The Death Shot, A Story Retold, by Captain Mayne Reid.
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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.
To illustrate the poor proof-reading, one of the chapters was completely
repeated, without any change in the flow of page numbers. This is
something I have never before seen, though I have seen chapters
completely omitted, without affecting the page-numbers!
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.
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THE DEATH SHOT, A STORY RETOLD, BY CAPTAIN MAYNE REID.