Perhaps the explanation is the simplest possible: despite the defects (and they are many), and despite an egotistical self-aggrandizement that led him to dress like Old Shatterhand, and even commission a rifle that replicated the “magical” 25-shot carbine the hero carried (although I have no clue whether or not the thing ever actually worked), Karl May wrote a rattling good story. If he was a “hack,” remember that the definition of a “hack” is this: a strong, dependable horse that can always be relied on to get you where you want to go.

There are worse things to be.

Prologue

BLESSED Mary, it is bitter. Friedrich Schnittel did not take his coat off after closing the door to the single room he and his family inhabited in a ramshackle building on the inaptly named Gartenstrasse in Freiburg. There was no point in taking it off. It was only a little warmer inside than it was outside. The single room, with its peeling wallpaper and single window with rags stuffed in every crevice, was mostly heated by the bodies of his family, when all was said and done.

His eight children crowded around him, waiting to see what he would produce out of his coat, but they knew better than to clamor at him. And they knew better than to grab for the loaf of day-old bread, the head of cabbage, and the little pot of rendered fat that was all he had to show for an entire day of work stacking crates of wine. He passed these treasures over their heads into the hands of his heavily pregnant wife, Maria. Eight pairs of eyes followed the food with longing and hunger. Maria sat down beside the hearth on a tin bucket, and propped a piece of chipped tile on her lap to use as a cutting board. The cabbage wasn’t very good, or very large, but Maria chopped it fine and added every bit, including the stem, to the pot over the tiny hearth. Meanwhile, Friedrich sat down on the bit of ruined masonry that he used for a stool on the side of the hearth opposite her. They didn’t have any furniture to speak of; if they’d had anything, it would have been broken up and added to the fire long ago. The only reason they had anything at all to burn was because three of the four oldest children spent all day scavenging every bit of wood or crumb of coal they could find within walking distance of their home. They were good at it, finding even the smallest scraps and the thinnest twigs, but they were competing with many others in similarly impoverished circumstances.

The eldest boy had a different task: he took whatever jobs people would give a nine-year-old boy, which in the winter, wasn’t much.