Richard Bonner 3 hr 11 min read

A mysterious X.Y.Z., a cipher code, a shot in the night, and three colored gems, a wireless mystery aboard the Tarantula for a band of clever young inventors.

Richard Bonner's 1929 novel is a brisk juvenile invention-adventure of the boy-inventor tradition. Fast, wholesome, gadget-filled period fiction. Read it for a rousing 1920s boys' adventure where scientific ingenuity and pluck untangle a wireless mystery, ciphers, and villainy, in the mold of the classic invention-story serials.

In its time

Published in 1929, during the 1920s, the pulp era proper.

Reading it

3 hr 11 min read (a novel-length work, settle in).

Illustrated by

Charles L. Wrenn