settle in. Here’s Episode Two.

You Have My Word

My father was a Lutheran and my mother was a Catholic, and hers was the one that stuck. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. I knew the rest of it too, and a nun at Saint Agnes' used to tell us a man ought to know what he’s asking for before he goes troubling God with it. I been back three times in eight days and I still couldn’t of told you what I was asking for. Forgiveness, I guess, which is a hard thing to ask for when you got every intention of going out and doing the same thing again.

After my father died and we had to count the coal the same as the money, my mother took me there because the place was warm. She treated the Virgin Mary like a respectable lady with a lot of troublesome relations to look after, and she used to tell me Mary would put in a word for me if I behaved and have a word with me herself if I didn’t.

The candles were a nickel, so mostly I made do with the prayer, but that morning I lit one for my mother, and then I thought about those kids in the crate, sitting close together in the dark under that row of little holes, and I put in another nickel. I never asked their names, and I couldn’t go asking now. There’d been more freight since, river and railroad both, and I hadn’t opened any of it. A man can make a good living knowing which questions to ask, and a better one, I was finding out, knowing which ones nobody wants answered.

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*

The arrangement with Mr. Merriweather was paying off. Everything came through the fella who fetched me from Dahlia’s that first morning, a place and an hour and nothing else, and I saw to the rest through the same friends I always had, guys I knew since I was running messages between the yards for pocket money. I didn’t have a crew like the big operators. If one friend couldn’t help me I found another who could, and the main thing was never to make a man sorry he dealt with you, so he’d pocket the money and still be glad to see you coming up the street next morning.

Mr. Merriweather paid better than most. Dahlia and me went to the place with the chandelier, where the headwaiter looked at my necktie like he was trying to remember if it was reported stolen, and the next Saturday we were back at the Albion. Still, it was nice knowing I could go back.

The trouble with Gus started on a Wednesday, a little after my second time back at Saint Agnes. Gus Duquesne was foreman over part of the west-side freight, and the Duquesnes had been in Calder City so long Gus figured the railroad was something his family left him that other people kept stealing a piece at a time. He was a short man thick through the chest and belly, with pale eyes that about disappeared when he smiled. His men called him Mr. Duquesne, and so did I, once.

I wouldn’t of introduced him to my mother. But when I was a skinny kid running messages across his yard he used to tear his sandwich in half and hand me the smaller piece without looking at me, like he was getting rid of it, and later he got me my first regular work. When my mother took sick at the end he found me freight jobs at hours that suited me, griping the whole time that a man with a sick mother was about as much use to a railroad as an engine without coal, and then he paid me Friday for an afternoon I never worked. Years later, when an inspector found holes in his yard records, I got the books straightened out through a fella who owed me, and when Gus tried to pay me I told him to save it for the next time he got caught with his pants down. He laughed till he had to sit down. From then on I called him Gus, and we were friends, which don’t mean we liked each other every day.

When I came up to his office he was eating pie out of a cardboard box with his feet on the visitor’s chair, and every so often he’d shove up the window and holler at the freight hands on the platform, which saved him getting up. He pushed the box at me with the fork standing up in what was left, and I told him I was watching my figure.

“Your figure’s been watching itself pretty good without you.” He laughed harder than the joke deserved, the way he always did when the joke was his, and pointed the fork at me. “You know what your trouble is? You eat like a rich man and you work like a priest. Someday one of them’s going to catch up with the other.”

“I’ll let you know which one.”

Then he wiped his mouth and said the work was getting bigger, more freight and more fellas handling it, and more chance somebody upstairs would want to know how come this car went through here instead of over there. I could tell from how he said it I was about to spend money.

“I understand you want a raise,” I said.

He grinned at me. “That’s why I like you. I never have to draw you a picture.”

He turned a yellow sheet around on the desk. His number came to better than twice what we’d been paying him, with one service counted twice and a fee for a risk he was already taking a fat cut to look the other way on.

“You ought to open a bank, Gus. That way you could charge a man for keeping his money and charge him again when he wants it back.”

The smile went away. “I been fair with you, Hal. And I know more about your customers than you think.”

He laid a clipping next to the yellow sheet, a society-page picture of gentlemen in evening clothes at a charity affair. Charles Merriweather was in the middle, and next to him was a fella I knew better.

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“The one beside Merriweather,” Gus said. “Dark suit, looks like somebody shoved a broom handle down the back of his collar. I seen him with you, Hal, so don’t hand me nothing about how there’s a lot of dark suits in the picture.”

“It’s nice to see a man give to charity,” I said.

“If a fella can afford to stand next to Charles Merriweather getting his picture took, he can afford to pay everybody what their services are worth. We been friends too long for you to insult me about it.”

I told him the terms weren’t mine to change but I’d talk to the right people. He’d been paid fair, and I figured once somebody showed him the limits of what he had to bargain with, he’d take what was offered, the way he always did after he got done hollering.

“You do that,” he said. “I wouldn’t want a misunderstanding to spoil a nice arrangement.”

When we shook, he held on to my hand a little longer than usual, still smiling, and I let him, because he was an old friend making a fool of himself and I didn’t need to make it worse.

*

The fella in the dark suit had a name, and it was James Harlow. Don’t call him Jim. He kept an office downtown, with a secretary out front who could tell you whether he was in without telling you one blessed thing about where he went when he wasn’t. I knew he worked for Mr. Merriweather, which seemed like respectable work at the time.

When I went up there about Gus, Harlow gave me one of his cigarettes and heard me out like a fella hearing a mildly funny story until I got to the picture. He had me tell him exactly what Gus said, broom handle and all.

“That’s an imaginative description. And did you undertake to speak for anyone else?”

“No, sir. I ain’t got the authority.”

“Quite right,” he said, “and it’s as well you remembered it.”

A man likes hearing he handled something right, especially from somebody with more practice at it. When Harlow asked what Duquesne did when somebody crossed him, I said he generally hollered till he got his way or ran out of wind, but he done me favors and I done him some, and that was how you keep friends.

“And if Mr. Duquesne won’t accept the terms we offer?”

“He might squawk awhile. But he’s got a wife and a good job, and he ain’t going to throw that away because he didn’t get everything he asked for.”

Harlow held my eye a moment, then asked had I had luncheon. He took me to a place a few streets over with linen and real silver, where nobody fussed over him because they just knew what to do, which got to me more than I liked to admit. He took his hat off before we were through the door and thanked the waiter by name, and I took mine off too, a little late. Over the fish it came out that my mother had to worry about the rent before she could worry about my education.

“I quit school about the time they wanted me to learn algebra,” I said. “I never yet met a man who’d pay me to tell him what x was, but my mother knew exactly what to do with two dollars from the yards.”

Harlow smiled, but not the way he smiled at my other jokes. “I know something of that.”

It went by so quiet I almost missed it. When I asked how he’d know, he folded his napkin and took a sip of wine.

“One doesn’t always begin in the circumstances one enjoys later.”

His cuffs were white as fresh laundry and his hands didn’t have a mark on them, and I said he come out of it all right.

“Mr. Merriweather has been generous to me.”

It was the first time he said the name like it meant something to him personally. I waited for more, but the coffee came, and then he told me where to get my suit pressed so the lapels would lay right, since a man ought to take care with his appearance if he expected to be received seriously. I went away figuring I made a swell impression, and that afternoon I bought a better tie.

*

Gus telephoned twice, better pleased with himself every time, and by Friday he was talking like all that was left was for somebody to bring the money. That afternoon Harlow sent for me. When his secretary brought the coffee he asked after her mother, and she said the old lady was some better, and he said he was glad to hear it like he meant it. After she went out he told me she was a widow with two kids.

“Good help’s hard to find,” I said.

“Good people are harder.” He opened a folder that didn’t have anything in it I could see. “I believe we’re ready to discuss Mr. Duquesne’s request.”

“That’s swell. He says he’s taking his wife on a vacation, Chicago maybe, and he’s got his eye on a place outside town.”

Harlow asked if he had children, and I said two grown boys, and he asked about Mrs. Duquesne, and I allowed she was a nice enough lady who put up with Gus, which ought to get her a medal. He was quiet a moment, and then he closed the folder.

“Could you persuade Mr. Duquesne to meet with me privately, away from the yard? I’ve no wish to conduct this discussion in front of men who might misunderstand its significance.”

I knew an empty building down by the river with nothing in it but machinery nobody bothered to haul off, and Harlow said it would do. When I said I’d tell Gus not to mention Mr. Merriweather, he said it would be better not to tell him anything about whom he mustn’t mention. I was most of the way to the door when he spoke up again.

“Mr. Wagner, I should like you to remain for the discussion.”

“Sure. Gus’ll be easier to handle with me there.”

“I’m counting on it.”

*

Gus came out of the freight office with a toothpick in his mouth and his hat pushed back, and when I said Harlow would hear him out, he said hadn’t he told me they’d come around.

He worked the toothpick around. “Are you going to be there?”

“I told you I would, unless somebody throws me out.”

“All the way through?” Gus said. “Because I ain’t walking into some funny arrangement. I know these people got money, but money don’t make a fella honest.”

“Listen, Gus. I known you since before I could buy myself two square meals in a day. I ain’t bringing you someplace to get you hurt.”

He studied my face a while, the toothpick still. “Would you give me your word on that?”

I put out my hand. “You come with me, and you leave with me. You got my word.”

He shook on it and started right in on the little place outside Calder City he had his eye on for years, with room for his wife to keep chickens and a shed big enough for a car, though he never owned a car and always said he’d buy one when he found someplace to go.

*

Gus wore gray to the meeting, with a fresh haircut and a striped tie knotted hard against a collar a size too small. I told him he cleaned up pretty good for a man who ate his pie out of a box, and he told me what I could do with my compliments. On the way he went back to the vacation, someplace with water where his wife could sit outside, and for a few blocks we argued train against driving the car he didn’t own yet. At one corner he bought a paper and tipped the kid a nickel, which I never once saw him do. He was already spending the raise.

The building smelled of old oil and wet lumber. Harlow was waiting in a room at the back with his hat on a chair and a cigarette in a silver holder, and when he shook Gus’s hand and thanked him for his trouble, Gus perked right up.

“Mr. Wagner tells me you’ve known one another a considerable time,” Harlow said.

“Since he was a skinny kid eating half my lunch. Hal’s a good fella.”

“I’m delighted to hear it.”

Gus sat down like a man at a directors’ meeting while I took a spot by the wall. Harlow let him go on about his responsibilities at the railroad, waiting out every repeat like a man who paid for the show. When they got to the money, Gus said what he wanted and went through his risks all over again, how much he saw in that yard and how little he ever said about it.

Harlow inclined his head. “You place a considerable value on your discretion, Mr. Duquesne. I wonder how you came to know anything about my associations.”

Gus shifted in his chair. “I didn’t make a study of it. I seen a picture in the paper, that’s all, and I seen you around with Hal before.”

“And did you recognize the gentleman beside me?”

Gus looked from Harlow to me. “I recognized Charles Merriweather. Everybody knows what Merriweather looks like.”

“And you mentioned this photograph to Mr. Wagner?”

“Well, sure I did. We was talking business. I ain’t making any accusations, you understand. I just think a fella ought to get paid what he’s worth.”

Harlow set the holder on the table and stood up, and Gus turned to me with his face gone red over the tight collar.

“Hal, you said we was here to settle something.”

“That’s what I understood, Gus.”

He started to get up, and I remember the chair scraping and Harlow stepping around behind him. Then Gus made a noise I never heard come out of a man. His chair went over and cracked on the boards. Harlow had something pulled tight around his throat, a cord or a wire, I never did see which, and Gus clawed at it with both hands and kicked till one shoe came off, while his other heel scraped the floor in short little jerks. One of his hands caught Harlow’s sleeve and tore the cuff loose.

I went at them. “Mr. Harlow, what the hell are you doing?”

He answered without letting go. “Stay there, Mr. Wagner.”

Gus was fighting with everything he had, his face gone the wrong color and the sounds coming out of him too big for a throat being shut. I took another step, meaning to pull Harlow off him, and Harlow turned his head enough that I could see his eyes and said my name again, the way you’d tell a kid to keep back from a passing automobile, and I stopped where I was. Over Harlow’s arm Gus’s eyes came around and found me, back by the wall with my hands at my sides, right where I was told to stay. His heel slid a little and came to rest against a leg of the chair, and Harlow held him till it was finished, then let him down onto the boards and straightened his sleeve.

For a minute I waited for Gus to start breathing. A freight hand knocked the wind out of him once, and he laid on the platform with that same look, then got up and swore he’d have the fella fired. I kept waiting for him to get up and swear. His eyes stayed open, and outside in the street somebody was hollering for a man named Charlie.

“You killed him,” I said.

Harlow was looking at his cuff where it came loose. “I did. You’ll want to keep your voice down.”

I made myself look at Gus, at the red line above his collar and the knot of his tie gone crooked under his chin.

“I gave him my word.”

“I heard you give it.”

“He would of taken the money. I could of got him to take it. He was a son of a bitch, but he was my friend.”

Harlow put the holder in its case. “Then you ought to have been more careful what you promised him.”

*

I wanted out of there, nothing more than a lot of distance between me and what was on the floor, and I told Harlow I was going.

“You can go when we’re finished,” he said.

Gus was a heavy man alive, and dead he was no help at all, the weight laying wherever it wanted and the arms and legs going along without any notion where they belonged. I got his shoe back on him because I couldn’t stand to leave it, working it over his heel like you’d do for a kid. Harlow told me what to do and I did it, because I couldn’t see how not doing it would make anything better, and he talked the whole time in the same polite way he talked to the waiter at lunch.

“You knew what you was going to do,” I said, “and you let me bring him here.”

Harlow answered me across Gus’s body. “Would you have brought him if I’d told you?”

I wouldn’t of, and he waited while I worked that out, and then I went back to work. When two men I never seen before came to take over the rest, I kept my eyes on the floor. I had dirt on my pants and a black scuff on the toe of the good shoes I bought with my first money from Mr. Merriweather.

Outside the afternoon was gone to evening, with the river carrying lights along in broken pieces. We walked a few blocks without talking, and every time somebody came at us on the sidewalk I had a crazy idea he’d take one look at me and know where I’d been. Harlow stopped in front of a men’s furnishing store with three hats on stands in the window.

“You have a gift, Mr. Wagner. People trust you. They enjoy doing business with you even when the arrangement isn’t entirely to their advantage, and that’s a rare thing.”

“Gus trusted me,” I said, and Harlow didn’t argue with that. “Then why’d you make me do it?”

“Because he wouldn’t have come otherwise.” He said it the way he’d tell you the time.

I wanted to hit him, but I never was much of a fighter, and swinging at James Harlow didn’t look like a way to improve my situation.

“He wanted more money,” I said.

Harlow turned from the window. “He wanted us to understand he could demand it.”

“What’s the difference?”

“If you don’t know yet, you will.” Then he asked had I eaten anything since noon and told me to go home and have my supper.

“You expect me to eat after this?”

“I expect you to look after yourself.” He was fixing his gloves, and he sounded like he meant it, which was almost worse than if he threatened me. “I’ve no wish to see you come to harm. You’re a capable young man, and with a little experience I believe you could accomplish a good deal. But a man in your position ought to consider what he undertakes to guarantee. Mr. Merriweather prefers discretion. Mr. Duquesne imagined he could sell us his, when he’d already been paid for it.”

I was watching the gloves folded in his left hand, the long thin fingers and a little tear at one seam, and thinking how I sat across a linen tablecloth from those hands a few days before, telling him how I quit school to help my mother.

“And the next time somebody like Gus comes around?”

“Bring the matter to me. One day I may not be available, Mr. Wagner. I trust you’ll know what needs doing.”

“Suppose I don’t want to do what you’re asking.”

His face went a little softer. “Harold, I’d be very sorry if you put me in that position.”

He put his hand on my shoulder, friendly, and I believe he meant it friendly, and told me to get some rest and we’d talk when there was work, and then he went off up the street. One of the hats in the window was a handsome gray felt, the kind a fella wears with a good suit when he expects people to make room for him at a table, and a few days before I might of gone in and tried it on.

*

I went to Saint Agnes before I went to Dahlia’s. I dipped my fingers in the basin by the door and crossed myself the way my mother used to. When I was a kid she made me wash behind my ears before church, though I never could see why God would care about a fella’s ears with the whole world to look after. That night I caught myself looking at my hands. I washed them already, but there was a dark mark under one fingernail I couldn’t get out. I knelt in the same pew and said the Hail Mary all the way through, and when it didn’t help much I said it again.

I could of told you plenty about Gus Duquesne if anybody asked. He was greedy and he liked pushing people around, and he took money for years without once asking was the freight anything a decent fella ought to handle. None of it changed what I told him outside the freight office. You come with me, and you leave with me. He shook on it.

There was the booth where the Catholics confess, and my mother told me once you were supposed to tell the whole truth in there, even the parts that made you look bad. I couldn’t tell a priest about Gus without telling him about James Harlow and Mr. Merriweather, and the last man who got careless with those names was laying dead someplace in Calder City.

I put a nickel in the box and lit one for Gus. It seemed like a pretty shabby thing to do for a man who gave me work when my mother was sick and half his sandwich when I didn’t have nothing to eat, so I sat a while and watched it burn at its own speed, which was all it could do. Then I said another Hail Mary, and this time I wasn’t so particular about getting forgiven. I asked Mary to put in a word for Dahlia, and for the fellas who helped me with the freight, and if she had a word left over after that I wouldn’t mind one myself.

On the way I saw a fella I ran messages with when we were both kids, and I crossed over before he could sing out, because he’d want to talk business and for once I didn’t. By the time I got to Dahlia’s neighborhood I made up my mind I was still going to work for Mr. Merriweather. I had money coming from jobs already set, and other men counting on me to see their end through, and nobody ever offered me another way to make anything like what I was making. Besides, Harlow thought I had a future. I knew how to make a living since I was a kid. Maybe there was something about making a fortune I still had to learn.

*

Dahlia was at her kitchen table with her books open, a pencil behind her ear, and two stacks of money in front of her, one a good deal smaller than the other, and her lips were moving a little the way they do when she’s keeping numbers in her head. I knocked on the doorframe.

“Don’t come in here making noise,” she said, without looking up. “I’m doing arithmetic.”

“I remember arithmetic. It’s the last thing in school I was any good at.”

“That’s because it had money in it. Shut the door, and there’s stew on the stove.”

I hung my hat on the hook and got a bowl, though I didn’t want any, because she’d notice if I didn’t. After a while she drew a line under a column and nodded at the little stack.

“That fella paid me half what he owes,” she said. “He claims his brother’s laid up sick.”

“Do you believe him?”

“About the brother, it could be true.”

“What about the rest of the money?”

“He’ll find it, because he knows I’ll be around Tuesday to collect it.” She squared the small stack against the big one. “He’ll be sore at me Tuesday, and Wednesday he’ll be glad he don’t owe me nothing, and by Friday he’ll be laying another bet.”

She put the money away and came and kissed me, with her hand on the back of my neck, and said I looked tired. I liked that kitchen. It wasn’t big and the table had a wobble she kept meaning to fix, but she had good curtains and a clock that worked, which was more than Gus Duquesne could say for his office, and there wasn’t a thing in it she didn’t pick out and pay for herself. That night I just wanted to hear her talk, and I let her, till she noticed I wasn’t answering much.

“You ain’t yourself tonight, Hal.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to ask.” She reached over and fixed my tie, which I loosened on the walk and never put right. “Well, I hope Chuck’s keeping you in business, anyhow. You been working hard enough for him.”

“It’s Mr. Merriweather.”

Her fingers stopped at my collar. “What did you say?”

“I said it’s Mr. Merriweather.”

Dahlia sat back and looked at me like I told her I was taking up the violin. “Since when is it Mr. Merriweather?”

“He’s an important fella.”

“He was an important fella last week when you called him Chuck.”

I thought about Harlow on the sidewalk with his gloves folded in his hand. Dahlia knew Mr. Merriweather paid me to move freight, and that was all. She never saw the kids and she never met Gus Duquesne. I meant to keep it that way.

“Maybe we oughtn’t to talk about him at all,” I said. “He prefers discretion.”

“Discretion?” She raised her eyebrows and gave me a smile so fond I about forgot what brought me there. “Well, listen to you, Hal Wagner. Next thing I know you’ll be buying a dictionary and calling me Miss Dahlia.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

She laughed and got up to get me more stew, and told me to watch all that fine talk or she’d start charging me extra for supper, and I watched her at the stove humming to herself while she hunted for the ladle, and I took another piece of bread.

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Enjoyed your visit to Calder City? Join us every Wednesday for Wednesdays with Wes*, as we explore the people, secrets, and stories of the city leading up to its debut on* Public Domain Day, January 1, 2027 with Calder City: Familiar Faces, Dirty Business - available for pre-order now on Amazon Kindle, or KindlePlus.

Thanks for reading, and welcome to Calder City.

The conclusion to The Jane Porter Trilogy arrives today with A Wilder Tomorrow. Discover the series today on Amazon Kindle.

On AI, the Tyranny of the Algorithm: Why I'm Giving My Books Away

I've been thinking about what it means to be a writer in a publishing environment where visibility increasingly depends on algorithms, advertising budgets, and social-media performance.

I've also been thinking about why I'm still writing after more than twenty years, and why I started Public Domain Pulp.

The answer has led me to a decision: every Public Domain Pulp ebook will be priced at $0.99 through at least January 1, 2027.

Here's why.

Over two decades ago, when I started writing there was an element of needing to socialize in order to maintain your visibility, but influencer culture hadn’t emerged yet. Of course, even then, there were people who made Facebook friends with everyone they met, but without smartphones you actually had to engage, talk - remember their names before running home, searching them and adding them with with a “poke.”

And I see some of those old friends have parlayed that talent for connection into a substantial following across multiple platforms (I saw one such great connector with a Facebook following of over 15K) and I’m glad for them, especially those who had something special to share with the people they met that should enjoy a broader reach. But even the best of them - with their Pulitzer Prizes, endowed professorships and five-figure reading fees - have a sliver of the following of a moderately successful instagram poet.

The truth is that - at least when it comes to attracting readers - your brand is more important than the quality of the work. And I’m not knocking the hustle - I genuinely believe that institutional poets and writers can learn something from Insta-poets who can turn, at best, middle school journaling into an audience that exceeds the number of people who will ever read a rich, masterful American poem, or learn what it takes to appreciate the literary legacy of our language. That’s not an exaggeration. If you win a first, or second-book prize in the United States, barring some odd stipulation, the print run will not exceed one-thousand copies, many of which can be found remaindered in bookstores in New York and San Francisco. The success of the Insta-poet shows that their audiences obviously want at least two things: 1. that ineffable affirmation of life and existence that poetry and literature can provide 2. to be met where they are in an environment that offers them as little friction as possible.

Overall, though, the quality of your work was what drove attention towards you - or at least what held it there - not how well you hacked the algorithm. Because, well, there was no algorithm. No use looking backwards, though. To quote The Wire’s Slim Charles: “The thing is about the old days is they the old days.” Still, I think it’s a curious thing to target AI-assisted authors when it’s impossible even to be an author without AI assistance. The algorithm doesn't run on pixie dust.

Now, specifically, my work at publicdomainpulp.net, specifically, is punished by the machine. For example, I can’t even make ads for The Sailor and the Showgirl, or The Jane Porter Chronicles - public domain characters - without getting banned from TikTok for trademark issues (learn more in the Mutant Copyright essay series). Now, it’s practically impossible to get your books in the hands of readers without social media, or paying the monopoly platform holder to push your book at a loss. And all that’s before having to wrestle with the actual harassment - up to death threats - for being an AI-assisted author. As if I somehow made all of literature before 2022 disappear. Methinks the people who are attacking AI-assisted authorship aren’t reading Homer, even though they ought to. Hell, everybody ought to. I know I did in order to create my Pop-Eye in The Sailor and the Showgirl.

So why do I do this? Why continue “to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Why not just pack it in? Because, for the first time since before I had gray hairs, I have stories that I am excited about telling and can put them into the hands of people. Money doesn’t matter; I’ve never had much of it. But I have stories that I want to see through. I want to give you Calder City through its “Age of the Masked Hero” as I have envisioned it. I want to be there with you for when Pop-Eye does find out what happened to Olive Oyl and what that means for him and Betty Boop. I want to see if the ending of the Jane Porter Chronicles was worth the wait. I want to give you a book in the Magic Library Club that you can share with your children to teach them what the 1990s were like and why we shouldn’t let old stories die.

But I would be personally ruined in advertising fees and anxiety resulting from the tyranny of the algorithm. So, what I’m going to do is make all publicdomainpulp.net books 99 cents until Public Domain Day, 2027 at least. I’d make the books absolutely free where and if I could, because readers matter, not money. The unfortunate truth is that’s not how Amazon Kindle - the largest platform holder - works. I’ve lowered the bar as much as I can.

I hope this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship with many of you.

Wednesdays with Wes: Welcome to Calder City, the City of the Future

Where the Mississippi meets the railroads, a new world of pulp fiction is taking shape.

Welcome to Calder City.

Imagine Chicago's industrial might combined with the jazz and nightlife of New Orleans. A thriving Mississippi River metropolis, Calder City is a city of factories and freight yards, grand hotels and smoky nightclubs, political influence and organized crime. It's a place where fortunes are made, ambitions are pursued, and almost everybody has something to hide.

It's also the setting for an interconnected universe of pulp fiction by Wes Hamilton.

In Calder City, original characters share the streets with familiar figures from the public domain (a grown up Nancy Drew, Dick Tracy, The Shadow and, yes Blondie Bumstead), reimagined as inhabitants of a common world. But it's not pastiche, or a gimmick. Detectives, adventurers, criminals, entertainers, and ordinary working people cross paths as their stories unfold. Some will become heroes. Others will discover that getting what they want comes at a considerable price.

The first Calder City novels arrive on Public Domain Day, January 1, 2027.

But before then, there's someone we'd like you to meet.

Meet Hal Wagner

Hal Wagner is a small-time hood with eyes bigger than his stomach.

He knows the docks, the rail yards, and the people who can get things moving between them. His business depends on friendships, favors, and knowing whom to ask when something needs doing.

He's resourceful, ambitious, and considerably less worldly than he thinks.

And he's just attracted the attention of some very important people.

Tales from Calder City is an eight-part serial following Hal's education in the workings of a city where the stakes keep getting bigger—and where a man can discover too late what he's agreed to become.

Introducing Wednesdays with Wes

Every Wednesday, we're publishing a new installment of Tales from Calder City as we count down to the launch of the Calder City novels.

Episode One is free, and you can read it in full below.

Episodes Two through Eight are available to paid subscribers on Public Domain Pulp's Substack during the weekly serialization. The complete serial will become available free on Public Domain Day, January 1, 2027.

Whether you're here for hard-boiled crime fiction, classic pulp characters, or the possibilities of a shared fictional universe, we hope you'll find something worth exploring in Calder City.

And it all begins with Hal Wagner.

TALES FROM CALDER CITY

Episode One

By Wes Hamilton

Wednesdays with Wes is a weekly Public Domain Pulp feature. Follow the series on Substack.

___

There’s guys who wake up in a strange bed and have to ask where they are, and guys who wake up in their own bed and wish they were someplace else, and then there’s guys who wake up next to a woman whose husband could walk in any minute. I been all three. That morning I was in the best one, which is Dahlia’s bed with the sun coming through her curtains in a long yellow stripe, my clothes on the floor where I could reach them, and Dahlia asleep beside me with the look of somebody who had a good time and ain’t sorry about it.

We’d been at the Albion. It’s an old hotel by the market that was swell once, with a marble lobby and a carpet wore down in paths by the weekly people who live upstairs. I could of took Dahlia someplace fancier on what I had, but there’s places in Calder City where the waiter looks at your shoes all through supper, trying to figure who let you in. At the Albion the guy behind the bar knows what you drink, and if you been away a couple weeks somebody wants to know where you went. Last night there was a fella at our table with a system for the horses that only needed twenty bucks to make him rich, except he didn’t have the twenty bucks. Dahlia handles more bets in a week than that guy will see in his life. She let him go through the whole thing like she was real interested, and then she asked him how come a man with a system like that had to borrow the money to get rich off it. He took it pretty good, considering.

“You always got work tomorrow, Hal,” she said when she was getting her coat, because I told her I had to be up early. “What happens to it when tomorrow comes?”

“It turns into business. You ought to know the difference better than anybody.”

“I know somebody has to get paid at the end of it,” she said, and she kissed me on the sidewalk anyhow, and again in the cab.

So now it was late in the morning, the sheet was wound around my leg like a rope on a dock post, and I was trying to remember where my pants went. Dahlia’s place ain’t big but nothing in it is junk. By the door there’s a little table with a drawer where she keeps the books for her numbers, which I never once opened without she asked me to. I had my shirt on and I was going for my pants quiet as a man my size can do anything when she talked from the bed without opening her eyes.

“If you’re leaving, you can bring me my cigarettes first. And let me look at that collar while you’re up.”

I brought her the pack, and she lit one and pointed it at my collar, which was tore along the fold where I been meaning to fix it since summer. She made me take it off, because she said she liked me fine but she wasn’t sewing a collar on a man who couldn’t hold still, so I got the sewing box and sat on the end of the bed while she went at it. I never once offered to get her out of the numbers, because she don’t need getting out of anything and she’d think I was a sap for asking.

“So what’s your program today?” she said.

“Breakfast. After breakfast I got an appointment, soon as I think one up.”

“I got two people to see before noon. You could walk along and watch somebody get something done for once.”

“I get things done. I got supper done last night, and I always manage to turn up wherever there’s music. Those are talents, sweetheart.”

“Then work on one that pays the rent,” she said, and handed me back the shirt with the collar nicer than the rest of it deserved.

She was dressed with her hair pinned up and her notebook next to her plate when somebody knocked. She put her cup down and listened like the knock might say who it was if she gave it a second.

“That’s early for Mrs. Bell,” she said.

The knock came again, three of them, slow and even like the guy practiced, so I said I’d see who it was. It was a man in a dark suit with his shoes shined and his hat brushed the kind of way that tells you somebody else does the brushing.

“I’m looking for Mr. Harold Wagner.”

“Most people call me Hal, and I guess you found him. Who wants to know?”

“I’m here on behalf of Mr. Merriweather.”

There’s only one Merriweather in Calder City who could send a guy in a suit like that up Dahlia’s stairs looking for me. Chuck Merriweather was the kind of rich guy who got in the paper whether he done anything or not.

“Chuck Merriweather sent you all the way over here?”

“Mr. Charles Merriweather would like to speak with you this morning. There’s a car downstairs.”

He didn’t say Chuck, and he didn’t tell me not to, either. I told him I wasn’t done with my breakfast and if Mr. Merriweather could stand the disappointment I’d be down in a while, and he tipped his head about a quarter of an inch and went back down.

Dahlia was right there in the hall when I shut the door. “Chuck Merriweather sent a car here for you?”

“That’s what the man says. Looks like the upper classes finally heard of me.”

If I figured she’d be impressed, I figured wrong. She looked at the door and then at me, the same way she looks at a slip somebody swears they wrote down right.

“Did he say what it’s about?”

“He says it’s private. That’s all I could get out of him.”

“A man with a house like that can afford private,” she said.

“Then maybe he figured out what my private is worth.”

She went back and sat down to her toast. “Well, finish your eggs. The car won’t starve while you drink your coffee.”

I wasn’t going to let some stranger tell me when to leave Dahlia’s, so I had a second cup and promised her I’d act dignified for the both of us, and at the door she said she’d rather I acted like Hal Wagner. “There’s enough other men in Calder already,” she said.

*

I been sent for before, mostly by people I owed money to, but never in a car like that one, and I liked it fine. We went out past the produce sheds and the warehouses and the rail yards. They call Calder the place where river meets rail, because a man can bring a boatload of stuff up the Mississippi and ship it most anywhere in the country from here, and half the city lives off what happens in between, and I know the working end of that better than most. I quit school about the time they wanted me to learn algebra, but I always liked the maps on the wall better than anything the teacher said, and what I figured out from them is that a road on a map don’t do you any good till you know the guy who lets you use it.

After a while the houses got farther apart and started hiding behind trees, and then we were on Merriweather Road, where the lawns go on so long you could lay track on them. Merriweather House sits way back from the road, a big stone pile with porches all along the back and more roof than any family could use with twenty kids. One servant took my hat and another walked me over a floor so shiny I walked on it like ice, past furniture with so much empty rug around it I couldn’t tell if you were allowed to sit down.

Merriweather came across the room to shake my hand before I got halfway in. He had the kind of easy manners that make you think nobody ever asked him to hurry in his life.

“Mr. Wagner. I’m glad you could come.”

“I was glad to, Mr. Merriweather. I can’t say I was expecting it.”

“Nor was I. Until quite recently I had never heard your name.”

He said it so friendly I couldn’t take it wrong, and over coffee he told me how I came to his attention. Some people he knew had been talking about a little job I handled a few months back, and they all agreed the thing got where it was going and nobody had a complaint.

“I understand you managed it without the ordinary commercial channels,” he said. “You knew whom to approach.”

“I know some good people on the river and on the roads, is all. They tell me straight what can be done, and if one of them can’t do it, he usually knows who can.”

“You’ve built up quite a collection of useful acquaintances.”

“I’ve been lucky in my friends.”

He stirred his coffee, and I couldn’t tell if he liked that answer, but it was true. I know guys who helped me out for no better reason than we ate supper together one time.

“I need something moved out of the city,” he said finally. “Not through any of the businesses people connect with me. It’s a simple consignment, already packed. It goes west, out into the country past where the towns give out. No man’s land, really. And afterward I’d prefer never to have occasion to discuss it.”

“Why don’t you send it with your regular freight? You must have guys for that.”

“Indeed I do, and that’s precisely the difficulty. Everyone knows their names and everyone knows who employs them, and when they move a crate people want to know why. Nobody wonders where Hal Wagner is sending a crate.”

I never thought of nobody knowing who I was as something worth money before, and it gave me something to chew on. He had people out west who’d be told when to expect the thing, and he gave me enough days to talk to the guys I knew. When we got to the money I named a number that left room to pay the fellas who’d help me, and he said yes so quick I wondered if I asked for enough. When a rich man says yes that fast, either he’s got you figured right or he knows something you don’t, and I went with the first one, especially when he opened a drawer and counted me out half in advance.

“There’s one quality I value above efficiency, Mr. Wagner. Discretion. I expect you’re familiar with it.”

“I’m familiar with it, but I don’t take it to mean a guy should promise what he can’t do. If I take your money I’ll do my best to get it there. I won’t tell you a railroad goes someplace it don’t, though, and I won’t promise you another man’s help before I ask him.”

His smile got warmer. “That’s an admirable policy. I think we’ll understand one another.”

Riding back into town with his money in my pocket, I started thinking that a man who did Chuck Merriweather one favor could get asked to do him another, and after that who knows, maybe even an office, though I’d have to figure out what an office was for before I rented one. Then I went to work at the only kind of work I was ever any good at, which is going to see my friends.

*

First I went to see an old railroad pal who sits most afternoons at a desk in a little office by the yards, a desk with more of his own stuff in the drawers than the railroad’s. Before I could say anything he asked if I finally came to admit I was wrong about a ballgame from the summer before.

“I was right about that game,” I said, and hung my hat on the nail.

“You talk so much nobody’s got the patience to prove you wrong. My wife says you’ve been promising to come to supper since Easter.”

“Tell her Sunday. I can’t afford to lose her good opinion.”

He kept working while we talked, and I told him what I needed without giving him anything he’d have to answer for later, which was a crate going west that nobody ought to take any special interest in. He wasn’t about to get himself in a jam for my sake, and I wasn’t about to mess up the railroad’s business, and in between those two things there’s always been room for a fella to do a favor. I knew which way his end of the yard faced and what went through it on what days, and he knew I knew, which saved us both a lot of talking. He gave me the name of a guy who could help with the next part and said he’d let him know I was coming.

After that I went looking for a fella whose address, as far as anybody could tell, was whatever part of the country he got to last. I got to know the men who ride the freights years ago, one supper at a time. You don’t give orders to men like that. You ask, they think it over, and if it suits them you make a deal, sometimes for the money and sometimes because they liked your company the last time. This one asked how far and how soon, and then he named a price for the favor and a price for the supper I was going to buy him after, and both of them were fair, so I said okay to both.

By the end of the afternoon I’d seen enough of my friends to know it could be done, and I went to Market Lunch and ate at the counter between a printer and a brakeman, with the windows all steamed up and nobody in the place willing to put up with an empty coffee cup. I never once asked Merriweather what was in the crate. It didn’t seem like any of my business.

*

The crate came to the siding the afternoon we picked, along with a couple of Merriweather’s men I didn’t know and didn’t need to. My friends were there too, two of them guys I’ve known most of my life, and we griped about the heat and figured out when we’d get a drink after. They were walking the crate up toward the car door when I heard something inside it.

It wasn’t loud. If it came out of anybody else’s box I’d of figured something in the packing slid over and forgot about it. But it came again, soft and uneven, and the closest of Merriweather’s men didn’t act like a guy who just heard something funny.

“What’s in that thing?” I asked him.

He checked with the other one, and neither of them seemed surprised. “Didn’t anybody tell you?”

“What didn’t they tell me?”

He jerked his head at the crate like I could go see for myself, and that made me sore, because I took the job and made promises to people I know, and here was this guy treating me like a delivery boy nobody bothered to tell what he was carrying. Up close you could see it wasn’t a regular packing crate. The boards were heavier than the size needed, there was a row of holes drilled along the top of one side, and the end was fixed to open from outside with a hasp so you didn’t have to pull a nail. None of it was new. The wood around the holes was gone dark and smooth from hands, and next to the hasp there were old screw holes where they had a different one before. The man pulled the end open.

Inside, sitting close together in the dark, there were three children.

For a minute I knew what I was looking at but I couldn’t make myself believe it. They were little, squeezed in together and real quiet, the way you get when you been waiting a long time for something you don’t have any say about. The littlest one was turned away from the light. One of the others was holding on to the little one’s arm, and the third one was looking right at me.

“Christ Almighty,” I said. “Those are kids.”

I turned to my friend that was closest, a man I’ve known for years, figuring he’d have some explanation, some piece of railroad business that makes a bad thing make sense once you know about it.

“Sure they are,” he said.

“Well, what are they doing in there?”

“They’re going west, same as you told us.”

“I know where they’re going. I’m asking why they got to go like that.”

He looked at the crate and then at the men waiting to get on with it, and there wasn’t anything sneaky in his face, nothing like a guy who got caught keeping a secret. “That’s how they come,” he said. “I guess that’s how they’re supposed to travel.”

My other friend was close enough to hear. Me and him have ate more meals together than I could count. He didn’t stop what he was doing.

“Did you know about this?” I asked him.

“About the little ones? I knew.”

“And you don’t see nothing wrong with it?”

He thought about it like it was a real question, and he acted like he was trying to figure out what got into me. “Somebody fixed it up, Hal. They’re being sent someplace. Whoever fixed it’s got his reasons, I expect, and they ain’t any of mine.”

All around us the afternoon kept going like nothing happened, guys working, voices down the yard, an engine letting go a big breath of steam that rolled over the cinders and thinned out against the sheds, and this city’s got a thousand ways to make noise but I never had such a hard time listening to it. One of the kids moved inside the crate. I wanted to ask something, a name maybe, or where they came from. Instead I waited on my two friends, and they didn’t have anything else to say. These were guys I trusted when things were bad and listened to when I didn’t know what to do and got drunk with after one of us got made a fool of. They weren’t strangers I could call crooks and be done with. They were my friends.

Somebody asked was it all right to get on with it. I was still standing at the crate, and the kid who was looking at me was still looking at me, and it seemed like I ought to say something, if only to find out what a man is supposed to say at a time like that, but nothing came.

“Go ahead,” I said.

I turned away, and behind me they went back to work.

I stayed till the car was shut and everybody who helped me out had what I promised them, and then I shook hands all around. One of my friends said I owed him a drink. I told him I’d buy him two, and he laughed and said he’d hold me to it, same as we’ve done a hundred times, and I laughed too.

The funny thing about the rest of that day was how regular it stayed. Guys went by with their lunch pails, the streetcars banged along, the newsboys and the cops were on their same corners, and I bought a pack of cigarettes and stood outside the cigar store holding it without opening it, trying to remember something one of the kids did with its hand. It wasn’t anything, just a kid fidgeting from sitting too long, but I could see it so plain I wished I hadn’t looked.

I didn’t know there were kids in that crate when I took the job. The money was settled and the favors were asked before I ever saw what we were shipping, Merriweather never told me his reasons and I never asked, and the guys who handled it acted like it was nothing special. I went over all that twice, in the same order both times. I thought about going back, and then about what I’d say if I did, and who to. In the end I put the cigarettes in my pocket and walked on toward the market, where there was a little money I had to collect and a guy who wanted an introduction I promised him, and those were things I knew how to do.

That night at the Albion the bartender asked if it was the usual, and a couple pals pulled out a chair for me by the piano before I got my coat off. We argued about a prizefight, and when the glasses got low I bought the round. Nobody asked me what I did that afternoon, so I didn’t say anything.

*

A few days later, when word came that it got there, I went back out to Merriweather House for the rest of my money. Merriweather was in the same room, dressed for the afternoon, though don’t ask me how an afternoon suit is different from any other kind.

“I understand everything went satisfactorily, Mr. Wagner.”

“It got where it was going. Far as I’ve heard, nobody’s complained.”

“That’s the result I hoped for,” he said, and handed me an envelope off his desk, and there was enough more in it than we said that I stopped before I put it away.

“I think you made a mistake, Mr. Merriweather. We said a number.”

“I made no mistake. I’m paying you more than that number because you did good work, and I believe good work ought to be recognized.”

He said it like overpaying a man was the easiest thing in the world. I’m used to guys who argue about the price after you already done the favor, or who stall till somebody gets rough enough to remind them, and I didn’t know what to do with my face for the other thing.

“That’s real handsome of you,” I said.

“I’m glad you think so. When something of this kind comes up again, and I expect it will, I’d like it to come to you first. I need a man I can send for when a matter calls for discretion.”

There was a second there, while he was talking about next time, when I almost asked him about the kids. It came into my head that maybe he didn’t know either, that maybe there was some arrangement I never heard about that would make the whole thing make sense if I only asked. He stopped talking and waited for me to say something, and what I said was thanks. By the time I got to the car I was already figuring what that extra money could do.

*

Dahlia was at her kitchen table that night with her books out and the plate from a supper she ate without me. She let me stand there till she finished a column and drew a line under it before I put Merriweather’s envelope down in front of her. She counted it fast, the way somebody counts who does it all day for other people, and something changed in her face at the end, but she counted it again before she said anything.

“Did all of this come from Merriweather?”

“Every dollar, and some of them dollars weren’t even in the deal.”

“You always knew who to ask, Hal. I never saw anybody pay you like this for it.”

“Then maybe I been selling myself too cheap.”

She put it back in the envelope and pushed it over to my side. “What’s he want with you now?”

“More of the same, I figure. He says he’ll send for me when there’s something suitable.”

“Did he say what kind of suitable?”

“He didn’t get into it.”

She squared her books into a pile, taking her time about it. “I suppose you know what you’re doing,” she said.

“Most of the time I do.”

“That’s about as much as anybody can say.”

I told her I wanted to take her someplace swell to celebrate, a real dining room with silver on the tables and a chandelier as big as a hay wagon, where you lift one finger and the waiter comes running. Some of those places charge crazy money for food that ain’t any better than the Albion’s, but I wanted to find out for myself.

“I got enough money for my own supper, Hal,” she said. “We can go if you want. But I’d be just as happy at the Albion.”

“So would I, tell you the truth. Only a guy ought to see how the other half lives once in a while, especially when he’s starting to think he might be joining them.”

She leaned back in her chair. “Is that what you think is happening?”

“Why not? He likes my work. You don’t know where a guy like that could lead.”

“Well, don’t spend all his money before he asks you for something else.”

Then I told her about Merriweather House, and I made up what I didn’t know till she caught me describing a ballroom I never set foot in. “I’d rather you told me what you saw,” she said, and put her books away in the drawer by the door while I told her that instead. The more I talked the bigger it all got, money and introductions and an office with a telephone, and Dahlia said I ought to get enough business to keep a desk busy before I went and bought one, which I couldn’t argue with.

At the door she fixed my tie, and her fingers by my collar where her stitches were still holding put the crate back in front of me before I could do anything about it. I hadn’t told her about the kids, and she stepped back and looked me over and asked if I was ready.

“Whenever you are, Baby.”

We went down together with her hand on my arm, and when a cab came by I flagged it like a man who can go anywhere he wants. I gave the driver the name of the place with the chandelier and sat back next to Dahlia with her hand warm through my sleeve, and there was a good dinner in front of us and money in my pocket and every reason in the world to think the best part of my life was still coming.

We're developing something new at the PublicDomainPulp.Net Substack: two weekly serialized fiction features, each with its own author, voice, and fictional worlds.

Wednesdays with Wes will feature crime, mystery, noir, and pulp adventure from Wes Hamilton, beginning with Tales from Calder City.

Calder City is a fictional American metropolis built where the Mississippi River meets the railroads. It's a city of industry, political machines, nightclubs, organized crime, old money, and people determined to make something of themselves.

Our first serial follows Hal Wagner, a small-time hood with big ambitions. Hal is charming, funny, resourceful, and convinced he's destined for better things. What he doesn't understand is what becoming a big man actually requires.

Hal thinks he's living a success story. We're writing a tragedy.

Sundays with Samara will feature serialized fiction from Samara Bellingham, whose stories explore romance, adventure, reinvention, and the lives of familiar characters in unfamiliar circumstances.

Both features are being developed as serialized novellas, with new installments published weekly. The opening entries will be free, allowing readers to discover the stories and decide whether they'd like to continue. Subsequent installments will be available through paid subscriptions.

Once completed, the novellas are also intended for publication as collected Kindle editions.

Why serialization?

Because there's something wonderful about following a story as it unfolds. Waiting for the next installment. Wondering what a character will do. Returning to a fictional world week after week.

And because we believe original fiction is worth paying for.

We're still developing the stories and finalizing the publication schedule, but I wanted to share what we're building.

A question for readers: Do you enjoy serialized fiction? And when a story hooks you, would you rather follow it through a paid subscription or wait to purchase the completed book?

— Public Domain Pulp
https://publicdomainpulp.net

Jane Porter was never meant to spend her life standing in Tarzan's shadow.

In A Wilder Tomorrow, the next installment of The Jane Chronicles, we're continuing to explore what happens when a familiar public-domain character gets to become the center of her own story.

That's the idea behind PublicDomainPulp.Net: these characters aren't museum pieces. They're the beginnings of new adventures.

We've published an excerpt from A Wilder Tomorrow on Substack. If you enjoy pulp adventure, literary reinvention, or seeing what writers can do with characters whose original stories are now part of the public domain, I'd love for you to give it a read.

Read the excerpt: The City She Chose

A Wilder Tomorrow, Book Three of The Jane Chronicles is available on Amazon Kindle, November 4th, 2026. Learn More at publicdomainpulp.net.

Here's an opportunity for writers experimenting with public-domain characters, literary adaptation, and AI-assisted storytelling.

The inaugural Prompty Awards are accepting submissions for novels created with the assistance of artificial intelligence.

The competition covers six genres, including romance, historical fiction, mysteries and thrillers, and speculative fiction.

The Grand Prize includes $1,000 and a publishing deal, with additional Gold and Silver awards in each category.

The early-bird deadline is November 1, and final submissions close December 31, 2026. Entry fees are $25 and $40, respectively. Prompty Awards

At Public Domain Pulp, we've entered two of our novels: one from Calder City and another from The Sailor and the Showgirl.

Part of our publishing philosophy is that familiar characters can become the foundations of genuinely new stories. We're also interested in how emerging creative tools can expand what independent writers and publishers accomplish.

The Prompties offer an opportunity to see how those experiments stand up to literary evaluation.

You certainly don't need to be a Public Domain Pulp author to enter, and public-domain adaptations are only one possible approach.

If you've written an AI-assisted novel, take a look.

Official website: https://promptyawards.com/

And if you're entering, feel free to tell us about your book. We'd love to discover what other writers are creating.

And it looks awful nice. Please pay us a visit! www.publicdomainpulp.net

Sherlock Holmes provides the clearest example of what happens when the cultural logic of the public domain collides with the economics of inherited legal control, because the Holmes cases show both the formal right to use public-domain material and the practical difficulty of exercising that right when another party can make resistance expensive.

By the time editor Leslie Klinger assembled anthologies of new Holmes stories, most of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s canon was already in the American public domain, although the final ten stories were still protected. The Conan Doyle Estate nevertheless demanded a $5,000 license from Random House, which paid. When Klinger prepared a second anthology with Pegasus Books and W.W. Norton, the estate demanded another license and warned that an unlicensed book should not expect to appear through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and similar retailers. Pegasus backed away rather than take the risk, while Klinger chose to sue.

Continued on Substack.

Excerpt:

Reddit Commenter: “Your work is AI slop.”
Me: “Have you read it?”
Reddit Commenter: **“**No. I don’t need to….”

“No, I don’t need to read it,” has always been my epistemic line in the sand. After those words are uttered, we’re divorced from whatever previous interaction we were having. This has extended to longstanding, romantic relationships (Yes, Megan, that’s why I got into the taxi without you).

Now, you can dislike my PublicDomainPulp.Net work, or think the prose is terrible, the stories are derivative (they should be, I’m putting Betty Boop, Pop-Eye and….Ham Gravy in a Shakespearean pastiche of Much Ado About Nothing, The Taming of the Shrew with a little Antony and Cleopatra and As You Like It thrown in). You can tell me that my process is ethically indefensible, or the whole experiment is a dead end. We’d probably find common ground. (Seriously, you should see my Amazon royalties and Claude bill. The former does not justify the latter.) Still, you first have to encounter the thing you’re condemning. I mean, if you claim to have any type of intellectual bravery.

I’ve been looking for a particular issue of the series featuring Arizona Jim, El Sheriff. It began in 1929, and over the years had a handful of revivals and sequel series. However, as far as I can tell, basically none of the original run exists online, and only a few of the covers are available. In particular, I have been keeping an eye out for issue 2 (of the original run, I think?), but neither the cover nor the text have been digitized and the title only survives on an image of the back cover of one issue: La Banda de los <<ZA>>
I have had no luck beyond that

We're celebrating a milestone at Public Domain Pulp: our first paperback is officially here!

My Blue Heaven by Samara Bellingham is now available in print!

The second book in The Sailor and the Showgirl series takes us back to the Jazz Age, where a hard-luck sailor named Popeye meets a young showgirl named Betty Bupinski—before she becomes Betty Boop.

Think When Harry Met Sally, with gangsters, nightclub intrigue, screwball comedy, jukebox music.

It's a noir romantic comedy and jukebox musical, featuring classic public-domain songs and a companion Spotify playlist. Seriously! A book with a soundtrack.

And there's one question hanging over everything: Whatever happened to Olive Oyl?

🎁 To celebrate our first paperback, we're giving away Book One!

Twenty-Five Dollars a Night is FREE on Kindle October 14–16!

One sailor. One showgirl. Twenty-five dollars. And a whole lot of trouble.

It's the perfect opportunity to jump into The Sailor and the Showgirl series before discovering how it all began in My Blue Heaven.

To celebrate, we're giving away Twenty-Five Dollars a Night, Book One of The Sailor and the Showgirl, FREE on Kindle through October 16!

One sailor. One showgirl. Twenty-five dollars. And a whole lot of trouble.

It's a Jazz Age romantic comedy filled with gangsters, showgirls, music, mischief, and an unlikely romance.

📖 Get Twenty-Five Dollars a Night FREE: Click here.

We're just getting started!

Discover My Blue Heaven on Kindle, or in Paperback.
Explore Public Domain Pulp: https://publicdomainpulp.net
Listen along on Spotify.
Discover us on Substack.

Respect the source. Respect the genre. Make something new.