“You old bucko!” Fell bellowed like a buffalo bull. “We sure enough figgered they handed you a free grave, or you wouldn’t have let this mangy crowbait fog down across our graze like a swarm of locusts. Get up an’ heat your kak, younker; we got us a whiz dandy run to turn!” —W. Edmunds Claussen, RUSTLERS OF SLABROCK
For the dedicated prospector, the main source of book-length, quality-challenged bang-bang Westerns is the lending-library publishers of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. If such splendid houses as Phoenix Press, Arcadia House, Godwin, and Greenberg had never existed, more than half the number of alternative-class novels would never have been published and many of the tophand authors—Walker A. Tompkins, Archie Joscelyn, Tom Roan, and the many-headed “Jackson Cole,” among others—would have remained mired in the pages of the pulp magazines that first spawned them.
In an article published in the WRITER’S 1939 YEAR BOOK, Charles S. Strong, who wrote Westerns as by Chuck Stanley and Northerns as by Charles Stoddard, describes the circulating-library novel as one “designed and planned to fill a longing for light reading in the breasts of those who want to take their books straight, to find them sensational and fast-moving”; and as one “written to entertain and not to air the author’s personal viewpoint and outlook on life.” He goes on to say that “as a general rule—without casting aspersions—circulating library novels are not the sort of books to be classified as Literature with a capital L, nor are they intended to be [even though] the novels of Charles Dickens and other famous authors were published under an almost identical set-up.... Occasionally they will be reviewed in the current literary journals, but they will not be considered for the Pulitzer prizes. On the other hand they are not as bad as you might think from the above.”
Well, yes they are. But since Strong contrived more than a hundred of various types, his point of view is forgivable.
The three main types of lending-library opuses were mysteries, Westerns, and either “sophisticated” (i.e. mildly sexy) or “sweet” romance novels. The books were generally about 60,000 words in length and had bright, sometimes garish, and, in the case of Westerns, often melodramatically pulpy dust jackets. They were “rented or sold to prospective readers in cigar stores, drug stores, book shops, rural post office general stores, railroad stations, gift shops, on trains by American News Company representatives, and sometimes through local book clubs (which are miniature circulating libraries in themselves).” As of 1939 there were an estimated 40,000 lending-library “stands” throughout the country, buying thousands of titles each month and selling them to customers for $2.00 each or renting them at an average fee of 3 cents per day. Cheap fiction for the masses: The novel-form precursor of the paperback original.
By and large, writers of lending-library fiction were also pulp writers who sought extra money by expanding 20,000-, 30,000-, and 40,000-word novelettes and novellas into full-length novels. (Not that the extra cash amounted to a great deal; even by royalty standards of the era, circulating-library publishers paid rock-bottom advances. Phoenix Press, for instance, laid out an average of $200 per book, and unless the author had some name value and/or a shrewd agent, that figure included all subsidiary rights, domestic and foreign.) Some Western fictioneers were novelists first and foremost, writing directly for the LLPs rather than for the pulp markets; Archie Joscelyn, Lee Floren, and Charles Strong were three of the more prolific members of this group. Despite the poor advances and low (if any) royalties, such hardy wordsmiths made their living on volume production and, when they could retain rights, on small sales to the British markets.
The ’30s were the boon decade for the LLPs. All of the major houses were born during that time, and even the smaller and weaker ones thrived for a few years. (There were a handful of purveyors of popular schlock in the ’20s—notably Macaulay and Chelsea House’s line of pulp-serial reprints from such Street & Smith magazines as Western Story and Detective Story; but as hokey as some of their titles were, the average Macaulay and Chelsea House book—especially in the Western category—was of a somewhat higher quality than what the LLPs regularly dished out.)
Arcadia House, Hillman-Curl, and Godwin, which were all part of the same publishing group, were responsible for scores of oaters by Tom Curry, Chuck Martin, Johnston McCulley (the creator of Zorro), Herbert Shappiro, Stuart Adams, Ed Earl Repp, Tom Roan, Denver Bardwell, and Buck Billings. The William Caslon Company, during its brief two years of existence (1936–37), specialized in novels that first appeared in Leo Margulies’ Standard Magazines line of Western-hero pulps—Texas Rangers, Rio Kid Western, Masked Rider Western, Range Riders Western—under such house names as Jackson Cole. Two years after Caslon’s demise, another short-lived LLP, Gateway Books (1939–42), which was directly affiliated with Standard Magazines, published pulp-reprint novels almost exclusively. Jackson Cole, Buck Billings, and Johnston McCulley were also in G. H. Watt’s stable in the early ’30s; Green-berg brought out five early bang-bang Westerns by L. P. Holmes and others by Nelson Nye and George C. Henderson; Robert Speller’s imprint appears on one novel by A. Leslie (Leslie Scott) and on Leo Margulies’ 1935 gathering of pulp novelettes, WESTERN THRILLERS.
Dodge Publishing Company’s “Two Gun Western” line, edited by a fairly astute gent with the unlikely name of Critchell Riming-ton, had perhaps the most consistently readable string of action gunsmokers between 1937 and 1942. Dodge’s leading contributor, J. E. Grinstead, was a cut above most of his contemporaries, despite having his work appear under such inflammatory titles as HELLFIRE RANGE and HOT LEAD.
Most of the LLPs were extinct by the end of 1942, having died as financial failures, been absorbed by other houses, or been killed off by the paper shortage and government paper restrictions of World War II. Arcadia House was among the few that survived; its Westerns line lasted well into the ’50s. Philadelphia-based Macrae–Smith, which published several titles by Charles H. Snow in the ’30s, was another survivor, though they abandoned Westerns until the post-war ’40s; they then commenced a new series featuring such luminaries as Walker Tompkins, Louis Trimble, and Roy Manning that lasted until 1956.
The other surviving LLP—the Big Augur of circulating-library publishers—was, of course, Phoenix Press.
Born in 1934, Phoenix began by publishing “sophisticated” love stories under such titles as SPEND THE NIGHT, PUSHOVER, WOMAN HANDLED, and HARD; and Westerns. Its first three horse operas were PURPLE DAWSON, RANCHER by William L. Hawkins, THE SLASH 44 by Al P. Nelson, and THE MEDICO OF PAINTED SPRINGS by James L. Rubel. Phoenix’s early success allowed them to begin bringing out Westerns (and mysteries and romances) on a more ambitious scale. Guided first by another unlikely-named gent, Emmanuel Wartels, who was editor-in-chief until 1940, and by Alice Sachs thereafter, Phoenix produced more category novels than any other LLP in the ’30s and ’40s.
It also produced more alternative classics than all the other LLPs combined.
The reign of Phoenix lasted until 1952, when rising printing costs, the burgeoning paperback boom, and the closing of many lending-library outlets forced the company into a merger with its arch-rival, Arcadia House. (The last few Phoenix mysteries and Westerns are strange schizoid mixes; one carries an Arcadia logo on the dust-jacket spine and a Phoenix logo on the book spine, while another carries the Arcadia logo in both places but advertises previous Phoenix titles on the jacket’s back cover.)
Alice Sachs was also absorbed in the merger; she assumed command of Arcadia’s line of Westerns and (increasingly fewer) mysteries until the early ’60s, when the firm underwent another metamorphosis and become Lenox Hill Press. She survived that change, too, and remained Lenox Hill’s senior editor, buying Westerns until the line was dropped in 1975 so the firm could expand its more lucrative romance line. At the time of this writing, Lenox Hill is still in business, amazingly enough—the last link to a vanished publishing era—and has resumed the publication of a limited number of Western novels.
For the most part, Phoenix Press books were well packaged. While its mystery and romance dust jackets tended to be two-colored, its Westerns for more than a dozen years were three- and sometimes even four-colored—no doubt because its cover art was either recycled pulp covers or commissioned as originals from pulp-cover artists. It was only in the late ’40s, when cost-cutting led to the hiring of less-capable artists and the use of two-color jackets, that the Phoenix Western lost its distinctive look and appeal. Throughout the press’s existence, it sanctioned a paper stock of good quality. Equally good were the bindings, though Phoenix’s printers, like those of other circulating-library publishers, were prone to using whatever cover stock happened to be on hand, with the result that any one title might have as many as half a dozen variant bindings.
Bang-bang Westerns were Phoenix’s number-one seller, so naturally more of these were published over its 18-year life span than either mysteries or romances—an aggregate of some 350 works. Titles ranged from the commonplace to the colorfully pulpy: THE RANGERS OF BLOODY SILVER, THE BANDIT OF BLOODY RUN, THE SAWBONES OF DESOLATE RANGE, HOOT OWL CANYON, BUSHWHACK BULLETS, GUNSMOKE GALOOT, SLUMGULLION TRAIL, HAIR-TRIGGER HOMBRE, TRAIL TO BANG-UP, LAWDOG OF SKELETON CANYON, CYCLONE OF THE SAGE BRUSH, and WHIZZ FARGO, GUNFIGHTER. The bulk of these sprang from the weedy imaginations of the obscure and forgotten: Tony Adams, Del Morrow, George B. Rodney, Lewis C. Merrill, Al P. Nelson, Clark Frost, Timothy Hayes, Tevis Miller, Robert Claiborne Pitzer, L.W. Emerson, C. L. Edholm, James L. Rubel, T. W. Ford (who also wrote as Abel Shott), and Earle C. Perrenot.
A few notables contributed both original novels and recycled pulp stories early in their careers. Norman A. Fox, who went on to become one of the half-dozen most accomplished writers of traditional Westerns in the ’50s and early ’60s (his later work was lavishly praised by A. B. Guthrie, Jr., among others), published five Phoenix titles between 1941 and 1943, all pulp-story expansions. Nelson Nye, Western fiction’s Jekyll (some of his work is very good) and Hyde (and some is very alternative), was a regular contributor in the late ’30s and ’40s under his own name and the pseudonyms Clem Colt and Drake C. Denver. Leslie Ernenwein, who would win a Western Writers of America Spur Award for best novel of 1956, dwelt briefly in the Phoenix stable in the early ’40s, as did the capable C. William Harrison. Another better than average pulpster, William Hopson, wrote 18 novels for the company, 15 of which were published under his own name and the other three as by John Sims.
And then there were the top guns—four authors whose names (and pen names) appear on more than 20 novels each. Nelson Nye can lay claim to 21. Lee Floren published 23 as by Floren, Brett Austin, Wade Hamilton, Lee Thomas, and Will Watson, and scores more under the Arcadia imprint after the 1952 merger. Charles Stoddard was the second most prolific, with a total of 29 Chuck Stanley yarns unleashed from 1943 to 1952, followed by a nearly equal number of Arcadias throughout the ’50s.
In first place, far outdistancing the rest of the field, is the King of Phoenix Westerns, Archie Joscelyn (whose alternative accomplishments we’ll examine in the next chapter). Over a span of 15 years, beginning in 1935, Joscelyn published 54 bang-bang sagebrush sagas with the press—23 under his own byline (1935–45), 28 as by Lynn Westland (1936–50), and three as by Tex Holt (1948–50). He also found time to perpetrate two Phoenix mysteries in the late ’30s, both of which appeared as by A. A. Archer; and two Phoenix romances in the same period, these under the name Evelyn McKenna.
The plots of Phoenix oaters were standard pulp fare. Cow-country yarns were the pre-eminent formula; they usually featured lean-hipped, quick-shooting cowboy heroes and stories of cattlemen versus rustlers, nesters, sheepmen, other cattlemen, crooked politicians, crooked mining or railroad interests, or adverse elements such as blizzards and flood-swollen rivers. Other favorites were tales of men wrongfully imprisoned or otherwise sinned-against, or whose friends or relatives were sinned against in some way, who then ride the vengeance trail; cavalry and/or nonmilitary folk in mortal combat with marauding redskins (Indians in Phoenix and other LLP Westerns are always on the warpath, and who can blame them?); and narratives of sheriffs, deputies, Texas Rangers, bounty hunters, railroad or government or range detectives of superhero dimensions (who often sport such stirring nicknames as Deputy Death and Lord Six-Gun) on the trail of outlaw gangs led by an evil supervillain who, like as not, is (a) a megalomaniac after land, money, or some sort of fabulous treasure, (b) elaborately masked, (c) known by such boo-hiss sobriquets as the Border Buzzard or the Riding Devil, and (d) revealed at the end to be a local banker, saloonkeeper, or other prominent citizen.
There were endless variations on these story lines. Here are a few as described briefly by Phoenix’s inventive blurb writers, from lists of “New and Forthcoming Phoenix Westerns” that appeared on the backs of dust jackets.
Trigo Truxton, shady owner of the Bar Nothing, was guilty of crooked gambling devices, blackmail, rustling and even murder until two-fisted Bill Dome, the straight-shooting sheriff of Spavined Nag and his chief deputy, Brimstone Buck Tranter, rode up. (Clem Colt, THE BAR NOTHING BRAND)
Lawmen and outlaws alike were hot in pursuit of plucky Steve Larrigan as he rode the hoot-owl trail into Bunchgrass. For he was accused of murdering Abe Valance, a two-faced hombre respected by the law as an upright citizen and by the dread Faceless Riders as their leader. (Archie Joscelyn, COTTONWOOD CANYON)
Whizz Fargo, a two-gun, fighting waddy, sees three men slain before his eyes—one by Ed Slocum’s desperadoes, one by the armed vigilante band known as the Black Sombreros. The third dead man is the father of Caroline Dermody, whose lips are red as gunfire and whose eyes are blue as the desert sky. (George C. Henderson, WHIZZ FARGO, GUNFIGHTER)
The editorial writers waxed even more eloquent in the longer blurbs that graced the front flap of each novel.
Men called the tough, two-gun marshal of Red Butte Junction “Killer” Kincaid, saying he had frost in his heart and sleet in his veins. This is Kincaid’s story. But because it involves the very essence of those halcyon days when the West was a rough-and-tumble frontier, it is also part and parcel of the most glamorous chapter of American history, with all the pungent, devil-be-damned flavor of the era.
Ride with Kincaid into a roaring boom town at end of steel where rowdy, robust men buy their booze and buck the tiger; and listen to guns blast to the tune of pianos playing Ta-ra-ra-ra Boom De-ay!” (L. Ernenwein, KINCAID OF RED BUTTE)
These and most other titles in the Phoenix canon are jam-packed with alternative elements, of course. Memorable sentences, passages, characters, plot twists, and gaffes abound. And there are more than a dozen indisputable classics among the 120 or so Phoenix Westerns that I’ve personally galloped through. In this chapter we’ll take a close look at a pair of one-shot Alternative Hall of Fame inductees, each of which was contrived by a relative unknown and each of which, in completely different ways, is a superior example of the art form. In subsequent chapters we’ll dissect Hall of Fame gun-blazers by Archie Joscelyn and Walker “Two-Gun” Tompkins and Northern tall tales by Samuel Alexander White—skookum he-wolves, all, in the Phoenix pack who could be counted on to provide chuckles, howls, and nutty surprises in book after book.
Our first inductee, RUSTLERS OF SLABROCK (1946), is what in lesser hands than those of W. Edmunds Claussen would have been a typical cowboys-plagued-by-outlaws yarn. Claussen, however, was a Pennsylvanian who not only grew up reading Wild Westerns but became a fan of such zealous proportions that he and his photographer wife lived in a Westem-styled-and-outntted home that must have startled their neighbors, spent two to three months every summer traveling through the West, and accumulated books and other lore by the carload. As a result of this unbridled passion, the gunsmoke stories he wrote for the pulps and his two Phoenix novels (THE LAWDOG OF SKELETON CANYON was published in 1945) were crammed so full of background material and colloquial lingo that they all but burst at the seams. Claussen was also, at this stage of his career, a clumsy and an adjective- and synonym-haunted writer—other factors that enhance his alternative reputation. (Later, he would hone his skills, learn restraint, and turn out a couple of nonalternative historical adventures published by Dodd, Mead, both of which feature a Colorado River steamboater with the inspired name of Captain Crotch.)
Our old friend, the Phoenix blurb writer, heralds RUSTLERS OF SLABROCK in terms almost as salty as Claussen’s:
It took a throaty-voiced honky-tonk girl at the Crystal Palace to call the turn on Lynn Remole and to point out to the proddy vaquero that quitting the Bar J when it needed him was the act of a belly-crawling sidewinder. So Lynn prepared to back-trail. Instead of gunning for the rustler who had shot down his pal Monty, he would meet trouble on the home range.
Then a stacked card game ended with drawn guns, and Lynn found himself hog-tied by Stud Lasher, the very rustler he sought, and sent travelling on an iron horse.
A ripsnorting yarn of a vengeance-bound pilgrim’s adventures in the Slabrock country.
So much for the plot. Leave us at the real delight of this chef-d’oeuvre, Claussen’s prose.
As noted, he doted on Western slang; he might in fact have been a disciple of the Sultan of Slang, Boothill Chuck Martin, whom we’ll meet in Chapter 2. Cowboys, in Slabrock country, are “bull nurses,” “cow-tramps,” “range warriors,” and “waddies,” among other things. (And Lynn Remole is the “ace-high ramrod.”) Horses are “hayburners,” “cowticks,” and “snaky nags.” Sixguns, of course, are “smokepoles,” “cutters,” and “powdersmokers.” Miners are “gulch rats,” tough hombres are “he-coons,” outlaws are “demon rod toters” and “sidekicks to a diamondback,” a cerebrally challenged individual is a “loco gazabo” or “a thick-skulled shorthorn,” other men are “jeebows” or “galoots,” and all women are “she-birds” or “she-stuff.”
Cow-tramps don’t get up in the saddle and ride; they “climb in their forks and start foggin’!” or “throw the gut hooks into that cayuse an’ get a-hellin’!” Waddies don’t have conversations with each other; they hold “red-hot palavers.” Bull-nurses don’t keep a wary eye out for Indians while riding; they are told to “watch out your stick don’t drift on the sign of some scalpin’ party cuttin’ across your trail.” Range warriors don’t leave a place; they “cut the breeze” from it. The ace-high ramrod doesn’t get angry; he “feels his own gorge risin’ near the simmerin’ stage.” And when he’s hit on the head with a smokepole, he wakes up “with a sore pelt between the horns.”
A good galoot doesn’t suffer from misfortune; he has “bad luck trailin’ his rear end.” An unattractive she-bird is as “ugly as a Crow wretch with tonsils like a mossy horn.” He-coons don’t warn each other not to shoot first; they tell their pards “don’t uncork a cutter unless the jasper goes for his iron.” Nor do they have gunfights with demon rod toters; they “throw lead in their teeth” or “give them a hell-slew of trouble.” And they don’t tell a sidekick to a diamondback to put up his hands; they “roll out an order” to “stretch for the rafters, killer, if yuh don’t want to be salivated!”
Two more examples of Claussen’s special brand of red-hot palaver:
“Stud sneaked up on me with two ugly-looking gunnies while my tail was showing their way. When he asked for a match I dug my paws into my brush jacket and one of his long-haired waddies uncorked an ounce of lead without me even slappin’ a six––––”
“The ornery, misbegotten polecats––––”
“I remember diggin’ my head in the sand after I sunfished my saddle. Next thing Lasher, or one of his cow-tramps, dug their heels into my backbone, same as a band of redskins jumping up and down at a medicine show.”
“Hot toads, you look like hell! By dammity, what’s that white-lookin’ stuff hangin’ on to your horns?”
“Never mind, Jud. My leg-weary nag’s down at Yucca in the feed barn. You run out and saddle me a fresh hayburner. Pick me a fast stepper with plenty of guts.”
“Lace—or I’m a Apache’s brother!” the old plainsman drooled. “Whoever done that wrappin’ job sure must like you a heap, younker!”
As the last passage above indicates, Claussen could uncork a mean said substitute when he set his mind to it.
“Go find out yourself,” he crackled.
“Hummm,” drolled Fell.
“Jiminey cripes, now we got two hayburners here for the same loco galoot,” he blatted his bewilderment.
In addition to all the hard riding and fast shooting, RUSTLERS OF SLABROCK has its tender moments, too. Of course, Claussen’s idea of romance might not necessarily be yours or mine, as in this exchange between Remole and Monty, his lady love (the first speaker):
“If he stays out of an open grave...I want a crack at that king-pin while the lobos are still ridin’ through powdersmoke. You’re countin’ on me sprawlin’ out in your bunkhouse when I get strong enough to hoist my leg over Fiddle, ain’t you?”
Remole sobered. “I been having crazy dreams of late. You know I’m not much on she-stuff around a spread, don’t you? Well, I been sort of day-dreamin’ about you and me...riding circle with our own chuck wagon on my own private range.”
“My Gawd, big boy, go on! I’m fair to droolin’ at the mouth!”
Our second one-shot inductee, RANCH OF THE RAVEN (1935), is as different from RUSTLERS OF SLABROCK as a cayuse is from a coyote. For one thing, it is neither a cowboy story nor a vernacular fun-fest. For another, it is a “modern” Western set in Depression-era New Mexico. (Phoenix published a few such bang-bang moderns, just as it published a few Northwest Mounted Police yarns—to give at least the illusion of balance to its Western line, if not to appeal to a broader range of readers.) For a third, RANCH OF THE RAVEN is more than a Western story; it is also a mystery, a horror tale, and a sort of desert-country CASTLE OF OTRANTO-style Gothic, all wrapped up in one mind-boggling package. The sort of book, in fact, that might have been written by Harry Stephen Keeler, he of the mad, mad “webwork-plot” mystery novels, if Keeler had decided to try his fine cracked hand at a Western.
Hamilton Craigie, the originator of this screwball masterpiece, seems to have been a real person; at any rate, eight other Westerns carrying his byline were published between 1931 and 1953, two of these by Phoenix Press—NEVADA JONES (1935) and HAIR-TRIGGER HOMBRE (1946), neither of which I’ve yet been able to track down. This one brainchild, however, is more than sufficient to trumpet his virtuosity and to rescue his name from, as Craigie himself might have put it in his inimitable style, the swallowing mists, dim and gray, of that great nonrespecter of the accomplishments of men, time.
Behold RANCH OF THE RAVEN.
Black Steve Annister, so-called because unlike most Western heroes he wears a black hat, who is known “in the back blocks of Wooloomooloof before he had made of that name a by-word in the honkatonks and the gambling hells from San Francisco northward to the Wind Rover [sic] country, and beyond it,” returns home from adventuring in the South Seas to find his father, Travis Annister, a wealthy stockbroker, vanished under mysterious circumstances. With the aid of a “certain office in a certain side-street not far distant from the Capitol” (i.e. in Washington, D.C.), Black Steve—“a bull’s bulk of a man [with] the heart of a cougar and the conscience of a wolf”—follows a three-week-cold trail that brings him to Dry Bone, New Mexico. Here are just some of the people he encounters there:
Hamilton Rook, attorney-at-law and owner of Ranch of the Raven, a.k.a. Rancho del Muerte or Ranch of Death, a desert fortress that looms “as a low, round excrescence like a toad’s back beneath the moon,” where ghosts are seen to walk and strange howlings are heard late at night. Rook, a.k.a. Prince of Plunder, who has “the heart of a hyena and the conscience of a wolf,” is the leader of a secret group of evildoers known by the initials S.S.S. who are responsible for a rash of bank robberies, cattle rustlings, and other nefarious activities. He has a “lean head like a vulture’s set upon wide, sloping shoulders [and] the smile of a satyr.”
Doctor Dominguez, Rook’s partner in crime, “half Yaqui and maybe half-Mex,” (or is he?), who has hatched a scheme far more insidiously wicked than Rook’s S.S.S. He has “a yellow face, a nose like a vulture’s, and a smile out of Hell.” His nicknames include Jailer of Souls and High Priest of Horror.
A South American Jivaro Indian (or is he?) whose visage re minds Black Steve “of a damned soul, unhuman, Satanic...a creature with a face and yet without a face, mewling and meowing like a cat, new come from horrors.” His hands are chalklike, mal formed, “like the talons of a beast, which in effect they were. The adventurer knew them upon the instant, for, in far off Java, for in stance, he had seen those hands, or, rather, the same yet not the same.” This specimen also has a sobriquet: Mephistopheles in a Stetson.
A legendary and supposedly dead gunslinger named Two-Gun Tone, who perfected “the famous blind draw.”
Assorted other gunmen with names such as Tucson Charlie Westervelt, Cornudas Jake, Picacho the Horse (“a dark-faced gent with a sand-paper trigger finger”), Two-Gun Guinness (who learned his trade from Two-Gun Tone), and Guinness’s partner, the Albino Killer.
Poker Hall, Sheriff of Otero County, who has “a face like an Aztec idol’s, burned black by the sun.”
A tough, Prohibition-busting bartender who is known far and wide as “the knight of the bungstarter.”
A drunken, loco Apache called Mescalero John.
A desert rat who appears to be loco and who resembles a scarecrow “with a face like a Hopi mask and skin like a Navajo’s.”
Ciudado Hines, a coot-crazy singing cowboy and foreman of Dumbbell Ranch in Dumbbell Basin.
Bull Bogash, ex-leather pusher (prizefighter), whose hands are like stone mauls and who is “a hell-bender, make no mistake!”
A girl with red curls, or maybe straight blond hair, who smells like violets, is the niece of Two-Gun Tone, may or may not be named Hattie Marvin, works for Rook as a secretary and housekeeper, may or may not be Rook’s mistress, calls herself Little Miss Muffet, and is also a waitress and a lady burglar.
These are some of the things that happen to Black Steve or in which he becomes involved:
He is shot at several times, once by a polecat who says “Damn your lights and liver!” and more than once by owlhooters carrying “silenced rifles.”
He receives all sorts of warning messages, mostly from the red-curled blond, Little Miss Muffet.
He is nearly strangled by the Jivaro, whose “face showed like a mask of Huitzilopctil, or of Nacoc Yaotl, god of transmutation, in an Aztec grin.” But the Jivaro isn’t an Aztec; he’s half-Yaqui and maybe half-Mex. Or is he?
A violent clash between a sorrel horse and a buck-jumping Model T flivver.
The murder of an S.S.S. gang member by a knife flung out of the darkness just as he is about to spill the beans to Black Steve. His last words before he croaks are, “They—they—got me!”
A near lynching.
A jailbreak.
A kidnapping.
A “fight to the death” between Black Steve and Bull Bogash, which ends in a sweaty draw with both men still alive.
These are some of the clues Black Steve stumbles across that lead him to the solution of the puzzle:
A sponge.
A gun containing blank cartridges.
A cage at Ranch of the Raven full of howling coyotes.
The charred remnant of a blank check bearing the initials TR, the first two letters of his father’s first name.
A somewhat mangled, gold-toothed dentist’s bridge.
And when the solution is finally reached, we learn that:
Black Steve is a dick. That is, he is an operative of the U.S. Secret Service, which job was bestowed upon him in the certain office on the certain side street near the Capitol in Washington, D.C.
The strangler with the face of a damned soul and the malformed hands like the talons of a beast is none other than Doctor Dominguez in disguise. And he is not a Jivaro Indian, not half-Yaqui and maybe half-Mex, not an Aztec, but actually “a Spaniard, crossed with the Ecuadorian.”
Hattie Marvin is really Hattie Marvin, Two-Gun Tone’s niece, and neither Little Miss Muffet nor Hamilton Rook’s mistress. The blond hair is bogus (she donned a wig and also adopted different disguises for obscure investigative reasons) and the red curls are real, which is a good thing because Black Steve never did much care for blondes.
Travis Annister has been held captive by the Jailer of Souls, and has “supped full of horrors” as a result, as part of a diabolical scheme in which wealthy men—some of whom are kidnapped (the case of Travis Annister) and some of whom are crooks in search of new identities—are forced to turn over large sums of money and then used as guinea pigs in terrible experiments that either kill them or drive them mad. One of the driven-mad ones, and the only prisoner to escape from Rancho del Muerte, was the putative desert rat with the face like a Hopi mask and the skin of a Navajo, who was formerly a banker named Porter Ide who absconded with his bank’s funds. He was also the former owner of the somewhat mangled gold-toothed dentist’s bridge.
The High Priest of Horror, a.k.a. Mephistopheles in a Stetson, is a master surgeon who specializes in “forged faces.” No, the fiend doesn’t practice plastic surgery. He’s into something far more devilish than that.
He practices—Dermatology!
“And you’ve heard of Dermatology...of course. Well...it’s been done, in out-of-the-way places, I reckon—practiced to an extent unknown here; we’ve got something to learn. Well, an anesthetic, and then an operation: new faces for old—forged faces—and the thing was diabolically simple, you see. And the coyotes—that was to cover the—noises, and if anyone should inquire, the beasts had been kept for purposes of experimentation, cross-breeding, you understand. And so when they, the victims, saw themselves in a mirror, sometimes they went loco, for who could prove it? Who would be believed?”
Who, indeed?
All of this ingenious twaddle is told in a prose style that plays hopscotch all over the narrative landscape, from a sort of superheated Western Gothic—
Grim shadow-shapes, like the bat-like phantasms of some hobgoblin horror, moved before her in a motion-picture of her thoughts. And all at once the plain, the Desert, the sierra, cloud-capped, became a mirage of evil, against which the gun in her holster would be but a toy gun, herself marked down.
Fear, that was not her heritage, came with the sudden thunder of hoofs. From somewhere behind her a gun crashed, flat, without echo, like the plunk of a drum-beat, of a tom-tom, with the swirl and eddy of the riders, as if the ground, sown with dragons’ teeth, had vomited them, left, right.
To slangy cowboy patter—
“So long, gents! An’ vaya con Dios...nightie-night! Keep goin’ straight an’ you’ll fetch up th’ hind side a trouble, less’n it’s a mule!”
The sun, blazing from high heaven, stippled the meadow with a shimmering iridescence of translucent green. Beneath it the grass seemed drowned in a veil that was like the veil of moving water, with pale fronds like dead-men’s-fingers, alive and yet dead.
To comma-choked pseudo-literary exercises, an affliction John D. MacDonald referred to as the “Look, Ma, I’m Writing!” Syndrome—
Annister, with the gun in his hand, and turned sidewise from the sheriff, rolled and with one hand lighted a cigarette. His fingers appeared to tremble a little, evoking from the sheriff a sardonic gleam, as the paper tube, with a funnel of sparks trailing from it, spurted from Annister’s lips, so that, half-turned, he bent to reach for it, fumbling for a moment, so that he was for the moment with his back turned to Hall.
To sinister descriptive passages more at home in a “shudder pulp” horror story than a Phoenix Western—
A house of silence, broken at times, by a weird wailing as from the Pit; a house of dreams, gray in the moonlight, under the leprous-silvered finger of the moon, brooding now, a grim, gray fortress: the stronghold of hidden horrors—the Rancho of Death.
Dense pines grew about it, so that when the wind wailed among them like the wailing of a lost soul, it met and mingled with an eerie ululation rising as if muffled by many thicknesses of walls, to end, after a while, with a quick shriek and a sudden hush, with, after a moment, the faint echo of a taunting laugh.
But that’s not all. Craigie treats his readers to a couple of verses of the cheerful song warbled by Ciudado Hines, the coot-crazy foreman of Dumbbell Ranch:
“Well, you cowboy shrimps!”
Old Satan bawled,
“Yu better be huntin’ yore holes!
F’r I’ve come up
Through white-hot rock—
T’ gather in yore souls!”
Shore looked like sin—
His voice rang like a bell:
“In a lava bed you’ll rest yore head,
Which the same’ll be in Hell!”
And now and then a nifty simile:
A gibbous moon, looking like the face of a Mescalero brave drunk on tequila, lighted the dim trail just ahead.
And some rather unique character delineations:
Hines, his brick-red face the color of wet paper, stared, with his jaw fallen, in his set, frozen expression the terrible curiosity that asks and must be answered, no matter what.
Her forehead was not too high, he decided, but it was broad. And her nose. Straight, just as she was, with that indescribable something at the nostrils that told of Race.
And finally, a touch of romance:
Light as the wind against a feather he felt her lips brush him, it might have been the wind, bringing, from the desert spaces, a rare perfume. Sound, and silence, and the beating of a drum. The drum was his heart, was it? Or was it the pound-pound of hoofs?
Neither, I say. What Black Steve may actually have heard was the Jailer of Alternative Classics, the High Priest of Humbug, drumming his heels on the floor in yet another fit of hysterical glee.