Sun 8 May 2016
DAVID VINEYARD: Stories I’m Reading – GORDON YOUNG “Born to Be Hanged, But….”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[10] Comments
GORDON YOUNG “Born to Be Hanged, But…” Adventure, 03 December 1919.
So speaks young Don Everhard, the hero of Gordon Young’s tough novelette that headlined the December 3, 1919, edition of the great pulp Adventure. It was a pretty good issue too, Harold Lamb’s “Said Afzel’s Elephantâ€, and stories by J. Allan Dunn, and Arthur O. Friel, but it’s the Young novelette and Don Everhard the character that are of interest here.
The story is pretty straight forward. Young Don Everhard, actually Don Richmond of a respectable San Francisco family, is a professional gambler with a fast and deadly gun in contemporary San Francisco. During an election year he comes upon an incriminating letter that would embarrass reform candidate Congressman Bryan and beautiful Helen Curwen and favor James H. Thorpe, a lumberman and Bryan’s opponent for the governor’s race. Everhard has a history with Thorpe and roundly hates him. (“If he was a Republican I would vote Democrat, and if he was a Democrat I would vote Republicanâ€).
In knightly style Everhard returns the letter unread to Mrs. Curwen, but when word gets out he had the letter he is approached by two men to buy it; one the mysterious Ellis, and the other an agent of Thorpe. Everhard isn’t having any of it, but when Thorpe tries to set him up in a poker game with a professional gunman, he kills the man and has to go to ground, which he does hiding out as a crew member on a ship, until the truth comes out.
When he is cleared Mrs. Curwen approaches him. She is meeting with Thorpe to try and beard the lion over the letter, but when the meeting ends in a blaze of gunfire … well, as Everhard opens the story:
Of course he gets out of it and retains his honor and the ladies, but the really interesting part of this story is in the telling, because years before Carroll John Daly or Dashiell Hammett, the only thing distinguishing Don Everhard from the hard boiled private eye of a thousand pulp stories is that he’s a gambler and not a detective. The language is the same, all-American unsentimental (but actually very sentimental) voice of Twain and London, out of Bret Harte and the Dime Novel. Young is a better writer than Daly, but if Daly didn’t read these and Race Williams and wasn’t influenced by the diamond-hard fast-shooting gambler I would be greatly surprised.
As honest a man as ever palmed a card.
My ears are keen, my hands are quick, and I seldom miss.
The man called Smith lay face down in a witch’s mirror of blood.
A “witch’s mirror of blood.†If that isn’t the hardboiled voice of Black Mask, I never heard it.
Robert Sampson wrote more about Gordon Young and Don Everhard in Yesterday’s Faces, his massive work on the early pulps. Today Young is best remembered for his South Seas adventure tales about Hurricane Williams, with only one expensive edition of Everhard stories reprinted, but if Young and Don Everhard are not quite the hardboiled private eye that soon followed they are so close that the difference is difficult to measure.
Like his private eye pulp descendants Everhard is a tough, no nonsense, cynical, fast-thinking, fast-shooting hardboiled egg with a soft center, an errant knight on the edge between respectable society and the underworld, a man with his own code and his own rules navigating a twisting course between the innocent and not so innocent and the truly guilty, brutal, corrupt, and dangerous.
The voice and the idea may not be quite there yet, but like the last half of Conan Doyle’s Valley of Fear, we are so close to the hardboiled private eye we can feel his breath on the back of our neck. I would argue that with this story alone Young was already ahead of Daly’s “Knights of the Open Palm†or Three Gun Terry Mack by a mile.
May 8th, 2016 at 7:13 pm
A mammoth two volume set of the complete adventures of Don Everhard has been promised by the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box Press for some time now. I don’t believe it has ever been published, but if I’m wrong, I’d sure like to know about it.
May 8th, 2016 at 8:00 pm
Steve,
That is the one I referred to, but like you I don’t know if it was published or not.
I have five or six digital copies of ADVENTURE with Young Everhard stories and one incomplete serial novel, and I would love more. I’ve read some of his other pulp work, but these have a special cachet considering how close they come to the hardboiled detective story to follow.
Similarly I don’t know if Battered Silicon Dispatch Box ever published those volumes of Bedford Jones John Solomon tales either.
May 9th, 2016 at 12:31 am
I spoke with George Vanderburgh who publishes the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box books while we both were at the recent Windy City convention. It’s hard to say what is out and what is not because George published such an enormous amount of titles.
I don’t believe the two Don Everhard books are out yet. The Battered Silicon website still lists them as forthcoming with no price set yet. The site also states the Bedford Jones books collecting the John Solomon series are out of print.
George has a very ambitious schedule of upcoming releases and it will be interesting to see what develops. Books are picked for possible publication by a group of collectors known only as The Sacred Six.
May 9th, 2016 at 11:42 am
Those two covers on this website are the Battered Silicon Dispatch Box covers … George always likes to spell the word COMPLETE as COMPLEAT and not COMPLETE. Someone told me it’s because he has a fondness for Walton’s COMPLEAT ANGLER. Still doesn’t mean they’ve been published. George rarely updates the website so just because it’s listed doesn’t mean anything.
May 9th, 2016 at 5:11 pm
Vanderburgh’s two volume set is being proofread as I write. A plug if I may, I’ve reprinted two collections of short stories and the novel Gaboreau. All are available from Beb Books, 11675 Beasonfield, Detroit, MI 48224 for $6.00 each plus postage ($3.00). The books are 8.5 x 11, inkjet printed and stapled along the side. Where art was attached to the story it has been included in the reprint.
May 9th, 2016 at 7:35 pm
Of course you may!
And good news on the Vanderburgh books. Thanks for the update.
May 10th, 2016 at 12:18 pm
The Sacred Six? I love it! What I especially love this site is its bottonless well aspect. I mean, I’ve been proactively reading hardboiled for more than 50 years and here comes Vineyard with a pioneering author I’d never even heard of! So many books, so little…well, you know the line. Great review, David.
May 10th, 2016 at 1:53 pm
Stephen,
Thanks, but I have to give credit to Robert Sampson for introducing me to Young and Everhard.
As I said, like Frank L. Packard and the Jimmy Dale milieu and Jack Boyle’s Boston Blackie, this isn’t there yet, but I would argue what I have read of the Everhard stories would have fit in neatly in the MASK with only a little adjustment.
Reading the stories I was reminded a good deal of Gardner’s Ed Jenkins stories, especially the earlier ones, in tone and structure, and Everhard has the errant knight thing down pat already.
I would be surprised if Daly and Gardner, at least, hadn’t read these, and maybe even Hammett.
May 13th, 2016 at 5:47 pm
I can recommend Blood and Thunder #27 (summer 2010) as it has an excellent article on Young and reprints one of his stories . Also contains other very interesting Adventure material. Also easily available and published by Murania Press is the Hurricane Williams novel SAVAGES.
I wrote this on the pulpmags forum in 2009:
“I had the pleasure of reading STORM ROVERS in the Mid-December 1920 Adventure. I decided to read this after reading the survey on Hurricane Williams in YESTERDAY’S FACES Vol 5: Dangerous Horizons by Robert Sampson. I could not resist a complete novel in one issue. Anyway, this novel was a iron fist in the face of anyone that puts down pulp magazines as fluff or filler material or gives a nudge-nudge, wink, wink when you talk about the pulps. There was so much bloody realistic carnage during the mutiny scene in the middle of the novel I was stunned, I just didn’t expect this. I think there was enough plot in the story for a dozen typical action films. Gritty and uncompromising is a great description for this novel. Highly recommended to anyone. Or a better way to put it is don’t read it because you might get the bug to collect this magazine and I don’t need the competition!”
I guess I liked it!
May 13th, 2016 at 7:07 pm
Rob Preston is right about Gordon Young and the Hurricane Williams series. One of my favorites and in fact I like Hurricane Williams more than Everhard.
I remember when Bob Sampson was asking me some questions about the series when he was writing YESTERDAY’S FACES. We carried on quite a correspondence for 25 years. It’s hard to believe he has been gone now for over 20 years.