The Mucker

Billy Byrne was made in Chicago's gutter. He's a mucker, a thug, a man who learned to fight before he learned to read. He robs, he drinks, he hates the wealthy with a purity that burns. When he's framed for murder, he runs, straight into the hands of sailors who shanghai him onto a ship bound for the Pacific. But here is the strange mercy in his captivity: hard work and ship's discipline strip away something in him. The man who emerges from the hold is not the animal who entered it. Yet salvation comes wrapped in sin. The vessel's secret mission is piracy, the kidnapping of a wealthy man's daughter for ransom. Billy must choose: the monster society made him, or the man he might finally become. Burroughs wrote this as two serial novellas in 1914 and 1916, and the result is pulp fiction with unexpected philosophical weight - a story about whether anyone is beyond redemption, and whether the road to grace must run through sin first.