The Mucker Series

Billy Byrne is a tough, a hoodlum, and a mucker. His adventures take him from the streets of Chicago to the wilds of the South Pacific to the hobo rails of America to the flatlands of Pancho Villa's Mexico. And even a mucker can be redeemed by the love of a beautiful girl. This is quintessential Americana from the pen of one of the 20th century's most popular authors.

Billy Byrne is a low class American born in Chicago's ghetto. He grows up a thief and a mugger. "Billy was a mucker, a hoodlum, a gangster, a thug, a tough." He is not chivalrous nor kind, and has only meager ethics - never giving evidence against a friend or leaving someone behind. When falsely accused of murder, he flees to San Francisco and is shanghaied aboard a ship. The ship's secret mission is soon enacted - the hijacking of a specific yacht to take a millionaire's daughter, Barbara Harding, for ransom.

The Mucker spent his life fighting. He fought his way out of the worst of Chicago's slums; he fought his way out of a jail sentence for a murder he didn't commit. Then, forced to fight for his freedom, destiny led him through a startling series of further adventures to Mexico - and a fight for his life in the middle of a bloody revolution.

In "The Oakdale Affair", we follow further adventures of Bridge. Bridge finds himself sheltering from a storm with a mysterious thief. The pair rescue a young woman who's run afoul of her gangster boyfriend. It seems that everybody wants the loot that the thief stole, and somewhere out there is a kidnapped young woman who is the key to it all. Bridge will have a lot of juggling to do to keep gangsters, gypsies, and private detectives in line and solve the mystery at hand.