The Death Shot

This was quite a difficult book to transcribe. There were the usual difficulties with this author--his frequent use of words in Spanish, or the Mexican variety of Spanish, of words in French. In addition it must have been something of an experimental writing, for it is generally in the present tense, and there was frequent use made of new words that have not survived in the language. Much, indeed almost all, of the speech is uttered by uneducated persons, so that it needs perseverance, sometimes, to make out what is being said. Probably most of the speakers would not have been able to read, and would not have known how to pronounce the words they uttered. Added to all that the proof-reading, particularly towards the end of the book, left much to be desired, quite common words having letters missing or all jumbled up. Finally, the copy used was in a bad way, not from over-use, but from bad binding. It fell apart completely, and we had to continue the work on a scanner that can only read books that have been reduced to single pages.

We do not need to mention the problem usual with cheaply made books of that period, that punctuation marks, especially commas and full-stops, and especially at the corners of the pages, tend to disappear, and some degree of cunning has to be brought to bear to recover them.

All that having been said, I would like to think that the author would have been pleased with our version, for certain it is that it is better than the published book, although it is certain there are still some errors in our text. It does make a very nice audiobook, taking almost fifteen hours to read. At the time of writing this I have heard it twice, and enjoyed it thoroughly.

After some thought I decided to replace his coy Victorian "G—d", "H—l", "D—n" and "D—d" with their intended words. Doubtless there are some who will not be happy with this, but this book was written 130 years ago, and times have changed.

It has been suggested that this book was entirely re-written by the author, this being his final version. Although it is an unusual piece of writing it flows very well, and the author could well have been unhappy about the poor printing. Let us hope that he is looking down upon us with a gleam of pleasure in his eye.

As regards the subject matter, it is really very strange. There are murders with no body, murderers on the run with no evidence against them, murdered persons who are perfectly alive and well, Red Indians who are no such thing, a body which is buried and comes to life again, being dug up by a dog, and all the time against a truly beautiful description of the terrain, and a considerable tenderness towards the somewhat strange persons who form the cast of this unusual book.

REID, Thomas Mayne (1818-83).

Irish writer of boys' stories, born in Ballyroney, County Down. In 1840 he emigrated to New Orleans, settled as a journalist in Philadelphia (1843), and served in the US army during the Mexican war (1847), where he was severely wounded. Returning to Britain in 1849, he settled down to a literary life in London. His vigorous style and hairbreadth escapes delighted his readers. Among his books, many of which were popular in translation in Poland and Russia, were The Rifle Rangers (1850), Scalp Hunters (1851), Boy Hunters (1853), War Trail (1851), Boy Tar (1859), and Headless Horseman (1866). He went back to New York in 1867 and founded the Onward Magazine, but returned to England in 1870.

(With acknowledgements to Chambers Biographical Dictionary)

The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature mentions that he was the son of a Presbyterian Minister, and that the first two books mentioned above were for a general readership. When he returned to England the publisher Davis Bogue suggested that he should write books specifically for boys, catering for the Christmas market each year. He was a naturalist, and wrote about the creations of Nature, where many other Victorian authors would have been all moralising and pious. He was a great admirer of Byron, and some of his heroes are Byronic in temperament.

A PDF of scans and an HTML version of this book are provided. We also provide a plain TEXT version and full instructions for using this to make your own audiobook. To find these click on the PDF, HTML or TXT links on the left.

These transcriptions of books by various nineteenth century authors of instructive books for teenagers, were made during the period 1997 to the present day by Athelstane e-Books. Most of the books are concerned with the sea, but in any case all will give a good idea of life in the nineteenth century. This of course includes attitudes prevalent at the time, but frowned upon nowadays.

We used a Hewlett-Packard scanner, a Plustek OpticBook 3600 scanner or a Nikkon Coolpix 5700 camera to scan the pages. We then made a pdf which we used to assist with editing the OCRed text.

To make a text version we used TextBridge Pro 98 or ABBYY Finereader 7 or 8 to produce a first draft of the text, and Athelstane software to find misreads and improve the text. We proof-read the chapters, and then made a CD with the book read aloud by either Fonix ISpeak or TextAloud MP3. The last step enables us to hear and correct most of the errors that may have been missed by the other steps, as well as entertaining us during the work of transcription.

The resulting text can be read at www.athelstane.co.uk