I'm including here Detective Edenhope’s 1894 dime novel Nellie, the Girl Detective not because it is a thrilling read, but because it includes so many of the tropes and themes prevalent in early girl detective stories. Despite the sensationalism of its content, the prose is plodding and the dialogue advances the story by baby steps, reminding readers, as do the one- and two-sentence paragraphs, that dime novels were uniform in length, so an author with a 20-page idea who wanted to sell a story …