“Ride the Red Killer” by N.E. Snoke

 

The universe belonged to Red Hellion and me! And I was going to conquer… I wasn't going to set back and die from inaction and boredom! Excitement—action—speed! Any damn thing to keep from thinking!

This story appeared in the September 1952 issue of Dime Western magazine.

Here we have a post-World War II tale of a former rodeo rider who lost a hand in combat. We travel inside our protagonist’s head as he navigates the waters of recovery, bitterness, and re-claiming the whole man inside as he comes to grip with this new lot in life.

It is a brief tale, but one of maturity. There are no shoot-em-up heroics; just a man with an obstacle to surmount and the complicated issues of the soul that go along with a man who chooses not to lay down no matter what is handed to him.

A bonafide buried treasure of mature Western writing from an author I was unfamiliar with and as far as I can tell his only printed piece.

“Fruit Tramp” by Daniel Mainwaring

 

[A Labor Day week offering.]

Still the fruit tramps came every year when the Elbertas were turning yellow in the shiny leaves. Not so many came, but the grove was pretty well filled with men and women and children who drove along the highway leading to the hills and pitched their camps in the shade of the trees planted there by a man named Cole fifty years before.

When times were bad it wasn't easy to make a living picking peaches and grapes, cutting the peaches in half, laying them in orderly rows on the trays. It was hard, unpleasant work. Out in the orchards the heat waves rose, and when you knelt on the earth to pick the fruit up the sand burned through your overalls. The cutting sheds offered little shelter from the sun, and the fuzz from the peaches crept up the women's arms and down the necks of their dresses. They stood all day on the packed earth of the shed, picking the fruit up with their nimble fingers, jabbing the knife point to the soft flesh and, with a twist, halving the fruit.

This 1934 short story by Daniel Mainwaring is an example of the proletarian fiction that was popular in the Depression era, the most notable example being Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

This genre emphasized the plight of the common man, often had a political bent to it, and when in an urban setting, there was often a strong union element to it.

Alternately, when proletarian fiction had a rural setting as in the case of the itinerant fruit pickers in this story or the melon industry in Elmore Leonard’s Mr. Majestyk, the tales take on a decidedly gritty western feel. We are treated to accurate descriptions of hard work and when there is confrontation,as in this story and Mr. Majestyk, one is hard-pressed to deny that these are “Western Stories” in their own right.

[The Leonard novel is also reviewed on in this blog]

Mainwaring’s story, found in the July 1934 issue of Harper’s Magazine is a strong example of the proletarian genre with an obvious element of the Western to it.

In addition, it is a fine piece of writing well in the vein of the aforementioned Mr. Leonard.

Well worth a read.