Many of my father’s fans greatly enjoy his Chick Bowdrie series of Western detective stories. Dad wrote the first few during the brief time he spent with his parents in Oklahoma before moving to Los Angeles in 1946. From the start the Bowdrie character was destined to have his own series; Dad wrote two stories about him back to back and sent them both in to Popular Western magazine. Initially, there was some editorial pushback, and in April of 1984, while wrapping up work on his contribution to the coffee-table book Frontier, Louis wrote the following in his journal:
My essays will be complete this week and I shall start on a polish of the Bowdrie bk, but taking my time as I shall also be preparing the next Kerbouchard and JUBAL SACKETT. The first Bowdrie was a big success and it amuses me to recall how…[a certain editor at Popular Publications]…tried to talk me out of doing them. He did not believe in series characters and did not like Bowdrie. Well, every man to his taste. Due to the pub. demands…I never got the chance to develop the character as I wished, hard to do now for such work needs to be woven into the fabric of the story, not tacked on.
Luckily, the editor mentioned above was overruled by Popular Western’s editor in chief, Leo Margulies. Margulies’ magazines were still buying Louis’s Turk Madden adventure series, which had started before the war, and they had recently begun to pick up his Kilkenny Westerns as well. The Bowdrie stories didn’t have to be delivered on any particular schedule, but the editor may have been concerned either in Dad’s ability to produce or that he might get ambitious and start demanding more money.
Dad called the first story he sent Margulies “No Rest for a Ranger,” but like many it was retitled by the magazine staff, and became “A Job for a Ranger.” In the next eight months, before any of the Bowdrie stories appeared in print, Louis pumped out five more. Confronted with this flood of creativity, Leo asked Louis to go back and write the Bowdrie origin story. “McNelly Knows a Ranger” was rushed into print ahead of all but the already published “A Job for a Ranger.” From then on Dad wrote a few a year, all the way up until 1952.
Oddly, I have a note that says the short story “The Passing of Rope Nose”—published in both West of Dodge and The Collected Short Stories of Louis L’Amour, Volume 2—started out as a Bowdrie story. Partway through, however, Dad started feeling that his hero did not seem mature enough and so renamed him Johnny Sutton.
All in all the nineteen Chick Bowdrie stories were a successful run for Dad. In a 1947 letter to novelist and professor Walter S. Campbell (aka Stanley Vestal), whom Dad had known for many years, Louis affectionately referred to the character as “this gun slinging Ranger who works for me.”
I was lucky to discover an unpublished Bowdrie story, “Strawhouse Trail,” after my father’s death and was able to include it in the 1998 short-story collection Monument Rock. Below is a fragment of yet another Bowdrie mystery; these two rough-draft pages are all that exist:
The heroes of tragedy, it has been said, were noble men with some imperfection, often an inconspicuous little trait. Such a one was Curly Lustig.
Now Curly was blonde and he was handsome. He was also gay and debonair. A lion among men, he was a veritable devil among women, but a lobo wolf on the trail. Yet Curly Lustig had his own imperfections and behind the glittering facade lay a mind that was a composite of cunning and cruelty, and with it all a penchant for relieving people of their hard earned cash, and for shooting them if they objected.
Yet the legend that had already grown about him kept him in the ranks of a Robin Hood character. Several times he had tossed coins or bills to needy people and these times had been magnified by telling until it seemed that all his ill gotten coin went in the same way.
In over a half dozen states Curly was known and admired, and the ratio of admiration grew in respect to distance from him. His easy going, carefree appearance drew people to him, and those who had never seen him in one of his murderous rages had no idea what the man could be like.
Shrewd as he was, he could make mistakes, and fleeing a Colorado posse into Indian territory he crossed the Texas Panhandle, and in crossing stopped to recruit horses from a small ranch on the plains east of Adobe Walls. The rancher, an old man named Barrow, objected to losing his best horses in exchange for the broken down horses that Lustig was leaving him, and Curly Lustig shot the man down in cold blood and then rode his horse over the body five or six times.
Riding past the window of the cabin he then shot the rancher’s wife, and they rode on their way into the haven of security of Indian Territory. Lustig thought his murderous trail was well covered, but behind him he left a boy of fifteen who immediately headed south on one of Lustig’s broken down mustangs. When he reached Headquarters his description of Curly Lustig and his four outlaw companions was accurate and concise.
NcNelly called Chick Bowdrie to his hotel room. “It’s Lustig,” he said, explaining the crime, “and no question about it. That’s the first time he’s ever been in Texas that we know of. See that it doesn’t happen again.”
Bowdrie nodded, building a careful smoke. He waited, knowing there would be something more. It came.
“This is the hardest job I’ve ever given you,” McNelly said quietly, “even many honest people admire Lustig. They don’t know the man. He’s as cruel as an Apache, with an insane lust for killing and torture, and coupled with it, he’s deadly with guns and absolutely fearless.”
“Who’s with him?”
“Four men, usually, Lonny Rickert is from Kentucky. He’s wanted for robbery and murder in four states. The others are Locard, Carey and Howe. All are wanted men, all are vicious, all are in the Ranger’s Bible.”
On a high headed Palouse gelding, Chick Bowdrie headed west. Curly Lustig was in Oklahoma, but Bowdrie’s route took him out of Texas and into northern New Mexico.
Along the grapevine there were rumors and more rumors, and he wanted none of them to connect him with the pursuit of Lustig. He knew, also, that in northern New Mexico were some favorite hideouts of the blonde and handsome outlaw. It was toward those outlaw towns he now headed
The final phase in the life of Chick Bowdrie was an attempted spin-off of the popular Desilu Productions television series The Texan, which ran for two years beginning in 1958. It is sometimes forgotten that Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball were far more of a Hollywood power couple than the roles of Lucy and Ricky Ricardo might suggest. Desi was a groundbreaking producer who, with his technical and legal acumen, was able to realize both the concept of the TV rerun and how to get rich off it. Lucy was often involved in the creative side of things, and even after her divorce from Desi, and his departure, Desilu continued to develop some of the most interesting shows on television, including The Untouchables, Mission: Impossible, and Star Trek.
Desilu’s The Texan starred Rory Calhoun, who had previously appeared in three Louis L’Amour features: Four Guns to the Border (1954), which was based on the short story “In Victorio’s Country” and later became the novel High Lonesome; Utah Blaine (1957); and Apache Territory (1958), based on Dad’s novel Last Stand at Papago Wells. Calhoun had been a partner in the company that had produced Apache Territory, and that same entity, Rorvic Productions, produced The Texan. Early on they’d picked up Dad’s short story “The Marshal of Yellow Jacket” as the plot for a single episode, but soon they were discussing how to bring in Chick Bowdrie as a character and then give him his own series.
The answer was the episode “No Place to Stop,” which Louis himself adapted from “McNelly Knows a Ranger.” It aired on April 27, 1959, with Chuck Wassil playing Chick Bowdrie. The pilot, suffering the fate of so many others, failed to evolve into a series, but if you ever wondered what a Chick Bowdrie TV series might have looked like, the answer is: “A lot like The Texan.”
The Chick Bowdrie stories saw my father through some desperate times in the late 1940s and early 1950s, years that included editorial skepticism and the collapse of Louis’s Kilkenny series and that lasted until the very end of the pulp-magazine era—right up until the moment when the adaptation of “The Gift of Cochise” into Hondo changed his life forever.
Beau L’Amour
May 2018