Fritz to the Front;  or, The Ventriloquist Scamp-Hunter

Fritz Snyder, a European born pawn broker from Philadelphia, is met with mayhem while on a vacation ferry to an Atlantic City summer resort.  And even more when he arrives at New Jersey!

His detective and ventriloquist skills are employed in a vicious thug's oceanfront cave hide-out, through a bizarre little island community and secret passages beneath a burning building.

Can he rescue a wealthy Irishman's kidnapped daughter?  Better yet, can Fritz fool his pursuers by throwing his ventriloquist voice through the throat of a decapitated head?

Fritz to the Front by Edward L. Wheeler originally appeared in the August 23, 1881, issue No. 213 of Beadle's Half-Dime Library, a 16 page, 9" x 12" inch weekly reader from legendary dime novel publishers Beadles and Adams.

This edition was restored from a 1920’s Arthur Westbook Company reprinting with Hollywood legend Lon Chaney as "Gaspard The Good" in The Trap (1922, Universal Film Manufacturing Company) is on the cover!

Optical character recognition (OCR) edition

When this 1920s edition was printed the plates for Fritz to the Front were badly worn out.  It’s pages were unusable for making our usual digitally restored facsimile reprint so each page was scanned and new text OCR (optical character recognition) was extracted and checked for accuracy against the original book twice.  That means quotation marks, hyphens and other characters are correct to the original printing plates.