The tall tall-man and Clay Thompson turned toward the interruption. Up the middle of the empty street it came. It walked like a man but it was different. There was always something different about a professional gunfighter walking to a gunfight.
The strong face of the tall tall-man of death went stronger. His eyes narrowed on the challenger, blazing as savage as those of a black cat on Hallowe’en. His voice broke loose from his throat like the devil rasping in a graveyard at midnight. “You’ve made a fool play, mister.”
“We’ll see!” snarled the antagonist. His hand swooped to his side. He saw in that instant the golden flames of one of The Big Gun’s forty-fives screaming toward him and he fell to the ground. He was dead when he got there.—John Fonville, WHERE THE BIG GUN RIDES
The American paperback original was born, along with a lot of other “illegitimate” infants, during the Second World War. It only achieved legitimacy many years later, while in its teens, after a prosperous but much-maligned childhood that may or may not have left it permanently traumatized. And it was in its 20s before it threw off the onus of “second-class citizen.” But by then it had already taken sweet revenge by fathering a couple of little bastards of its own: the softcore-sex paperbacks of the ’60s and ’70s (see Chapter 8 for a close-up look at those little bastards in Western garb).
Until World War II, nearly all book-length fiction first appeared between hard covers or as serials in magazines. (Dime novels, which prospered in the 1800s and in the early years of this century, were not so much books as pulp magazines in book form.) A large number of the more successful hard-back mysteries, Westerns, and general novels from 1920 onward were gobbled up by the burgeoning paperback industry throughout the ’40s. Pocket Books brought out the first major Western reprint, of William MacLeod Raine’s OH, YOU TEX!, in 1940; Popular Library, Dell, Avon, Bantam, and Handi-Books also issued sagebrush reprints during that decade. As did a handful of small houses that specialized in digest-size abridgments of lending-library books under a variety of imprints, among them Hillman Periodicals (Western Novel Classic, Western Novel of the Month, Fighting Western Novel, Gunfire Western Novel), Crestwood Publications (Black Cat Western, Prize Western Novel), and Century Publications (Century Western).
The first novels written specifically for the paperback market were Green Publishing Company’s Vulcan Books line of mysteries, which began in 1944 and lasted through 20 titles into 1946. But it was not until 1950 that the first brand-new soft-cover Western appeared, when Fawcett Publications launched its innovative Gold Medal line of original, male-oriented category novels. When the first batch of Gold Medal books was published in late 1949 and early 1950, editors Richard Carroll and Bill Lengel had already assembled (and would continue to assemble throughout the ’50s) a stable of some of the best popular writers of the period by paying royalty advances on the number of copies printed, rather than on the projected number of copies that would be sold; thus writers received handsome initial payments, up to four times as much as hard-cover publishers were paying. And instead of printing hundreds of thousands of copies of a small number of titles, Fawcett sanctioned hundreds of thousands of copies of many titles in order to reach every possible outlet and buyer. This resulted in million-copy sales through several printings of dozens of Gold Medal novels, particularly by such writers as John D. MacDonald and Richard S. Prather in the early ’50s.
The “name” author commissioned by Carroll and Lengel to produce the first Gold Medal Western was W. R. Burnett. STRETCH DAWSON, a novelization of Burnett’s screenplay for the 1949 Gregory Peck film, Yellow Sky, appeared in March of 1950 as the seventh Gold Medal book. It was followed that year by three other Old West yarns by established writers: Les Savage, Jr.’s THE WILD HORSE, Will F. Jenkins’ movie tie-in, DALLAS, and William Heuman’s GUNS AT BROKEN BOW. Scores more historical and traditional Westerns appeared under the Gold Medal imprint over the next 15 years by such well-regarded individuals as Louis L’Amour, Luke Short, Richard Jessup, Clifton Adams, and Steve Frazee.
The sensation caused by Fawcett’s new line led reprint houses such as Avon, Dell, Popular Library, Bantam, and New American Library (Signet) to begin bringing out originals of their own; it also spawned several new publishing ventures that either emphasized originals or published them exclusively: Lion, Ballantine, Pyramid, Graphic, Monarch, and Ace, among others.
Of all the publishers producing originals in the ’50s, the one of most interest to the alternative prospector is Donald Wollheim’s Ace Books and its line of Double Novels. These glorious postpulp Westerns, mysteries, and science-fiction yarns came two to a package, back to back, and bound so that the half you weren’t reading was upside down: “turn this book over for a second complete novel.” The early Ace Doubles featured one reprint and one original, but it wasn’t long before most volumes contained two ripe new works.
Between 1952 and 1974 nearly 200 Western originals saw print in the Ace Double format (and dozens more of what were considered better-quality items were published as Ace Singles). A small percentage was penned—in many cases, ill-advisedly—by established writers in the field: Louis L’Amour (early works under his own name and the pseudonym Jim Mayo), Frank Gruber, Harry Whittington, Philip Ketchum, Lewis Patten, Brian Garfield (as Brian Wynne and Frank Wynne), Nelson Nye, Louis Trimble, Samuel Anthony Peebles (Brad Ward), and Merle Constiner. The rest sprang from the skewed imaginations of such alternative masters as Walker A. Tompkins, Archie Joscelyn, and Leslie Scott, and such alternative-leaning tale-tellers as J. Edward Leithead, Tom West, Lee Floren, Walt Coburn, Burt Arthur (Herbert Shappiro), Edwin Booth, and Gene Tuttle.
Despite Ace’s predilection for pulp-style bang-bangers, and the alternative nature of many of the ones that carried its logo, it somehow failed to produce a single Western that even approaches the classic status of that towering Ace Double mystery, Michael Morgan’s DECOY. The closest to a Hall-of-Famer is probably the very first Ace Double Western original—J. Edward Leithead’s BLOODY HOOFS (Ace D–2, bound together with a reprint of William Colt MacDonald’s BAD MAN’S RETURN).
Cover-blurbed “A square-shooting wrangler is caught in the crossfire of a no-quarter range war,” this bullet-studded cowpatty is set in a drought-ridden corner of West Texas and features the efforts of a drifting waddy named Bret Kane to settle a “bloody triple showdown” among three strong-willed ranchers “who hated each other’s guts and itched to pull triggers.” Before he succeeds, he must survive a series of “bullet tornadoes” that include a midnight massacre, a desperate flight from a sheriff’s posse, a sort of rodeo run by horse thieves, and a last-ditch battle at a “lost” desert waterhole.
According to Ace’s editorial blurb-writer, “J. Edward Leithead, veteran author of fast-action Westerns [i.e. ’20s-style pulp gun-smokers of the Chuck Martin and Ed Earl Repp ilk], has packed BLOODY HOOFS with more excitement than you’ll find in many a long time.” Leithead packed it with more creaky prose than you’ll find in many a long time, too. The story fairly bulges with such passages as:
“Word from Bob at last!” the old-timer exclaimed, his chin coming up, his shoulders straightening. With a new light in his cavernous eyes, which was foredoomed shortly to go out again when the nature of Kane’s errand was divulged, One-shot Lowrie swung wide the screen door.
In a living room that showed neglect, Bret Kane set himself to the distasteful task of informing the suddenly eager old man that the absent son for whom he was eating his heart out would never come home. Bret, momentarily tongue-tied from the deepest sympathy he had ever felt for a fellow human being, bethought him of the contents of the gunny sack he toted, which might mutely substitute for the words he couldn’t bring himself to utter.
As many quality-free originals as were published in the ’50s and early ’60s, it was not until 1964 that the first great, nonerotic alternative paperback Western blazed into print. Ironically, even though John Fonville’s WHERE THE BIG GUN RIDES is about as sexy as a hooker’s daydream, it was published by a notorious sex-book outfit that grew out of the fertile soil of California’s Central Valley (headquartered in Fresno and in nearby Clovis) and thrived like ragweed in the late ’50s and early ’60s. This entrepreneurial bunch specialized in steamy erotica under a number of imprints— Fabian, Saber, Tropic Books.
In 1961, in an effort to (a) honestly expand its none-too-steady empire, or (b) create a protective coloration of legitimacy so as to stave off pressure from public-decency watchdogs, the publishers launched two new lines of traditional genre novels, Suspense Library and Western Library, both under the imprint of Vega Books. Titles in these new lines had very little sexual content. Unfortunately for their sponsors, they also had very little quality content. In large part this dearth of merit can be traced to a disinclination to pay writers other than rock-bottom royalties, so that most novels purchased for the new lines were either commissioned from the company’s stable of sex-book hacks or bought from rank amateurs. Even so, a few readable crime stories crept into Vega’s Suspense Library, notably two early efforts by mystery and young-adult novelist Willo Davis Roberts, and an above-average Mickey Spillane pastiche by Ennis Willie called VICE TOWN.
The same claim cannot be made of the Western Library. The only near-worthwhile titles therein are a pair of minor Nelson Nye reprints, FRONTIER SCOUT and COME A-SMOKIN’; the other 13 are horse apples. Twelve little horse apples by the likes of Wade Pierce, John Nemec, William Cuthburt, Arthur A. Howe, Allen Stark, Marvin Tuma, and Benny Runnels. And John Fonville’s one boulder-size horse apple, WHERE THE BIG GUN RIDES.
The dual heroes of this gutbuster are a mild-mannered boun-tyhunter (one word, not two, in Fonville’s fictional landscape) named Clay Thompson, who is also known as the Baron of the Bountyhunters, and a gunslinger, John William Prince, who is “equally known as” The Big Gun, The Big Gun from Texas, Black Eagle, Mr. Death, the tall tall-man, the tall tall-man of death, the famed giant of mystery, and the loudest living legend of the frontier man’s game of the gun.
Clay Thompson doesn’t much like being a bountyhunter; he wants to settle down with a good woman in a good town and become a star-toter. The tall tall-man doesn’t much like being Mr. Death, either. In fact, he turned into The Big Gun from Texas because he became disillusioned by his experiences fighting for the Union in the Civil War and then found a new life on the Big River, equally known as the Mississippi, where he gambled and drank and “picked up another trait that would later help to romanticize his name across the entire frontier. He found that women loved him. And he simply took the lovely course of least resistance. He loved them back.” Then he was forced to start killing scum who tried to make a name for themselves by killing him, which made him even more tired and disillusioned, and now he’s heading west to San Francisco where he hopes to quit being a “notorious head-hunter” and settle down with a good woman or maybe a bad one, whichever comes first.
But what Prince really wants, as is pointed out to him during a meeting in an abandoned church with a couple of spiritual old folks who are on their way to visit “grand-younguns” in the town of Headstone, which is near Lordsburg in New Mexico Territory .. .what he really wants is to learn how to whistle a hymn, which is to say make peace with himself and start living a righteous life. But he can’t do that as long as scum keep trying to salivate him and he’s forced to salivate them instead, because a “big-time killer” isn’t fit to whistle a hymn or do much of anything except continue his lonely life of drifting and salivating.
Mr. Death’s plight and skill are vividly illustrated for the reader in the very first chapter, which takes place in a ghostly graveyard “somewhere after midnight and before dawn [where] almost human mists of dust dance wildly around jagged rows of tombstones, those bold, vivid markers of death, as if the souls of this eternal underground hotel had risen to play.” Enter a seeming giant, who “waited over the dead for death.” But not for long: “From its safe distance the moon still watched. And it saw in its own vague light the hulk of another seeming giant warily enter the home of the late.”
Each seeming giant grows aware of the other’s presence. Long coats are pushed back over lean hips to reveal the “dueling weapons of the day,” which Fonville tells us are “Frontier cold [sic] forty-fives, the steel judges of a raw land, each with a six-count jury of unconscienced lead.” The two men walk toward each other, slowly. And then—
The snail-pace march ended and the bullet-pace battle began. It was short and to the point. Hot yellow streaked from the flashing gun of the giant who had entered the graveyard second. And the first man joined the ranks of permanent sleepers. The raging echoes of six-gun justiced hell died with him.
“You can’t win ’em all, mister,” arose a voice that you might expect to arise from the remaining giant. For the man who had been left standing was not just a tall man but a tall tall-man. And his voice was as deep as his stature was high.
A light flickered and lit a big cigar in his great face. It was a rugged face, the face of The Big Gun. Everyone west of the Big River knew of the great face of The Big Gun. He was a legend, the loudest living legend of the frontier man’s game of the gun...and the frontier woman’s game of the heart…
The famed giant of mystery, snorting smoke like a conquering dragon of old, turned and strode from the yard of the dead.
Now that’s a gunfighter! Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin? Bah. I’ll take the smoke-snorting, famed giant of mystery any day.
Well, Prince and Clay Thompson soon meet and strike up an uneasy rapport, after which Black Eagle is forced to bump off more scum in fair fights, including some local gundogs called the Slinger brothers who have bounties on their heads. Once the Slingers have been salivated, Prince surrenders to the Baron of the Bountyhunters so he, The Big Gun, can have help in salivating all the other fame-seeking scum who are sure to try pumping the tall tall-man full of lead, it being the code of the bountyhunter, or the code of the mild-mannered Baron of the Bountyhunters anyway, to keep a prisoner alive, for “a man of honor never refuses an obligation of his trade.”
So then the Baron and Mr. Death leave town, but not alone; accompanying them is Katie Slinger, beautiful young sister of the gunned Slingers, who is everything her brothers weren’t, which is to say she’s good and sweet and kind and loving, and Clay has fallen head over spurs for her. She’s the girl of his dreams, the one he wants to take as his wife so he can settle down and quit the bountyhunting racket and become an honest and forthright startoter.
Not long after the trio arrives in Headstone (yes, the very same Headstone, near Lordsburg in New Mexico Territory, to which the spiritual old couple who counseled Prince were bound), the tall tall-man and the mild-mannered one collect the bounty on the Slinger brothers, which Clay generously offers to share with The Big Gun, and then The Big Gun decides to get laid. Of course, he’d rather have the deep and abiding love of “a real little lady” like Katie so he can learn how to whistle a hymn, for after all he “liked they-lived-happily-ever-after stories, especially out of books,” but since he doesn’t have a real little lady, “a painted one was all his frantic life could afford at the moment.” So he picks up a saloon babe and makes arrangements to meet her in her room. After consuming a quart of whiskey, he goes upstairs, enters the room, and sees that the girl is lying face down with a thin nightgown covering her body and her face hidden in the pillows.
“Playin’ asleep,” whispered Prince to himself. “And her eyes in the pillows. Such sweet modesty while I shuck out of my clothes.”
He undressed quickly and sat on the edge of the bed by the resting beauty. She was lying on her front side with her back side confronting the hungrying Big Gun.
“Honey!” he sighed. “Honey!”
The girl didn’t move. Well, asleep or not asleep, he determined to be a touch fresh with a fresh touch. He brushed the flimsy gown up and over a beaming white seat and planted his hand firmly across the naked rear in the manner of a playful slap.
With the resounding “splat” a romantic end upended. A horrifying yelp accompanied the flipping form. The nightgown went down in one hand and the covers up in the other. The yelp became a yell. And the yell became a scream.
“Good Lord, have mercy!” moaned the suddenly sober Big Gun as he stared in the shrieks from a completely strange face. “I’m in the wrong goddamned room!”
While Mr. Death is experiencing one of life’s embarrassing moments, Clay and Katie are enjoying a much more romantic tête-à-tête under the benevolent light of a full moon.
Clay put his head down beside that of his goddess. And together, they looked at the moon. The romantic moon.
Then, gradually, they weren’t watching the moon. But the moon was still watching them. The romantic moon wouldn’t miss this for the world. And the faint light from the heavenly window-peeker graced the pillow of lovers as their lips met.
But the heaven’s glowing symbol of romance was to be left hanging. Yet, maybe it was more proud than disappointed. For there is a certain kind of love that expresses itself far deeper than in physical satisfaction. And it was in an innocent closeness of respect that these two young people spent the night.
But enough of chucklesome embarrassing moments and heavenly window-peekers. Back to the salivating.
Prince and Clay face their biggest challenge in Headstone, which is under the cruel thumbs of the Martin brothers—Rake, Mule, Kale, and Wes—and their gaggle of scummy gunslingers. Only Sheriff Tom Courtland and a handful of deputies stand between the Martins and a takeover of Headstone and all that is good and honest and right and true. Naturally the Baron of the Bountyhunters and the loudest living legend of the frontier man’s game of the gun must do the right thing and join forces with the law.
And Prince is rewarded for this noble gesture when he meets and falls instantly in love with beautiful young Lucy, who happens to be Rake Martin’s girl, but not by choice and never in the Biblical sense, she being good and sweet and kind and loving like Katie Slinger. Lucy’s the girl of The Big Gun’s dreams. She’s the girl who can and will make him hang up his Frontier cold forty-fives and then teach him how to whistle a hymn. If, that is, he survives the murderous intentions of the Martins, who are also known as the Mad Dogs of Headstone.
The action comes fast and furious at this juncture. There are more gun duels. There is even hand-to-hand combat between Clay and Prince, the result of a disagreement on how best to deal with the Mad Dogs—
The right hand of the tall tall-man gripped itself. It gave away his plan. As Prince turned back with his powerful arm unleashing the balled fist toward Clay’s chin, the bountyhunter was already in action. His own right hand smashed full into the great face with the result of terrible distortion....
The lawmen dismounted to break the furious twosome. But they were too late. They were already in the midst of breaking. And rather colorfully. Clay had been hoisted high by Prince and was now sailing through the air like something that had not yet been invented. When he landed, it was his turn to be dazed. He was aware that The Big Gun was hovering over him and even more aware that he was hovering at the top of his voice.
The final gun battle between the forces of good and evil is of epic proportions, told in brilliant metaphor:
The Big Gun took to the street. And he was walking. Walking for the end of it and the Martins. Walking slow and steady. Walking for a town. Walking for life. Walking for death. Walking. The tall tall-man was walking....
The time for lip talk was past. The time for gun talk was present. And the mouth of a six-gun screamed. It was that of John William Prince that had the first word....
The six-guns of Wes and Kale shouted simultaneously with Prince’s second explosion. The cold heart of Wes Martin was to grow a lot colder. But at the moment it was bursting and burning. The Big Gun’s oratory had hit peak performance. No shot thrown by any frontier pistol had ever been truer to its mark or brought faster results. Wes Martin was dead on his feet and his fall was inconsequential.
Kale Martin never fired again. Ever. Prince’s fire and brimstone sermon had risen to a thundering height and he was rending his agitators speechless. Kale gagged and staggered at the third flaming and booming point of that furious lecture.
As stimulating as the foregoing is, Fonville and The Big Gun save their all-out best for the demise of Rake Martin, the slavering head of the Mad Dog pack:
Rake Martin was to make one final attempt at regaining his suddenly lost status as a true fighter. His whining ceased. And his weapon began to slowly rise from the dry dust of dismal defeat into the gun-smoked air of potential victory. The air of war. That same challenging air of death that has labeled heroes and cowards throughout the history of man. For the male child grows from the crib in an obligation of manhood. The choice of good and evil is his. But the responsibility of the sex is predestined. And it was with the full knowledge of this responsibility that the lost Rake Martin was trying to die as a man.
Prince was fully aware of the struggle before him. The barrel of the gun continued to rise in his direction. And he waited. But why was he waiting? Had he come this far to search for death? Was he once again defying all odds and making the end of his own trail? Had he tired of his wild ride on the great horse of life? Was he dismounting forever?
Nah. He quits asking himself rhetorical questions and salivates the Dog right between the eyes.
And then he takes another walk, whistling as he goes. Whistling a hymn at long last. Whistling “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, I’ll Be There.”
Finis.
But before we leave the mild-mannered Baron and the tall tall-man, I can’t resist quoting a few more passages from this one-of-a-kind leather-slapper. In addition to Fonville’s other alternative attributes, he had a rare talent for devising the pithy said substitute:
“He’s done it!” fanged out Rake.
“That son of a bitch is crazy!” heehawed Mule.
“You goddamned right we got you!” iced Wes.
“Ain’t nobody can whip me!” Mule loudly claimed his chief claim to fame.
“He’s my prisoner, sheriff,” rumbled Prince-thunder.
And he could mangle the English language in ways that invite exclamations of “Huh?” as well as chuckles.
Every person on that street was staring at the suddenly changed Rake Martin and his way-too-big smile, while the sadistic sound of the wind groaned over his sarcasm.
Livid red streaks were obvious across each of his cheeks. The marks from Clay’s vicious slaps blended symbolically into the crazed expression of revenge carved on his face.
Prince swept back his coat tails and placed his hands on the two angry-looking pistols at his sides. The quiet fear that gripped the room suddenly became a quieter panic. Clay innately went to a [gun] drawing position.
Mule Martin’s bullyishness was apparent in his whole demeanor.
Clay’s actions since the poker game at dawn had bred their consequences. And those consequences were coming to a head outside.
There was a long pause in the [verbal] sparring. One thing for sure was in every mind on that street. Tom Courtland was a talking man. And he didn’t just talk words. He talked thoughts. And his thoughts were well worth thinking about no matter in whose head they were.
In 1966 one of the bottom-end paperback houses, Belmont Books, launched a short-lived series of “Two Double-Barreled Westerns” per book, after the fashion of Ace Doubles. There were three differences in the Belmont versions: The “novels” were much shorter than Ace’s, well under 40,000 words each; they were bound one after the other rather than one upside down; and they shared a split front cover instead of each having a cover of its own. Most of the Belmont doubles seem to have been originals, though some may well be unattributed reprints of pulp novellas.
Like the bulk of Ace Double Westerns, Belmont’s were tried and true bang-bangers. E. B. Mann, a moderately well regarded action writer in the ’30s and early ’40s, was responsible for nearly a dozen titles, two thirds of the total number of “Double-Barreled Westerns” published between 1966 and 1968. Others were written by Burt Arthur, Lee Floren, and the one-time “King of the Cowboy Writers,” Walt Coburn.
Easily the worst of the Belmont crop—a chunk of Yellow Peril nonsense in Western dress called BORDER TOWN—was the drooling brainchild of Coburn, perhaps devised early in his career when he was still learning his trade, or concocted out of liquor-soaked whole cloth near the end of his rather tempestuous life. It is unclear whether this 30,000-word deformity is a pulp reprint or an original.
Like Chuck Martin, Tom Roan, and other legendary crankers, Walt Coburn enjoyed both a long and a commendably prolific career. Between 1922 and 1970 he published upwards of a thousand pieces of short Western fiction and nonfiction in Argosy, Adventure, Western Story, Lariat, Dime Western, True West, Frontier Times, and dozens of other magazines; close to a hundred novels; and a couple of acclaimed histories of cowboy and ranching life in his native Montana. He was the only Western writer other than Zane Grey to have more than one magazine named after him: Walt Coburn’s Action Novels, a Fiction House publication that ran briefly in 1931, featured four of his cowboy novelettes per issue, and carried a Will Rogers quote (“I read all of Walt Coburn’s stories”) on the cover; and Walt Coburn’s Western Magazine, a Popular Publications pulp in 1949-50 that in each issue contained one long Coburn novelette, and one nonfiction reminiscence under the umbrella title “Walt’s Tally Book.”
During his heyday in the ’30s and ’40s, Coburn churned out an average of 600,000 words of Western pulp per year. (His total published wordage, by his own estimate, was nearly 20 million words.) “In all my years of fiction writing,” he claimed in his posthumously published autobiography, WALT COBURN, WESTERN WORD WRANGLER (1973), “I never rewrote a story, never missed a deadline, drunk or sober, never used an agent, but dealt directly with editors, and never used a pseudonym.” He was a prodigious drinker and allowed as how he worked many times with a bottle of whiskey beside his typewriter. (His autobiography drips with accounts of various wet escapades, a couple of Machiavellian complexity.)
About his pulp writing he stated proudly: “I went after the job as if it were a game from which I got a big kick. I had no set plan of work, no idea in my head, just a kind of cockeyed, haphazard way of putting down words on paper.... My plots came from the stars. I might awaken in the middle of the night with some idea which would keep me awake. Dreams took shape, the plots just came from nowhere.”
Some of Coburn’s dreams translated well into fiction; others were thinly disguised nightmares, whiskey-induced or not, which resulted in stories that were downright terrible. BORDER TOWN is one such nightmare. If its plot “came from the stars,” it was a mischievous alien presence that transmitted it telepathically into Co-burn’s fevered brain. And he was never more cockeyed or haphazard in putting its words down on innocent sheets of typing paper.
The setting is not the Montana cattle country of much of his Western output, a background he knew intimately and wrote about with authority, but Ensenada and the nearby Mexican wilderness. The time is the flapper era, circa 1925. Herbert Smith, a.k.a. Dick Smith, an American remittance man hooked on booze and marijuana, “the Mexican substitute for opium,” is hanging out in his usual haunt, a squalid cantina in Ensenada’s Chinese sector (?) run by Quo Wong, “a slant-eyed, close tongued half-caste” who is also an expert knife-thrower. Herb–Dick begins beating up on Rosita, his bar-girl enamorata because she won’t give him any more “hop.” Enter then a lean, tough Texan named Jones who proceeds to abuse the abuser, and for his trouble almost gets a knife in the neck.
No sooner is order restored than another American, a criminal attorney named Crittenden Briggs, a close pal of Herb-Dick’s millionaire industrialist father, shows up and spirits the Texan away to a better-quality watering hole for some private palaver. Briggs has a scheme: He wants Jones to kidnap Herb-Dick and spirit him off into the wilderness, where with the help of a faithful old Chinese retainer, one Ah Hell, Jones will spend a year breaking Herb-Dick of his drug habit. At the end of that year, Jones, if he is successful, will receive $10,000 and Herb–Dick will be allowed to claim a large inheritance from his father. Jones refuses at first, but Briggs has some dirt on him and, with the added promise of $10,000 for his troubles, talks Jones into going along with the plan.
So the Texan, with the aid of a touring car and its driver, Hans, kidnaps Herb–Dick and transports him to a camp in the rock-strewn hills where Ah Hell awaits. But not before he, Jones, barely manages to escape the clutches of Weasel Stanley, an implacable “human ferret”—a sort of Lieutenant Girard prototype—who has chased Jones halfway around the world so as to arrest him on a charge of bank robbery.
Okay. That’s the general setup. So now you think you have a pretty fair idea of how the rest of the plot develops, right?
Well, you’re wrong.
You’re wrong because what I’ve just outlined to you is almost entirely illusion and red-herring and brainless motivation and pure crap. Very little of the early setup and none of the characters are exactly what they seem to be.
Herb–Dick Smith is really a World War I draft-dodger named Herbert Freuling, son of a rich Bosch sympathizer named August Freuling.
Jones is really Zack Davis, who is neither a Texan nor a bank robber (and not much of a hero, either), though he is a fugitive from a trumped-up bank-robbery charge.
Quo Wong is not a sleazy, half-witted bar owner; he’s the cunning head of a ring smuggling Chinese across the border into the U.S., and the Oxford-educated son of an English lord who was thrown out of England for taking a Chinese wife. He says things like “If you have got the wrong line of information on this, old dear, it’ll go bloody well hard with you. I am much upset over the loss of our dear old Herb, you know. Quite upset. Damnably so.”
Rosita is neither a simple Mexican bar-girl nor Herb-Dick’s love interest, but a refugee from Los Angeles who likes to dress in clothing “copied from Hollywood fashions as set by the moving picture folk,” is in the employ of Quo Wong, and speaks thusly: “The Hans hombre had on a crying jag and when I pet him ever so little, and let the big fish hold my hand, he spill the beans, no foolin’, and tell about the way this smart jane gets a bird to liquor him all up, see.”
The Hans hombre, driver of the kidnap touring car, is neither Hans nor an hombre; she is really a beautiful girl named Billy who may or may not be in love with Herb–Dick Smith–Frueling, may or may not be engaged to marry Herb–Dick, and may or may not have an ulterior motive for jumping off August Freuling’s yacht in the Ensenada harbor and then knocking out the real Hans and dressing up in his clothing and joining up with Zack Davis–Jones and Ah Hell in the effort to help Herb–Dick kick his booze-and-hop habit.
Ah Hell is not a faithful family retainer but a cohort of Quo Wong, except that he really isn’t working for Quo Wong but has murkier motives that have to do with hating the Bosch sympathizer and his draft-dodging son and not wanting Herb–Dick to kick the hooch-and-drug habit, to which end he secretly supplies Herb–Dick with booze and hop after Zack and Billy deliver the young wartime slacker to the camp in the rock-strewn hills. He delivers such lines as “Ketchem bossy-man Herb? Heap good. Too much Quo Wong Mexican hop, smokum. Blekfas’ leady now.”
Crittenden Briggs is in fact a “great criminal defender,” but he isn’t really in the employ of August Freuling and doesn’t really care about Herb–Dick’s welfare; his true interest lies in the fact that he is secretly Billy’s father and doesn’t want her to marry a draft-dodger, drunkard, hop-head, and son of a dirty Bosch sympathizer.
And Weasel Stanley, while a tenacious human ferret, isn’t really such an implacable sort after all but a good old boy who befriends Zack Davis–Jones, helps him to subdue Herb–Dick when the young slacker becomes “glassy-eyed with insensate hate” because his hop supply has been drastically reduced, and then joins forces with Zack in an effort to thwart Quo Wong and his pack of “yellow-fanged, grinning celestials.”
Confused? Imagine how I felt, reading this mind-altering blather for the first time. Imagine how Walt Coburn must have felt, writing it with what may have been a large hangover and possibly with numerous nibbles from a fresh jug of whiskey next to his typewriter.
Mercifully condensed, the balance of the narrative amounts to this: Billy is taken prisoner by Quo Wong and Ah Hell, who are heading for their smuggler’s hideout in a little town on the edge of El Desierto Arenas. She thinks Zack Davis–Jones is dead, the result of a sneak attack by a murdering compadre of Quo Wong’s, but Ah Hell knows that Zack survived the attack and broke the assassin’s neck instead, and since Ah Hell is only half bad he flashes her a Morse Code message by means of sun reflections off the blade of his knife to let her know Zack is okay (which, of course, earns him a quick exit when Quo Wong tumbles to what he’s doing).
Herb–Dick Smith–Freuling escapes from Zack Davis–Jones and Weasel Stanley, but not before he induces them to give him a desperately needed shot of hooch. (“He pressed the flask to his lips and the metal clinked like a clock against his shaking teeth.”) Zack and the human ferret rush in pursuit of the “damned murdering Chinks” who have swiped Billy, and get close enough to spot Ah Hell’s Morse Code flashes. (“‘Z A K O K,’ muttered Stanley. ‘Sounds like a hair tonic’”) Herb–Dick also charges off in pursuit of the “filthy half-caste son of an exiled Britisher whose country kicked him out” (Quo Wong) and his “Chink playmates.” One of the playmates ambushes Zack and Weasel, and the human ferret is wounded, thus delaying Zack and allowing Herb–Dick to get to Quo Wong and Billy first.
Herb–Dick, in a final effort to atone for his draft-dodging, boozing, and hop-heading, challenges Quo Wong to a Jim Bowie–style duel in which they each take one end of a scarf between their teeth and then try to carve each other up with knives. Which they both manage to do, delivering killing blows at approximately the same instant.
Billy is saved. Zack Davis–Jones rides in anticlimactically (I told you he wasn’t much of a hero), just in time to profess his undying love for Billy and to learn that she never really loved Herb-Dick Smith–Freuling but felt sorry for him and hoped to change him and now that he’s been filleted by that “yellow devil” Quo Wong, why, she’s free to marry Zack whom she fell in love with the first moment she saw him in the kidnap touring car while disguised as Hans. And he’s free to marry her because just before the final fade-out he finds out that he has been cleared of the trumped-up bank-robbery charge and no longer has anything to fear from Weasel Stanley or any other human ferret.
And if all of that isn’t the ultimate overdose of hop-hooch-and-hair-tonic, I’m not sure I want to be subjected to the “plot from the stars” that outdoes it.
Over the past quarter-century, a handful of enterprising new publishing houses have made valiant if mostly unsuccessful attempts to compete in the mass-market paperback trade. Only one, Carroll & Graf, has had any persistent success. The most recent of the failed newcomers to sponsor a line of Western originals was Major Books, a poorly distributed and editorially challenged Southern California outfit. During its four-plus years of existence (1975–79). Major published well over a hundred fiction and non-fiction titles with emphasis on category novels—mysteries, spy stories, Gothic romances, science fiction, and Westerns. Among such a large output one would expect to find at least half a dozen books of some quality. Major and its editorial mavens defied the law of averages, however. Only one book with any claim to literary merit appeared under the Major imprint: Loren D. Estleman’s maiden novel, THE OKLAHOMA PUNK (1976).
Ah, but on the alternative side of the ledger...
Nearly 40 Westerns carried the Major Books logo. A few were early efforts by writers who went on to bigger and better accomplishments in the Western field (Jory Sherman, James Powell); a few more were late-career and trunk items penned by pulpsters and crossover writers (J. L. Bouma, A. A. Baker, Margaret and George Ogan); one was a novelization of a 20-year-old Rory Calhoun flick, The Domino Kid, written by none other than Rory Calhoun himself and published as THE MAN FROM PADERA; and the balance are the alternatively gened offspring of wannabes, never-should-have-beens, and never-heard-from-agains (Ladell J. Futch, Dean W. Ballenger, Martin Ryerson, Charles G. Muller, Steve Sherman, Cliff Davis, Charles Plumb).
The plots of most Majors were minor; that is, standard gun-thunderers whose chief ingredient was violence lavishly described, often in stomach-churning detail. Lawmen, owlhooters, waddies, soldiers, Indians, Mexicans, and other traditional frontier fighting folk spill each other’s blood in all manner of trite shoot-outs, raids, skirmishes, and pitched battles. Only one title offers any real departure from the formula. And as luck would have it, that one is Major’s major contribution to the Alternative Hall of Fame.
THE CAVES, a snazzy little underground thriller, was the joint effort of Norman Thaddeus Vane and R. Rude. At least, the novel would seem to be a collaboration, since both names appear on it; yet the copyright is in Norman Thaddeus Vane’s name alone and on the copyright page there is an odd little disclaimer: “This novel was co-written, but is based on the original story by Norman Thaddeus Vane, who created the original idea and all the characters and dialogue.” Hmmm. So just what did R. Rude do to earn a byline credit? Edit the thing? Write passages of narrative to complement Norman Thaddeus’s idiosyncratic dialogue? Or did he have something on Norman Thaddeus and take partial credit as a unique form of blackmail payoff? In any case, the impression one gleans from the disclaimer is that Norman Thaddeus wasn’t too happy at having to share his glory with somebody named Rude. If Mr. or Ms. Rude was in fact responsible for some of the ruder aspects of the tale, then Norman Thaddeus had every right to be upset.
The story, we are told in a brief forward, is based on historical fact; and the setting, a labyrinth of caves in the Huachuca Mountains of southern Arizona near the Mexican border, not only is a real place but was once a refuge for Geronimo, and “to this day, the way out of the Caves remains an Apache secret.” Well, maybe.
The time is May of 1884 and a band of murderous Chiricahua Apaches led by Geronimo has escaped from the White Mountain Reserve and left a bloody trail of dead civilians and burned-out farms and mine stakes in its wake. In pursuit is the 4th Cavalry out of Fort Huachuca, under the command of Major Emmett Pilcher. A few survivors of the Indian attacks have been picked up by the soldiers and brought along for want of anything better to do with them. Both soldiers and some of the civilian whites are spurred by more than just a desire for justice, revenge, and/or safety: A bounty of $100 in gold for every Apache scalp has been offered by the government.
Hunted and hunters meet at a spot called Skeleton Canyon in the Huachucas. Geronimo and his renegades appear to be trapped; the soldiers and civilians brace for battle. But then the Apaches disappear in the Caves, the secret entrance to which Pilcher and his command soon stumble upon. Should they follow the Indians inside? Yes, and a bad decision it turns out to be: A landslide (triggered by a “freak tornado,” no less) kills several of the party and traps 13 others in the maze of subterranean passages. Thus begins, as the back-cover blurb has it, “an incredible two-month odyssey of desperate men set against nature and one another. Terrified soldiers and civilians are faced with Apaches in ambush, death, starvation, and utter despair! The reward that drives them on is no longer gold—it is survival!”
So far so good. All the ingredients are present for a dandy suspense story. In the thorny and none-too-subtle hands of Vane and Rude, however, what develops is an alternative cauldron of superheated melodrama, brute savagery, and formidably awful prose.
We’ll begin with a look at some of the main characters, as described by the authors:
Major Emmett Pilcher: “[His] face was a map of crosscurrents —Scots, Irish, English—tempered badly like impure iron—with the ore of German and Scandinavian blood. The combination seethed, rather than settled in his veins—making him a curiosity of nature—somewhere between a distempered prairie wolf and a bulldog. His Scots’ ancestry gave him a rawboned solidity; his Irish and English blood bristled hostility in every instinct. Reflected in his blue-green eyes was his journeyman’s soul. The jaw was too thick, but the lips too full to be a man’s man. His big-boned hands and feet were his German curse. His head was topped by a bristle and thistle of carrot-blonde-gray streaked strands of mismatched hair, which compared unfavorably to his horse’s.”
Sergeant Talbot: “His shanks of muscle slithered under his shirt threateningly, his gnarled, knotted, calloused fingers aiming [his horse] slipshod among the soldiers. If the major was the devil, Ser geant Talbot was his advocate. Often a sharp slash of whip across a man’s or animal’s ass made his point.”
Private Orley: “A string of lean meat that ended in a baby face— where two beacons of eyes, blushed in outward innocence. He was from the South, even without opening his mouth, his slink swore it.”
Joshua Barrett, Washington, D.C., newspaper columnist: “Barrett stuck out in the group like a sore, educated thumb. He even looked like a thumb. With his bright, piercing eyes—intelligent eyes—and an always questioning mouth, out of which words tumbled, with a faint ring of contempt.”
Venable Brown, prospector: “[He owned] a wiry mass of hair, which sprouted from his head and face. He was a lead nugget who had spent a lifetime in the fantasy of chasing fool’s gold. In his own words, he had found the pot at the end of the rainbow ‘was a pissin’ pot.’”
Eli Fly, photographer: “He was a little gnat of a man [with] a gnawed cigar stuck in his goat’s face.”
Judge Bedediah Tasker, a.k.a. “Old Necessity”: “He drank like a fish, dressed like a deacon, and lived like a gambler. A weasel-faced, slight man, with a perpetual liquor stench, he was a salted product of the West, a drifter and a con man of some repute [who] was once hauled into a saloon in Kansas and made to judge the kangaroo trial of an old Irishman for the killing of a Chinese la borer.... The good judge thumbed through his law books and finally decreed he could find no law that said a Chinaman couldn’t be killed in Kansas. Drinks were had by all.”
Old Gabe, scalper and bounty hunter: “He had a face like a horned lizard. From a distance he could have been easily mistaken for a barrel cactus. Scalping—after a lifetime of failure—had be come a way of life for Gabe. He was an artist, quick and efficient— seven or eight deft strokes and he could lift off the whole top of a head.”
Baby Doe Trabber, née Margaret Stallmayer: “Baby Doe was a comely woman in her mid-30s. The sun had not touched her soft, pallid complexion. Her fair skin was an oddity in the dirt-brown desert. She had made marriage her career...had had five marriages and three divorces. [The failure of her last marriage had forced her to] flee from creditors with the last remains of her past splendor, her great fortune, on the back of one jackass.”
Bull Whacker, waddy: “A greasy, one-eyed, glass-eyed cowboy, with a face like a tired saddle [who] bristled like a cactus when he was angry [and who] always sided with the man who shouted the loudest.”
This truly motley bunch, along with a stoic Indian scout called Dull Knife, a 300-pound black Army cook, and a weathered old farmer cleverly dubbed Sidney Ducks, faces all sorts of wonders, hardships, and terrors while trapped in the Caves. They encounter, not necessarily in order: stalactites, stalagmites, great limestone vaults full of smelly bats, underground streams, sulphur pools brimming with bleached prehistoric fish, human bones, ancient Indian hieroglyphics, deposits of gold, oil, and natural gas, and a cache of fresh and bloody scalps. In addition to Geronimo and his renegade Chiricahuas, they are menaced by a hunger-maddened black bear, falling rocks, razor-sharp stones in a narrow underwater passage they must traverse that are “like jutting teeth whose dangerous edges protruded and scraped them as if they were passing through the gigantic mouth of a swallowing sea monster,” and last but far from least, each other when their supplies of food begin to run out. It isn’t long before they’re forced to eat horses, mules, bats, green slimy snakes, warty lizards, the prehistoric bleached fish, and finally—you guessed it—their own dead. Only a handful of the original group of trapped survivors, naturally, lasts long enough (and stays sane enough) to chance upon an escape route through an old well in an abandoned churchyard.
All of this is told in a style that ingeniously combines sloppy syntax, descriptive passages of elaborate incoherence, dialogue bristling with anachronisms, half-wit wit, and epicurean depictions of various acts of violence and depravity. (The scenes involving cannibalism are guaranteed to gag a glutton.)
According to Vane (he created all the dialogue, remember), this is how seasoned Indian-fighting soldiers conversed and comported themselves:
Lieutenant Bernard: “Where are those Apaches heading, sir?”
Major Pilcher: “Beats the shit outta me.”
Major Pilcher: “Lemme tell you, Barrett—I’ve been in this country so long that when I came here, Pike’s Peak was just a hole in the ground, but I never saw the likes of this. We’re camping right here till I figure it out. I’m not goin’ back to Fort Huachuca without Geronimo’s scalp.”
Joshua Barrett (cynically): “Then, I suppose, you’ll get promoted to colonel?”
Major Pilcher: “Unfortunately, that won’t make much difference. I’ve killed over one hundred braves since ’69. I was a captain five, long years. Been a major seven. I put my life on the line for seventeen hundred bucks a year. Piss most of it away on liquor, women, and cards. Won’t never be a colonel, friend—not long as I’m judged by the back-slapping, ass-kissin’ bunch from the Point.”
Barrett: “Can I quote you?”
Major Pilcher: “Not on your life. I have one year to retire.” He thrust his hand with his middle finger extended toward the rim of the canyon. “Then, up the generals’ asses!”
Then we have Venable Brown, “smashed altogether” on an Apache liquor called tiswin and “looking like a heap of sorry desolation,” reciting what he calls “the miner’s Ten Commandments.” The recitation lasts for three pages; the sixth of the 10 is sufficient to give you an idea of this particular hunk of lunacy.
“Neither shalt thou kill thy neighbor’s body in a duel. Neither shalt thy destroy thyself by getting tight nor slewed nor high nor corned nor three sheets in the wind by drinking smoothly down brandy slings, gin cocktails, whiskey punches, rum toddies nor egg nogs. Neither shalt thou suck mint juleps nor sherry cobblers through a straw, nor gurgle from a bottle the raw nor take it neat from a decanter; for thou art burning the coat from off thy stomach. Thou wilt feel disgusted with thyself and inquire, ‘Is thy servant a dog that he doeth these things?’ Verily, I will say, farewell, old bottle, I will kiss thy gurgling lips no more. And thou, slings, cocktails, punches, cobblers, nog, toddies, and juleps, forever farewell. Thy headaches, tremblings, heart burnings, blue devils, and all the unholy evils that follow in thy tram....”
Here we have Venable and Old Gabe, in another drunken exchange:
“The only good Indian is a dead one, right, Gabe? Just what they always said about niggers.”
“And Jews.” Gabe straightened up. “I ought to know!”
Venable eyed him derisively. “You a Hebe?”
Gabe flared his chest proudly like a mating pheasant. “My momma was.”
“Don’t believe it.” For the moment, Venable relaxed from his watch. The only Jews he had ever seen were tight-assed shopkeepers in the cities. Jews were about as welcome in the West as Apaches.
“No. Gabriel in the Bible was a Jew same as me. I play a Jew’s harp, don’t I? That’s a dead giveaway.”
“Prove it.” Venable’s face leaned closer to him. “Let’s see your pecker.”
“You’ll have to kill me first!”
And finally—Norman Thaddeus’s crowning achievement— here is Venable, drunk yet again (the survivors do a lot of drinking in the Caves), serenading Baby Doe Trabber with a frolicsome little ditty:
“One, two, three, four,
I don’t care if I go crazy,
I don’t care if I die, die, die—
Long as I can see it fly!”
Those gallant frontier folk sure knew how to laugh in the face of death and danger, didn’t they?