Mon 9 Sep 2013
A Review by Dan Stumpf: HOLLISTER NOBLE – One Way to Eldorado.
Posted by Steve under Reviews[5] Comments
HOLLISTER NOBLE – One Way to Eldorado. Doubleday, hardcover, 1954.
Okay, this’ll sound like a trip report, but it’s really a book review. A few years back we took two trips: one to Lake Tahoe for a wedding, and one to Myrtle Beach to see my parents. For the Tahoe trip we flew into Sacramento and took a “shortcut” to Tahoe — driving across the mountains on a road that went straight up, spun around, twisted, bucked and plunged back down again, with all the charm of a Brahma Bull that’s just been kicked in the nuts. Along the roadside, we noticed reflectionized markers about 12 feet high, and suddenly realized they were there to mark the road in heavy snow!
As for Myrtle Beach, I’ve always found it crowded and touristy, but my folks like living there, and that’s the main thing. There’s one Used Book Store in the whole city, a moribund place pretty much devoid of charm, but I found something there called One Way to Eldorado by Hollister Noble.
It looked like a mystery set in a deserted whistle-stop town: a Railroad trouble-shooter stuck in a blizzard with assorted gamblers, miners, dance hall gals, etc. and I’d never heard of it (it’s not listed in Hubin) so I thought I’d give it a try. Imagine my surprise when I found the story was set in the same mountain pass I had driven through just a few months earlier!
Your chances of finding this are pretty slim, but it’s worth a look. Noble takes too long getting the story off the ground, and the background seems rushed at first, but once he gets started, he delivers a fast-paced tale filled with roaring winds, avalanches, train wrecks, fights, robberies, and a nifty ending I didn’t quite see coming.
There’s also some unintended charm: Noble wrote this when Train was still the primary method of travel and shipping cross-country, and his picture of this forgotten time has a faded splendor I found captivating all by itself.
September 9th, 2013 at 11:06 am
The “Treasures 5: The West, 1898-1938” set of DVDs looks at mainly silent films set in the Old West:
http://www.filmpreservation.org/dvds-and-books/treasures-5-the-west
One of these is a documentary:
Lake Tahoe, Land of the Sky (1916, 6 min.), travelogue celebrating the new auto road.
***
This review makes One Way to Eldorado sound interesting.
But one thing isn’t clear:
Is One Way to Eldorado a mystery?
That is, does it have a mysterious situation like a murder or theft, solved by the hero at the end of the story?
Or is it a pure thriller, without mystery?
September 9th, 2013 at 6:17 pm
Mike, it’s a grown-up mystery in the Hardy Boys vein, with robbery, missing what’s-its and plenty of colorful action but as I recall nary a murder
September 9th, 2013 at 7:31 pm
Dan,
I’m happy with mysteries involving theft, forgery, unknown moles giving out secret information, mysterious strangers who appear, anonymous letters, deep dark personal secrets, odd lights in the sky, etc. Don’t need a murder – just want a mystery.
Thank you for the information!
September 19th, 2013 at 9:00 am
Neat! It’s always cool when you recognize something in a book from personal experience.
January 15th, 2017 at 5:19 pm
I read the book “One Way to Eldorado” several times over back in the middle 1950s; my mother had acquired it as a member of the Book of the Month Club. Even back then I was a train fan and railroad buff and have been on many cross-country train trips since early childhood; being from California originally, I am familiar with some of the locations mentioned in the book. What a cliff-hanger!