Sun 29 Mar 2009
This isn’t a review of the book in the title of this post, Blast to Oblivion, by Chap O’Keefe, but I do want to tell you a couple of interesting things about it. You can find a much more lengthy write-up in the most recent online edition of Black Horse Extra, the March-May 2009 issue, in fact.
Each issue is devoted to the westerns published in the UK by Robert Hale, Ltd., and this issue is chock full of tidbits about the current quarter’s group of authors and their pen names, but there is also a sad note at the end in which the life and death of one of Black Horse’s more prolific western writers, Walt Masterson, is covered.
You may recognize Chap O’Keefe’s name as someone who frequently leaves comments on this blog, sometimes under that moniker and sometimes as Keith Chapman, which happens to be his real one.
Talking about his book, however, Chap says:
“The first words in this book, after the title pages, are written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle: ‘The old wheel turns, and the same spoke comes up. It’s all been done before, and will be again.’
“Black Horse Western readers who are also Sherlockians will recognize that quotation as words spoken by Sherlock Holmes in the second chapter of The Valley of Fear. The Holmes novel was serialized in Britain in The Strand magazine between September 1914 and May 1915. Along the way, the George H. Doran Company, of New York, gave it a first book publication on February 27, 1915.”
There is much more to Chap’s essay, which goes into great detail about Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes movies, the Pinkerton Detective Agency, the Mollie Maguires, and every point you can think of in between, including his own book, Blast to Oblivion. Highly recommended!
March 30th, 2009 at 2:49 am
Whenever I think of British western writers (and it has been a fairly flourising genre), I am reminded of John Creasey, who wrote westerns as Tex Riley. Creasey, who eventually lived several years in Arizona, said that his westerns improved no end when he “got the coyotes out of the skies.”
Technically, you could say the second half of A Study in Scarlet is a western, and I once read a very good article suggesting Valley of Fear might well be the first hard boiled private eye novel. The more you read Doyle and about his work the more interesting he becomes.
March 30th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
John Creasey had a hard time living that particular slip down, I’m sure.
I don’t suppose the story goes down well with the current group of British western writers, either!
(The story IS true, isn’t it?)
As for Doyle, there was a post a while back in which the comments became heavily involved with writers who were proficient in both mysteries and science fiction. See https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1059.
I think it was you, David, who mentioned Conan Doyle in this regard. I don’t think Doyle would be remembered very much today if all he’d written were his Professor Challenger stories, but in terms of being the best all-around double achiever, he’d rank pretty high.
Walker Martin’s first response to this question, Fredric Brown, is still a good choice in this category. My only concern is whether or not Brown is still as well known for either his SF or his detective fiction as he once was.
I’m talking the general public here, not people reading this blog.
— Steve
March 30th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
As far as I know the Creasey quote is accurate, but I’d have to look up where I first saw it. It’s not a knock of British western writers, just a comment on cultural differences. And of course when Creasey was writing his westerns things were quite different than now. And it isn’t as if all American written westerns have some inate superiority. More than a few western writers, even some very good ones, never got west of the Mississippi.
I think I mentioned before that when Creasey was living in Arizona his neighbor (which can be a couple of miles away in Arizona) was Georges Simenon. Considering how prolific the two men were you have to feel sorry for the poor postman. Simenon’s Bottom of the Bottle is set in Arizona and a couple of Creasey’s Mark Kilby books are set in the West, while one of the Baron books is set at the World’s Fair in San Antonio.
I think one of Horler’s Tiger Standish books may be set out west, but it’s based on a cover I once saw and not a book I read. If I remember correctly it shows Standish on a bucking bronco.
J.T. Edson was successful on this side of the puddle and you still see one of his westerns once in a while. There are probably others who I may have read and never knew they were British. And it isn’t without precedent. One of the best known gunfighters, gamblers, and lawmen of the Old West was Ben Thompson, an Englishman. In fact Thompson’s death in Dennison, Texas in 1915 is considered by many to be the last gunfight of the old west. I know he was a lawman, and have even been on the street where he died, but can’t recall what title he held. He had previously been the bartender at Luke Short’s (not Fred Glidden but his namesake) Fort Worth saloon where for a brief time Wyatt Earp ran the roulette wheel and Bat Masterson dealt Faro. For that matter, before he turned explorer, British born Henry Morton Stanley had served as a correspondent covering the Indian Wars for Hearst. One of the curiosities of the old west is that the day of one of Wild Bill Hickcock’s most famous gunfights he had lunch with the touring Oscar Wilde, and of course Dickens even did readings in Virgina City (dramatised and highly fictionalised on Bonanza with Lost in Space’s Dr. Smith Jonathan Harris as a testy Dickens). Among others who took the tour were explorer Richard Burton and Frank Harris, the latter even writing a book on the subject.
I’m not sure, but wasn’t Mayne Reid the popular boys writer British? Many of his books were set on the American frontier. More recently George Macdonald Fraser’s Mr. American involves a mysterious westerner in London pursued by a figure from his past. Flashman even does a walk-on. And the hero of Louis L’Amour’s Shakako is a former British soldier turned American scout. Then of course there is German Karl May whose Winnetou books inspired a German film series whose popularity were the stimulus for the Spagetti Western. May is still hugely popular in Europe, his books beloved by Einstein, Schwitzer, Herman Hesse, and (sorry to say) Hitler.
As for Conan Doyle, I think he would probably still be remembered for Challenger, but no where near as famous as Holmes made him. Several of the Holmes stories have American ties, even to the frontier, and the back story of A Study in Scarlet isn’t all that far from the back story of Zane Gray’s Riders of the Purple Sage.