GENE FOWLER – Salute to Yesterday. Random House, hardcover, 1937. No paperback edition.

   The lead-in to this review is long and fairly pointless, but I’ll tell it anyway.

   Around Thanksgiving I decided to lighten the Holiday Mood by watching some old W.C.Fields movies (there aren’t any new ones) and reading a couple books on the old master: Robert Lewis Taylor’s W. C. FIELDS, HIS FORTUNES AND FOLLIES and William K. Everson’s THE ART OF W.C. FIELDS.

   Everson does his usual fine job analyzing and evaluating films which at the time it was written (1967) were nearly impossible to see. I think he over-praises Fields’ Paramount films, some of which seem slow and self-indulgent to me (but others, like THE OLD FASHIONED WAY and TILLIE & GUS are lots of fun) and he misses the fun of Fields’ Universal films, which are fast and pleasantly surreal… but he’s entitled to his opinions.

   Everson also takes some pains to point out that Taylor’s book on Fields is filled with inaccuracies and downright lies, which may be true, but it’s also one of the most fun-to-read biographies I’ve ever opened, which seems only fitting for a subject like this. And while perusing FORTUNES & FOLLIES I came upon mention of SALUTE TO YESTERDAY, a novel written by Gene Fowler, a close friend of Fields, Barrymore, Flynn and the crowd they ran with.

   Taylor’s story is that Fields loved this book and wanted to buy it for the movies — there’s juicy part in it that would have suited him perfectly. Fowler, however, knew that Fields tried to cheat everyone he did business with, and he didn’t want to put a strain on their friendship, so all his life he refused to do any professional work for him. More’s the pity that this was probably a wise decision.

   At any rate, the story inspired me to seek out a copy of SALUTE TO YESTERDAY, which is probably the most enjoyable book I’ve read all year. Fowler fills his story with colorful characters, hilarious happenings and humorous asides that had me laughing out loud as I read.

   The plot revolves around Captain Trolley, a colorful and rather talkative veteran of the Civil War, who was a gunner’s mate on the Monitor but earned the nickname “Captain” later in life when he was in a brothel that got caught in a flash-flood and swept downstream, whereupon Trolley (the story goes) assumed command, fashioned a rudder out of a headboard, quelled mutiny on board as he piloted his Magdalenic Ark to shore, and held back the gentlemen present at gunpoint until the ladies had all safely debarked and was himself the last to leave the sinking bark of ill-repute.

   Fowler fills SALUTE with charming incident like this, and also eventually gets around to a plot of sorts involving Trolley, his daughter (equal parts Goneril and Regan, but a very likable character when she appears) a suicidal reporter, venal politicians, cops (corrupt inefficient and inept) a faded harlot with whom the aged Trolley dallies, and a really nasty local millionaire who years ago legally murdered Trolley’s son, and whose own murder sets off a chain of events that are only wrapped up by one of the finest amateur sleuths in literature, anthropologist Otto Thumb, whose criminological creds are that after thirty years of research he proved conclusively that Egyptian queen Hatshepsut poisoned her husband, Pharaoh Thotmes II.

   SALUTE TO YESTERDAY abounds with enjoyable twists like this and turns of plot that keep the reader (this one anyway) entertainingly engrossed from start to finish. A book I’m glad I discovered, and one I’ll cherish.