Tue 7 May 2019
Western Pulp Stories I’m Reading: CLIFF FARRELL “Sign of the White Feather.”
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading , Western Fiction[2] Comments
CLIFF FARRELL “Sign of the White Feather.” Short novel. First published in Fighting Western, March 1946. Collected in The White Feather as “The White Feather.” (Five Star, hardcover, 2004; Leisure, paperback, March 2005).
Fighting Western is generally considered one of the second- or even third-rank western pulps, but this particular issue is filled with a bunch of better western writers. Besides this long tale by Farrell, there are four shorter ones by gents such as Giles A. Lutz, William J. Glynn, Thomas Thompson, and Joseph Chadwick, of whom only Glynn is completely unknown to me.
As you can probably guess from the title, “Sign of the White Feather” is the story of a man considered a coward but who in the end redeems himself. It seems that in order to make a hurried trip to Salt Lake City to raise money to save his estranged father from bankruptcy, he had to forego a fight with one of the men working for his father’s ruthless competitor in finishing a coast-to-cast telegraph line.
A contract is a contract, and a deadline is a deadline, but it’s even harder when thugs, gunmen and outlaws are working for the other side. Even Kelly’s fiancée is starting to wonder how much courage the man she is engaged to marry actually has. It does not help in that regard when she learns that the only person who has agreed to give Kelly the loan he needs is a woman, and what’s more, she’s coming back with him.
The story is non-stop action, starting with a rough and bumpy stage ride back to Salt Lake City, then up in the mountains cutting down logs to be used as poles — just as the winter season is ready to settle in. The enemy is suitably vicious, the romance suitably up in the air, and while the characters are not deeply developed, I found myself rooting for them all the way. Is Kelly Brackett a coward? Far from it!
May 8th, 2019 at 6:02 pm
The other stories in the Cliff Farrell collection are:
“The Brave March West” [See below.]
“No Peace for the Living.” First published in ACE-HIGH WESTERN, April 1937, as “The Gringo Hell Breaks Loose.”
The history behind the first of these two is complicated. The introduction to the story is not signed, but I’m sure it was by Jon Tuska, who packaged old pulp stories for Five Star and Leisure Books for many years, up until his death in 2016.
“The Brave March West” was sold and scheduled to be published in ACE-HIGH WESTERN, but was held back and was published instead for the first issue of PIONEER WESTERN, August 1937, as “”westward — to Blood and Glory!”
It was then reprinted as “Westward, the Wagon Trains!” in the November 1951 issue of .44 WESTERN. Under its original magazine title, the story was included in the WWA collection WESTERN BONANZA: EIGHT SHORT NOVELS OF THE WEST, edited by Todhunter Ballard (Doubleday, 1969).
On the basis of its appearance in that book, it won the 1970 Spur award for the best short fiction of the yer before, and was reprinted again in SPURS, Bantam 1977) soe 40 years after it first appearance, long before the WWA was even formed.
May 8th, 2019 at 6:24 pm
The Empire Builder was a sub genre of the Western that often took a back seat to cowboys, soldiers, Indians, and outlaws, but most of the major writers tackled it at least once, and in the right hands, as here, it seemed to have a heft as a story sometimes missing from gunfighters and rustlers.
Zane Grey, Haycox, L’Amour, and others all tackled the genre at least once, often to good effect, and it was a favorite in the movies.