Max Sumpter, owner of the SV Ranch, who says things like “Honin’ to rent yore rope, eh? Waal, we ain’t got no places open. Yuh kin bed down for the night, though. But come mornin’, I’ll have to ask yuh to rattle yore hocks thither, buckaroo.”He lifted his arms, stretching his long, lithe body in the sheer joy of being alive in the open, and dropped them to take a puff on his cigarette, regretfully watching its being consumed in that air it apparently drew in, too, with such gratitude that the tobacco was disappearing into blue curls of smoke far faster than he could have wished. —Jackso n Cole, THE OUTLAWS OF CAJA BASIN
Staring at the colored pictures, the sinews of Matt’s body tingled.
“She’s beautiful!” he gasped inwardly.
Suddenly the flare in his own eyes fanned into a miniature inferno as, for a long moment, he was lost in despair. Of the countless times the single tragedy of his life had persecuted his reminiscence, not in many years had its recollection loomed so distressingly vivid as during this moment. —Lynton Wright Brent, THE BIRD CAGE
As we’ve seen in previous chapters, there are many different varieties of alternative-classic Westerns. It may be the peculiarities of one’s plot that elevates it to its lofty status. It may be the unique mix of he-coons and she-stuff that inhabits its fictional terrain, or the nature of the fictional terrain itself. It may be the author’s prose: his inspired use of Western vernacular, the manner in which he slings similes and metaphors, the brand of red-hot palaver he dishes out. Or it may be a combination of these and other, less clear-cut elements (genius, after all, is not always easily defined). The important thing is that in each work there is a savory blending of ingredients resulting in a peerless taste treat, a kind of fictional slumgullion stew for the jaded palate.
In this chapter we’ll sample a few more potsful of perfection, two of which—the first and the last considered—your old pros-pectin’ pard ranks in the Top Ten Pisswillie Whizzers of All Time.
There are Western novels, and there are alternative-classic Western novels. And then there is BLACK GOLD, which is truly and quite literally in a class by itself. If I were to teach a course in the Alternative Western Novel, this is the book I would use as the centerpiece. It not only has everything a bad Western can possibly have, it brilliantly manages to go one step further: It has something no other horse opera has, a plot element so bold, so dazzling, so innovative, so casually insane that it left me awestruck when I first encountered it.
I wish I could tell you positively who deserves the credit for this masterwork, but I can’t. Fact is, I’m not 100 percent positive which Jackson Cole wrote it. Judging from the prose style and other internal indicators, I think Leslie Scott; but since it is a Jim Hatfield yarn that first appeared in Texas Rangers in 1933 or 1934 (the book version was published in ’34), and since Scott shared the Hatfield corral with Oscar Schisgall—and no doubt one or two others—in those days, and since there seems to be some bibliographic disagreement as to who wrote what Hatfield prior to 1937, we may never know for sure who was responsible for BLACK GOLD. More’s the pity.
The basic premise is typical of the Jim Hatfield stories and barely intimates the wonders to come. As the William Caslon dust-jacket blurb has it: “Into the big valley known as the Alamita Basin rode Jim Hatfield, faced with as tough a job of cleaning up a gang of organized exploiters as ever confronted the Texas Rangers. To this valley which knew no justice, which flamed with wild greed and unrest, where no one was safe from violent death, Jim Hatfield, the Lone Wolf, was to bring the RANGER LAW. His foe was ‘Black Gold’—that precious metal [sic] more coveted than the yellow gold the early 49’ers fought and died for, whose power drove men to pillage, to murder, and unjust lynching.”
Hatfield is a man among men, a hero of Bunyanesque proportions:
When Jim Hatfield walked into his captain’s presence and stood before his desk, the grizzled old frontiersman thought of something he had once seen many years before. Before his eyes drifted the unforgettable picture of a moonlight night in the mountains, with one gaunt crag fanging up against the black sky, and on that crag, etched in silver by the moonlight, a mountain lion, lonely, aloof, head raised, lithe form poised as if to soar away from the solid rock and dare the black depths that yawned beneath.
“All steel and hick’ry and coiled-up chain lightnin’,” mused the captain.
(The rather purplish nature of that passage and others are one pointer to Leslie Scott as the author. In those Hatfield’s which are indisputably his, in the scores of novels he produced as by Bradford Scott and A. Leslie and under his own name, and in his 80-plus Walt Slade paperback oaters published by Pyramid between 1956 and 1973, there are numerous such lavishly lavender descriptions, some of the more memorable of which you’ve already had the pleasure of reading in Chapter 6. Oscar Schisgall was a much less verbose, and therefore much less interesting, pulpeteer.)
The characters who help, hinder, and continually try to salivate the Lone Wolf once he arrives in Alamita are a wild and woolly lot. There is Barrel-belly Burks, who runs the Grand Imperial Hotel and who “has warts and no morals...weighs part of a ton and has a voice like a tail-pinched rat”; Sam Sullivan, proprietor of the Glug-Glug Saloon; Miguel Garcia, owner of a “buzzard roost” watering hole in the Mexican quarter; Sheriff Bart Cole, crooked as a dog’s hind leg and in the employ of a group of New York capitalists led by an unscrupulous former Alamita miner, Benson Cartwright (no relation to Ben and the boys on the Ponderosa); Muddy Waters, a “monkey-faced hellion and skookum he-wolf,” which is to say slug-slammer; Tom Carney, a small ranch owner (the ranch is small, not Tom); Jim Damrock, an old cattle king and father of Rose, who is in love with Tom; a band of outlaws, “the wust gang of sidewinders and horned toads in the hull South-west,” led by Black Bender; and yet another dispenser of tarantula juice, Bull Bellows, whose place of business in the outlaw border town of Goromo is called the “Here You Get It” Saloon.
Hatfield’s adventures with these and assorted others in Alamita Basin, the surrounding hills, Goromo, and the wilds of Mexico read like a novelization of a ’30s movie serial written by Ed Earl Repp. Gunfights, fistfights, and other action sequences not only abound, they virtually stumble over one another; Hatfield gets himself into and out of melodramatic hot water so often he ought to be puckered and parboiled by the final chapter. He is wounded by a drygulcher, nearly drowned in a millrace in a mountain gorge, lassoed and knocked on the head, kidnapped and chained inside an abandoned mine, almost knifed by an allegedly sweet young saloon girl who “danced like a leaf in a vagrant breeze,” and nearly salivated, punctured, ventilated, and lead-pizened on half a dozen different occasions.
In addition, he finds time to set a dynamite boobytrap to blow up outlaws who are cutting fences in order to steal cattle, because “the only way to deal with hyderphobia skunks is to wipe ’em out”; save Rose Damrock’s life; save Tom Carney’s life three times, once from a lynch mob; follow a trail of stolen cattle into the Mexican wilderness; pose as a hyderphobia skunk himself in order to track down Black Bender’s hideout, which is located (yes!) in a hidden grotto inside a mountain reached by means of a cave behind a waterfall; discover salt and sulphur springs (by dint of a convenient knowledge of geology from his college days) which tell him that oil—black gold—is what’s behind the capitalists’ scheme to start a bloody range war so they can gain control of the basin; help dig an oil well, which yields a gusher, which soon turns Alamita into a boom-camp surrounded by derricks and controlled by an outfit called the Great Western Oil Company; vanquish Muddy Waters and Black Bender’s gang in a shootout in which “men went down in a storm of lead like bowled over rabbits”; expose Benson Cartwright as the head of the Great Western Oil Company; expose Sheriff Cole as a Cartwright flunky and then fill him full of lead; avoid by the skin of his teeth being blown up in a Cartwright-triggered explosion of one of the derricks; and escape “a flood of fire that rushed down the steep slope like a raging wind” and engulfs Cartwright instead.
All of this frantic and frenetic blather is told in energetic prose dripping with flowery descriptive passages of the sort Leslie Scott specialized in, earthy colloquial dialogue, Texas-style similes and metaphors, and graphic violence that alternates between silly and brutal. The novel’s opening paragraph appropriately sets the stage, in more ways than one:
Sunset over the Sienegas. With a riot of scarlets and golds and purples and trembling amethysts flooding the western sky, as if a drunken god were twirling a rainbow riata over the jagged peaks that spired up to rip the color-drenched clouds to bloody streamers.
Here are a couple of dialogue samples, the first of which is graced by a truly ingenious said substitute:
“Sleep well?” asked Barrel-belly.
“Shore,” Jim told him, “like a bear in a butter tub. Thought I heerd shootin’ ’long some time durin’ the night, though.”
“Yuh did,” rusty-pumped Barrel-belly.
“Garcia, one more move like that in my direction and I’ll slit yore damn neck and shove yore leg through it! So long as I’m workin’ for yuh, I’ll take orders from yuh, but don’tcha go playin’ big skookum he-wolf with me! Hereafter when yuh fill yore hand, play it, and don’t try to run a whizzer!”
And a few of the niftier similes:
Before him stretched a long slope dotted with groves and thickets among which the trail wound like a bad-tempered snake through a cactus patch.
Darkness like the inside of a black bull at the bottom of a well at midnight swooped down.
“As a sheriff yuh’re about as much good as a mangy last year’s hide stuffed with chawed and swallered hay!”
Jim Hatfield went into that cave like a sausage down a houn’ dawg’s throat.
The tall puncher went into action like a lightning flash through a tub of goose grease.
The man grunted like a hog with a rattlesnake’s tail stuck in its throat.
“To chase that seven-foot hellion on a slabsided jughead ’thout a saddle would be jest about as sensible as ridin’ the sharp end of a cactus spine after a sore-tailed catamount.”
Which brings us, at last, to the bold, stunning, innovative, and casually insane plot ingredient that can be found in no other Western. It occurs while the Lone Wolf is on the trail of the stolen cattle in the Mexican mountains. A shootout ensues when he chances upon the rustlers, forcing Hatfield to take refuge in a cave. The rustlers, wily devils that they are, dynamite the cave entrance, trapping Hatfield inside. (“Now I know jest how a frog feels when he’s crawled in a milk jug and somebody’s corked it up on him.”) He has nowhere to go but deeper into the cave, which leads him down into the depths of the mountain were the air grows warmer and warmer. Could it be that he’s entering “the very bowels of a volcano”?
Yes, it could. But not just any old active volcano near the Tex-Mex border, as he soon discovers. In a vast ampitheatre containing a coiling, bubbling lake of molten fire, he comes upon a second awesome spectacle.
Winged and scaled, birdlike and serpentine, a great stone figure crouched against a wall of black rock. Its inscrutable eyes were of reddish quartz and its mouth was the hooked beak of a vulture. Surmounting its feathered headdress fantastically carved in stone was a gleaming crescent of silver. Silently the Ranger stood and gazed at the ghostly form of a god.
“This musta been a old Aztec temple,” he mused.
Yes, it must. But the Aztec temple isn’t the most amazing thing he encounters in the volcano’s bowels—not by half, it isn’t. The temple isn’t The Ingredient. The Ingredient is—
Giant crabs.
Giant phosphorescent crabs!
GIANT FIGHTING SCREAMING KILLER CRABS!
The depths were swarming with monstrous luminescent forms, moon-bright, crawling, writhing—claws, feelers and dreadful protruding eyes. Gigantic crabs that lived in holes and under boulders. Aroused by the Ranger’s passage through the water, they were swarming toward him. Shuddering with horror, he dashed through the glowing water.
A sharp pain stabbed his thigh. One of the monsters had seized him in viselike claws.
Jim surged forward and broke its grip, and as another of the devilish phosphorescent things rose to the surface directly in front of him he jerked his dripping gun from its holster and struck viciously with the heavy barrel.
The crab, its shell shattered, set up a horrid hoarse screaming and its fellows, perceiving it to be hurt, surged about it with reaching claws and chopping mouths.
Jim plowed madly through the glittering water, cracking shells and breaking claws until the cavern was an inferno of screams and crackling hisses. Behind him the swirls of pale blue light rolled in pursuit.
Reeling, gasping, utterly exhausted, he stumbled on and just as his last strength was flowing from him the water began to shoal. A moment later he struggled through the last shallows and sank panting upon the rock floor. He took a dozen gulping breaths, glanced over his shoulder and swore despairingly.
“The damn things are follerin’ me right out onto the land!” he gulped.
Yes, they are. But they’re slow, clumsy creatures and the Lone Wolf soon outdistances them and then escapes the volcano by climbing up over the lip of a crater. The giant phosphorescent screaming killer crabs are never seen or heard from again. Nor are they explained, rationalized, or even mentioned again.
Splendiferous ploy. Stroke of utter genius that makes Gene Autry’s gunfight with the Muranian superman and his death-dealing raygun in The Phantom Empire seem uninspired and insignificant by comparison. Leslie Scott or whoever came up with it has my undying gratitude and an eternal place of honor in the Alternative Hall of Fame.
As I said in an earlier chapter, Nelson Nye, the prolific Western novelist and authority on quarter horses, was something of a literary Jekyll and Hyde: He could be very, very good and he could also be very, very alternative. Often enough he managed this difficult feat in the same book, and occasionally on the same page—a consequence, perhaps, of the fact that he turned out copy at a white heat. He averaged six novels per annum in the years prior to World War II, and claims to have once written three full-length books in 20 days.
As was the case with many of his contemporaries, Nye had a great fondness for Western vernacular and sometimes overworked it to the point of incomprehensibility. As in this passage from the Clem Colt oater, GUNSLICK MOUNTAIN: “Jake juned around like the seam-squirrels had him. He could not seem to hold his eyes on Sundance; they frittered around like a harried heel fly.” Or this one from MULE MAN: “I felt meaner than gar soup thickened with tadpoles, too damned riled to keep a hitch on my lip.”
He also did himself proud, alternatively and otherwise, with his penchant for colorful manipulation (sometimes strangulation) of the English language. Similes and metaphors abound in his work, as do inspired synonyms and verbs of his own manufacture (such as “juned” in the example above). Such rampant experimentation often worked; just as often it didn’t. Here are two sentences from the same chapter of GUNSLICK MOUNTAIN, the first a sample of Good Nye and the second a sample of Alternative Nye:
Jake.. .was sunk beyond the reach of threats, a man buried deep in the debris of his own scheming.
The crash of the shot gagged the night with its clamor.
GUNSMOKE, the first of more than 20 titles published under his Clem Colt pseudonym, is atypical Nye in that it has a West Texas setting, rather than the Arizona milieu of most of his novels. The hero is young Red Lawler, sheriff of Pecos, a “sleepy little cowtown sprawled in slumbrous lethargy near the banks of a mud-brown river,” and the plot is a standard lawdog-versus-outlaw-crew bang-banger, the crew in this case led by a bushwhacking killer who leaves notes signed with the word “Justice.” Along with the usual quota of gun-soirées and hair-breadth escapes, there is a considerable amount of what Nye himself characterized as “redeeming humor of the droll, wry variety.” It is that redeeming humor, or rather a particular type of it, that warrants GUNSMOKE’S inclusion here.
Red Lawler’s sidekick is a gent named Pony George Kasta, who has “a dried-apple countenance” and a drooping, straw-colored mustache. After the fashion of Andrew A. Griffin’s Johnny Forty-five, Pony George fancies himself a poet. He is constantly giving birth to “another of those four-line atrocities which he pridefully labeled ‘poetry,’” heralding each new verse with a “series of grunts, groans and salty ejaculations” and then, after inflicting same on Red Lawler, patting himself on the back by declaiming, “Gosh—ain’t that a pistol!” Nearly a score of these verses are reproduced in the pages of GUNSMOKE, each one part and parcel of an episodic poem Pony George is constructing entitled “The Ballad of KyoteCal.”
It is no exaggeration to say that Pony George and Nelson Nye are even more formidable alternative rhymemakers than Johnny Forty-five and Andrew A. Griffin. As evidence, I offer some of the choicer stanzas:
A yarn I’ll spin that’s full o’ sin,
It’s a tale both old an’ new—
A saga of times when men was bad
An’ women was bold as brew!
This ornery Cal was the sneakin’ pal
What stole his pard’s best dame;
She was a busy, hustlin’ skirt
Thet sang in the Golden Flame.
One night at the Flame, Cal an’ his dame
Was havin’ a damn mean row—
When in through the door stepped a tall slim gent
With his hat pulled low on his brow.
One hand, long an’ lean, clung close to his Colt;
As he chuckled right nasty an’ grim—
“Jest lissen tuh me, yuh dirty Piute;
Thet dame yuh been neckin’s my him!”
Cal whirled around quick, an’ he sez “Looky here,
Pilgrim, yo’re headin’ fer hell—
I don’t give a damn if yo’re mean as a mule;
It’s time someone sounded yore knell!”
“Oh yeah?” says the stranger. “Yuh son of a Chink!
Get yore paws up an’ keep ’em right still—
Don’t gimme no sass, yuh mangy kyote,
’Cause it’s you thet I’m pinin’ tuh drill!”
Swift his narrow-eyed glare flashed round like a curse,
As he looked for Kyote Cal’s dame—
She stood there by the bar, with her hand on a knife,
An’ her charms standin’ out like a flame.
’Tis a saga of sorrow, a tale bold but true,
That yuh’ve heard of ol’ Kyote Cal—
An’ the moral this sage has tried tuh drive in, is
Don’t be a fool for a gal!
Gosh. Ain’t that moral a pistol?
The jacket blurb on this Jackson Cole powdersmoker, which stars Brad “Brazos” Kennedy in lieu of Jim Hatfield, begins with the statement: “Now and then there is offered to the lover of Western novels, a story so out of the ordinary in its richness of thrills, pictured by a master hand, that it is an open sesame to the hearts of red-blooded Americans.”
Bullpoop.
BLACK GOLD is out of the ordinary in its richness of thrills; this gun-roaring tale of modern bushwhackers and kidnappers running amok on the Turkey Track Range would be just another ’30s Texas skirt job if it weren’t for its first two chapters. Those opening chapters were pictured by a master hand, fortunately, so its open sesame is not to the hearts of red-blooded Americans but to the doors of the Alternative Hall of Fame.
Leslie Scott and/or Oscar Schisgall may have written the balance of OUTLAWS OF CAJA BASIN, but if either man perpetrated the first 29 pages he was blind drunk or suffering from a severe attack of the seam squirrels. More likely it was a fledgling wannabe who was allowed, for some obscure reason, to briefly flap his fictional wings. Nepotism, perhaps, the individual being a poor relation of an editor or publisher. By the time his functional illiteracy was discovered, and he was chucked out of the bunkhouse never to be heard from again, it was too late for Scott or Schisgall to do much except finish the novel and hope that nobody paid close attention to its initial 10,000 words. The only other explanation I can come up with is that an imp of the perverse—the ghost of Bulwer-Lytton, say—got his otherworldly dew-clams on a perfectly competent (by pulp standards) manuscript after it had been accepted for publication and gleefully and maniacally screwed up Chapters 1 and 2.
In any case, those first 29 pages are a lopsided monument to fractured English. Only in the mystery field, in the works of such alternative greats as Florence Mae Pettee, will the discerning reader find butchery of such magnitude.
He was beginning to wonder if he would have enough [clothing] left to cover himself with if he ever did stumble on some friendly cabin for which he was looking. It would suit him much better if he could run into an unused one, which would be all for which he could hope in the higher ground.
Presently he struck an old cattle trail, followed it until it began to wind around the foothills of a rise.
Then silence, unbroken and drowsy, held sway over the ridge once more. Only, when the breeze halted for a breath of space, just the faint scent of herb-scented tobacco drifting to Kennedy’s acute sense of smell let him know, aside from the first sounds he had heard, that the gap possessed other human habitation than himself.
There was something furtive and underhand in the slithering manner in which those feet had scampered.
Brad Kennedy’s lean face, though stained by sun and wind, smudged by blind-baggage [train] travel, and muddied from his last night’s encounter with an obstreperous stream and with no chance as yet to remove its traces, was not of that weather-cured, deep-dyed hue one instinctively notices as the copyright of the Southwestern man.
He lifted his brawny arm, and a single blow from it sent the boy sprawling into the dust of the road, shooting through the car door like a catapult.
A bullet had found its way to some portion of Brad’s anatomy that was resenting it.
He tossed aside the buzzing noise in his ears, the sickness and faintness, and staggered on...hurling his useless weapon from him like a man gone berserk and catapulted himself at the girl’s man-handler with a Tarzan roar.
And Brad Kennedy’s vision went out in a burst like fire-glare laid upon a world that reeled in a devil’s hornpipe. The sinking sun vaulted halfway across the sky and struck him.
My best guess is that the remainder of the book was written by Oscar Schisgall, since it lacks the distinctive purple hue and Lone Star patter that mark Leslie Scott’s work. But you should not think, no matter which professional hand penned the final 227 pages, that those pages are totally lacking in alternative pleasures.
She said eagerly: “I haven’t thanked you yet for—everything. I do, I do thank you, Mr.——”
“Brazos,” Kennedy answered bluntly. “Not Mister—just Brazos.”
She laughed lightly, the sound coursing through Brad like little tinkles of highland bells. “Brazos! Why, that’s the name of a river! It’s always sounded to me like moonlight and ripples and the tinkle of guitars and soft, bright things, like Mexican girls’ laughter....”
The guns in each of his hands began drumming their own scarlet rafale. In answer came red flashes and snarling slugs from Quamon’s crew as some of them turned in surprise at this new challenge to their rear.
As the reader who has delved into SON OF GUN IN CHEEK will recall, Anthony Rud was a highly regarded (by me, anyway) writer of alternative mysteries as well as of alternative Westerns. His “full-fledged, card-carrying supersleuth,” Jigger Masters, hero of several pulp stories and such cracked novel masterpieces as HOUSE OF THE DAMNED and THE STUFFED MEN, is a first-magnitude star in the firmament of loony heroes.
A Chicago native, Rud began writing shortly after his graduation from Dartmouth in 1914, and over the next 25 years contributed short stories, novelettes, and serials in a variety of fields— jungle adventure, mystery, Western, science fantasy, horror—to a variety of pulp magazines, among them Argosy, Lariat, Thrilling Wonder, Detective Fiction Weekly, Weird Tales (where his best-known story, “Ooze,” was originally published in 1923), and even Black Mask in its early years. He also worked as an editor on both Adventure and Detective Story from the late ’30s until his death in 1942, just shy of his 50th birthday.
Of Rud’s nine novels, five are Westerns. The first two, THE LAST GRUBSTAKE and THE SENTENCE OF THE SIX GUN, were pulp serials brought out in book form by Doubleday, Page in the ’20s, as part of their “Pocket Copyright” line of pulp reprints (a line similar to Street & Smith’s “Popular Copyrights” Chelsea House books, though distributed for the most part in dime-novel-style paperback editions). Anson Piper made his pseudonymous debut in BLACK CREEK BUCKAROO in 1941, a rather surprising link in Morrow’s well-regarded chain of action Westerns. The remaining two Pipers, THE PAINTED GHOST and BLUEBONNET RANGE, were both published in England in 1946 and have no U.S. editions.
In both his crime yarns and his horse operas, Rud specialized in eccentric (and eccentrically named) characters, in vastly improbable situations that contain all sorts of mismatched elements, and as Cussemout Crandall demonstrated in Chapter 7, in some of the most originative screwball dialogue ever to spring from a fictioneer’s imagination. BLACK CREEK BUCKAROO is loaded with bits and pieces of his unique brand of nonsense. Allegedly set in the Texas Panhandle (Rud’s Texas, while different from John Creasey’s version, is no less a fantasyland), the story has as its hero Breck Wilson, “foreman pro tem of the wealthy Rafter T, and for six years an unquestioned top hand with horse, rope, six-shooter, rifle—or fists.”
Breck dreams of owning his own ranch and has his eye on an old trapper’s cabin near Hondo Creek. But nesters have taken over the cabin (or are the interlopers really nesters?), and by the end of the first chapter they have blown the place to fragments in a dynamite explosion that loudly says, “Grrrrrooooouuuummmm!” That’s when things really start to happen to and because of Breck, who “jest bulls ahead and does things irregardless, like a dose of croton oil goin’ down a sow’s throat.”
Breck’s adventures include trouble with nesters, rustlers, dead cows, a bunch of Kansas pumpkins, milk goats, an emerald brooch, mules, Indians, night riders, lead-slingers, a mandolin tune called “Rackamaw Jig,” and the U.S. Cavalry.
Among the individuals he favors and locks horns with are she-birds named Mary Landon (“a plumb tinsel angel”), Nettie Royce (a.k.a. Lady Button Eyes, who calls him “the blue-eyed menace”), Federal Court Judge Big-Horn Bascom, a salt-cured ranch cook with the handle of Rooty Tuohy, a Piute Indian brave called Little Smoke, two Piute squaws known as Missus Hippy (a.k.a. Rains-All-Day) and Danger at Night, cowboys and ranchers named Buff Orpington, Windigo Rains, Pogey Mallen, and the Hassayampa Kid, a snakehunter dubbed Sibby Sawtell, an overstuffed ex-barkeep whose moniker is Egg-Head (because he has “a face like an omelet, an’ a head shaped like the rest of the egg”), an outlaw known as Romero the Mexican, Nick St. John, “the high-priced killer of Tascosa,” two vicious gunhawks called Twenty-Mile Mitchell and Peanuts Bagg, and Old Clint Rafferty, owner of the Rafter T, whose favorite expressions are “Moses on a miser’ble mountain” and “By the whiskers of whistlin’ Willyum.”
The action, much of it to the accompaniment of Tompkins-style sound effects (Wham! Crash! Tinkle! Bong!), takes place in such locales as Punkinhead Range, Pawnbroker Ranch, Star Stencil Ranch, J Up and J Down Ranch, Dogey Coulee, and the No Snakes Saloon.
If I were to attempt to sort all of these disparate components into a coherent synopsis, it would take me several pages and even then it wouldn’t do the proceedings justice. This is another of those books that have to be read in all their magnificent lunacy to be properly appreciated. What I will do is to provide a few more specimens of Rud’s Western pod-creature dialogue.
This is how Breck Wilson talks:
“Hey, you chunkers! Gimme my pants! Who’s glommed on to my new corduroys? Who’s the ranny that limped away with ’em, huh?”
This is how Rafter T cowhands talk:
“Hoo-oo! Dingle-dang it all! Somebody’s swiped my Sunday shirt, the crimson silk one! By gummus an’ gran’ma, I’ll chaw his ears down to the roots!”
This is how Old Clint Rafferty talks:
“Hell’s bells an’ boomalacka bunions! Breck, didja think I’d waste m’ time and brains workin’ out a scheme like this, if’n it wasn’t a good one, a dinger? Huh? Now, don’t go to imaginin’ re-mote possibilities, an’ pilin’ horseradish on my plan.”
“Moses on a miser’ble mud mountain! I’ve helled around some, I’ll admit, as a younker. But by damn and hell’s whiskers, I’m respectable now, I am. I’m too dang old to finagle around an’ play Dan Cupid in the love affairs of a dingle-danged punkin’ vine!”
And this is how Rooty Tuohy, the ranch cook, talks:
“Green River gravy bowl!” exclaimed Rooty, his eyes widening.
“By the snaggle-tooth of Laughin’ Lulu, you sure got lucky!”
“My gawsh! I’ll have to sorta enlarge the kitchens, sorta. Or mebbe you’ll build me a special pie cookhouse, Clint? Lessee, a good big punkin’ll make four pies. Four times one hundred and forty-four— oh gawsh, I can’t multiplicate that far. But I’m here to state, it’s one hellious-bellious hoodie of punkin pie!”
“Oh, it’s you, huh? Well, why’n the name of whem-gubblin’ gruxes of Mongreymoul didn’tcha say so?”
Sexy Westerns such as LUST GALLOPS INTO THE DESERT and THE FURIOUS PASSION OF THE LAUGHING GUN were not Brent’s only contributions to the genre. He also wrote traditional shoot-’em-ups, mainly for a short-lived Southern California publisher, Powell Books, after the demise of his own Brentwood Publishing Co. Powell (1969–70, requiescat in pace) brought out dozens of mystery, Western, science-fiction, and romance novels and short-story collections during its brief life; among the Westerns were six collections of four novelettes per book that carried Brent’s byline and had such titles as APACHE TOMAHAWK, OUTLAW VILLAGE, and THUNDER OF THE ARROWS. These are splendidly awful. As is a Powell mystery novel by Brent, DEATH OF A DETECTIVE. As is his purported “documentary on violence and crime in the Movie Capital of the World,” HOLLYWOOD CRIME & SCANDAL. Come to think of it, nothing that Lynton Wright Brant published is anything but splendidly awful.
But his magnum opus is THE BIRD CAGE, which as noted previously was also his first novel. Published in 1945 by Dorrance & Company of Philadelphia, a vanity press, its dust-jacket blurb says inaccurately, “Here is the first novel ever written about Tombstone, Arizona,” and goes on to declaim, also fibbing shamelessly, “It is the thrilling story of a theatrical troupe that came by stagecoach to open this once wild and reckless mining town’s historic Bird Cage Theatre in 1881.... A book pulsating with violent love and living—one you will wish to read and to own.”
C. L. Sonnichsen, in FROM HOPALONG TO HUD, held an opinion of the novel that approximates mine. He called it “an astonishing fictional concoction,” and went on to state that it “has small merit as a novel. It sounds like East Lynne or one of the old melodramas moved to the Southwest, where the superheated emotions and overblown style are much less tolerable than they would have been elsewhere.”
Here is Sonnichsen’s capsule summary of the plot, which is better than any I could offer:
Tombstone’s famous theatre is about to open, and Donna Drew is coming with her company from New York to present The Westerner. Donna is a ravishing redhead who has every able-bodied male in Tombstone drooling, especially Peter Crawley, professional gambler and impresario; Matthew Prane of the P-Bar-B Ranch; and Matthew’s partner, Steve Brammer. Prane himself comes from stage people who were killed and robbed by a gang of desperadoes...many years before. Matt [is] obsessed by the idea of killing the murderers. As the story opens, he has disposed of four of them and is looking for the fifth and last.
The show opens and is a failure [because no one involved] knows anything about the West. Matthew steps in, rewrites the play, becomes the leading man, and takes the show to New York, unaware that Brammer has raped Donna in her dressing room and is the fifth man he is looking for. Successful in the East, the troupe comes back for a Tombstone triumph and to a showdown between Matthew and Steve. Donna finds that she is carrying Steve’s baby, but nobody seems to be unhappy about that at the end.
The main story line and various subplots are even more of a hodgepodge than Sonnichsen’s summary indicates. But it is Brent’s sterling prose that makes THE BIRD CAGE the triumph it is. Just how overblown and melodramatic is his style in this maiden effort? Behold his descriptive powers and attempts at characterization:
The warm night-wind swept down from the Dragoon Mountains as though to flaunt confirmation of Nature’s acknowledged capriciousness. In any other part of the wild and reckless Territory of Arizona, this open sesame to vigorous, healthful life would have belonged to Spring.
His sharp blue eyes were alive with dancing pebbles of fire, akin to sparks leaping from a blacksmith’s busy anvil, which gave him the vigorous, expectant look of the man, spirit-starved, who has just discovered where to find his particular kind of coveted mental grub.
Matthew Prane for ten years had endured the agony of a devastating thought, until his brain had cried out violently for relief. The torturing urge to commit compensative murder had demanded an avocative thought, something to relieve his brain of such gruesome tension.
Matthew’s heavy black eyebrows drew together in a desperate effort to invent a clever rebuttal.
The old feeling of slime, snakes, returned to his mind and physical senses.
Something inside Lily Palmer rolled over and rammed against her feelings.
“The Dragoons are so much——” The broken utterance lifted strength to her mouth, and she swallowed sub-consciously as though some kindly creature had just furbished her soul with the clean medicine of the earth—the good earth; the solid earth which supplied a foundation for her feet.
Behold his action sequences:
During the reception of felling blows, Matthew thought of Donna Drew—and he was not unhappy... He was delighted over the added power the thought of her allotted him. The memory of her surged through his veins; and he felt the force of it as his fists drove hammer-like. His body was painfully bruised, but now his spirit soared high over the heads of his attackers.
Suddenly, as he lay prone, his rifle bounced to his shoulder [and] he fired.
Both men were sweating profusely, despite the fact that the penetrating Arizona sun was slipping down behind the Whetstone mountain quietly, neutrally...
Sensing that his strength for combative action would not exist much longer, and wracking his brain for the animal cunning he needed now to end this struggle victoriously for himself, Matthew at last left his face unguarded. He received several penetrating blows thereafter.... But he rallied every ounce of available strength, every spark of viciousness, every iota of animal nature within him —and pounded with his big right slugger.
Behold his dialogue:
“I know you well enough,” she told him, “to know that you only play one woman at a time. And when you make a change—the other woman is through.”
“That’s right, my dear.”
“Then—I am through?”
“That’s right, Lily.”
“Just like that, huh? Lordy! Crawley, you are worse than a Gila monster! You are worse than Satan! You are the filth of the earth!”
Crawley was grinning amusedly at her scathing metaphors.
“A man’s nature, my dear,” said the gambler, “requires that occasionally he have a change of venison.”
“I’m Steve—and yo’re Donna! Yo’re beautiful, and I’m rugged. And life is what yuh make of it—if yuh got sense enough tuh recognize a good roundup when it comes.”
“To hell with everything,” she muttered incoherently.
Crawley chuckled ruggedly. “Traggit’s getting rustler’s pneumonia,” he remarked to Steve. “His courage is freezing.”
“Justice,” Nellie mused, “does not always fall on the right side of the pasture.”
“She’s too beautiful to be alive,” Crawley murmured. “An ace in the world’s beauty-deck!”
Aces in the alternative-Western deck—that’s THE BIRD CAGE and Lynton Wright Brent.
It’s only fitting that our final Alternative Western Hall of Fame entry be another of Two-Gun Tompkins’ quintessential bang-bangers. THE BORDER EAGLE was his first for Phoenix Press and was based on, or perhaps lifted wholly or in part from, a series of stories he contrived for Wild West Weekly under the pseudonym Philip F. Deere; it immediately established him as an ace ramrod on the Phoenix spread. Along with BORDER BONANZA, it ranks as his most memorable achievement.
The titular hero, whose real handle is Trigger Trenton, is a U.S. Marshal who “joined the forces of law with only one objective in mind—to locate his brother, Jack Trenton, or failing in that, to avenge his brother’s death. [His] feats of derring had won for him, inside of eighteen flaming, daredevil months, the title of the ‘Border Eagle,’ loved by every man, woman, and child in five law-abiding states.” He has “a pair of massive shoulders, as square as a block of granite [and] lean legs encased in Cheyenne-style chaps with leather tie conchas.” He wears blunt-roweled spurs buckled on kangaroo-leather boots, and carries a pair of ivory-butted .45s in “shiny holsters, basket woven, thonged at the muzzle ends.” A flowing red bandanna is the only spot of color in his otherwise solemn (for a Tompkins’ protagonist) costume. All in all, an impressive figure—until he opens his mouth. When he makes that mistake, this is the sort of thing that comes out:
“I’ll be teetotally danged.”
“Yore in a shaved ace o’ takin’ a one-way ticket to blazes, Mex!”
“Which same words was perzactly the booger talk this Soldavo skunk was makin’, a couple of ticks afore he took a ride down the slick skids to blazes.”
The story opens, typically, in a thunder of angel makers during which gunfight Trigger Trenton salivates Pepe Soldavo, “the most brutal killer along the Arizona border.” Shortly afterward, while fleeing from Pepe’s boss, Demon Home, “notorious smuggling chief,” a.k.a. “the king of all smuggling kings,” the Border Eagle— in a Tompkins masterstroke of improbable coincidence—stumbles upon the skeleton of his long-lost brother, half hidden under “a carpet of dead thistle poppies” in a badlands canyon. (He knows the skeleton is his brother’s because he finds “balanced over the slot between two rib-bones” a U.S. Marshal’s badge identical to his own.) A dying message fingernail-scratched into rock on a nearby cave wall identifies Jack’s slayer as one Baldy Cook.
Vowing bloody vengeance, Trenton makes his way into Suicide Valley and begins his hunt for this Baldy Cook jasper. Before long, his path crosses those of such individuals as:
Max Sumpter, owner of the SV Ranch, who says things like “Honin’ to rent yore rope, eh? Waal, we ain’t got no places open. Yuh kin bed down for the night, though. But come mornin’, I’ll have to ask yuh to rattle yore hocks thither, buckaroo.”
Texanna Sumpter, Max’s “starry-eyed girl,” with whom the Border Eagle is soon smitten—so smitten that her father is later prompted to observe that Trigger Trenton is “the fust feller I ever seen as could fall in love with a woman, give her a kiss, an’ be off on a six-gun trail, all in the same breath!”
Hob Lipe, wearer of a gunny-sack apron around his “gorilla middle” that instantly marks him as the ranch cook, and described as having “a thick, shaven head, as knobby as a lump of rock [and] a pair of stern eyes as black as raw gunpowder—cold and evil. The man’s nose was thick-lobbed and twisted to one side by the same snarl which pulled the lips into a slanting red line across the blue-jowled face. The man’s grimy white shirt was stuffed with muscles, and a carpet of hair showed at the open throat.”
Demon Home, something of an evil vision in black and white: black silk shirt, white leather vest with ornate black trim, black-and-white batwing chaps, white cartridge belt containing black-butted .45s, a black Stetson hat. Inexplicably, his sacklike mask is of blue silk—something of a lapse in sartorial harmony, but then what can you expect from an evil smuggling chief?
Poison Fang, notorious Apache outlaw, who passes such remarks as “Keep um heap still, Sumpter! Pull um mitt out o’ them papers. You might have um shoot-iron cached in thar.”
Kink Nibless, sickly-faced gambler, who chin-gabs thusly: “I been hopin’ our sticks would drift together ag’in, you salty young sprout! The Border Eagle, eh? Wai, hard luck has laid a nit in yore feathers, this deal. Better be gittin’ down on yore prayer bones, Trenton. Yore goin’ to git yores!”
The Mummy, a dried-up old Indian who guards a place called the Haunted Pueblo that was built by “ancient Zunis.”
Hopi Joe, a dried-up old Indian desert rat who ends up dead in a well full of “pizened minerals” known as the Well of Doom.
Arana the Spider, a bulldog-jawed vinegaroon who opines: “Afore that Trenton hombre ever dabs his loop on Home, his hide’ll be curin’ under a cloud o’ buzzards.”
Pablo Germez, devil-faced Mexican bandit, who is blown away by Demon Home because he says in a cowardly whimper, “Pero, señor—no! NO! Thees Border Eagle—he ees keel me! Do not send Pablo to be keeled by thees Border Eagle!”
Action scenes involving these and other individuals are strung together like exploding firecrackers (a simile Two-Gun himself might have jabbed up). Smoke-wagons roar in Suicide Valley, in the Sunblaze Mountains, in Devil’s Gorge, near Tombstone Peak, at the edge of Goathoof Basin: Whinng! Crrash! Bam-bam-bam! Bang-bang-bang-bang! Brrang-bram! Bam-slam! There is an attempt to croak Trigger Trenton by feeding him poisoned coffee, which our sensitive hero circumvents by deliberately and coldbloodedly feeding it to a cat instead. There is another attempt to croak Trenton by tossing him into a pit filled with rattlesnakes. And finally there is a climactic duel between the Border Eagle and Demon Home, in which the king of all smuggling kings is unmasked and our hero finds himself staring in amazement into the face of none other than Hob Lipe, the bald SV Ranch cook (“Baldy Cook”—get it?).
Trenton’s brain worked faster than his dazed muscles during that split clock tick when the two men stooped to pick up their six-guns from underfoot.
The Eagle’s lightning flash of memory covered back to the time when he had first come to Suicide Valley. Hob Lipe, who had faked a crippled leg as part of his disguise, had in reality been the great Demon Home himself!
No one would suspect a ranch cook of being Demon Home. [No one except any reader with an IQ above 50.] Yet from the kitchen of Max Sumpter’s ranch, the shaven-skulled Hob Lipe had directed the greatest smuggling ring on the border, using his days off to visit his hide-out lair on Tombstone Peak.
And a lot of days off he took, too, once Trigger Trenton showed up in Suicide Valley.
The Border Eagle finally perforates Horne/Lipe with the same bullet Horne/Lipe used to salivate Trenton’s brother. But not before there is considerably more gunplay (Brrum! Brrrt! Spang! Brrrom!) and Trigger is forced to seek refuge behind “a silvery-gray hedge of ignota.”
Ignota hedges, a.k.a. ignota brush, turn up elsewhere in THE BORDER EAGLE, and in a couple of Tompkins’ other Phoenix Westerns as well. A typical Arizona border-country plant? Well, no, not hardly. Two-Gun’s research (if in fact he did much research in those halcyon pre-war days) sometimes failed him, yielding bizarre as well as inaccurate results.
Ignota, you see, is neither a hedge nor a bushy plant.
It’s a type of moss.
Walker Tompkins not only invented the world’s first rhinestone cowboy; he invented the one and only Incredible Shrinking Buckaroo, who was able to avoid hot lead by crawling behind a patch of moss!