Plumb Drillin’ [aka Gold Fever] by David Case

 

“Sure, things like bravery. It’s normal, you see a brave man, you reckon him to possess character. And maybe so. Then again, maybe he’s just afraid to be a coward, if you see what I mean?”

Horror writer David Case wrote a trio of Westerns in the mid-70’s. I have enjoyed his horror work, so I tracked down one of this trio—reportedly it was optioned by Steve McQueen but never made it to the screen.

A brief look at the premise reveals why McQueen was likely so interested. A man returning from a stint in territorial prison is sought to lead a blind man and his wife in search of a lost gold seam.

The plot summary, which might be a bit generic, does not do justice to Case’s work. He takes his time with languid character building, and one is all the more sure why McQueen wanted to embrace this role.

It has a wise yet cynical edge that reminds me of upper-tier Frank O’Rourke, which is a good thing indeed.

Well worth a read and a ponder of the film that might have been.

Seven Devils Road by Richard Prosch

 

Tom Baldwin’s card table was nothing, but rough-hewn planks of weathered pine wood nailed together, and it balanced on two wobbly saw-horse legs. In the center, a pot of fifty double-eagles, a silver pocket-watch, and a German meerschaum pipe waited for a winner.

That is the opening paragraph for the second volume of The Hellbenders Trilogy.

[See this blog for the estimation of the first volume.]

But…I surmise that you’re ahead of the game. Why would I dip into Volume 2 if I didn’t already enjoy what I encountered in the first outing?

I did, and I do.

That opening is precursor of all the cinematic turns I could have cherry-picked throughout the volume.

Where many authors seem to rest on, “And then this happened, and then this and then…” at the expense of the wood smoke smells, the textures of the wood, the creak of leather, the squeak of a hasp—the living breathing details that set a scene in the mind’s eye. This author puts us in the middle.

Now some can overdo the scene setting I just praised, spending pages to limn seemingly every detail of a panorama.

Not Mr. Prosch. He’s our sommelier of the senses. He narrows down the details to the redolent few and then gets each scene going in the midst of the sparse vibrancy.

Highly recommended.

A Dorothy M. Johnson Twofer

 

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance by Dorothy M. Johnson

The swamper’s job at the Prairie Belle was not disgraceful until Rance Foster made it so.

This brief tale was the inspiration for the film. I’ll admit the film is one of the few Ford/Wayne team-ups that leaves me a little cold. Likely my fault.

I always found Jimmy Stewart’s resentment hard to reconcile, but the source story has no such issues. Interior motivations are clear, adult, unromantic and make for fine reading.

“If you’d asked me,” Barricune mused, I could’ve helped you. But you didn’t want no helping. A man shouldn’t be ashamed to ask somebody that knows better than him.”

Sparse writing from a keen observer.

The Hanging Tree by Dorothy M. Johnson

“Now I wonder who got strung up on that tree,” remarked his partner. Wonder Rusell was Joe Frail’s age—thirty—but not of his disposition. Russell was never moody, and he required little from the world he lived in. He wondered aloud about a thousand things but did not require answers to his questions.

A wonderful novella full of human truth and the brooding uncertainties inside the facades most of us assemble each morning for the world.

The ending may be a bit pat and abrupt, but it works.

What works even better, the ride along the way inside the skulls of real-life humans uncertain in their own skins no matter what they present to the world.

Hellbenders: A Traditional Western Novel by Richard Prosch

 

The locus of the skirmish was an oversize longhorn calf, its wild neck and shoulders straining against a wooden yoke. It was caught between a long hinged squeeze gate, partially broken and weighted down by the vaqueros, and the far side of the chute. One of the straw-hat cowboys swung a glowing iron back toward a caliche block firepit piled high with ash and glowing embers, and the animal’s hip smoked with a fresh brand. Lin smelled the singed fur and burnt flesh even as he noticed the former bull’s male parts, freshly removed, slick and glistening atop a pile on a canvas tarp. Naturally, they’d be saved for frying.

I’m gonna say a few words and then have you read that paragraph again. It is typical of most any I could have selected. It drips with detail without becoming an exercise in what the author discovered in research.

Many in the pursuit of authenticity turn a bit pedantic, a bit “Look what I read in a history book, now I put it in my fiction.” Such practices mar many a historical entertainment.

Bernard Cornwell educates you easily, painlessly and fascinatingly as we follow his Richard Sharpe throughout the Napoleonic Wars—this author does the same, as handily and effortlessly.

The details are offered in easy offhand observations that smack of authenticity, they “feel” as if the character lives where he is as opposed to simply “And then this happened,…and then this…”

In one paragraph we see the struggle, the straining wild neck.

We see and feel the glowing iron that came from the mighty specific and resonant caliche block firepit.

We smell flesh and fur.

We are even called upon to guess at taste as Lin offers the obvious “male parts” meal that is to come.

Have a read of that paragraph again. Notice that it is chockful of detail and yet it blows by like a breeze.

This is a superlative example of the genre.

If I have a quibble with it, it is this—the four words that follow the main title of Hellbenders.

Those words, “A Traditional Western Novel.”

Now as fans of the genre, we’d be liars if we didn’t admit that much of what can be classified as “traditional” is mere plotting and not crafting the world we are to inhabit as we read.

This novel is more than mere traditional, it’s a bit of a time machine.

Superlative.

The Aviator by Ernest K. Gann

 

Now the pilot glanced down at the terrain and knew again a momentary sense of foreboding. Unless the weather was very fine it was always the same through here. The mountain plateau was high and devoid of human trespass. Here the surface of the earth seemed to be made of roughly cast iron. Bold and barren escarpments served the pilots who flew this way as recognizable markers in a rumpled ocean of rock and desert. It was wild country and there had been times when the pilot wondered if it were possible to fear land itself.

Lest one think that a novel that centers around aviation does not belong in the Western genre, allow me to plead its case.

The novel is set in 1928, thusly the early unregulated wild and wooly years of flying. The days of “do it yourself” repairs and often self-taught fliers taking chances in a brand-new frontier.

Here’s historian Paul O’Neil on these early days.

“The men and women who flew the Jennies and later the Gee Bees, the Super Solution and the Wedell-Williams racers were direct descendants and, in many ways, the final heirs of the footloose frontiersmen of an earlier century who had crossed the Appalachians and wandered the West; they risked their lives as a matter of course because that was the only way to reach the next mountain range—or to achieve the next aerial stunt—and the prize still seems worth the gamble.”

Or, consider this, the early airmail fliers [“Flying the mails” as in this novel] were required to carry a side-arm, a holdover from the Pony Express days.

Or, consider this, Western filmmaking legend John Ford saw these early fliers as “cowboys of the sky” we see it in later work but none more tellingly than his own 1932 Air Mail which features some spectacular stunt flying by Paul Mantz.

Viewing this film one can easily feel the precursor of the rough and rowdy camaraderie that pops up in Ford’s cavalry pictures.

John Wayne himself made a few flying pictures, most notably, 1953’s Island in the Sky an adaptation of a novel by the very author we are examining today.

To the book itself, at last.

Is it good?

Indeed, this brief novel [148 pages] packs the heart of middle-period L ’Amour and has that same resonance with the land itself.

Upon its release it was described by some critics as a “True Grit of the air.” There is a young girl in it, but the comparisons beyond that does little justice to either novel—both are exceptional and have their own merits.

Spoiler-free: Here we have a disfigured air mail pilot who reluctantly takes a young girl as a passenger on a dangerous run.

What follows has heart, resonance, depth, perhaps a bit square around the edges but the authenticity smooths that squareness with its humanity.

A fine novel.

The Searchers by Alan LeMay

 

“He made a labored calculation, and decided Laurie was twenty-one. That explained why she seemed so lighted up; probably looked the best she ever would in her life. She was at an age when most girls light up, if they’re going to; Mexicans and Indians earlier. A look at their mothers, or their older sisters, reminded you of what you knew for certain. All that bright glow would soon go out again. But you couldn’t ever make yourself believe it.”

While familiar with the classic film the novel was off my radar. That defect has been corrected. While not the classic the film is, the book still is a fine read within the genre and rife with pungent observations as in the opening quote.

We live more as an outsider than we do in the film, experiencing all through young eyes. It is a nice perspective to view as young grows older through harsh experience.

A fine companion piece to a fine film.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel by Quentin Tarantino

 

It was sometime around fifteen years later that the reputation of a deadly half white/half Mexican gunfighter named Johnny Madrid reached the ears of Californians. The reputation was that of a scoundrel, but a scoundrel with lightning-fast prowess with a pistola. From the accounts of eyewitnesses and dime-store pulp writers, he had the quickness in killing of Tom Horn, the accuracy of aim of Annie Oakley, the nasty disposition of John Wesley Hardin, and the lack of human empathy of William H. Bonney. He was one of the most feared killers who rode the Mexican side of the border, known by the peons in the pueblos he passed through as El Asesino de Rojo (translation: “The Murderer in Red”), due to the fancy red ruffled shirt he always wore.

Those who enjoy the films of Tarantino, his Westerns in particular, may find this “novel” of interest.

First, let’s get an expectation out of the way. If you enjoyed the titled film, you do get plenty more time with Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth but…if you open the pages expecting the book to follow the film, well, that is not Tarantino’s way.

The fiery finale is reduced to a mere single paragraph summary towards the beginning of the book.

So, if the book is not the movie what is it?

Well, it’s inside baseball on filmmaking, it’s film criticism, it’s a primer of on-set behavior, it’s, well it’s many things but what it is not is a carbon copy of the film and that is what makes it interesting [to this reader’s mind.]

I assure readers of the Western Genre, we get lots of insight into how Western film and television is made and the author’s views on his own favorite Western novelists-one will not surprise you, two or three may.

There are entire chapters that seem to be no more than extended plot summaries of Western episodic television.

If your tolerance for Mr. Tarantino’s digressive style is low, well, this might be a skip for you.

If you like his films [and I do] I found myself admiring the chutzpah of choosing not to tell the same ol’ story he already told.