“La Grande Demoiselle” by Grace Elizabeth King

 

What Mademoiselle Idalie cared to learn she studied, what she did not, she ignored; And she followed the same simple rule untrammeled in her eating, drinking, dressing, and comportment generally; and whatever discipline may have been exercised on the place, either in fact or fiction, most assuredly none of it, even so much as in a threat, ever attainted her sacred person. When she was just turned sixteen, Madame Idalie made-up her mind to go into society. Whether she was beautiful or not, it is hard to say.

A perfectly delightful representative example from King’s Balcony Stories [1893.] These tales are a series of fourteen stories told  one evening by New Orleans women in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Being close in time to the event they are redolent with period detail that was not studied detail but lived detail.

I find it hard to believe that Margaret Mitchell did not read this volume and study it closely for her magnum opus, Gone With the Wind.

Delightful.

A Case for Conan the Barbarian as Western Hero

 

Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.—The Tower of the Elephant

A Barbarian wandering hither and yon and laying waste in a Mythic Age?

What does such a character have to do with Western fiction.

Stay with me as I plead my case, a poor one perhaps borne of predilection, but there are a few points of evidence that may give pause to the doubters.

First, I refer only to the Conan of Robert E. Howards pen, and not to any of the authors that have attempted to follow in his footsteps, be it a character named Conan, Kane, Brak, what have you.

Secondly, I refer ONLY to Conan and not to the “sword and sorcery” genre in general, aka “Heroic Fantasy.”

Again, all of my meager arguments refer to the Conan of Howard, not the conan [lower case] of de Camp, Carter, Nyberg, Anderson, Jordan et al.

All other sword and sorcery and heroic fantasy leaves me unmoved.

Such a thing has always puzzled me.

Why is it that this single character, more specifically this single character in the hands of a single man click whereas the others strike me as carboard pawns?

To my mind this is no mere wish-fulfillment to shoehorn an icon of one genre to be more in alignment with one I adore—The Western.

It may be a small matter, but one that is not small to the author.

Many claim the fictional hero Jack Reacher of the Lee Child novels -and now those of his brother, Andrew Grant—is a “Western” hero.

This is thanks to a New Yorker piece by Malcolm Gladwell [not known for pinpoint research] making claims that “Oh yeah, Western hero thru and thru.”

I quote from Gladwell’s piece:

“The Reacher books are Westerns: they are about the man of honor coming to the lawless frontier town in order to impose a rough sort of justice.”

And…

“Our contemporary fantasy is about lawlessness: about what would happen if the institutions of civility melted away and all we were left with was a hard-muscled, rangy guy who could do all the necessary calculations in his head to insure that the bad guy got what he had coming. That’s why there are rarely any police in Reacher novels—or judges or courts or lawyers or any discussion or consideration of the law."

Sounds like a pretty good justification, right?

The trouble is, Lee Child, the creator himself says, he holds no fondness for the Western. It is a genre he does not enjoy.

I don’t begrudge Gladwell for wanting to claim Reacher for the Western, but, maybe, just maybe it matters what the author himself intended.

Which brings me back to Conan.

Jack Reacher, on the surface at least, has seemingly more in common with the Western hero than a mythic Barbarian.

Let us allow Conan’s creator to have a say in the matter.

Regarding the character of Conan, “[He] simply grew up in my mind a few years ago when I was stopping in little border town in the lower Rio Grande… He simply stepped full grown out of oblivion and set me at work recording the saga of his adventures… Some mechanism in my subconscious took the dominant characteristics of various prize fighters, gunmen, bootleggers, oil field bullies, gamblers, and honest workmen I have come in contact with, and combining them all, producing the amalgamation I called Conan the Cimmerian.”

And there we have the key, to me at least, as to why I felt this Western affinity to the character of the original Conan.

Howard, a West Texan by birth, lineage and experience living in a day when his Conan models walked among us, created a living breathing bold character from living breathing swaggering actual gents.

Howard created the character and wrote from a real-life Western sensibility, whereas his followers are writing imitations of characters they encountered in books in false authorial worlds where inspiration is literary rather than gritty and actually human.

Conan in his wanderings strikes me as a forerunner to the laconic wanderers of the Spaghetti west.

Not cynical but pragmatic.

Not amoral but brutal.

Alive in a mythic past, but nevertheless alive.

One need not agree with my estimation of Conan as a Westerner, I merely offer as food for thought and as mystery solved for why one single character in an entire genre works for me and all other false heroes fail.

Conan was borne of real men.

That reality shows.

“Daughter of Don Manuel” by Frederico Gana

 

Rounding the bend in the road, I came suddenly upon a group of men on horseback. It was a funeral party which had stopped for a little rest. I recognized some of the tenant farmers from the neighboring haciendas. Silent and motionless, they sat on their lean, perspiring horses. On their faces, tanned by the sun, half concealed under blue cotton caps and wide brimmed sombreros, there lingered an expression of somewhat conventional sadness, I might almost say of smiling drowsiness.

Frederico Gana is a new author for me. He wrote of the Chilean countryside and its peoples in the early 20^th century.

This brief tale is melancholic, wise in observation and tinged with cynicism.

It reminds me of a Guy Maupassant writing of the West.

Based on this taste I shall seek more.

“Beyond the Frontier” by Dorothy M. Johnson

 

It was right that Edwards should think of Blossom first; she was his wife. She was standing in the yard in front of the still smoking log house, her long skirts blowing, her hands up to her mouth in a theatrical gesture that said Rancher’s Wife Waiting for Husband’s Return After Indian Raid.

How have I missed this story?

I am a fan of Miss Johnson. “The Lost Sister” and “The Hanging Tree” are acknowledged classics, but this little gem escaped me until now.

It packs a wallop of character in its brief page count. There is more limned in single sentences than many novelists pack into overthick covers.

Art, craft, narrative force—packed tight.

Simply superlative.

West Texas by Al Sarrantonio

 

“The killer’s name is Curtis Marks?”

“Not much of a name for a man who's murdered so many, is it? He must be”-- Thomas studied the short entry—“twenty years old now. This explains almost everything.” He looked up at Lincoln, eyes bright. “The mystery is solved, Trooper Reeves. I not only know where the killer is, but who he is, why he kills and why we'll find him where he is now.”

Um...if that passage feels a bit like the third act wrap-up of a third-rate English murder mystery, well, that’s because that is just one of the shoehorned elements in this mish-mash of a novel.

We take Buffalo Soldiers in West Texas, mix in a serial killer with baroque motivation and apparent superpowers, add a cavalryman who has trained himself to be a detective reading Sherlock Holmes stories, add some various kitchen sinks here and there and you get, well, writing like the opening extract.

The author clearly knows what he has in mind, our Sherlock Holmes wannabe knows what’s what, the problem is, we the reader are never offered the same insight to, well, much of anything.

That is not just referring to the motivation and ability to track down the serial killer [which is well nigh nonsensical] it is also down to standard elements.

I was well into the novel before we are privileged to the information that our protagonist is black and the victim of prejudice. The information just seems to come out of nowhere.

Each additional character along the way, we are never quite certain who they are, or why we are even meeting them.

There are entire chapters that pop up towards the end involving Mescalero Apache—they feel dropped in from a completely separate nonsensical novel.

My first from Mr. Sarrantonio, and perhaps there are excellent choices out there—we can all have a bad day.

But I gotta say, this one is, well…

The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider

 

Now if you'll be patient I guarantee you'll get your money's worth but it's the truth I'm getting at and if you're not interested I suggest you run along to the stores and pick up one of the little books full of lies about the Kid’s life, written by some smartaleck easterner that never sat in a western saddle, never smelt good horse flesh or a campfire dying in the hills and yet is ready to tell the country all about the Kid. I was there and I know what happened. With a little patience you will know it too before long, what I aim to tell is exactly how he died, when there was no reason for him to have died at all.

This 1956 novel by Neider is a riff on the Billy the Kid tale, it was adapted into the 1961 film One-Eyed Jacks starring and directed by Marlon Brando.

The film is fine; no classic.

As for the Billy the Kid tale, I am no fan, thusly I came to this novel reluctantly.

I was wrong.

This novel is simply superlative.

Hendry Jones is definitely Billy the Kid in outline but there is no legend here.

There is no romance.

No studio picture gloss.

Neider gives us grit and dirt and reality and the smallness of killing.

It is a surprisingly candid novel for 1956.

When they put the hemp around his neck and jerked how long would it take for him to choke to death? What would his legs be doing? How would his face look? Would it turn purple and look like a dried prune, making the kids laugh when he pissed in his pants and be buried with it stinking on him?

With its brief page count-144—Neider accomplishes more than many at four times the length.

Easily moves into the pantheon of one of my favorite Westerns.

The Genuine Article by A.B. Guthrie

 

She collapsed by the roadside and moaned. She could have been pretty, I thought, grade-school pretty, but now her clothes were dirty and torn, and her face swollen and red, like a man’s marked by booze.

A volume in the Sheriff Chick Charleston series by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the classic Western The Way West, and the screenwriter who adapted Shane for the big screen.

The Chick Charleston series was a series of 5 contemporary crime novels in Big Sky country.

This volume is brief, full of on-point observations such as the one we opened with and the following examples:

The morning was as fair as ever nature could give. The sky was tall, to the end of sight and beyond. The horizons lay peaceful and distant, drowsing under the early sun. I thought of a statement I had read somewhere: values arise by contrast. So, sure, we needed cold and wind and rain for a full appreciation of days like this one.

Or…

It was hard to believe, on this quiet and tranquil morning, that murder could have been done, that violence could exist. Had the killer only counted to ten, so to speak, a day like today would have soothed him. The whole sky said peace.

Gorgeous writing up and down the line.

If there is a problem, and there was to this reader, it is the mystery itself, the reason for the novel’s existence. It is simply formula and, well, unnecessary.

To be candid, I feel that way about many “mystery/crime” novels.

I formerly was a big fan of the genre but now find much of it tedious wheel-spinning no matter how skilled the execution.

They all must wind up being the same.

The end is a foregone conclusion or we, the reader, are left unsatisfied with an unsolved mystery.

Whereas other genres, the Western in particular, to my eye, when skillfully executed may only be predictable in setting. Nothing more.

One opens the pages of a western not knowing if it is a de regueur shoot-em-up, a man vs. land tale, a fable told from the point of view of a dog, the exploits of a frontier newspaper publisher, a verité of a life among the Indians, or…examples and variations abound.

Whereas the murder “mystery” is no mystery at all.

One opens the cover, and one knows there will be a murder. There will be complications to keep the page count on point, and the book exists to solve the “mystery.”

All art that is found within must be shoved aside at some point to fulfill the genre’s dictates.

A shame here, as Guthrie’s skill is so high, I would have loved to see him use it on something less predictable as a “mystery” to be solved.

Again, if you are enamored of the crime-mystery genre, well, you might be in for a treat.

A well-written volume with a gorgeous setting.