Pannin’ for Pulp: “Thirst” by John Prescott

 

Anyone who reads the old pulps can tell you there is a heap of dross there, but occasionally one comes across a bit of shine that is well worth holding aloft to catch a glimpse of sun.

Well, here we have one such nugget.

He had been in Darwin, Inyo County, indifferently considering some offers of day labor, when Lawson and Cooke had ridden in; and after the manner of a man who all his life had amounted to very little, and had prospects for nothing better, he was greatly flattered when the outlaw spoke to him.

Prescott’s lean and mean tale from the pages of Gunsmoke magazine [1953] is grim, gritty, informed and gets a lot done with a slim page count.

Well, worth a look-see.

Front Sight by Stephen Hunter

 

Stephen Hunter, a poet of accurate gunplay among thriller writers. A man who often gets the violence right and extracts as much of the romanticism as he can to lean into realism offers us three novellas in this volume.

The first, “City of Meat” puts it in western territory by my reckoning as it takes place in the Depression Era Gangster days and is built on the premise of a Pretty Boy Floyd sighting in Chicago.

The writing quality is high, as the following extract shows regarding a visit to the massive stockyards and slaughter pens.

In a few minutes, he was sitting next to an elderly black man who owed him nothing and hardly noticed them. A slatternly old pony pulled a little cart along, driven by the casual slash of a whip Cracker snapped into its flanks. The pony, which could only be called You Poor Thing, pulled his wagon to the right under Cracker’s ungentle mandate, and they left the administrative city behind, entering the pens, unprotected by the bubble of his car, Charles experienced the smell full on. It seemed to double or triple, like a palpable cloud, a tear-bringer, like a phenomenon of the weather. It was everywhere and could not be avoided. Worse still, its fetid promise of nourishment brought flies in the billions, even some carrying birds silhouetted on bare branches, ready to pounce on the gobbet of beef, a foot, an eye, whatever spillage there was.

The other two novellas advance in time, one a 1940s noir piece and the final, a 1970s tribute to Italian giallo cinema.

The quality is high in all, if there is a quibble, it is that of all series characters—the end is a foregone conclusion—the author cannot risk killing the cash-cow, so there is seldom much surprise in these endeavors.

Still, the writing across all three is high.

I would love to see Mr. Hunter dip full-bore into the Western with no onus of preserving a character. Simply allow his muse to craft and beguile.

Three novellas, not a bad deal for the buck.

The Invader by Richard Wormser

 

Ken felt he'd have gone crazy sitting in an office staring at papers and talking to people who wanted to buy or sell houses or the like. And the time was long past when a married man could support himself decently by riding fence or punching cows. If the pay was good--being foreman one of the big spreads paid more than the county gave him--the owner was a movie star or a Texas oilman, and the ramrod had to go through three bookkeepers, a secretary, and an accountant, and a business manager before he could buy a sack of fence staples.

So Sheriff Ken Craigie would stick to driving the roads. He and his four deputies put in a thousand miles a day in the three cruisers and a Jeep that were the county fleet; Not that they expected to run into enough crime to pay for all that gas and oil and wear and tear, but because it was good crime prevention.

Not to mention that it was good public relations. Law abiding people like to know that the law was keeping an eye on them, and lawbreakers disliked the same thing and even proportion.

This Fawcett Gold Medal paperback from 1972 features the tag “From the Publishers of The Godfather” on the cover. The sales of that novel were so high you could feel the idea of, “Hey, all you Gold Medal authors out there, ya mind shoe-horning the mob into your tales?”

Mr. Wormser, a fine writer of Westerns, gives us a neo-Western that feels like something Brian Garfield may have offered us. Lots of desert country, lots of informed ranch lore [Mr. Wormer himself owned a ranch and writes of this authentically.] The mob element is introduced with subtlety and does not feel intrusive.

Until it is…

The first 2/3rds of this book are mighty enjoyable fare, then the author seems to realize he has to leave all this wonderful groundwork behind to get all La Cosa Nostra.

Here, the novel becomes rushed and reliant on Agatha Christie level plot machinations to make it work in the end.

Too bad, I was enjoying the ride and kinda sorta would like to see what Sherriff Craigie got up to if Mr. Wormser were left to his own devices.

The Journal of Francois Antoine Larocque

 

The Journal was composed in French concerning events occurring in 1805 along the Assiniboine River to the Yellowstone. A translation was offered in 1911. A few other examinations of scraps of Larocque’s journal survive but his own words capture the rawness of the early fur-trading expeditions.

The tribes referred to within are variously called “Rocky Mountain Indians,” “Assiniboine,” and the offered incident below takes place near the Little Big Horn, 71 years before the notorious battle.

The tribal combatants in the well-known battle were Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho. It is only a surmise that any of these tribes could be a portion of what is referred to in the described incident.

[See here for a further Arapaho offering.]

All escaped with the exception of two of the most advanced, who sent as spies, had drawn nearer to us than the others without perceiving us. After a long pursuit they were surrounded then killed and scalped in the twinkling of an eye. When I arrived near to the body I ascertained that the scalp and the fingers on the right hand had been taken off and that those who had done the trick had left. They borrowed my hunting knife to cut off the left hand and returned it to me all covered with blood as witness of esteem and expressed to me the desire “to […?] at him.”  Men, women, and children crowded to see the cadavers and tasted the blood. Each desired to poignard the corpse to show us what he would have done if he had met them living and to pour out then on these remains insult and outrage in a horrible language.  In a little while it became difficult to recognize in this debris that form of a human body. All the young men had attached a piece of flesh to their gun or on their spears, then they retook, while singing, the rush to the camp and showed their trophies with pride to all the young persons they met. A few women had an entire limb suspended from their saddle. The spectacle of such inhumanity made me shiver with horror and the sentiments that I had felt in setting out had made place for its state of mind very different.

The journals are rife with raw incident and ingenious scoutcraft. A treasure trove for historians, and Western genre readers who like to understand the reality behind the legend.

Resources for the Lived Side of Things.

“THE SECRET OF MACARGER’S GULCH” by Ambrose Bierce

 

Nevertheless, there was something lacking. I had a sense of comfort, but not of security. I detected myself staring more frequently at the open doorway and blank window than I could find warrant for doing. Outside these apertures all was black, and I was unable to repress a certain feeling of apprehension as my fancy pictured the outer world and filled it with unfriendly entities, natural and supernatural - chief among which, in their respective classes, were the grizzly bear, which I knew was occasionally still seen in that region, and the ghost, which I had reason to think was not. Unfortunately, our feelings do not always respect the law of probabilities, and to me that evening, the possible and the impossible were equally disquieting.

A Ghost Story disguised as a Western story.

We find this one buried in Bierce’s collection Can Such Things Be?

I’ve enjoyed Bierce and I have also found some of his work to be slight.

This one falls into the latter category.

Caveat: One of my faults, I do not enjoy the subtle oblique ghost stories of M.R. James.

If you do, your tolerance for this tale may be higher.

Building a State in Apache Land by Charles D. (Charles Debrille) Poston

 

L'il Ol' Me

We could not explore the country north of the Gila River, because of the Apaches, who then numbered fully twenty thousand. For three hundred years they have killed Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans, which makes about the longest continuous war on record.

Poston, a miner, a poet, an explorer, a superintendent of Indian Affairs, a delegate to the House of Representatives, a rousing figure in the early rowdy days of the Arizona Territory composed a series of articles for the Overland Monthly in 1894.

These articles tell his experiences in the wildly violent Arizona pre-statehood and his sojourn as miner, Indian proponent and ultimately statesman to the region.

It is a political tract in some respects but not dry at all.

Full of incident.

A reference that sings to me is the following…

These Arizona cliff dwellings are the only edifices of the kind that are known to have been inhabited by mankind. They exist mostly in the mountains in the northern portion of Arizona. A more ancient race, still, lived in the excavations on the sides of the mountains, prepared, no doubt, as a refuge against enemies.

For the past two years my wife and I have made sojourns to Northern Arizona to track down many of these awe-inspiring edifices just as found mentioned in this work, Bourke’s and many other Hosses of the early days.

It is gratifying and soul-stirring to stand where these prior men and women stood and admire the work of the Sinagua who came far before us, far before the Apache.

A fine volume. A fine land.