WILLIAM HOPSON – A Gunman Rode North. Pyramid #225, paperback, 1956. First published in hardcover by Avalon Books, 1954.

   A while ago back I read William Hopson’s DESPERADO, and was taken by the book’s portrait of a man slowly becoming an outcast in his own community. A GUNMAN RODE NORTH isn’t nearly as compelling, but it does have its points of interest — mainly plot devices lifted from old Burt Lancaster movies.

   The story starts with Lew Kerrigan in Yuma territorial prison, whence he has gone for the sake of a beautiful girl named Kitty, who is now a gangster’s moll, or rather the mistress of Colonel Harrow, a scheming gold baron, but basically the same figure as Ava Gardner in THE KILLERS (1946).

   We quickly learn (maybe too quickly; there’s a lot of exposition in the early chapters) that Harrow was Kerrigan’s erstwhile partner in a gold strike, but Kerrigan’s stake in all this has vanished in a swirl of corporate chicanery (shades of I WALK ALONE, 1948) and Kerrigan is about to be released into the custody of the man who sent him there, a plot device from ROAD HOUSE (1948) which was not a Burt Lancaster movie, but might as well have been.

   From this point we segue into a bit of BRUTE FORCE (1947) with sadistic prison guards and desperate convicts bent on escape, until Kerrigan is finally released and confronts Harrow, who is flanked by his hired goons — excuse, me, hired guns — and learns that he is now a pawn in another of Harrow’s nasty plans (see CRISS CROSS, 1949) while Harrow has spurned Kitty for a more socially acceptable marital prospect (back to I WALK ALONE.)

   Out on the street/riding the range once more, Kerrigan moves across a landscape peopled with noir figures: bent cops/deputies, a corrupt judge, a too-helpful stranger (back to CRISS CROSS) an old friend who happens to be an honest-cop/deputy and boring as the range is wide (back to THE KILLERS) plus hired killers (ibid) stalking him across the prairie as he pursues his lonely vengeance against all odds. Hopson also throws in a few rampaging Apaches (ULZANA’S RAID, but that came later), who add to the noir feel of a hostile universe.

   Okay so there’s nothing too original here, and the ending’s entirely too pat, but Hopson keeps the plot moving nicely, and he has a sure hand for the action scenes. And A GUNMAN RODE NORTH is fast-reading enough that it’s fired and back in the holster before you have time to say, “Who was that masked man?”

MICHAEL CARDER – Decision at Sundown. Macrae Smith, hardcover, 1955. Ace Double D-160, paperback, no date [1956]. Bound dos-à-dos with Action Along the Humboldt, by Karl Kramer. First serialized in Ranch Romances magazine, January 1955. (Part Three can be found online here.)

DECISION AT SUNDOWN. Columbia, 1957. Randolph Scott, John Carroll, Karen Steele, Valerie French, Noah Beery Jr., John Archer, Andrew Duggan. Based on the novel by Michael Carder (screen credit given to Vernon L. Fluharty). Director: Budd Boetticher.

   My mention a while back of Jim O’Mara’s Wall of Guns elicited a comment from James Reasoner (a worthy western pen-slinger in his own right) revealing that O’Mara was actually one Vernon Fluharty, who also wrote westerns under the name Michael Carder, among them Decision at Sundown (Macrae Smith, 1955; originally serialized in Ranch Romances, January 1955) which two years later at Columbia studios was turned into one of Budd Boetticher’s most complex and least satisfying westerns.

   The book Decision at Sundown bears some interesting similarities to Wall of Guns; in both a bitter loner rides into town seeking revenge, and in both he runs into a range fraught with intrigue: crooked locals grabbing for power, ranchers nursing long-simmering grudges, neighborhood bad guys, loyal friends and a woman who should hate him but finds herself strangely attracted to the handsome stranger (yawn).

   The difference is that Wall of Guns was enlivened by some deeper-than-usual supporting players whose actions — whether short-sighted, passionate or surprisingly thoughtful — sent the book places where lesser tales don’t go.

   In Decision at Sundown however, the ensemble remains depressingly stale: Tate Kimbrough, the town tyrant, is just a double-dyed rat; Lucy, his intended bride comes off like Daisy Mae on the printed page, too purely wholesome and impulsive to believe; Swede and Spanish, the hired guns are nothing but thug-uglies, and — and so it goes: the blowsy ex-mistress, the gruff doctor, grizzled rancher, doughty pardner … they all remain firmly in the cookie-cutter.

   There’s a trace of depth as the plot develops and our hero suddenly finds his revenge turned laughable, but it’s quickly drowned in the shallow characters charged with putting it across.

   When the novel reached Hollywood two years later, director Budd Boetticher and writer Charles Lang (story credit goes to Vernon Fluharty) picked up on that particle of originality and ran with it, adding some depth to the characters along the way and coming up with a B-western that if not completely satisfying, is at least original enough to remember.

   The hero here is Randolph Scott, and when he rides into town it’s with the easy assurance of two decades of westerns behind him, abetted here by Boetticher’s graceful camerawork and feel for action. Unfortunately, he and the viewer get quickly mired in the story’s rather static complications, and the drama plays out in a few rather cramped and confining sets.

   When one thinks of Budd Boetticher’s films, it’s with appreciation of his feel for characters framed against an open, rugged landscape, dealing warily with their issues and each other as they traverse hostile terrain that reflects some inner conflict. (Or as Andrew Sarris put it, part allegorical odysseys and part floating poker games.) But in this movie, we’re just stuck in a stable.

   Stylist that he was, Boetticher managed a few fine moments, notably a couple of deliberately theatrical showdowns in the middle of Main Street, first with Andrew Duggan metaphorically stripping himself down for the performance, and later with John Carroll trying to hide his fears and live up to the Bad Guy’s Code of Conduct, murky as that may be.

   In fact, Boetticher’s attention to this stock character almost brings the film to life. We first see Tate Kimbrough in standard attire for dress heavies in shoot-em-ups: fancy vest, dark coat, and the snide moustache worn by thousands of B-western baddies before him.

   Then he starts to show some depth; he’s thoughtful and loving to his trampy ex-girlfriend, frank about himself and his past with his bride-to-be, and toward the end, when he has to go out and face Randolph Scott alone (a pre-doomed enterprise in films of this sort) there’s a rather touching moment when he confesses his fears to his ex-gal (a fine performance from Valerie French, who specialized in this sort of thing) but goes out there anyway.

   I said this was a complex film and I meant it. I also said it was unsatisfying and I meant that too. In Westerns, action is traditionally cathartic, but in this one it simply becomes irrelevant, leading to an ending that Boetticher seems unprepared to handle.

   There’s a lot of stage business between the dramatic climax and the actual ending of the film, and it dilutes the impact of what could have been a uniquely powerful Western. And that’s kind of a shame.

Note: To read Mike Grost’s extensive comments on this same film, check out his website here.

JIM O’MARA – Wall of Guns. Dutton, hardcover, 1950. Pocket #816, paperback, June 1951. Signet, paperback, 2002.

   I almost started this review by saying that Jim O’Mara’s Wall of Guns is Western writing at its finest. On second think, that honorific is better suited to books like The Big Sky, Saint Johnson and True Grit. Perhaps it’s more apt to say Wall is Western writing at its most enjoyable.

   Frank Landry drifts down from Montana to the Rio Grande to find out who killed his brother and stole their ranch, eventually ending up in Broken Wheel, Texas, a town like something from Red Harvest, with sundry factions in a range war at each other’s throats, various hombrae and varmints crossing and double-crossing one another, and a general feel of violent malfeasance roaming the plains.

   Landry’s fit for it, though, being one of those Western hero-types who never loses a gun-or-fist fight, thinks faster and smarter than any sidewinder, and draws the women-folk to him like kids to Christmas.

   And we’re still in the first chapter when he meets up with Mary Wayne, purty as prairie flower, whose dad is a local rancher being squeezed out by a bunch of cattle thievin’ no-goods over on the next range, and whose weak-willed brother has fallen under the spell of one Carolina Steele, the local cattle queen and de facto head of the rustlers.

   From this clichéd start, and with those boiler plate protagonists, Wall of Guns could have been a very ordinary western, no better or worse than most. But O’Mara has a smooth, vivid way of evoking the landscape, a good hand with action, and he peoples his story with a supporting cast far from the usual stock types. A dumb goon-type shows a surprising, gentle loyalty to his spineless boss, one of the good guys goes wrong when Landry’s girl dumps him, people make dumb mistakes now and then, and show surprising insight at other times — it’s as if a spear carrier in Aida suddenly dropped his lance and burst into an aria.

   There’s a remarkable moment late in the book where one of the bad guys starts thinking about how he took the wrong road, and wonders if it’s too late to retrace his steps. At which point the good guys catch up with him and

   Characters like that, propelling a violent, fast-moving story, lift Wall of Guns well out of the usual rut and make it one to look for. And remember.

KING OF THE RODEO. Universal, 1929. Hoot Gibson, Kathryn Crawford, Slim Summerfield, Monte Montague. Director: Henry MacRae. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   One of the high points of the weekend. Hoot is thrown out by his rancher father because he wants to ride in a rodeo in Chicago rather than go to college. Hoot’s films are notable for their superb action and good humor and his search for his rodeo shirts (ill-advisedly stolen by the film’s villain during the commission of a more serious crime) provided both laughs and thrills in a motorcycle/car chase that kept this eternal adolescent on the edge of his seat.

SPRING PARADE. Universal, 1940. Deanna Durbin, Robert Cummings, Mischa Auer, Henry Stephenson, S. Z. Sakall. Director: Henry Koster.

   Saturday night featured a “lost” Deanna Durbin musical Spring Parade, with the unbeatable Deanna playing a girl from the country who befriends the Emperor Franz Joseph II in pre-war Vienna, benefiting her boyfriend, the insufferable Robert Cummings and her employer, S. Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, being his usual … uh … cuddly self. DD is in fine voice and there’s a scene at a beer garden where she sang and danced her way into my heart. I love this kind of schmaltz.

   In 1962, Doyle Trent walked into the Tucson Police Department, a newly-hired reporter for the Arizona Daily Star, the town’s morning paper.

   Then in his late 30’s, he was older than the typical “cub” reporter, as some old newspapermen labeled such creatures. He stood about 6-feet, of medium build, with sandy, close-cropped (but thinning) hair. His face was smooth and permanently tanned. From mid-forehead to his hairline was a band of white skin, the permanent trademark of a face long in the sun, partially shielded by a hat.

   In contrast to reporters’ “newsroom-grunge” collection of barely-ironed shirts, rumpled slacks and scuffed shoes, Doyle’s taste ran to tailored Western pants, leather belt with a simple silver buckle, a complementing colored shirt (tie-less) with snap-type pocket flaps and shined cowboy boots. But no cowboy hat. And he ambled, rather than walked.

   Initially working the “day cops beat”, Doyle was a quiet presence in that noisy, smelly environment. He shared the large, wooden “press desk” with the afternoon paper’s cops reporter, consigned to the corner of a large, windowless room which housed police dispatchers. From that vantage point, they observed the endless parade of cops and prisoners.

   Soft-spoken and polite, even with the ever-prickly cops of all ranks, Doyle was a good writer who favored two-fingered typing on one of two battered Underwood typewriters at the press desk. He was thorough, always asking the reporter’s basic “Five-W’s” but always managing to get just a bit more. In one highway accident, an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer had overturned, killing the driver. The truck carried several tons of steel; it was in Doyle’s lead sentence. His rival missed that little detail and had to deal with an unhappy city editor who explained the relevance of a law of physics involving mass and momentum.

   Doyle didn’t talk a lot; personal details were sparse. He never said where he was from, offering only that he had been a cowboy and had served in the Army. Knowing a cowboy’s career was limited, he said he used the G.I. Bill to earn a college journalism degree. He spoke with a slow, soft drawl and, at times, with difficulty. A lifetime of little or no dental care caused him pain, not that he ever really complained. It just added to his taciturn demeanor.

    — These recollections came from another reporter who worked “cops” with Doyle a half-century ago. Decades later, that former reporter stumbled by chance on Doyle’s literary career and he observed that, “Given the list of book titles to his credit, it was obvious that his background as a working cowboy, his journalism experience and a vivid imagination combined to make him a successful Western novelist. In a world of cowboy-writer wannabes, Doyle Trent is the real McCoy.”

“SHOOT HIM ON SIGHT!” – William Colt MacDonald. Ace F-389, paperback original; first printing, 1966. Ace ‘Tall Twin’ Western, 2nd printing, 1972; paired with The Troublemaker, by Edwin Booth.

   Most westerns, it has been said before, and probably by me, are crime stories. They just happen to take place in the west, and mostly in the late 1800’s. Rustling, bank robberies, feuding between cattlemen and homesteaders and so on, all crime fiction, but unless there’s an element of detective work, Al Hubin does not include it in his bibliography of Crime Fiction, and rightly so. There’s a matter of intent, as well. Most western writers were (and are) writing westerns, and not crime fiction.

   And of that aforementioned element of detective work, there is, I have to admit, none in this book. Not that there isn’t a crime, and it’s fairly obvious who the villain is, to the reader that is, and not the narrator of this tale, which is told – and I think this is unusual for westerns, isn’t it? – in first person by John Cardinal, who is on the run from the law.

   It seems that to help out his foster parents, he extorted money from a mean, tight-fisted banker and then, knowing that he did wrong, lit out of town. What he doesn’t expect, though, is that his reputation as an outlaw would grow and grow, with WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE posters going up all across the west. Thinking that this is due to sheer laziness on the part of the law – blaming him when the local sheriffs cannot catch up with their own local desperadoes – the noose that John Cardinal has placed around his own neck grows tighter and tighter. He quickly learns to survive in wilder and wilder towns, trying his utmost to live up to his reputation.

   Until he reaches the crookedest town of them all, that is, which is to say Onyxton, a town that’s run by Shel Webster, and whose girl friend is a beautiful dance hall hostess named Topaz. And this is where John Cardinal stops and makes a stand, where he finds out who he is, who’s been behind the problems he’s had in life, and what on earth are guns and ammunition doing in boxes labeled sewing machines being sent to small villages just across the border in Mexico?

   A number of MacDonald’s other westerns are listed in Hubin, by the way, many of them featuring a rangeland detective named Gregory Quist, and if I have ever read any, it was so long ago that I do not remember. John Cardinal’s forte, on the other hand, seems merely to be being in the right place at the right time, once he’s decided that Topaz is the girl for him, that is.

   Here’s a long quote from pages 112-113, a picturesque scene from Webster’s dance hall:

   There’s not a great depth involved here, as you can plainly see, but this is a smoothly told tale that’s not only tasty but a whole lot of fun to read.

MURRAY LEINSTER – Outlaw Guns. Star Books #3, digest paperback, abridged, 1950. Previously published as Wanted–Dead or Alive!, Quarter Books #25, digest paperback original, 1949. First serialized under the latter title in Triple-X Magazine, February-May 1929.

   Outlaw Guns is a popular rallying cry in some circles these days, but it’s also the title of a rather odd western by that prolific and very talented hack Murray Leinster (Will F. Jenkins.) Leinster is probably best remembered for his enjoyable sci-fi, but he also did a number of westerns, generally as much fun to read as his other stuff. Outlaw Guns is a solid western, but I was struck by the motifs it shares with the sci-fi.

   The story starts ordinarily enough, with rancher Buck Galway getting shot out of his saddle by owlhoot or owlhoots unknown, and his brother Slim leaving the Wild West Show and coming home to square things. But on the train into his home town, Slim comes close to getting killed by a man hired for that purpose, and when he hits town he discovers another man posing as him while he is suddenly known as outlaw Snatch Gillian, wanted for murder, robbery, cattle rustlin’, hoss thievin’ and who knows what all.

   This theme of lost identity recurs in Leinster’s sci-fi, as does the notion of a community cut off from the rest of civilization (it quickly develops that the bad guys have bottled up the roads into town and are controlling the telegraph) and the portents of something big and bad taking place in secret — we soon get glimpses of some kind of secret lab set up in a hidden valley, populated by odd-looking denizens who have terrified the good folks in those parts into ominous silence — that’s yet another vibe from his tales of Space Aliens and creepy invasions.

   This ain’t sci-fi though, it’s Western, and a crackling good thing, filled with chases, shoot-outs, fist-fights and a surprising sense of humor, as when Slim is nearly run down by a posse and finds himself rescued by a bunch of squatters who have decided to turn outlaw, and since they don’t know anything about the business, they figure to learn the trade from the notorious Snatch Gillian. The passages where Slim pretends to be the ornery varmint they think he is — and they follow his orders with a devotion bordering on hero-worship — have an understated hilarity to have to read to appreciate. And I recommend you do.

WILLIAM HOPSON – Desperado. Century #118, paperback original, 1948. Reprinted as Long Ride To Abilene: Avon #837, paperback, 1958; MacFadden 40-146, paperback, 1964.

   I picked up Desperado by William Hopson because of the cover, and stayed with it because of the text. Hopson was apparently a prolific writer for the pulps (and later for Gold Medal) and his work offers that unique fast prose and hard edge that seem to typify both forms at their best.

   The story starts with Jude, a farm boy with wandering feet, who hooks up with a passing cattle drive, makes some friends and helps navigate the outfit to Kansas City. Once there he gets in a shooting scrape on behalf of his employer and when he comes out alive he’s offered a full-time job on the boss’s ranch.

   But things around the spread get dicey fast — which is really want you want in a Western, now isn’t it? Jude discovers someone is coming up behind his boss, not just rustling his stock, but worse: eating away at his good name and influence around those parts.

   When Jude survives a couple more shooting scrapes and his opponents don’t, he gets a reputation as “that hired gun from Kansas City” and the decent folk and ordinary cowhands shun his company as disreputable or just plain unhealthy. Hence the title, I guess.

   Hopson can write. He knows something about ranch life and he can put it across to the reader in a way that conveys all the work and none of the boredom. He handles the action scenes capably, and structures his plot with a pace and economy that’s pretty much lost in these days of mega-books.

   I did wonder a bit at how a sod-buster like his hero got so apt with a gun, and the ending softens what might have been a really powerful finish, but these are the conventions of the Western form, and you can’t really fault the author for sticking to them. By and large, it’s a worthwhile book to spend a couple hours with, and one that stays surprisingly in my memory.

GIL DODGE – Flint. Signet #1414, paperback original, 1957. Included in 3 Steps to Hell as by Arnold Hano, Stark House, softcover, October 2012, along with So I’m a Heel and The Big Out.

   Flint offers some fine Western characters and a terse, hard-boiled opening, but ultimately it’s more interesting for the story behind it than the story within.

   Arnold Hano, the editor-in-chief at Lion Books back in the 1950s ought to be legendary for the quality of the work he sustained. While not every Lion Book was a classic of its time, Hano gave work to writers like Jim Thompson, Robert Bloch, David Goodis and Richard Matheson when they needed it most. And he didn’t just give them work, he gave them free rein to indulge their pulpy passions on the printed page.

   Books like The Kidnaper, The Killer Inside Me, The Burglar and Someone Is Bleeding teem with genuine artistry inside their gaudy covers that would be admirable anywhere, and simply amazing inside a cheap paperback.

   So when I learned that Hano himself wrote a western based on Jim Thompson’s Savage Night (with Thompson’s blessing) I came to it with high expectations — maybe too high. It starts well, with Flint, a notorious Hired Gun, previously lung-shot and in hiding, making his painful way across barren countryside to keep a rendezvous with a mysterious cattle baron named Good who needs a job done right—very close to the same situation the tubercular Charlie Biggers walks into in Savage Night.

   And in short order, Flint finds himself working a run-down ranch with his intended target, a rancher named Thomason (get it?) romancing a buxom wife and playing cat-and-mouse with Good’s henchman and a slovenly sheriff.

   And then [SPOILER!] everything just kinda stops as Flint gets sucked into an elaborate, nay byzantine, game with the man who hired him, trying to figure out his place in the scheme of things and the roles and motives of the various other players. Every move Flint makes, Good has seen coming, everything he tries gets him nowhere, or leads him to where Good has figured he’d go… and nothing really happens as several chapters go by with Good’s schemes getting more complex and Flint’s efforts more futile.

   Okay now, maybe this is a personal thing with me, or maybe it’s the vision and talent of the writers in question. I’ll entertain both possibilities, but in Savage Night, Jim Thompson conveys the notion of a cruel and mocking universe through which his doomed characters must wander.

   And this to me was more compelling — more convincing, even — than Arno/Dodge’s picture of a nasty old man cooking up murderous plots just for the fun of seeing folks squirm. I guess the difference is that Thompson’s characters do battle with nightmares while Arno/Dodge’s simply grasp for the banal — and find it all too readily within their reach.

LUCAS TODD – Showdown Creek. Macmillan, hardcover, 1955. Toronto Star Weekly Novel, newspaper supplement, Saturday 19 November 1955. Permabook M-3044, paperback, 1956

FURY AT SHOWDOWN. United Artists, 1957. John Derek, John Smith, Carolyn Craig, Nick Adams, Gage Clarke, Robert Griffin. Screenplay: Jason James, based on the novel Showdown Creek, by Lucas Todd. Director: Gerd Oswald.

   Showdown Creek is the kind of spare, gritty tale that Westerns should aspire to. Researching this, I can find no other book attributed to Lucas Todd, the author, nor any bio/bibliographic background on him, but perhaps that’s as it should be for a book that celebrates the outcast as this once does.

   As the story opens, Brock Mitchell is trying to ramrod a one-horse ranch for his broken-legged Uncle Ben and live down a reputation as a smart-ass hellion. Uncle Ben has arranged financing to get him through lean times, but the deal’s hit a snag, and nobody seems to know what the delay is —- until Mitchell learns that Chad Deasey, an ex-con with a grudge against him, has hit town and put up a respectable front, tied in with the most prominent local lawyer (soon to turn up dead) and persuaded the town banker to put the brakes on Uncle Ben’s deal, apparently just to ruin him and repay Mitchell for killing Deasey’s brother in a fair fight back in Brock’s gun-toting days.

   It’s pretty standard stuff for a Western: crooked banker, shady lawyer, upright hero handy with a gun, honest ranchers and even a purty blue-eyed widder woman trying to understand it all. Author Todd seems to know something about moving cattle around (not all western writers do) and he puts it across as he ladles out the more standard ingredients into his prairie stew, giving Peters a hot-headed sidekick and adding something about the railroad coming through.

   But he also tinges all this with an almost intangible feel for the dilemma of a flawed man painfully misunderstood. Every fight, shoot-out and unsolved crime echoes not only in physical violence but also in the looks Brock gets from the good citizens of Showdown Creek: the rumors, conversations broken off when he enters a room, and his increasing isolation from a community he needs.

   It’s intriguing stuff, and if it never quite rises to the level of Camus, the sense of alienation is still strong enough to lift this above the run-of-the-range shoot-’em-down and linger in the memory.

   Showdown Creek was filmed, appropriately enough, by Gerd Oswald, himself something of a Hollywood pariah, who was given only five days and a cast of unknowns and no-talents to do the job —- the only two players you ever heard of in this movie are John Derek and Nick Adams, so you see what I mean about the acting.

   The marvel is that Fury at Showdown emerges as a tight, deeply-felt tale of guns, cattle and youthful angst.

   Given the low budget and tight schedule, Fury at Showdown is necessarily a town-bound western, rarely leaving the claustrophobic confines of office, saloon and jail for the free range that now seems more like a false promise than the reality of the West.

   Somehow, though, that only helps convey the sense of constriction felt by the hero (or supposedly felt; this is John Derek acting, remember) as he struggles to reach some wide open plain of the soul, free of the town’s censure.

   That sounds like tall boots for a B Western to fill, but writer Jason James tweaks the story significantly — in his version, Chad Deasey has always been a respectable citizen and it’s Brock Mitchell who’s the ex-con, just released from jail for killing Deasey’s brother — and director Gerd Oswald puts it across with well-judged camera work and a sense of pace that never falters.

   Fury at Showdown never got much attention, and it’s far from ideal, but definitely worth your time.