Wed 11 Jan 2017
A Western Fiction Review: MAX BRAND – Dogs of the Captain.
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Reviews[5] Comments
MAX BRAND – Dogs of the Captain. Five Star, hardcover, March 2006. Leisure, paperback, 2007. First appeared as a six-part serial in Western Story Magazine, January 2 through February 6, 1932.
There are moments in this book, especially in the first half, when you may have the feeling that Max Brand was writing the great American novel, Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn style. The portrayal of a small 12-year-old boy in a small town finding his way among his peers by breaking into the universally feared Captain Slocum’s property to steal a watermelon, then on a later night, climbing the side of the house to the uppermost tower to investigate the general belief that a ghost is in permanent residence there — why that is the stuff that dreams are made of.
What Don Grier, shaking in his — not boots, as he is barefoot — does not reckon on is that when he is caught, the captain will take a liking to him, and will eventually ask Don’s Aunt Lizzie if he may adopt him. All would be well, except that Aunt Lizzie, before letting go, lets slip that Don’s father was hanged — and for the offense of killing his brother.
Don’s uncle, it seems, was shot to death several years before in a mining camp called Chalmer’s Creek, somewhere out in the untamed West. Don will hear of nothing but leaving at once to salvage the name of his father, and the captain agrees.
Obviously this is a rite-of-passage story, and what Max Brand does is take the basic material and does his best to shape into a small epic of legendary proportions. While the resulting novel is not an easy one to put down, he doesn’t quite succeed. Characters and characterization seem to slip away from him more often than once, and when much is made of a surprising reappearance of Aunt Lizzie into the story, she just as quickly disappears, never to be heard of again.
January 13th, 2017 at 1:58 am
Steve really got my attention by mentioning “great American novel” and HUCKLEBERRY FINN. I pulled out my 6 issues of WESTERN STORY and I’m reading the novel.
January 13th, 2017 at 2:30 am
I hope you find that I may have exaggerated only a little.
January 16th, 2017 at 9:55 am
Steve, I had hopes that this would be one of Max Brand’s better works. I know you were impressed by parts of the novel but I have many questions that maybe you could answer. It’s possible I missed some of the following:
1. The WESTERN STORY serial may have been abridged and thus the 2007 paperback that you read may have more wordage explaining why The Captain would take an interest in this 12 year old boy. First the kid is caught stealing watermelons and The Captain ignores it. I can believe that but not when the kid is caught in the house acting like a burglar. I think any home owner would turn the boy over to the Sheriff, etc. Instead he ends up adopting the kid and spending a lot of money on him. He even assigns one of his employees to travel with the child for several months.
Why? I kept thinking The Captain must be the long lost friend of the kid’s father or maybe another brother, etc. Nope. My serial version does not make the whole thing believable at the end of the story.
2. In the story The Captain hurts his hand so seriously that he can’t use it and has to learn to write left handed. This is never explained in the serial. Also it is never explained where The Captain goes several times a year.
3. It’s never explained why the two servants of The Captain hate the kid so much. He just seems like the typical naive kid to me.
4. What’s with the ridiculous attempts to kill the kid, all of which fail miserably? Four attempts in four days. They could have just walked up to the boy and shot him in the head.
Does your paperback version explain any of the above? I see Jon Tuska and one of the Faust Biographers don’t even talk about this book, so they are no help. But as usual with my 60 year project of reading Max Brand, I need help with understand why so many like him.
To me, he simply wrote too much and too fast. Maybe that explains the plot holes?
January 16th, 2017 at 1:27 pm
Walker, It’s very possible there is quite a bit of difference between the published serial serial version and the Five Star/Leisure Books version. The copyright on this book as well as most of Tuska’s westerns reprinted from the pulps always mention that it covers restored material. I always assumed that this meant that he was working from original manuscripts that the magazine editors went to work on before they published them.
So I doubt you and I read the same exact story. I don’t have the book to refer to, so when I try to answer your questions, it’s from memory.
As to why the Captain took an interest in the boy, I assumed that it was that he admired his spunk. He and the men who worked for him were a gang of crooks, and he saw something in Don Grier that reminded him of himself.
The trips that the Captain and his men went on several times a year were were on behalf of some nefarious activity. Apparently he had a narrow escape on that most recent one, and came back with the injured hand. Learning to cope with it was an interesting sidebar to the story, but it had nothing to do with Don Grier’s quest for revenge.
As for why the Captain’s servants hate him so much, that I can’t tell you. Perhaps they simply thought he was an interloper and was interfering with how they stood with the Captain. I remarked on this in my review by saying “Characters and characterization seem to slip away from him [Brand] more often than once,” and this is one glaring example of that.
You also ask about he ridiculous attempts to kill the kid. My response to this is that bad guys in B-westerns are always dumb and do not do the obvious thing. When they have the good guy trapped and one of the is ready to shoot him in the head, another says, “No wait, I have a better plan.”
There were parts of this book that I liked very much, but you are right in saying that there are way too many plot holes in it for it to be considered any kind of a success, either the pulp version or the reprint. You summed it up correctly. Brand wrote too much and too fast.
January 16th, 2017 at 1:56 pm
Thanks for your input Steve. Jon Tuska in the MAX BRAND COMPANION has a chapter where he talks about how some serials were cut and also some books were abridged from the serial version. But he doesn’t mention this novel.
All these years later I still have mixed feelings about Max Brand. There are not too many Faust collectors around any longer. Not like the old days when I used to trip over them at Pulpcon!