Comanche Moon by William R. Cox

The 2nd printing of the Signet paperback edition.
(The 1st printing was in 1961, but the 75 cents
tag suggests this came later in the decade.)
My copy looks more beat-up than this one.

I didn’t know William R. Cox’s name when I first encountered his writing. It was a novel featuring drifting Thomas Buchanan, a self-proclaimed “peaceable man” who somehow ends up in trouble—usually someone else’s trouble, but it’s someone who must rely on Buchanan to clear up the mess. The Buchanan series of westerns was published by Fawcett-Gold Medal—currently Piccadilly Publishing is re-releasing the novels in the ebooks format—as written by Jonas Ward. William Ard created the series, the first novel of which was published in 1956. Ard completed only five books in the series. He died while writing the sixth, Buchanan on the Prod, which was finished by Robert Silverberg. Brian Garfield, immersed in writing westerns before publishing his breakout novel (DeathWish), wrote the next—Buchanan’s Gun, and Cox took over the series with Buchanan’s War (1971). He ended up writing more Buchanans than Ard, a total of sixteen books. To be honest, I prefer Cox’s Buchanan to Ard’s version.

Comanche Moon was published under Cox’s name in 1959, twelve years before Fawcett released his first Buchanan. The earlier book develops a tone that is harder-boiled than the overall feel of most Buchanan novels, but includes elements one can see arise later in Cox’s Buchanan tales.

For example, Comanche Moon brings together a disparate group of people—an old plot device even at the time Chaucer used it for TheCanterbury Tales—which happens in several Buchanan stories. Further, Comanche Moon focuses on this group trapped in Comanche Station, a stage-line station halfway between Pecos and El Paso, by a war band of raiding Indians. In 1973’s Buchanan’s Siege, the eponymous hero and a band of allies are trapped by a large gang of badguys.

The main difference in the two books is that the Buchanan stories typically have an identified villain, usually a land baron or crooked banker or swindler working toward a big score. For Comanche Moon, the threat comes from a large gathering of Comanches. Cox makes them essentially faceless and thoroughly vicious presences—think of the attackers in John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13—who form the stereotypical savage Indians from innumerable Hollywood oaters. While the massed warriors surrounding the station may not—from Cox’s perspective—consciously represent the nightmarish, primeval wilderness arrayed against the representatives of civilization trapped within their deadly circle (harking to cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence [“the eternal presence of the native people of the woods, dark of skin and seemingly dark of mind, mysterious, bloody, cruel”] and literary critic Leslie Fiedler in Loveand Death in the American Novel discussing Charles Brockden Brown’s 1799 novel, Edgar Huntly [“It is not the Indian as social victim that appeals to Brown’s imagination, but the Indian as projection of natural evil and the id; his red men are therefore treated essentially as animals, living extensions of the threat of the wilderness, like the panthers with whom they are associated”]), Cox occasionally describes them in ways that echo these dark shadows that haunt civilization’s dreams. As one character states, “They fight to kill. They try to kill you all over, not just in one place.”

Other passages that demonstrate their bogeyman qualities:

They were riding harder and harder. There were so many of them that it seemed they could ride right through the buildings, sweeping everything away.

They were coming as he remembered a storm marching across a wheat field and it was like shooting at slanting raindrops.

Only three members of this mass of warriors are named. More on them later in this essay.

Another similarity between this novel and the Buchanan series: Comanche Moon’s Luke Post is a small-statured gambler who’s full of chutzpah, savvy about the wily and cowardly ways of cornered men, and quick with a gun; Thomas Buchanan mentions at least once per story his acquaintance with real-life Luke Short, a diminutive cardsharp known for his gun skills. (This is not Luke Short, the pseudonym of prolific pulp- and slick-fictioneer Frederick Glidden. Bat Masterson wrote in 1907 of the actual Short, “Luke was a little fellow, so to speak, about five feet, six inches in height, and weighing in the neighborhood of one hundred and forty pounds. It was a small package, but one of great dynamic force.”  Clearly, Short’s history made quite an impression on author Cox.

Quite different from the easy-going but effective Tom Buchanan is Cox’s ostensible protagonist, Pierce—who initially appears to the reader in the guise of a hard-boiled, amoral anti-hero remarkably savvy about fighting Comanches, but who later is revealed to be haunted by demons even he can’t restrain.

We’re introduced to Pierce as he’s going about his business—collecting Indian scalps that he sells to the Mexican government. It’s an ugly business about which he appears to have no qualms. Indeed, his initial appearance suggests he might fit in very well with the band that marauds its way through Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. When his two companions are apparently ambushed by a scouting party—their fate remains unknown, because the two simply disappear after Pierce sends them to surprise an Indian family—Pierce gives no thought to rescuing them or even looking for them before skedaddling to a safer location. It doesn’t matter that the two companions are clearly lowlife-types with no more human regard for their victims than Pierce. That Pierce abandons them to certain death—or, more likely, to horrible torture and then death—with no more consideration than he gives his Comanche victims, immediately frames his character for the reader.

Cox doesn’t even tell us Pierce’s full name. We know only that he’s called White Eye Pierce:

“White Eye,” they called him, because of the rage which made glass of his eyes when he caught them unprepared and killed them and took their hair. They hunted him and he hunted them, and so far as he was concerned that was proper and the way it had to be. There would never be an end to this so long as Josie was alive and with them, never.

Only later in the novel does Pierce fully reveal the source of his hatred. He tells one of the trapped travelers, Ben Tyler—a sympathetic and mostly honorable fellow from the East—how the Comanches had killed his parents when he was young, and made captives of him and his sister, Josie; how they’d repeatedly raped his sister until one of the war chiefs, Bear Head, had taken her as a wife; how Pierce, once he was older, had repeatedly implored Josie to escape with him, but she had refused, pointing to the children she’d borne as tying her to the tribe. The first of these children, Walking Jay, had been the child of one of her rapists and was adopted by Bear Head. And Pierce realized that he’d lost all chance of removing her from the Comanches once she’d become pregnant, but he continually fought an internal battle over the pre-captivity sister he’d adored and the adopted Comanche she’d become and that he hated.

Late in the novel, Pierce encounters and kills Walking Jay, his nephew--and his sister's first-born son. Several times he sees Bear Head guiding the warriors during their attacks. And at least once, Pierce sees his sister at Bear Head's side, encouraging the war chief's efforts. It is a sight that nearly crumbles Pierce's precarious mental state.

Tyler is sympathetic to Pierce’s anguish, and he admires his leadership qualities among the besieged as well as his fighting acumen, but he’s also repulsed by the vile manner by which Pierce expresses his hatred toward the Comanches. Although Tyler is among those trapped by the native warriors, he can’t quite align himself with Pierce’s view that the Comanches are aliens whose existence is completely antithetical to anything non-Comanche.

It is Tyler’s observations of Pierce through the rest of the novel that lift the scalp hunter from a mere two-dimensional hating and killing machine to a fully formed character.

Cox demonstrates his storytelling skill by successfully fleshing out Pierce’s character into a believable personality. The writer truly shines in delineating the other characters trapped at the station. While the scenes of action and violence lend a pulse to the plot that pulls along the reader from Chapter One, it’s the quieter moments of interaction between the twelve men and two women that knit the narrative cords binding the story into a cohesive, entertaining whole. As in the best tales, the tension that builds between characters—builds, ebbs, and sometimes explodes—engages the reader in a way far stronger than the external drama (the surrounding threat of the bloodthirsty Comanches) that frames the visceral scenes within the walls of the station. The emotions, the scheming, the cowardice, the dreaming, the foolishness, the heroics of these fourteen characters are what truly bring Comanche Moon to life. The heightened moments Cox composes inside the surrounded station at times rival those dramatic, claustrophobic, deadly scenes that often mark Harry Whittington’s best-remembered books.

Cox, who wrote scripts for a number of television shows over the years, notes at the novel’s beginning that it originally was developed as a screen treatment. My research turns up no info suggesting the story was ever filmed, but its scenes suggest it could have made a powerful movie. It has all the elements to be such: an outsider protagonist with a troubled past that haunts his present, an ensemble cast with room for a variety of character actors, a dramatic plot. Although Anthony Mann and other directors were making noirish, hard-boiled westerns in this vein during the 1950s, some of Cox’s lurid or sexual details might have had to be diluted for the tale to have made it to the screen at that time. Still, there’s plenty of room for an enterprising director to tackle a motion picture based on Comanche Moon today.

This is a strong, excellent novel composed in the guise of a traditional western. As noted earlier, Piccadilly Publishing is releasing Cox’s Buchanan novels. The company also is releasing another series Cox wrote under his own name—the Cemetery Jones novels—plus a number of Cox’s stand-alone westerns. As of this writing, Comanche Moon isn’t yet one of these, but be on the lookout, as it would surely be a fine addition to their catalog.

Lewis B. Patten's rough-hewn Ruthless Men

According to Wikipedia, The Ruthless Men was the second of four novels written by Lewis B. Patten published in 1959. All were paperback originals. This and one other of the four were published by Fawcett Gold Medal. The other two were published by Avon Books.

Patten had been publishing novels for seven years by this time—his first published story, according to Robert E. Briney in The Best Western Stories of Lewis B. Patten by Bill Pronzini and Martin H. Greenberg [Southern Illinois University Press: 1987], appeared in the April 1950 issue of Zane Grey’s Western Magazine. According to the “Bibliography of Western Publications,” Ruthless Men was his twenty-first novel for adults (Pronzini and Greenberg)—he’d also written at least three novels for younger readers featuring Gene Autry and Jim Bowie (what we’d call tie-in novels today) for Whitman Books and Big Little Books.

All that preamble is to say, Patten’s apprenticeship was done by 1959. He knew what he was doing as a storyteller of traditional westerns. For the most part, The Ruthless Men demonstrates the truth of that statement. In other ways, it also demonstrates that Patten hadn’t yet achieved mastery in his storytelling efforts. There was still time for that. After all, his last novel wasn’t published until 1980.

The Ruthless Men focuses on Luke Partin, who opens the novel intending to kill a man he’s tracked for days after he follows his trail from the house of a family who’s been butchered. Years before, the family had nursed Luke back to health after he’d been left for dead by Apaches. For Luke, this vengeance trail is a way to repay a debt and assuage his fury.

After Luke succeeds in his quest, his target’s surviving family members set after him on an enraged vendetta. This sets up a long chase-and-fight narrative that drives Luke to the end of his reserves and lets Patten show a character dealing with deadly situations as he nears the end of his rope.

This narrative landscape allows Patten to demonstrate his skills at showing a hero under stress—something he did very well for years in nearly all his books—as Luke must deal with the ramifications of his vengeful ride.

On the other hand, the story relies on melodrama and pulp-magazine-style schemes and strategies for scenes featuring ambush and escape to support its plot. While Patten’s pacing and characterizations keep a strong grip on the reader’s attention, the pulpy flavor of some of the drama shows that his mastery of the traditional western isn’t quite complete. For instance, some of the subtlety Patten would employ in later novels isn’t quite evident here:

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Riding away, Nancy Holcomb glanced up at the foot of the rim and saw Luke watching her. She raised a hand, then dropped it abruptly and turned her face away.

She hated him. He was brutal and savage and had probably lied about the man he had killed and about those who were following him.

And yet, if she hated him, why did she feel such shame at leaving him thus? Why did she feel like weeping all over again, just as she had last night? (p. 39)

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This is rather simplistic emotional turmoil. It may form the reality of some folks' perceptions at some level, but Patten drops it on the page in a rather raw form, belying his efforts to describe his characters as having more complicated or mature interior lives. The nuanced emotional and psychological portraits readers have come to expect from Gold Medal's genre novels isn't entirely on display here, but the sort of fast-moving action novel that readers look for—or at least I look for—in Fawcett westerns is certainly evident in The Ruthless Men.

Still, these quibbles shouldn’t stop you from seeking and reading this early-ish novel by a writer who would win three Spur Awards and become a master of the traditional western.

What led to the trail to Santa Fe Passage?

Not the actual Sante Fe Trail. A novel with that title.

While reading a book, I’ll sometimes wonder what prompted the author to write it. Was there some event in the news that capture the nation’s attention? Was there a historical commemoration? Was a Broadway play, a song, or a movie popular in such a way that a writer wanted to ride its coat tails?

The question came to mind while reading Santa Fe Passage by Clay Fisher. I can’t say why I wondered—the Trail is a worthy setting for a novel.

The Trail’s timeframe normally is defined as 1821-1880—an important period bridging the early era of the United States’ establishing itself as a nation to the post-Civil War expansion and settlement of the western territories. The Trail also fueled the country’s economic growth, playing a part in the spread of the U.S. presence and influence westward and southwestward; and the flow of people and goods and money placed markers for future relations with Spain and Mexico. But on the whole, the Trail and its environs seem to be an era rarely explored by writers of traditional westerns (at least compared to the number of novels focused on the Wild West and Trail Drive periods of the nation’s history).

So I did a little research.

Santa Fe Passage was published in 1952 by Houghton Mifflin Company. It also appeared in the April 1952 issue of Esquire illustrated by pulp-and-slick stalwart Walter Baumhofer. Was anything happening in popular culture at the time that may have sparked the writing of Santa Fe Passage?

A Michael Curtiz film, Santa Fe Trail, starring Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Raymond Massey and Ronald Reagan, was released by Warner Brothers in 1940. A little early to have sparked a 1952 novel. A Randolph Scott movie, Santa Fe, was released in 1951 by Columbia Pictures. (Interestingly, Scott had been considered for the lead role in the 1940 film, Santa Fe Trail.) This movie was based on a novel by James Vance Marshall, Santa Fe: The Railroad That Built an Empire, published by Random House in 1945. It’s possible the book may have sparked an idea in Fisher’s creative mind, but more likely the Scott film did so.

Of course, there’s always the possibility Fisher just had a notion about a story independent of any other external stimuli. Clay Fisher is a pseudonym of the prolific Spur Award-winning Will Henry—a name that also is a pseudonym for Henry Wilson Allen. My general perception of a Will Henry novel is that it will be historically accurate and focus on a particular person, event, or thing—like the Santa Fe Trail—that carries some significance. This examined point of significance—what modernist poet Ezra Pound called the “barb of time”—allows Henry to build engaging, entertaining narratives in ways that may be said to elevate his tales from mere genre fiction (the “traditional western” label) to carrying the cachet of “historical fiction.”

Which doesn’t mean Santa Fe Passage doesn’t carry the tropes of melodrama. The story includes a hero, a villain (actually, more than one), romance, and violence.

Sounds like a traditional western, right? This one isn’t about the wild-and-woolly post-war West we expect in most traditional westerns—that is, those novels that fully conform to the genre tropes and expectations typically in place for those novels popularly known as Westerns. It is, instead, a novel set in the pre-Civil War era frontier. It takes place on the Santa Fe Trail—in fact, the characters do not even complete their journey and reach Santa Fe by the book’s end.

The tale focuses on a wagon train heading to Santa Fe from St. Louis. There are a number of conflicts—thanks to an unscrupulous wagon master, Kiowa raiders, terrible weather and bogs, to name only a few. One suspects Fisher pulled unfortunate events from every published history of the trail and crammed ‘em all into this single journey. Even if that is true, the travails have the feel of authenticity—particularly if one has also read some of the journals written by the Trail’s actual travelers. Fisher accomplishes the storyteller’s goal: the story is filled with incidents told at an interesting pace, making for an entertaining read.

The hero and his sidekick are Kirby Randolph and Sam Beekman, mountain men who’ve come east to civilization—in this case, St. Louis—after a long spell in the wilderness. They remind me a bit of the two male leads in David Thompson’s (David Robbins’) Wilderness series of books, Nathaniel King and Shakespeare McNair. Just as Thompson’s McNair teaches King how to survive and thrive in the frontier, Beekman attempts to mentor Kirby in the ways to live among civilized folks. Kirby’s attempts to shoehorn his oversized personality into the molds crafted by civilized expectations are sometimes humorous, sometimes deadly.

Fisher’s continual reliance on Mountain Main Idiom for Kirby and Beekman’s dialog is colorful but tiresome. David Thompson handles this much more successfully and satisfyingly in his Wilderness series. Here’s a sample from Santa Fe Passage:

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“Wal, if them mules is packin’ whut we heered they was, we should ought to have a reular guard commander. When the Kioways and Commanches get the wind of whut’s laced onto them longears, ye’ll have yer hands full jest bossin’, without yer tryin’ to run the camp guard, too.”

“Whut’s on them mules is Company business. I don’t know nothin’ about it. But I’m handlin’ the guard and if ye don’t like it, ye’d best haul out right now.”

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An interesting historical note: Santa Fe Passage is set in 1839. Part of the novel’s conflict arises from the transport of a woman—Aurelie St. Clair, Kirby’s eventual romantic interest—along the Trail. Women were few and far between on the actual Trail. For instance, the remarkability of one woman’s trip is documented in Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847 published in 1926. (Magoffin was long described as first woman to travel the trail, but more recent research [1984] by Marian Meyer has turned up documentation that another woman—Mary Donoho [like Magoffin, from Kentucky]—actually made the trip 13 years before Magoffin’s journey, earlier still than Fisher’s fictional passage. You can see my earlier blog post about this account by clicking here.)

I’m going to stray afield—or off-trail—for a bit and mention that Magoffin’s claim to the title of first “American lady” to travel the trail is somewhat spurious based on the cultural biases of the time (indeed, Meyer’s further investigations suggest Magoffin may actually have been the sixth woman): after all, she was accompanied by her maid, Jane, who may have been excluded from consideration because she was a servant, because she wasn’t white, or both. As Kelley Pounds points out in the online version of an article that first appeared in the January/February/March 1998 issue of Calico Trails, “Mary Donoho: The Santa Fe Trail’s New First Lady,”

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In Jean M. Burroughs' fictionalized account of Susan Magoffin's life, titled Bride of the Santa Fe Trail, Jane is portrayed as a black woman who had cared for Susan since childhood. If Burroughs' supposition is true, Jane might have been the first African American woman to travel the Santa Fe Trail all the way to Santa Fe. "Black Charlotte," wife of Dick Green and slave to Charles Bent, preceded Jane at least to Bent's Fort, where she worked as a cook in the early 1840s.  According to David Lavender in Bent's Fort, published in 1954, Charlotte supposedly made the claim that she was the "only lady in de whole damn Indian country."

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You can read more of Donoho's essay by clicking here.

These historical notes aside, Santa Fe Passage remains an entertaining frontier tale. And as to its possible spark in Fisher’s mind—the question that kicked off this essay—I lean toward thinking it was the release of the Randolph Scott movie Santa Fe in 1951. (Randolph Scott . . . Kirby Randolph. Hmmm.) After all, Fisher—under his actual name of Henry Wilson Allen—worked as a screenwriter for MGM’s animation division. Santa Fe Passage was filmed and released by Republic Pictures in 1955, starring John Payne, Faith Domergue and Rod Cameron. It was directed by Republic stalwart William Witney. Interestingly enough, the script was by Heck Allen—another pseudonym of Henry Wilson Allen.

Tex Rickard, boxing promoter

George Lewis Rickard, known as Tex, died January 6, 1959—four days after his 59th birthday.

He was a true entrepreneur. He launched the New York Rangers franchise of the National Hockey League in 1926. He owned the team until his death.

Tex was the primary force behind building the third incarnation of Madison Square Garden in 1925. It was located at Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets in Manhattan.

Rickard was an innovator. Between 1921 and 1927, Tex raised the popularity of boxing by promoting a number of fights for “The Manassa Mauler,” world heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey. For the Dempsey-Charles Carpentier bout in 1921, Tex was responsible for the first live radio broadcast of a title fight and the first million-dollar fight.

Tex promoted the July 4, 1910 Fight Of The Century in Reno, Nevada, between former heavyweight champion and “Great White Hope” Jim Jeffries and reigning heavyweight Jack Johnson. 15,760 fans paid $270,775 to watch the bout. Tex sold the film rights to the match for $101,000.
In 1906, while running a saloon in Goldfield, Nevada, Tex organized the first boxing matches in that state.

After moving to Alaska in 1895 during the Gold Rush, Tex earned and lost several fortunes. As owner of The Northern Saloon in Nome, he befriended famous lawman and gunman Wyatt Earp. And in 1900, he met down-on-his-luck bareknuckle boxer Jean St. Vrain—an encounter that would lead to a very different sort of fight.

You can read about the results of their meeting in FIGHTING ALASKA, a Fight Card book, now in paperback, by clicking here.

Now available: FIGHTING ALASKA, the ebook version

Western fans may be interested in my new tale, Fighting Alaska, an entry in the Fight Card series. Although it focuses on a NorthWestern setting, its action begins in the Texas Panhandle.

Set in 1900, Fighting Alaska tells the tale of a reluctant fighter's trip to the Alaskan gold rush. On the way, he encounters a fictional hero who may be recognized by fans of TV westerns from the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as historical folks like Wyatt Earp, Rex Beach, and Tex Rickard.

You can find the ebook version now at Amazon. You can reach it by clicking here.  (For those who prefer paper and ink over Kindle pages, the print version should be available soon.)

You can also find my article on writing Fighting Alaska, "A Fighter's Trail to the Alaskan Gold Rush," at the Fight Card site. Read the article to find out why Charles Bronson's photo is included with this post. Click here to visit the site and see the article.

  

The vigor of pulp prose: Allan Vaughan Elston

Allan Vaughan Elston was a writer for the pulps--remembered primarily today as a writer of westerns--who also wrote for TV. Apparently, according to the Wyoming Author's Wiki, he's claimed by Wyoming, although he was born July 28, 1887 in Kansas City, Missouri, and died  October 21, 1976 in Santa Ana, California. The Wyoming Author's Wiki page also includes a nice listing of Elston's books.

His papers are housed by the UCLA Special Collections at the Charles E. Young Research Library. You can find a tidy biographical summary at the Social Archive maintained by the University of Virginia. Elston lived a varied and interesting life.

At least a couple of Elston's westerns have been reprinted as Large Print books the past few years: Roundup on the Picketwire and Saddle Up for Steamboat.

Elston wrote extensively for the pulps. However, the passage from The Sheriff of San Miquel I quote below originally saw print in the Toronto Star Weekly, a newspaper supplement, of December 18, 1948. It was later published in book form by J.B. Lippincott Company in 1949. That's my source for this example of vigorous pulp prose. Elston demonstrates his mastery and his confidence by describing in a very elegant manner a character who could easily be described in a moment with clichés:

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. . . through the veins of each ran generations of an impulse called sporting blood. Alfredo was a Mexican of the ruling class, directly descended from the original Conquerors. He was only twenty-eight years old, with a face smooth, olive and gentle, a mustache thin and black, flashing dark eyes and mellow, courteous speech. In build he was slight, in feature delicate, in dress quietly elegant. Nothing visible to the eye gave evidence that he was sheriff of San Miguel County. Being a scion of los ricos and the owner of a great rancho, he had no need for the pay of a sheriff. But he liked hazard and excitement. That too was in his blood. His trimly fitting vest showed no badge. The badge was in his pocket, along with his cigarillos and watch. His slender waist showed no belt or gun. But a gun was on him somewhere, and upon certain occasion Alfred Baca had been known to produce it with eye-baffling celerity. His real weapons were dignity, self-confidence and a reputation for being utterly fearless. Once he'd walked into this very bar to arrest an outlaw. Showing no gun, he'd merely taken from his pocket a sheriff's badge and exposed it in the palm of his hand. "I am Alfredo Baca. You will follow me, senor." Whereupon, taking obedience for granted, he had turned his back on the outlaw and walked three blocks to the carcel. "After you, senor." And the wanted man, two guns and all, had marched sullenly in.
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Iron Men and Silver Stars: Donald Hamilton's western anthology

Iron Men and Silver Stars
Gold Medal, Greenwich, Conn. (Fawcett Publications: 1967)

Donald Hamilton is known among PBO readers and Gold Medal collectors as a writer of vigorous prose, dramatic situations, careful plotting, well-delineated characters with realistic, human personalities and reactions. He's best known as the creator of the Matt Helm series of thrillers. But he's also a writer of westerns.

Based on this last qualification -- and probably to capitalize on the popularity of the Helm novels -- Fawcett had Hamilton edit a western anthology, Iron Men and Silver Stars.

The collection opens with a slight piece by the editor about writing westerns, originally published in the Western Writers of America's April 1956 issue of The Roundup. But everything that follows that preface is a fine example of solid writing by masters of the short prose form. I'll share a few opening paragraphs to demonstrate the energetic, engaging qualities of the writing in this book:

"Green Wounds," Carter Travis Young
He was a big, easy man with a way of relaxing completely that was rare in Burt Haskins' experience. Strangers just didn't settle down on the other side of the sheriff's scarred oak desk and act like they'd come home! (p. 11)

"Epitaph," Tom W. Blackburn
The man in overalls could run like a rabbit. He was shifty on his feet and fast as hell, but he was a sitting duck, just the same. Like the shot Jack Dall had put through his hat inside the Pioneer Bar when the fellow had loudly claimed the marshal of Fort Sand was a saloon marshal, Dall's shots here on the street were precisely planted. A warning, a chastisement, stinging the man's heels, driving him to a more frantic retreat. There was only one way to rule a turbulent town.

"In the Line of Duty," Elmer Kelton
The two horsemen came west over the deep-rutted wagon road from Austin, their halterless Mexican packmule following like a dog, its busy ears pointing toward everything which aroused its active curiosity.

"Coward's Canyon," John Prescott
Jimmy Conroy's mouth was dry and sour in an acid-like way and the jogging of his horse intensified it in some way. The bullet-laden bandoliers, crossing at his breastbone, the big Frontier Colt, slapping at his thigh, and the buck-loaded double shotgun in his scabbard, all dragged their weight upon him in a nagging way, and failed to provide him with the assurance he thought he should expect of them. If he alone of the posse had felt this weight of fear he might have drawn sustenance from the others, but in three days they had lost two men from ambush, and he could tell they all felt the thing by now.

Each of these paragraphs sets a stage for a compact drama that will engage the reader in a narrative as compelling as a novel-length work, but with fewer words. To simply call these pieces short stories denies the energy and craft evident in each. They are all small but potent bursts of narrative magic.

Once upon a time, the western short story ruled the publishing market. Tons of ink and paper were devoted to satisfying the reading public's desire for more western fare.

Options for placing western short stories are far fewer now. But the examples in Iron Men and Silver Stars provide a picture of a time -- late in the heyday, to be sure, but still viable at the time -- when the western short story still commanded respect in the mainstream publishing industry.

High Country by Peter Dawson

Thorndike, Maine (Thorndike Press, 1992). Originally published 1947.

Many western readers know Peter Dawson is the nom de plume of Johnathan H. Glidden, brother to Frederick Glidden, better known as Luke Short. The latter may be the more-recognized name, because a number of his stories were adapted into well-remembered Hollywood movies, and Short had a strong career as a writer for the slicks.

Dawson had a long career of his own. I recently read a trio of his stories in Ghost Brand of the Wishbones, and as a result wanted to try out a novel-length work by him.

The stories in Ghost Brand were entertaining, but their artifice as stories was evident: the cause-and-effect of the action that moved the plot seemed a little forced, as did the romantic elements of the stories. Something organic was missing. I wondered if the limited lengths of the stories might have played a part in Dawson’s narratives seeming a bit stilted, and if a longer form -- the novel -- might allow him more room to build and develop his story and characters more naturally.

In reading High Country, I think my intuition was correct.

The novel features Jim Sherill’s plans to sell a herd of horses to prove his worth to the self-proclaimed Commodore Lovelace, a riverboat magnate, so he may take the hand of the Commodore’s daughter, Ruth, in marriage. Jim’s plans are thwarted when his herd is stolen. He tracks down the rustlers, insinuates his way into their camp with a story that they can throw in together and make money selling stolen horses from Canada to the Army in nearby Whitewater, and can also send horses rustled nearby from the region for sale up in Canada.

Along the way, he meets Jean Ruick, running her father’s ranch after the old man’s death with the help of a trusted old hand, Brick, and her uncle, Caleb Donovan, whom she doesn’t quite trust. Jim falls for Jean after he realizes how shallow Ruth actually is and how greedy and domineering the Commodore truly is -- infatuation had blinded Jim to the faults of both, and Jean’s integrity and honesty strike home at his heart.

In the course of the novel, Jim wins over one of the rustler’s lieutenants, and the two steal back Jim’s herd. Donovan’s involvement in the rustling is revealed, and Jim loses his herd again -- and Jean’s trusted hand, Brick, is murdered.

If this plot sounds convoluted, it’s so only because I’ve condensed the narrative so concisely. Peter Dawson pulls it all off very nicely. In the limited confines of a short story or novelette, this plot wouldn’t have worked at all. But in the more forgiving parameters of a novel, Dawson uses the larger narrative space to construct a world, a situation, with fully developed characters and with appropriate pacing to end up with a very enjoyable story.

By the end of the tale, we reach a very satisfactory wrap up. The bad guys get their deserved comeuppance, and the weary and hard-working good guys -- and gals -- end up in one another’s arms.

I’m pleased that my curiosity led me to try out Dawson’s efforts in the longer form. I’m also pleased to say that I’ll be looking for more Peter Dawson novels to read.

Greenhorn Stampede by Kit Prate

Kit Prate, New York (Tower Books: 1981)

Trace Belden is leading a trail drive from Nogadoches with his younger brother, Lon. Moving 900 spooky cattle to a new ranch in Texas is hard work enough. Trying to keep rein on Lon, who is immature and rebellious against his sibling's hard authority, ratchets up the stress exponentially.

Further conflict enters the plot when Trace pays a visit to his ex-wife. Her husband -- arrogant and powerful -- has no care for Trace, and preens before him with the cattleman's former spouse. But Lon throws oil on the fire smoldering between the men with an ill-timed, brash and foolish move. As a result, the rift between the brothers grows wider, and Cord Bishop -- the bullying husband -- has a bitter taste in his mouth and a strong desire to do in the Belden brothers.

Kit Prate sets up a tough task for an author, for none of the protagonists are particularly likeable or sympathetic, not even Trace, the titular hero of the story. But Prate's characters are very human, not mere stereotypes playing parts in a stereotypical traditional western plot. So the route the writer traces in this narrative holds the reader's interest to see just what will happen to these contentious folks.

Entertaining. I'll keep an eye out for more books by Kit Prate.

Clay Randall's Amos Flagg--High Gun

I've been entertained by the adventures of Thomas Buchanan for a few years now. I don't mean artist and blogger Thomas Buchanan, whose posts at The Pictorial Arts I find interesting, witty, and entertaining, and whose blog I recommend. I mean Buchanan, a series of peripatetic westerns published by Fawcett from 1956 to 1986 (meaning it lasted longer than Gunsmoke [1955 to 1975]), and written by diverse hands during that time.

So I was interested in reading other western series published by Fawcett. The company had published a number of solid and reliable series characters under its Gold Medal imprint in the hard-boiled spy/detective/thriller genres (notably Richard Prather's Shell Scott, Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm and Edward S. Aarons' Sam Durrell/Assignment series). With a deep catalog of western titles, and the long-running Buchanan series as a model, it made sense to me that GM would have more than one western series character.

I appealed to the collected brain trust at the Yahoo group moderated by James Reasoner, WesternPulps, and learned I was right.  Although none of the series named in the responses lasted with as many entries as Buchanan, I was pleased to find out there are more GM western series to enjoy.

One of those series is about Amos Flagg, written by Clay Randall. While Buchanan's adventures were chronicled by a number of writers during his 30 years of activity, Flagg was the sole responsibility of Randall--a pseudonym of Clifton Adams, a reliable writer in the western and detective genres. Randall's career is detailed at Mystery*File here and here.

Flagg is the tough sheriff of Sangaree County, Texas. He is tough but fair, but he's driven to be unyielding by his family history: his father, Gunner Flagg, was a notorious outlaw. Now retired (ostensibly) from the owlhoot trail thanks to a long term in prison and old age, Gunner now lives in Sangaree County. His presence is a constant prod to his son that the sheriff must continually exceed the expectations of his constituents, who -- whenever they are disappointed by Amos' performing his duties --recall the adage that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

So far I've been able to get my hands on only the second entry in the series: Amos Flagg--High Gun. It's a solid western tale, well told, whose plot demonstrates the father-son conflict described above: Gunner, never far from a scheme, makes a deal with a writer/photographer from a big East Coast newspaper to interview Wild West outlaws whom Gunner has cajoled into gathering at a remote location. The plan goes awry, of course, and danger threatens the photographer, Gunner, Amos, the sheriff's closest friends, and eventually all of Sangaree County.

The build up is a bit slow, and -- to me, at least -- seemed to bog down a bit in the novel's middle portion. Things picked up about page 100 in this 160-page book. But my expectations were based -- probably wrongly -- on my experiences reading the Buchanan books. The entries in that series are fast paced, the characters quickly and deftly drawn, the situations lined out early and allowed to run like a galloping horse. For this Flagg novel, Randall delves a bit more deeply into the psychology of his characters, details the snares the sheriff must navigate in Sangaree County's political geography, and manipulates a much  larger cast than one usually finds in a Buchanan caper.

Thinking about comments made by Ed Gorman on Randall's western writing, I've decided my initial dissatisfaction wasn't justified: Randall is a solid western writer, and High Gun is a tough, well-written western.

You'll find a listing of Clay Randall's Gold Medal output at Eddie Stevenson's Gold Medal-focused site, here. You can read another review of High Gun at Cullen Gallagher's Pulp Serenade. (He also posts a second cover painting for the Belmont Tower edition of the novel, which pictures an unmistakable likeness of Clint Eastwood as Amos Flagg. I've posted both it and the GM cover to accompany this post. Having two icons linked with the western (model Steve Holland on the GM edition, Eastwood on the BT edition) on two editions of the same book certainly is a fine honor for a western novel, I'd say.

Randall gets high marks at Pulp Serenade. I second the opinion. I'll be searching out more Amos Flagg novels.

Strong stuff: Edge and the Piccadilly Western

Recently a co-worker said to me, "You made the coffee this morning."

"How do you know?"

"I added cream and it didn't change color."

I nodded. "Strong stuff."

Strong stuff is what I've encountered not only in my beverages but also in my reading lately.

I've recently read the first Edge novel and the second entry in that long-lived series. (The first Edge novel, The Loner, was published in 1971. The last entry in the series was published in 1989. I'm just now getting around to it. I'm more like the tortoise than the hare.) Famously and accurately blurbed as "The Most Violent Westerns in Print!" Any virtues (and there are very few) the other characters exhibit are overshadowed by the primary character's apparent amorality.

Edge starts out as Josiah Hedges, returned from the War Between the States to find his younger brother tortured and murdered. He sets out on a vengeance trail. Hardened by war and heartbreak, Edge is a killing machine, cold and ruthless.

Fashioned to take advantage of the surge of popularity in the Spaghetti Western films of the time, the Edge series features a lot of hard-boiled, ugly characters in noirish situations. Author Terry Harknett -- working under the George Gilman pseudonym -- writes a sharp-paced, snappy narrative with flares of black humor. But the entries I've read have a far stretch to go before reaching the epic and nuanced development of Sergio Leone's The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly or even My Name is Nobody.

Edge and most of the other Piccadilly Cowboy westerns were nearly all published with a distinctive cover design, an easily recognizable style of cover paintings that helped readers quickly see that here was a book similar in mood and graphic violence like others published by New English Library (or, in the U.S., Pinnacle or Chelsea House). The covers and the packaging are attractive, and it's easy to see why readers were first tempted to purchase these books when they initially appeared. 

 

The violent-action thrillers set in a contemporary setting that would have been the counterparts of the Piccadilly westerns would have been Don Pendleton's Executioner series. But from a purely packaging and marketing standpoint, I'd say the Piccadilly westerns had the upper hand.

 

I also recently read the second entry in the Jubal Cade series, Double Cross, which was contemporaneous with the Edge series, and also penned by Terry Harknett and Angus Wells, who belonged to the Piccadilly Cowboys. Jubal Cade is another ruthless character. However, he debates with himself the appropriateness of his actions: he was trained to be a physician, to heal people; but he will take a life as quickly as stomping a bug if that person thwarts or threatens his plans. This debate is highlighted in the novel I read when he shot and wounded an attacker, then was captured by the attacker's brother, and had to tend to the wounded man's injuries. Hard-boiled, just like the Edge books, but with a glimmer of morality at least visible between the lines.

But there are few glimmers for hope, optimism, or morality in the Edge books. He takes the wandering antihero figure fashioned by Leone and Clint Eastwood to what may be its most extreme depiction in western series fiction. Edge is deadly, misogynistic, focused purely on self preservation -- as if his lizard brain is the only functioning part of his mind.  Perhaps most telling about Edge is this description in the second book: "He was a man without imagination."

Strong stuff has its place. But for me, a little reading of this type goes a long way. I think the next western book on my reading list will veer back more to the traditional mode.

Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847

In an earlier post I discussed my appreciation for the University of Nebraska Press' Bison Books imprint.

One of the Press' books I read recently was Down the Santa Fe Trail and into Mexico: The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847. I have some interest in the Santa Fe Trail, and when I found this volume on the library's Sale cart, I thought it would be a handy reference.

Well, it is, But when I began reading it, I had no idea I was also going to be immersed in lots of Kentucky history, as well.

Susan Shelby Magoffin (July 30, 1827 – October 26, 1855) was tied to two families important to frontier history. Really, more than two.

She was the granddaughter of Isaac Shelby (December 11, 1750 – July 18, 1826), a hero of the American Revolution and the first and fifth governor of Kentucky. She was born near Danville, Kentucky. She was named for an aunt, who was married to Dr. Ephraim McDowell  (November 11, 1771 – June 25, 1830), a Danville physician famed for performing the world's first successful ovarian tumor removal by surgery. (The tumor weighed 22.5 pounds!)

At the time of the journey, Susan was 18 years old and had been married only eight months to frontier merchant Samuel Magoffin, whose family also hailed from Kentucky. One of Susan's sisters was married to Beriah Magoffin, 21^st governor of Kentucky. Samuel's brother – and Susan's brother-in-law – James played an important role during the journey recounted in Susan's journal, serving as an emissary of the United States government to deal with the Mexican authorities as the Army advanced—because, while the Magoffins made their business trek to Santa Fe, the U.S. Army was battling the Mexican Army in efforts that would eventually expand the United States' border to the Rio Grande to include he Republic of Texas and New Mexico.

So Susan met another famous Kentuckian on her trip: Zachary Taylor (November 24, 1784 – July 9, 1850), General of the Army at the Battles of Monterrey and Buena Vista, afterwards known as Old Rough and Ready, and eventually elected as the 12^th President of the United States.

Susan is quite proud of her Kentucky heritage, and she continually compares the men she meets during her trip with the Fine Kentuckian Qualities of the men she knows back home. For example, while in Santa Fe . . .

On leaving the Fort we rode to the opposite side of the city (to the West) to see the Gloriatta, an inclosed public walk. It was commenced by Gov. Gen. Garcia Conde, being planted altogether in indifferent looking Cotton-woods it is quite susceptible of improvement—a Yankee's ingenuity and Kentuckian's taste is wanting to make it a beautiful place. (pp. 141-142)

While in Santa Fe, she is visited by a number of the military men. To one such visitor, Susan says,

I complimented him a little and my own dear Kentucky, at the same time by asking him, for my own private information, if he [came] from Ky. as I believed most or all of the great men were from there, or connected with her in some way. (132)

Susan's allegiance to her home state sound a bit funny to our ears. But really, people today have local and state pride; and the boosters of college sports teams aren't so much different today. (SEC fans may be a bit more zealous.) But her biases aside, her journal provides a remarkable record of the time for a civilian caught in a war zone while the U.S. invades Mexico. The worries – for loved ones captured or for her immediate family, when rumors reach them that the enemy is approaching and killing all Anglos – and the delights of her journey are presented with details that military and business-oriented accounts overlook or have no concerns for. The details of the journey – the number of hours of travel, the stops for water or rest or repairs, the description of the landscape and its features, the difficulties of living on the trail – are wonderful for those who seek that sort of information, and her descriptions lift the Santa Fe Trail from being a dry historical subject to something alive and real.

Susan's place in history as the first Anglo woman to travel the Trail and journey into Mexico with the traders is made all the more important by her journal, which gives the modern reader a look at the War with Mexico, a wonderful view of travel and work on the Sante Fe Trail, and a sense of what people from North American culture experienced when they first encountered the South of the Border culture during the 1840s.

I heartily recommend this book.

Riker's Gold by Skeeter Dodds

I picked up this novel wondering what kind of western writer someone named Skeeter might be. Checking the copyright page, he's apparently actually James O'Brien. I gargled the Internet and came up with nothing about this particular writer.

Riker's Gold was originally published as a Black Horse Wester in 2001. I read the large print edition published in the Dales Western Library.

I thought I would be in for a long, slow read when the novel opened with Jack Riker bemoaning the bad times: his once-fruitful farm has hit bad times, as the past few years have brought drought and a failing future to Riker and his wife, who has turned rather bitterly against him as well.

Then a soldier comes by and leaves behind saddle bags full of Army gold for Riker's safekeeping. The soldier is sick with a fever that has wiped out the rest of his company. He wants Riker to hold onto the gold until the Army sends someone looking for the lost troop. Then the soldier rides into the snow-covered mountains to die.

A band of thieves come across the soldier's trail and follow him into the mountains. They see him scribble a note, then fall over dead. Overcoming their fear of the illness that's claimed all the dead soldiers lying about, they take possession of the note and read about the gold and its whereabouts.

Meanwhile, Jack has ridden into town to lock the saddlebags in the safe within the sheriff's office. Jack is part-time lawman for the town. After a rattling argument with his wife, who wants him to simply take the gold and start a new life, Riker thinks the gold will be safer hidden in town until the Army shows up. But a nosey townsman peeps through the office window and sees Riker locking away the saddlebags, which raises his curiosity. The fellow is a known lush, and the wily bar owner can tell something is on the man's mind. Lubricating the gent with free drinks, he learns about the hidden saddlebags and wonders why Riker would make the effort to secure them.

The barowner has kept a long-simmering feud going with Riker, because he hankers for Riker's wife. When he learns the sheriff's safe holds gold, he stirs up the townspeople – who, like Riker, are beaten down by bad times – in a scheme to get the gold and Riker's wife, too. The conflict boils over when the deadly gang of thieves arrive in town, and the shooting begins.

Dodds uses the love triangle effectively in this story, building a range of conflicts from that emotional dynamic coupled with Riker's ethical dilemma about how to handle the gold placed in his care. Although there are plenty of characters willing to fire guns in this tale, Dodds plays a wary game with his primary character, Riker, by having the sheriff keep gunplay at bay until the final town-sized shootout that brings the story to a climax. Dodds handles this nicely.

I was intrigued enough by Riker's Gold to wonder how the author might handle another plot. I'll have to find out.

Railroaded! By Mark Bannerman

Mark Bannerman is the pseudonym of Robert Hales writer Tony Lewing, whose first Black Horse Western was Grand Valley Feud, published in 1995. Steve Myall has a very nice interview with him from 2009 on the Western Fiction Review blog. You'll find it here.

Railroaded! was published as a BHW in 2001. I read the large print edition published in the Linford Western Library in 2003.

Here's the cover blurb:

After the Civil War, Kansas was a wild territory ripe for exploitation German immigrant Helmut Rapp and his wife come west, claiming land under the Homestead Act. With the new railroad thrusting towards his land, Helmut strives to preserve the life and obscurity he has worked hard to achieve.

Mark notes in his interview that he's a fan of Ernest Haycox. His well-crafted sentences, the details he uses to build his characters, and the descriptions of events all provide proof that he's studied Haycox's finer works. There is a pulse and rhythm to Bannerman's narrative that demonstrates his attention to his storytelling craft.

His structuring of the novel provides a nice example. Most BHWs I've read offer a linear narrative, building from a traditional exposition of place and setting, introducing characters, and then adding the points of conflict from A to B to C.

In Railroaded!, Bannerman opens with a dramatic scene spotlighting the primary character in mortal danger, then moves to a deep flashback, so that the narrative keeps moving forward to the point at which the novel opened—not the climax, but quite near it. Building his novel with this structure displays Bannerman's confidence in his skills and his awareness of how to place the load-bearing structures in a plot.

This story is an emigrant tale: Helmut Rapp's story begins in Bavaria, where – as a starstruck and somewhat naïve youth -- he marries stage star Ingrid. Ingrid continues to bed other men, and when Helmut discovers her continual infidelity and lack of remorse, he takes his savings and goes to America. He meets a resourceful Irish girl and marries her, sure that his past will not catch up to him.

Of course, how wrong he turns out to be introduces all kinds of conflict into the plot.

After he successfully builds a ranch in the west, Ingrid tracks him down and extorts him into signing over ownership of the farm to her. In return, she won't reveal that Helmut is a bigamist. She opens a brothel in town and lives the high life of a wild west entrepreneurial bordello queen.

Helmut's troubles grow exponentially when the railroad arrives and wants to buy his valley to make its way to the nearby town. The townspeople want Helmut to sell, because the railroad will bring money to the town's businesses. Helmut could be rich. But Ingrid holds the paper on his property, so he stands his ground and refuses to sell – even though the ground he stands on doesn't legally belong to him.

Conflict escalates until the reader returns to the first scene, where Helmut is on the run from the local marshal, a bloodthirsty gunman named Keno who doesn't mind if the line of the law wobbles a bit in favor of the railroad.

In terms of storytelling finesse, this is one of the best BHWs I've read. Bannerman demonstrates an expert hand at pacing and storytelling. Recommended.

LINKS:
Railroaded! is available from Amazon. Click here for a large print edition. Click here for the Kindle edition..

Former desert ranch of Roy Rogers sells for $645K

<<
The Associated Press

VICTORVILLE, Calif. — A 67-acre Southern California ranch that once belonged to the late King of the Cowboys Roy Rogers has been sold for $645,000.

The Double R ranch near Victorville, in the Mojave Desert, includes a 1,700-square-foot home, a red barn, a stable with 15 stalls, a half-mile horse track and fenced pastures

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2012/07/16/2260087/former-desert-ranch-of-roy-rogers.html#storylink=cpy

>>

The rest of the story can be reached by clicking here.

Bison Books

The Bison Books imprint of the University of Nebraska Press is a great boon to scholars of western history, to fans and writers of western fiction.

It's true that many of the older documents and narratives that form their backlist are now available digitally from Gutenberg and other online sources as free electronic files. But it's nice to have a printed edition on one's shelf, close to hand, and the spine of which can trigger a thought that leads to digging through the pages of one or another of these tomes.

I have several Bison books on my shelves. I've been particularly fortunate the past couple of months to add to this collection thanks to my wandering thrift stores and library sales. Here are my recent acquisitions:

Magoffin, Susan Shelby: Down the Sante Fe Trail and into Mexico, The Diary of Susan Shelby Magoffin, 1846-1847. Edited by Stella M. Drumm. Foreword by Howard R. Lamar. 1982.

Majors, Alexander: Seventy Years on the Frontier, Alexander Majors' Memoirs of a Lifetime on the Border. Edited by Colonel Prentiss Ingraham. With a Preface by Buffalo Bill Cody. Introduction by David Dary. 1989.

Lavender, David: Bent's Fort. 1972

Adams, Andy: Wells Brothers, The Young Cattle Kings. Introduction by Jim Hoy. 1997.

These are all nice-looking books, filled with interesting info. I intend posting a review of the Magoffin volume soon.

Many thanks for Bison Books' keeping these texts readily available!

Frederick Faust's Abrupt Endings

It's been awhile since I shared something about Frederick Faust, more popularly known as Max Brand. While Leisure Books was publishing fresh Brand paperbacks in the mass market format, a new title seemed to appear every month. But once Dorchester filed bankruptcy, new Brand westerns have been hard to find. Five Star is still releasing hardcover editions of Brand's work, but I don't know from whom they will appear as paperback editions (or if they will).

So, back to this re-post from the old Pulp Rack Web site:

Frederick Faust's Abrupt Endings

 by Duane Spurlock

Frederick Faust's stories frequently seem to defy the traditional plot arc, in which a denouement -- or falling action that wraps up loose ends -- follows the climax. More than one reader has commented with a grumble about the abrupt endings of Faust's stories. With the body of his tale told, the author seems to have no interest in providing a typical sense of closure to his readers. Like a rocket that has expended all its fuel and then falls to earth, a Faust story speeds pell-mell to its climax, and then stops.

One explanation for this trait of Faust's storytelling is easy to apply: that the editorial demands of pulp fiction magazines did not require the artifice of closure.

This argument suggests that readers weren't interested in a neat, tidy, wrapping up of narratives, or that editors didn't want or worry about such things. There may be some weight to this theory, but I don't believe it is the ultimate answer. Of course, in some cases a lack of closure led to readers' demanding more of the story. A prime example is Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes, which ends with Tarzan giving up his rightful inheritance so that the woman he loves -- Jane Porter -- may marry the man he mistakenly believes that she loves. Of course, Burroughs wrote a sequel -- The Return of Tarzan -- in which everything ends as readers had hoped, with John Clayton (Tarzan) recognized as Lord Greystoke and married to Jane.

A second explanation that one may apply to the lack of closure is that Faust's lifestyle -- his extravagant spending -- demanded the furious pace he followed in writing his fiction, and he had no time or inclination for crafting tidy endings. After all, wasn't he writing for a popular audience seeking entertainment, not for a literary audience expecting aesthetic pleasures?

There is a third explanation for the lack of closure: simply that Faust was unable to craft such scenes. Look at the typical course his stories run -- the protagonist is always moving forward against hardships, toward a goal (known or unrealized), tacking a seemingly unending succession of obstacles, natural and manmade; Faust simply ends his story when its hero overcomes the latest difficulty that is most pertinent to the immediate narrative. We can assume that other obstacles will lie ahead for the hero -- any closing action that Faust might craft (that is, closing action that is true to the world of the protagonist and the narrative he has inhabited) would actually form the beginning of a new story, a new series of hurdles to leap over.

For examples, and to demonstrate that Faust's tendency toward this sort of ending was not limited simply to his pulp magazine stories, let's turn first to a non-pulp publication, to a couple of non-western stories that appeared in an untypical Faust market, Good Housekeeping magazine. Faust had two stories published there -- "Miniature" and "Level Landings" in the September and October issues of 1939, respectively. In "Miniature," the protagonist has found a solution to the trials he has faced the past recent years. But by the end of the story, he throws away this option, even with the sure knowledge that he will face greater difficulties in the future.

At the end of "Level Landings," the awakened hero realizes that the expectations for him -- to marry his sweetheart and settle down to a comfortable domestic life with no physical threats, no dangers -- will be utterly unsatisfying for him. He feels the pull of a life filled with excitement and adventure, and the reader leaves the story with the full expectation for the hero to dump his fiance so he may seek out the bright face of danger.

In neither story do we see the sort of closure that readers of contemporary popular fiction have come to expect. The stories end with no real happiness, no complacency, no happy marriages that signal the end of a comedy by Shakespeare, whose work Faust so loved. Instead, the heroes of these stories look forward to further trials and obstacles to overcome.

Pulp Protagonists
Let's turn now to Faust's pulp protagonists. Like Hercules working through his twelve labors, Faust's heroes move from one task or difficult situation to another. A story recounts a hero's particular labor, then ends. In the case of Faust's series characters, the next story in the series covers another labor, and then ends. Even if a character reaches the end of his labors to win some treasure or knowledge, there is no closure, for other challenges shall arise for such characters.

For instance, Faust's "Reata" must perform three missions for Pop Dickerman to repay a debt. Reata's saga is told over the course of seven stories -- those devoted to each of his missions for Dickerman, and then the stories that recount his labors to clean his name in the eyes of the authorities.

Each story about "Bull Hunter" can be seen as focusing on that character's overcoming some great physical or situational challenge until he finally wins the hand of Mary Hood.

The "Thunder Moon" stories focus on the character's many challenges -- to prove his manhood (in differing ways) to the Cheyenne and to the whites and to himself -- and each story examines the character's trials as he faces these challenges. At the end of the series -- "Farewell, Thunder Moon" -- Thunder Moon has turned away from his Cheyenne brothers to marry a white woman, but the reader knows that the warrior's psychic split as a white man raised among Indians will still bring him torment in the life that may follow the closing of the story.

Whether Faust was actually unable to write scenes of typical closure, this hypothesis -- plus the examples just given -- suggests a fourth explanation for the abrupt endings of his stories: that he was instead following a tradition of heroic stories in which closure is not an element.

The Heroic Tradition
Faust was an avid student of older literatures, and it's quite possible to see him working within that tradition -- just as he was so devoted to writing out-of-fashion, classically styled poetry.

To further describe my point about the older tradition that may have been Faust's model, I'll rely on a quote from John Crowley's Aegypt because it makes the point so succinctly. In this scene from Crowley's novel about stories and histories, a character -- history professor Frank Walker Barr -- neatly summarizes the sort of heroic literary tradition of which Faust's protagonists might be a part:

"It seems to me that what grants meaning in folktales and legendary narratives -- we're thinking now of something like the Nibelungenlied or the Mort D'Arthur -- is not logical development so much as thematic repetition, the same ideas or events or even the same objects recurring in different circumstances, or different objects contained in similar circumstances." . . . .

"A hero sets out . . . to find a treasure, or to free his beloved, or to capture a castle or find a garden. Every incident, every adventure that befalls him as he searches, is the treasure or the beloved, the castle or the garden, repeated in different forms. Like a set of nesting boxes -- each of them however just as large, or no smaller, than all the others. The interpolated stories he is made to listen to only tell him his own story in another form. The pattern continues until a kind of certainty arises, a satisfaction that the story has been told often enough to seem at last to have been really told. Not uncommonly in old romances the story just breaks off then, or turns to other matters.

"Plot, logical development, conclusions prepared for by introductions, or inherent in a story's premises -- logical completion as a vehicle of meaning -- all that is later, not necessarily later in time, but belonging to a later, more sophisticated kind of literature. There are some interesting half-way kind of works, like The Faerie Queene, which set up for themselves a titanic plot, an almost mathematical symmetry of structure, and never finish it: never need to finish it, because they are at heart works of the older kind, and the pattern has already arisen satisfyingly within them, the flavor is already there . . . " (pp. 360-361)

It isn't so difficult to recognize in Faust's work elements of that older kind of literature, in which the adventures of the protagonist are the treasure -- for both the reader and the story's hero.

It is generally acknowledged that Faust's characters are larger than life in their personalities and abilities, are mythic in their proportions. As Faust collector and novelist William Nolan states in an article for the May 1997 issue of Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine, Faust's "West was primarily a place of myth and fancy, an imaginary landscape people with demigods, wonder horses and legendary villains." (p. 41) So it isn't so difficult to understand how Faust -- an avid student of older literatures -- would cast his tales of action and adventure, of heroes surmounting challenges and crises in the mold of older traditions in which the niceties of the sort of "logical completion" that contemporary readers expect do not appear. Do not, according to the determination of the author, need to appear because the labors of the hero are all that is essential to the story: These labors prove and prove again the worthiness of the protagonist to be considered heroic.

Think again of Bull Hunter. Each of his stories recounts his facing some hardship; his saga ends with a sort of incompleteness -- "The Trail Up Old Arrowhead," the last of Faust's five stories about Bull, ends with Bull unconscious, clobbered by the conniving Hal Dunbar. Bull unknowingly is saved by Riley, with whom Dunbar had conspired to kill Bull. But Riley drives off Dunbar when he recognizes the truly heroic presence that fills Bull. Riley leaves as well after making sure -- from a hiding place -- that Bull will revive once Pete Reeves arrives.

There is no scene of marriage to beloved Mary Hood, no assured declaration of a "happy ever after" ending. But Riley reaffirms the lesson of the Bull Hunter stories when he essentially summarizes them to Dunbar:

"Here's a simple gent, lying here stunned. Well, it ain't the first time that he's beat the both of us. He's lying there knocked cold, but he'll be found by a partner, Pete Reeve. And he'll be brought back to Moosehorn, and he'll marry the prettiest girl we ever seen. How does he get all this? Just by being simple, Hal, and honest. . . " (p. 248, Leisure Books edition)

The last entry in the Thunder Moon series offers another example. In "Farewell, Thunder Moon," the adopted Cheyenne warrior's true family travels west and locates the lost son and his tribe. Thunder Moon/William Sutton is torn between the two worlds that call to his soul. He loves Charlotte Keene, a beauty from the white world, yet he cannot make himself abandon the frontier. Similarly, Charlotte is unwilling to give up on her love for him. So, in Chapter 14, she agrees to leave behind her civilized world and to live in the wilderness with her beloved.

In Chapter 16, Thunder Moon and his white visitors are set upon by Cheyenne warriors jealous of his accomplishments. After dispatching the would-be murderers, Thunder Moon realizes that his trust has been betrayed by men he considered to be like brothers to him. This betrayal severs all ties with his Cheyenne past.

There is no final scene of William Sutton and Charlotte Keene leaving the frontier together, no romantic fade out. There is only Thunder Moon's monolog, which effectively ends the novel and the series, summarizing the primary dilemma of the entire series and its resolution:

"The river was between me and my life as a Cheyenne. The river is between us, and I never can cross it again. There is blood upon the water. This night my friends have gone from me. I was a Cheyenne. My name was Thunder Moon. All the prairies knew me. But Thunder Moon is dead. Do you hear? The knife of Standing Antelope found the heart of that chief. He is dead. He will return no more. . . .

"I was two people in one. . . but now one half of me is dead. I am going home to my own people. I am William Sutton at last." (pp. 79-80)

It's interesting that in the passage quoted from Aegypt, Crowley's Barr mentions The Faerie Queene -- Robert Easton notes it as a favorite of Faust in Max Brand: The Big Westerner. And like Edmund Spenser's poem, Faust's stories of larger-than-life characters and mythically powerful animals hark back to "works of the older kind" -- tales whose structure depends upon incident and adventure; not upon plot arcs, development and denouement. As in "Level Landings," it is striving against adversity and overcoming danger that mark the hero. Settling down to domestic comfort -- the typical denouement upon which many hundreds of grade B westerns have faded out -- has no place in the rugged landscape drawn by Faust.

Bibliography
Crowley, John. Aegypt, Bantam Books (New York: 1994)