ONCE UPON A time, I used to work in an office. There wasn't much to the office, and as I got better at my job, I was able to complete my work in less and less time. Rather than behave like a stooge and ask my supervisor for more work, I used my head and started reading public domain books online, using sites like Project Gutenberg and Project Gutenberg Australia. (More on PG: Australia later.)
What I soon (re)discovered was that, just as it had been when I was a penniless "non-traditional" (read: older) state college undergrad, some of these books are fun. Quite a lot of them, in fact. I started with a few authors I'd already heard of whose works were in the U.S. public domain, like H.P. Lovecraft, Voltaire, Bram Stoker, and Kenneth Grahame, but soon found myself craving new and different voices. Eventually, my literary wanderlust started to take on a more definite shape: I can appreciate a great work of high literature as much as the next bibliophile, but what I really see—what best helps to pass the dull hours of a life—is adventure.
Naturally, a word as broad as "adventure" has a wide range of possible interpretations. Certainly a swashbuckling romance, like Rafael Sabatini's classic Caribbean pirate tale Captain Blood (1922), counts. But that novel is a far cry from the earlier, darker, and much more famous novella Heart of Darkness (1899), by Joseph Conrad, which is also, arguably, an adventure tale (if not "merely" an adventure tale). Lord Dunsany's sweet little short story "The Kith of the Elf-Folk," from The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories (1908), is also an adventure in its own way, albeit one of a different, more spiritual sort.
Rather than try to set limits on what I'd be reading, I resolved to simply read anything that seemed to have some movement in it, and finish it if I liked how it began. I also started jotting down notes about whether I liked a story or not, what the idea of the story was, and any sociopolitical sticking points that had prevented me from enjoying the prose as much as I otherwise might have. In short, I started writing capsule reviews of public domain stories for my own benefit. Sharing them with others is simply the next logical step.
On this site you will find, eventually and as I have time, a slowly-growing collection of such reviews, curated and rewritten to make sense to people besides just me. Not everything in this collection will actually qualify as an adventure story: if a work is short enough, I might finish it before I have a chance to decide whether it's up my proverbial alley or not—but that doesn't mean, in my opinion, that I should skip reviewing it. At the very least, it's a useful way to warn myself off of accidentally reopening things I didn't like. For the most part, though, these stories have at least some genuine adventure in them.
When complete, this site will feature:
All that said, for now, if you just want to read the best adventure story I've found (thus far) that's currently in the U.S. public domain, here it is: The Hour of the Dragon by Robert E. Howard, an author of striking descriptive prose and breathtaking racism and xenophobia, whose better angels are more fully on display here than in much of his lesser work. If you read it, and like it, then bookmark this site, because you're in for a treat!