Fri 12 Nov 2021
A Western Fiction Review by Dan Stunpf: EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES – The Proud Sheriff.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western Fiction[4] Comments
EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES – The Proud Sheriff. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1935, with a preamble by Henry Herbert Knibbs. Dell #688, paperback. 1953 (cover by Robert Stanley). University of Oklahoma, hardcover/softcover, 1968/1977.
If you want an introduction to the works of a major Western writer, this will do very nicely. It opens with a lengthy foreword, detailing the life and character of Eugene Manlove Rhodes, then follows with an excellent novella detailing the activities of the proud Sheriff, Spinal Maginnis.
Maginnis is proud, a character explains, because there hasn‘t been a killing in his county in ten years. And because the Mexicans get along with the Americans, the miners get along with the ranchers, and the big rancher gets along with the smaller ones.
He’s proud that there aren’t many rich men in his county, but no one goes to bed supperless. And he’s proud because “I been sheriff here near to eight years and made my few and simple arrests with ne’eer a shot fired.â€
Shortly after the story opens, Maginnis’ first cause for pride gets squelched by a double murder. And as the story ends, so does his final boast. In between times, Rhodes offers up a rich, fast-moving story filled with colorful characters, spiced with humor, and moved along at a steady pace by sound detective work and bursts of action.
Mostly though, this is the story of Spinal Maginnis, the proud sheriff, and here Rhodes provides a character distinctive, well-rounded, and fascinating enough to keep the reader (this reader anyway) up way past bedtime.
November 12th, 2021 at 8:39 pm
I looked up Rhodes and I see that he spent very little time in the pulp magazines, only 5 short stories in All Story at the beginning of his career. The rest of his fiction appeared in the slicks, mainly The Saturday Evening Post, including The Proud Sheriff in October, 1962 as a three part serial.
November 12th, 2021 at 8:49 pm
The cover art reminds one of Ward Bond.
Ah these infrequent western pulp reviews remind me of a massive running battle I once had with a very cynical buddy of mine. We agreed only that yes, there is a certain amount of divergence from history, in western entertainment. But the debate was: just how much?
He’s one of those modern-day wise guys with the highly caustic attitude that no western fiction …was ever based on any facts at all. To him, it’s all just ‘tall-tales’.
He took his jaundice even farther: he didn’t even grant that any historical records at all were ever accurate, with regard to the old west. He doesn’t believe that outlaws were real, or that banks or trains were ever robbed. He doesn’t believe that men carried sixguns.
The guy is just a rhino, a minotaur. He thinks what he wants to think, at all costs.
Me, I am a fervent fan of many western movies and I showered him with the undisputed historical facts that some of my fave flicks are based on. Got nowhere. It still makes me fume!
November 12th, 2021 at 9:36 pm
This is probably as close to a standard Western as Rhodes wrote. He’s most famous for PASO POR AQUI (filmed as FOUR FACES WEST) about a rancher who holds up a bank with an empty gun to get money to save his ranch, and pursued by Pat Garrett pauses in his escape to help a family stricken by plague (that one was a POST serial too).
Like a lot of New Mexican writers of the period he was a friend of Billy the Kid though he wrote well about Pat Garrett. He had a penchant for outlaws, writing a book about well liked Oklahoma outlaw Bill Doolin too.
He’s more a novelist in the vein of Owen Wister than strictly a Western pulp writer, less Zane Gray or Max Brand than Peter B. Kyne, his books more realistic novels of the West than pulp shoot-em-ups.
November 12th, 2021 at 9:46 pm
I read Paso Por Acqui principally because at nine I’d seen Four Faces West and it stayed with me, but the book did not. I got through it, but it was slow going. A disappointment.