Sat 4 Apr 2009
Archived Western Review: LES SAVAGE, JR. – Gambler’s Row.
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Reviews , Western Fiction[4] Comments
LES SAVAGE, JR. – Gambler’s Row.
Leisure, paperback reprint; 1st printing, February 2003. Hardcover edition: Five Star, February 2002.
Yes, this is a western, and if you’re a mystery fan only, you can go right on to the next review, if you prefer. But over the past few years Five Star has been doing western fans a great big favor in publishing collections of vintage pulp stories like this one, and thanks to Leisure Books as well, many of them are now available in cheaper editions.
There are three short novels in this one, all previously appearing in the badly flaking pages of Lariat Magazine, circa 1945-48. But where’s the crime connection, you ask? I’m glad you did, since I was coming to that. In “Gambler’s Row,” the title story, a wandering cowpoke named Drifter (well, yes) is hired by the female owner of the Silver Slipper to locate the sole witness to a murder.
In “Brush Buster” the only crime is cattle rustling, but it does take some detective work on the part of small-scale rancher Nolan Moore to track them down (and win the hand of lush, full-bodied Ivory Lamar). And in “Valley of Secret Guns” one-armed bronc-buster Bob Tulare is suspected by a gang of rustlers and killers of being a private detective, working undercover to bring them to justice. There is, of course, a woman involved as well.
As you can probably tell, Al Hubin isn’t likely to include this book in the latest edition of his Bibliography of Crime Fiction, nor would I if I were he, to tell you the truth, but like most westerns, it’s not all that far afield. The stories are melodramatic, especially the first one; humorous, especially the last one; romantic, all three of them; and, most importantly, authentic, again all three of them.
If you read carefully enough, you can learn how to track someone on horseback without being spotted; how to retrieve cattle used to running wild in the mesquite and thick brush along the Mexican border; and how to break killer horses at five dollars a bust.
There are cowboy terms in this book that I’ve never heard of, and I don’t think Savage made them up. From page 160: “Center-fire rig popping and snapping beneath him, Tulare unhitched his dally … he didn’t have to get too close with forty-five feet of maguey in his hand.”
Savage also writes great fight scenes, a few that go on for pages. Not great literature, by any means, but for the market for which they were written, these stories are top of the line.
April 5th, 2009 at 4:10 am
Savage was one of the masters of the great pulp music that can still hit familiar notes we all hear with our hearts rather than our heads. Even today names like his, Harry Sinclair Drago, W.C. Tuttle, Jackson Gregory, William McLeod Raine, William Colt Macdonald, and the old masters like Mulford, Brand, Johnston McCully, and Zane Gray still appeal to us, and not just for nostalgia. McCully’s non series westerns are some of his best work, and his Black Star a curious cross between Zorro, the western bandit, and the super criminal.
No apology needed for including westerns as far as I’m concerned. There has long been a tie between the genres — not just the bandits, rustlers, lawmen, and the like, but actual mysteries and detectives too. Gregory Quist, Hashknife Hartley, Page Murdoch, Whispering Smith, Texas Ranger Jerry Frost, Jim Hatfield, Quincannon, and Renfield of the Mounties all had one foot in either genre to some extent.
And the list of western writers who wrote mysteries or vice versa is endless; the aforementioned Jackson Gregory, Stewart Edward White, Max Brand, Bill Pronzini, William Ard, W.T. Ballard, Loren D. Estleman, Elmore Leonard, Richard Mathieson, Trevanian, Louis L’Amour, even Robert E. Howard and E. Hoffman Price and countless others wrote in both genres and sometimes mixed the two as in many of Luke Short’s books.
More recently Michael Moorcock paused long enough in his The Metatemporal Detective for his Sir Seaton Begg tribute to Sexton Blake and Zenith the Albino (tribute to Anthony Skene’s pulp figure) to venture out west in a tribute to Clarence Mulford and Hopalong Cassidy in “The Ghost Warriors” (originally in Tales From the Texas Woods).
Even Ellery Queen’s golden age classic The American Gun Mystery takes place in a rodeo in New York’s Madison Square Garden and Rex Stout gets Nero Wolfe out west at a dude ranch in Death of a Dude. Notable western novelist A.B. Guthrie Jr. wrote several mysteries set in contemporary Montana, and Sarah Andrews books about geologist Em Hansen are set in the modern west as of course are Tony Hillerman’s books. Joseph Hansen’s Bohannon tales are all set in the modern west and some of Donald Hamilton’s Matt Helm spy noves are set in the west — no surprise as Hamilton also wrote westerns including ones that inspired two major films — The Big Country and The Violent Men. There’s even a Shell Scott novel where Prather’s white haired skirt chaser gets involved with gangsters and the filming of a nudie cutie western spoof. Before creating Race Williams Carroll John Daly found his hardboiled voice with Three Gun Terry Mack set in old Mexico and both Doc Savage creator Lester Dent’s novellas about private eye Curt Flagg have modern western settings. Dashiell Hammett’s Op ventures out west in one short, and is essintially in a western setting in Red Harvest with ‘Poisonville’ based on Colorado’s Leadville. Michael Shayne finds himself deputy to an old fashioned Colorado lawman as he cleans up a gambling mecca in Murder in a Mummer’s Mask and the Saint had several adventures in the American west including helping a Texas lawman break up a sabotage ring in wartime Galveston in The Saint and the Sizzling Saboteur. Charlie Chan gets out west in The Chinese Parrot where he goes undercover as a gun happy cook, and even James Bond finds himself in a recreation of a western town surrounded by mobsters in western drag and escaping on a 19th century locomotive in Diamonds Are Forever.
And it would be hard to find a funnier book than Eliot Paul’s surreal Marx Brothers inspired Fracas in the Foothills in which he transports Homer Evans and the whole crew of Parisians and expatriates out west for a one of a kind epic western mystery that is one of the genuine odd classics of any genre.
Granted not every mystery fan is going to like westerns, and there are no doubt fans of Pronzini, Estleman, and Leonard who either don’t read the mysteries or don’t read the westerns, but the ties between the two genres are so close that you sometimes wonder there was no pulp called Cowboy Detective Stories or forget that for most of it’s life Black Mask published western material including Erle Stanley Gardner’s fast gun gambler avenger Black Burton.
As with mysteries ties to science fiction you almost can’t divorce one genre from the other. Just a quick review of those who crossed the genre boundaries between western and mystery include Steve Frazee, Leigh Brackett, Edgar Rice Burroughs (at least three westerns and one genuine mystery plus many combining elements of one or the other like The Mucker and Return of the Mucker), Ed Gorman, James Powell, Marvin Albert, Glendon Swartout, Frank O’Rourke,John K. Butler (creator of cabbie sleuth Steve Midnight who wrote numerous entires in the Roy Rogers Republic films), and W.R. Burnett who even re-wrote two of his classic crime novels as western films — High Sierra as Colorado Territory and Asphalt Jungle as The Badlanders. Even Brit phenomena John Creasey wrote westerns as Tex Riley.
April 5th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Creasey also wrote westerns as William K. Reilly and Ken Ranger. For more info about this and other Brit crime novelists who dared to write westerns, go to blackhorsewesterns.com and click on the Backtrail to March 2007. (The current page, by the way, features an article about a newly published western that “borrows” from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes novel, Valley of Fear.)
April 5th, 2009 at 10:03 pm
Steve
Thank you for your private note about the Mystery*File post on Blast to Oblivion in response to my comment above. Although I visit regularly, your guess is right — I did miss that one and can’t remember what I was doing on March 29 that would have been more interesting!
Anyway, huge belated thanks for such generous cover and for David Vineyard’s very full comments there on Creasey, Conan Doyle, Karl May et al.
Les Savage, Jr, by the way, is a western writer I admire, mainly because he had the temerity to break out of the mold into which many pulp publishers tried to force their contributors. Incredible though it may seem, some western writers still run into censorship problems! I have a copy of the restored Medicine Wheel and have borrowed other Savage works from the public library. From memory, my past comments to this effect led to your posts on Señorita Scorpion, whom I’d not “met”. I thought she might be a “sister” to Misfit Lil, whose latest exploits are at this very moment summoning my attentions….!
Keith
April 5th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
Les Savage and Senorita Scorpion have come up before on this blog, but this review of Gambler’s Row was written at least a year before then — which explains why Ms. Scorpion didn’t get mentioned this time around.
I think the first post on the blog in which she came up was this one, but there were two or three others that followed later, in which Jon Tuska and several others helped to put together a complete bibliography for her. In the process Jon also talked quite a bit about Les Savage’s career.
To find all the posts in which she’s mentioned, you might do a search in the box over in the area to the right for either ‘Les Savage’ or ‘Senorita Scorpion.’
— Steve