false 4 0 false false Mon Jun 01 00:00:00 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 15 02:28:28 -0700 2009 Mon Jun 15 03:36:48 -0700 2009 2
He's kind of an antipodean Moriarty with a bit of Fu Manchu and Fantomas thrown in for good measure.

In this, the first of the stories, we meet adventurer and trader Richard Hatteras, who falls in love with the daughter of an Australian diplomat in his travels. Phyllis's father gets caught up in Dr. Nikola's bid for world domination and by association - and coincidence - so does our boy Hatteras. It's up to him to use his intelligence and pluck to extricate his lover and his friends and his father-in-law-to-be from the grasp of the fiendish and frightening Dr. Nikola. But can any mere mortal outwit such an inhumanly determined and resourceful foe?

The answer is actually not as straightforward as you'd expect. This is a great mystery, with lots of things happening off-camera that nevertheless drive the plot forward, and which are revealed with exeptional timing on Boothby's part in a way that gets your juices flowing for the next in the series.

Nikola is a brilliantly vivid character, skirting safely the borders of cliche and melodrama, genuinely capable of surprises by virtue of being so freakin' weird. Hatteras is good too - a satistying and likeable fusion of righteous gentleman good with his fists and capable independent thinker (if a touch gormless), which is good, because he's our narrator.

Of course, being Victoriana pulp the prose is long-winded and quite formal, but that's the charm of stuff like this. All that "Do you know I think it's the most extraordinary thing, but I could have sworn on the life of my sainted mother that it was Nikola that I saw lurking about the gaslights outside number twenty-seven Acacia Lane? The devil take him and all his nefarious associates!" is just delicious.

I actually read an e-text version of this on my phone, which I scored from Project Gutenberg. So not only is Dr Nikola's Vendetta an excellent hidden gem of 19th-century pulp, it's FREE!

You can't, as someone once said, go wrong.]]>