Western novels by female authors

 

My earlier post about western novels was so popular, I decided to pick up this entry I had earlier posted only to the WesternPulps e-mail group (remember those?). It's about western novels (and some short stories) that are written by female authors. I was reading these for an essay I later used in a collection of my western-themed book of articles. This is a bit skimpy at times, but I don't have the time to edit it. Here's hoping it suffices. 

Helen Hunt Jackson: Ramona: very popular in its time, but seems forgotten now. Must admit that I didn't finish the book, as the style and narration felt so dated, but interesting nevertheless in its portrayal of the oppression of Indians.

B. M. Bower: The Chip of the Flying U: I didn't get into Bower's "yuh mangy polecat" style, so I wrote more about her influence and place in the history of western fiction. I found an Elmer Kelton quote that Bower's sales diminished when the audience found out she's a woman.

Dorothy M. Johnson: The Hanging Tree: Johnson is a great short story writer, but for some reason I couldn't get into this, maybe there were too many characters for such a short length (90 pages in a Ballantine pb) or then it was because Johnson couldn't concentrate more fully on the woman in the lead (it seems she stopped writing westerns for a long time after having this frustrating experience with the editors (of Saturday Evening Post, I believe) - or then she just wasn't a novelist. Not bad, though, in any meaning of the word. Haven't seen the film, unfortunately.

Jane Barry: A Time in the Sun: I couldn't find much info on Barry, but seems like she wrote some other historical novels as well, but is largely forgotten today. Her western from 1962 is a Haycox-influenced novel about two women abducted by Indians and attempts to rescue them which have large political consequences. Barry turns the focus at times on the women themselves, not just the heroes trying to save them, and one of them doesn't want to leave his Indian husband. A bit slow, but interesting, and based on what Barry says in her foreword, she really did her homework. You can find this on Kindle, if you're interested. I read this based on her entry in The Twentieth Century Western Writers, which is still a valuable reference work.

Marguerite Noble: Filaree: this was a nice surprise, a very touching portrait of life in early 20th century Arizona, written from a perspective of a woman trying to come up with her indifferent and at times violent husband who tries to make the woman abandon his family, and her large bunch of kids. This really felt real and lived throughout, and I believe Noble based the story on her mother's life. I believe this was also mentioned in TCWW, but I don't think Noble has an entry there of her own.

JoAnn Levy: For California's Gold: a tale of the California Gold Rush told from the viewpoint of a woman whose husband forces them to go searching for gold, with tragic consequences. Suffers from being a bit too nice, though several people die in the course of the book. It's also too literary with some narrative techniques that I found implausible, especially from a diary-like narration. I wouldn't have read this, and possibly not many know about JoAnn Levy, but I received this book from a Finnish professor who had lived in the US and read lots of westerns during his time there and donated the books to the Finnish Western Society. (The books are in my cellar and I don't really know what to do with them. I'll never be able to read so many westerns in my lifetime.)

Kathleen Kent: The Outcasts: a pretty tough novel for a female writer, contains some harsh violence, but for some reason I didn't feel much interest in the characters. This was the newest novel I read for the article.

I also read short stories by Jane Candia Coleman and Peggy Simson Curry. The former's "Moving On" was superb with original characters, highly recommended. This was in the book The Morrow Anthology of Great Western Short Stories, edited by Jon Tuska and Vicki Piekarski. The anthology looks very well done by and large, with lots of forgotten pulp and female writers. Peggy Simson Curry's "Geranium House" was in the anthology A Century of Great Western Stories, edited by John Jakes (at least in name, maybe he had some assistant working on this also). I didn't really care for the humorous story, but I liked reading about Curry in the short introduction. The story came out originally in SEP or Collier's. (I didn't mention Curry in my article.)

I also tried to read Mari Sandoz, but her style wore me down. I understood maybe half of what was going down in The Tom-Walker. I tried Cheyenne Autumn, but as it isn't a novel per se, I didn't try to force my way through it. I understood from an on-line essay that her publishers tried to diminish her use of the old slang, and you can rest assured they should've tried harder.

Three westerns from the sixties

Here's a summary of three western novels from the sixties I recently read in quick succession. One of the books was a hardback originally, two others were paperbacks. I read the books in Finnish translation, hence the books in the picture are in Finnish. 

D. B. Newton: On the Dodge (Berkley 1962): Bannister, wanted by law for killing a man in a fight, finds himself in a town getting tangled up in the fight against the railroad contractor and the landgrabbers. One of the books in Newton's Bannister series. Bannister is a flawed man, but he can take care of himself.

Wayne D. Overholser: The Bitter Night (Macmillan 1961): a fine thriller set almost entirely in a stagecoach station.

Reese Sullivan (Giles A. Lutz): The Demanding Land (Ace Double 1966): a man returns to his hometown after having been suspected of a murder and ends up fighting the father and brother of the dead man. At the same time he sets up his own ranch. Not very tight plotwise, but I liked Lutz's angular style and his eye for peculiar details, such as poisoning wolves with strychnine and selling wild horses to the English for the Boer War.

I thought that Newton's book was the best of the bunch, but I noticed I have a hard time remembering what actually happened in the book. All were quite hardboiled, and with the exception of Overholser, there were no real heroes, and with Overholser the main character is just an ordinary man.

There's one thing about westerns, though: they don't really seem personal to me. In noir and hardboiled, you find more books in which the writers reveal themselves, their fears, desires and dreams, but in westerns this is quite rare. H. A. DeRosso is one exception. I haven't yet read Arnold Hano's Flint, which reportedly has the same plot as one of Jim Thompson's novels (and Hano was his editor in Lion Books). There are more literary westerns, such as the books by Max Evans, which have this personal quality.

Dorothy M. Johnson: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and A Man Called Horse

I've been going through some American Western classics that have never been translated in Finnish, for some reason or another (someone might remember I read Thomas Berger's Little Big Man over a year ago; this has to do with the same project). First I tackled Michael Ondaatje's pretty cryptic The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. I can't say I understood all of it, but nevertheless managed through (and even wrote an essay on it!).

Secondly, I read two short stories by Dorothy M. Johnson, in the collection called Indian Country. Now, she seems to be a bona fide American classic, but she's never been translated in Finnish, and I can't see why not. She's a very good writer, with a somewhat hardboiled and even modernist understated style to her writing ("less is more", one might say), and her stories are actually closer to the later cycle of revisionist Westerns than the classic Westerns.

"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance", possibly her best known short story, differs greatly from John Ford's film, and to its advantage, I might say. I for one am more interested in the seedy characters of Johnson than the pleasantries of James Stewart or the macho posturing of John Wayne. Johnson's Ranse Foster (Stoddard in the film) is an unpleasant and uppity young man who almost deserves to get whipped by Liberty Valance, and Bert Barricune - the film's Tom Doniphon (I don't know why they changed the names) - isn't the brave and courageous man of Ford's film. He even ends up in jail in Johnson's story. The ending is also different, and better than in the film, in my mind, but you'll have to read the story to find out.

John Ford's film is deservedly a classic, though it has its setbacks, but "A Man Called Horse" is definitely better than the sensational film. Here Johnson produces a dignified narrative of a man captured by the Crows (in the film they are Sioux). Johnson's story doesn't have the exploitative self-torture scenes of the film, and it's more mundane, which makes it seem more realistic. The ending is touching.

I didn't have the time to read more Johnson, though I definitely intend to. Her "The Hanging Tree" was also made into a film, and here's an interesting essay on the troubled history of the short story or novellette (or novella). The writer doesn't really seem to like Johnson's writing, and I think she's mistaken when she says Johnson relies on stereotypes, but the story behind "The Hanging Tree" is intriguing. Feels like Johnson stopped writing Westerns after the frustrating experience.

Stark House Western Classics

There's been some talk about the idea of reprinting classic hardboiled and noirish westerns of the fifties and sixties. I compiled such a list earlier on my blog here (I called the list, jokingly, Hard Case Western) and the Spinetingler Mag maven Brian Lindenmuth has been talking about the same kind of westerns on his Facebook site.

Only now I noticed that Stark House Press has started doing this. Earlier they reprinted three of Harry Whittington's noir westerns, and they reprinted one by Arnold Hano, the Lion Books editor, and now they've done a two-fer by Clifton Adams. This is incredible! I only hope I'd have more time on my hands.

If anyone wants to work along these lines, the list I compiled can be used. I only wish my name would be mentioned somewhere.

Science fiction westerns

I'm editing a collection of my writings on genre and pulp literature. Included is an essay on horror and sci-fi western hybrids. I'd added some comments in English at the end of the text, possibly snatched from the Fictionmags or other e-mail list discussions, but I won't be incorporating them into my essay (or at least all of them), it's long enough as it is. But here they are, for your reading pleasure:

Did you ever read FOR TEXAS AND ZED by Zach Hughes? (Popular Library, 1976) It's my all time favorite in the SF-about-Texas sub-genre, and it's a pretty good story to boot!

From the jacket copy:

"Spacemen from Texas on Earth had settled this remote planet centuries ago. While the rest of the galaxy was being divided between two vast warring empires, Planet Texas preserved its
independence, created its own unique civilization, developed its own advanced technology. But now all that Planet Texas was and all that it believed in were threatened, as the super-powers of space moved in for the kill."

William Rotsler's space western novel (THE FAR FRONTIER?)?

Eric Frank Russell, "The Illusionaries," PLANET STORIES 11/51, reprinted in Andre Norton's anthology SPACE PIONEERS.

David Drake's Hammer Slammer spinoff, The Sharp End, though set in a galaxy far far away, was structured along the lines of Sergio Leone's western, Fistful of Dollars.

PERTWEE, HIRAM
Julian F. Grow:
The Fastest Gun Dead (ss) If Mar 1961
The 7th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F, ed. Judith Merril, Simon &
Schuster 1962
The Sword of Pell the Idiot (nv) F&SF Apr 1967
The Starman of Pritchard’s Creek (nv) If Dec 1968
Bonita Egg (nv) F&SF Sep 1969
Formula for a Special Baby (nv) F&SF Dec 1969

Phyllis Eisenstein's "In the Western Tradition". Wonderful story. (A time viewer story, one of my pet categories.) F&SF, March 1981

William F. Wu's story and novel of a robot in the west: "Hong's Bluff" and HONG ON THE RANGE.

I dug out Eric Frank Russell's "The Illusionaries" (PLANET STORIES 1951, reprinted in Andre Norton's anthology SPACE PIONEERS), and that's the category it falls into also. Aliens land on
earth, are accustomed to enslaving lesser species by controlling their perceptions, try it on humans and it works fine, but decide that they can't make it work, get in their spaceship, and check out.
The end of the story suggests that the humans have been creating an illusion for the aliens and invokes Wyatt Earp and Jesse James.

All of Quinn Yarbro's vampire novels are historicals as well, and "In the Face of Death" is set muchly in the West of American Indians and San Francisco pre-Civil War ... and in the South during the war.

Howard Waldrop, with "Night of the Cooters" (Omni, April '87; also in the Waldrop collection NIGHT OF THE COOTERS, and in Kevin J. Anderson's GLOBAL DISPATCHES anthology) which has Texas Rangers battling H.G. Wells' Martian invaders -- of WAR OF THE WORLDS fame -- at the same time they are landing elsewhere on Earth (1898?). A gem.

SF/Westerns:
Anybody yet mention Jonathan Lethem, _Girl in Landscape_ (1998), which makes complicated (but perfectly recognizeable) play with _The Searchers_ .

WiIliam Tenn's story "Eastward Ho!" which, I think, was about the Indians crowding the white man out of America.

The Lando series as by Tex Kirby?

One of the Finnish Landos:
"Don't Show Mercy, Lando"

There are fourteen books published in Finnish paperback series as by "Tex Kirby". The books are westerns and they feature one Brad Lando as the hero. Now, there seems to be at least two Lando books published by British cheapo publisher John Spencer (in their Badger paperback imprint), called Lone Gun Renegade (see photo below) and Arizona Manhunt (both 1971). But I can't seem to be able to find any info on the other Brad Lando books. In the Finnish editions they are clearly announced to be translated from English as they have such original titles as "Wildcat Breed" and "Trial by Gunsmoke". For some reason or another, Lone Gun Renegade isn't one of the Finnish Landos.

But there's nothing on them in any place I can think of. Pat Hawk's pseudonym catalogue credits John S. Glasby having written two Lando titles, but there simply are no other Tex Kirbys or Landos in Abebooks for sale - I even went through all the "original" titles in the Finnish Tex Kirby books and checked whether Abebooks had them.

These could of course be anything: something penned by German writers with hoax English titles; something written by English writer or writers, but left unpublished in the UK and published only in Scandinavia (or even only in Finland); something penned by someone else entirely, but published for some reason in Finnish under different name or title. Similar things have happened in the past.

Edit: I edited this, since there were some errors in my posting. Pat Hawk's pseudonyms catalogue does indeed list Lone Gun Renegade and Arizona Manhunt as written by John S. Glasby, but other than that, there's nothing.

Tuesday's Overlooked Films: Finnish Westerns, part one

The publicity photo of High and Mighty, 1944

The Festival of Finnish Cinema was held in Turku, Finland last weekend. I'm part of the group organizing the festival and it was my idea to show this year Finnish westerns films. You might ask: "what in the name of God are Finnish westerns?" But in fact westerns are an European invention. The first westerns were written and/or directed by Europeans, and there are lots of westerns that have been made elsewhere than in the USA. Italy of course is the best known of these countries that have produced lots of their own westerns, but he have also Germany, Soviet Union, France, the Great Britain, India, Japan... and Finland.

There are six feature films made in Finland that can be called westerns - five, if you're more strict about the genre definition. There are some more if you look at TV movies, short indie movies and TV commercials and such. There are also some films that utilize the same motifs and types of plots as many western movies - many of these are situated in Lapland or the Ostrobothnia area in the Western coast of Finland with its violent "häjy" culture. These films are truly about the edge between the civilization and the frontier, as the more actual Finnish westerns are not - they are merely about playing with the conventions of the genre and trying to cash in on with the more international fads.

The first real Finnish western film is a borderline case, as it's set in Mexico and resembles more the Zorro stories and films. Herra ja ylhäisyys ("High and Mighty" might be a good translation; see photo above) was made in 1944 and at the time it was the most expensive film made in Finland. The film was based on Simo Penttilä's series of books of lieutenant general T. J. A. Heikkilä, Finnish soldier working for the Mexican government. The books deal more with Heikkilä's amorous adventures, and the film follows suit. I haven't actually seen this (at least so I can remember something about it) and it wasn't shown at the festival because of the technical limitations (it's available only on nitrate film), so I can't really comment.

Director and screenwriter Aarne Tarkas, a somewhat legendary figure in his own right, made the next Finnish westerns. The Villi Pohjola AKA Wild North trilogy doesn't represent the true western thematic, as the films don't take place in the American Wild West. Instead they're set in a Never-never-land that shares some of the characteristics as the actual westerns: people ride horses, shoot six-guns, wear stetson hats, dig gold, but then they also have machine guns (Stens, to be exact), drive jeeps and wear wrist watches. And then there's the startling fact that the American Indians are replaced with the Sami people! It makes the films pretty funny - unintentionally of course - at times, but it also goes to show that the Indians in real westerns are a fictional construction.

Tamara Lund in The Gold of the Wild North

I didn't have a chance to see the first Wild North movie (simply called The Wild North, 1955) at the festival, but it's pretty easily available on DVD and elsewhere. The other two films are more difficult to come by. The second film, The Gold of the Wild North (1963), is according to some the best of the three films. It's fast-moving, though there's also the usual sloppiness of director Tarkas with too long scenes and a very bad climax at the end (it's actually quite incomprehensible - the words fail me). The film tells about the three Vorna brothers who are digging for gold somewhere in the utopic North of the films. The plot is pretty thin and meaningless in the end, as this is a mere spectacle of the beautiful Finnish scenery, fist fights and horseback riding. The film has also the charm of the very sexy young Tamara Lund - she plays a foxy lady who's also good with guns.

(Here's Tapio Rautavaara (of the London Olympics fame) singing one of the songs in the first Wild North movie.)

The third Wild North movie, called The Secret Valley of the Wild North (another one from 1963), is the rarest of the bunch as it's been last shown in TV in the early 1980's and it's not available on DVD (nor it was available on VHS either). It's also the wildest one, as it boasts a science-fictional theme of the lost civilization. The Vorna brothers run into a gang of bad guys who are searching for the secret valley they have a map of, but the Sami Indians with their medicine man fight back hard. There is some hilarious action and also some unintentionally funny stuff about the Sami Indians, and the film is fast-moving enough not to be boring, but there are also some scenes that must've looked pretty embarrassing even in the early sixties, such as the two of the Vorna brothers trying to pick up some Sami girls who are out doing Midsummer magic tricks.

The Vorna brothers in The Gold of the Wild North

The Wild North films have largely been seen as parodies of the western genre (and I thought so earlier, too), but having seen the two films I can't concur. It's obvious Aarne Tarkas was pretty enthusiastic about his efforts to bring western thematics and iconography into Finland without having to resort to doing a fake version of Wild West. There's of course humour - some of its largely unintentional, as I've pointed out -, but that's not the same thing. The stuff about the Sami people substituting Indians was a critical mistake, but now it seems only funny. (I don't know how the Sami feel about it themselves.)

One thing about the Wild North films still: the Finnish horses look too big, too muscular compared to the horses in the American or Italian westerns. They don't look right. Some of the guns also look dead wrong (not to mention the Stens), but I can live with that.

Coming up in the 2nd part: the western films of Spede Pasanen (and possibly a cable channel oddity called The Gold Train to Fort Montana).

Here's a stylish song with some parodic overtones, sung by Rose-Marie Precht, from The Gold of the Wild North. (More Overlooked Movies here.)

Patrick DeWitt: The Sisters Brothers

Catchy title, ain't it? I'm in a minority here, but the title is probably the best thing in the book that's been celebrated everywhere it's been published, including Finland. (Patrick DeWitt also came here to promote the translation. I was away travelling, otherwise I would've made an interview with him.)

Okay, I'll take some of that back. The Sisters Brothers is a book filled with lots of funny stuff, some of it absurd, some of it downright scary or nasty, some of it so disjointed it doesn't have much to do with the rest of the book. There's something demanding respect in the way DeWitt writes a western novel without any of the usual western themes. There's no juxtaposition of Wilderness and Civilization, there's no Shane character trying to decide into which world he belongs, there are no cattle drives, there are no lone cowboys, etc., etc.

The book is filled with intentional anachronisms, such as a hired killer demanding a low-carb dish, since he wants to lose weight. Almost none of these felt funny to me, only clever and not very clever at that. The forced cleverness was the most annoying thing in the book to me. The irony felt too obvious and too overworked. I thought this might be called "The Hipsters Brothers", since this is clearly directed to urban 25-30-year-olds who dwell in irony. Which is of course okay with me, if there are new western readers this way. But this wasn't for me, though I somewhat respect the gesture.

And I totally understand this is an old fart speaking here, but there are better ironic western novels out there, such as Charles Portis's True Grit. I'd also call forth Charles Locke's The Hell-Bent Kid. I admit I'm not particularly well-read in the revisionist anti-western western here, but some of the most-mentioned include Roy Chanslor's The Ballad of Cat Ballou, Ishmael Reed's Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Thomas Berger's Little Big Man and E. L. Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times (made into a movie).

I don't see a line leading from them to DeWitt's novel. I don't honestly know what that means.

Where's Lucky Luke?

The Official Blog of the Western Fictioneers, Professional Authors of Traditional Western Novels and Short Stories lists Top Ten Western comics. See the list here. Seems pretty nostalgic to me, but what's missing almost completely are the European comics. There are Blueberry (on 10) and Ken Parker (tie on 21), but where's Lucky Luke, where's Tex Willer, where's Cocco Bill, where's Yakari, Buddy Longway, Jerry Spring, Oumpah-pah... I know, I know, not many of these have been available in English, but here's hoping they will be!

Edit: a friend of mine pointed out there are more European comics included: Alejandro Jodorowsky's Bouncer on 19, Victor de la Fuente's Amargo on 20, Hermann and Greg's much-praised Comanche (tie on 25) and Giraud's and Charlier's (known for Blueberry) Jim Cutlass (tie on 32). 

Friday's Forgotten Book: Zane Grey Western Magazine, August 1970

When I was sick last week, I read a couple of stories from an old mag a friend of mine had sent me. It was an August, 1970 issue of Zane Grey Western Magazine, a magazine I'd never seen (mainly because these don't often travel to Finland) and I was curious about it. I thought maybe reading a Western short story or two might be manageable even on my sick bed.

The lead story of the issue was by "Romer Zane Grey", who was supposed to be Zane Grey's son, but was actually Tom Curry. At least according to the Fictionmags Index; I'd earlier thought that Bill Pronzini and Jeffrey Wallmann used the pseudonym, at least in the two or three paperbacks that came out of the pages of Zane Grey Western Magazine. The Romer Zane Grey story in the issue is called "Last Stand at Indigo Flats" and it's basically a standard Western yarn, full of six-gun action. The lead character is Zane Grey's Laramie Nelson, but he could be any Western hero, just give him a different name and you have a different story. On its own, "Last Stand" can stand comparison to any pulp story: it is full of action and full of tension, with quite many intersecting plots and twists going on at the same time. Whoever wrote this, Tom Curry, Bill Pronzini or Jeffrey Wallmann, he knew how to do his stuff. Not all of the plots are handled with equal depth - one of them is actually resolved pretty badly - but I can live with that.

The other story I read from the issue was a sequel to Bret Harte's classic story, "Luck of Roaring Camp". The new story, "Reunion at Roaring Camp" was said to have been written by "Robert Hart Davis", which was of course a house name. The sequel is said to start a new series, called "Bret Harte Country", i.e. stories about mining life. I don't know how many stories appeared in this series. "Reunion at Roaring Camp" is an amusing little tale, nothing more, but nothing less; I think this should be reprinted in some massive Western anthology, collecting various and ephemeral pieces of literary history.

The other writers in the issue are James Hines (a reprint from a 1955 Action-Packed Western), Gladwell Richardson, Glenn Shirley, Doris Curda (her only story according to the FM Index), William Heuman and R. Brennin Ward (his only story). Heuman is the only name I recognize.

More forgotten books at Patti Abbott's blog.

Hard Case Western

I've said it as a comment to a blog post here and there, but let's make it official: besides their great Hard Case Crime line, Charles Ardai should've set up also a line called Hard Case Western. Many of the Western novels of the late fourties, fifties and early sixties could also be catered to the audience of the hardboiled and noir literature, and many of the books from bygone decades would very well be worth reprinting.

This idea came to me many years ago, but I was reminded of it, when Cullen Callagher started posting reviews of hardboiled westerns on his delightful blog, Pulp Serenade. You can see some of the reviews here (Harry Whittington: Desert Stake-Out), here (A.S. Fleischmann's Yellowleg, basis for an early Peckinpah film), here (Frank Castle's Dakota Boomtown) and here (Gil Brewer's rare entry into the genre, Some Must Die), but do read all of his blog, I guarantee it's worth your while.

All of those novels could well be published under the Hard Case Western by-line. I have some other recommendations:

Marvin Albert: Posse at High Pass, Fawcett 1964 (Albert wrote also excellent crime novels as Al Conroy and different other nyms; this is a great Western thriller)
Jack April: Feud at Five Rivers, Dodd Mead 1955 (Broadway script writer's only Western novel, great noirish atmosphere in a story of revenge)
Frank Castle: Brand of Hate, Tower 1966 (Cullen said nice things about Dakota Boomtown, this is a very good tale about guy who sells guns to Indians, but winds up being double- and triple-crossed)
Merle Constiner: Short-Trigger Man, Ace 1964 (if there's a blueprint of a hardboiled Western, this is it)
William R. Cox: Comanche Moon, McGraw Hill 1959 (unbearably suspenseful thriller of the people trapped by Indians, noir in its tones of despair and disappointment)
H.A. DeRosso: .44 (need I say anything more about this?)
Steve Frazee: Desert Guns, Dell 1957 (became a bad film with Roger Moore, but the book is gripping, full of action)
Philip Ketchum: Harsh Reckoning, Ballantine 1962 (is there a more noir title than that?)
James B. Chaffin (Giles Lutz): The Wolfer, Belmont 1962 (weird story about wolf-hunters, living in caves, full of action)
Richard Meade (also known as Ben Haas): Big Bend, Doubleday 1962 (man has to go to Mexico to avenge wrongs)
D.B. Newton: The Wolf Pack, Bantam 1953 (great thriller about a gang terrorizing a whole city, compares to The Violent Saturday and preceded it by two years)
Dudley Dean (also wrote as Dean Owen): Six-Gun Vengeance, Fawcett 1953 (great claustrophobic and hysterical noir)
Gordon Shirreffs: Too Tough to Die, Avon 1964 (just gotta love that title! Boetticher-like minimalism and hardboiledness)
Luke Short: Blood on the Moon, 1948 (I haven't read this one, but the film that was based on this, with Mitchum, would be just too great to pass)

Any early Western by Brian Garfield would also fit the bill, and so would anything by Donald Hamilton, whom Hard Case Crime has already reprinted. A later addition could be Jack Ehrlich's The Fastest Gun in the Pulpit from 1973: funny and violent. I'm also sure many new writers would like to try their hands at a Western, and I'm sure someone like James Reasoner has a noir Western in him, and so do Joe Lansdale, Tom Piccirilli and others.

Having said all of the above, I do know that the market for Western paperbacks is limited and that the market for paperbacks is diminishing, but who says one can't have a dream?

Rare Clint Eastwood western

Over a week ago, at the annual Summer meeting of the Finnish Western Society, paradoxically called "pukkujoulut ("Lidl Christmas" or something like that), held in Oulu we watched a rare Western movie from the fifties that's reportedly never been released on VHS or DVD. Ambush at Cimarron Pass (1958) would be totally forgotten these days if it didn't star the young Clint Eastwood in his first film to get a screen credit. He's billed third in the opening credits, but there was a rerelease - probably later in the sixties, after his Italian Westerns - in which he was credited first.

The film is not a B-picture, as someone might have an urge to call it. It's more like a cheap A-western, shot in black & white Cinemascope (or actually Regalscope). The film was written by prolific pulpster and later prolific B-picture writer John K. Butler (whose Steve Midnight stories from the Dime Detective are very good), and I think this shows in the dialogue. It's very crispy at times: "What happened to him? He's much nicer now than before." "The Indians made him nice."

Otherwise the film's virtues pretty much end there. Eastwood isn't very good - he plays a young, hot-headed Southerner, who's in with a ragtag crowd of other Southerners who haven't given up the fight after the Civil War. Eastwood grins uncomfortably through the film, and one won't give him a long future on silver screen. Scott Brady, the first-billed star of the flick, plays a Yankee officer who leads a small gang of soldiers. They end up ambushed by some Indians - we never see much of them and they act pretty stupidly. (Which is of course a Western cliché, but these guys are really dumb. And there's not too many close-ups of them. Maybe their contract with the studio didn't say anything about the close-ups. Actually there are not too many close-ups of other actors either.)

My biggest problem with the film - beside that it's wooden and doesn't pack much suspense - is how the only female character is portrayed very stupidly. Her whole family is slaughtered, even to the smallest kid, and yet she tries to hit on all the men she sees, with a greedy lust in her eyes. Maybe she's gone into a severe shock after traumatic events? And yeah, okay, the film ends more abruptly than anything I've seen in a long time.

Eastwood has been reported saying that Ambush at Cimarron Pass is "the lousiest Western ever made". In this interview he says the film almost destroyed his career, because he thought he never wanted to act again. (His wife talked him out of the decision, and then came Rawhide.) Is it because of Eastwood the film has never been released on video? Has he put a ban on it? It seems the film can be seen occasionally on something called Western Channel. Our version was taped from a small Finnish cable channel in the mid-eighties and transferred to DVD. We had a great time watching the film, as we had a small cinema at our use. I bet there are not that many people alive who have seen this on silver screen.

There's a long comment on IMDb here, which contradicts a lot of things I've said here. It is true that I fell asleep in the middle and maybe all the good parts came during those 5-10 minutes. See also this blog post. Seems like there's an illegal download doable from here.

A pair of Morgan Kane jeans

I spotted this pair of vintage Morgan Kane jeans at the UFF thrift store earlier today. I believe they are from the seventies. The size was a kiddies' (or a small lady's) size, so no point for me to buy them. Unless as a trophy. Must think about this further.

The Hell-Bent Kid: Reprise

Sorry, haven't been blogging much lately, but here's a comment that just came to an old post here. It's about Charles Locke's Western novel, The Hell-Bent Kid, which I reviewed over a year ago.

I've just finished this book. Found it in a garage sale and almost didn't read it! So glad I did. Your review is excellent. Locke wrote brilliantly really. I note, from several reviews I've managed to track down, the film altered the ending making to something less tragic. However, in so doing they obviously failed the author by turning what could well have been something quite remarkable into a film some reviewers saw as forgettable. That was also tragic. Though I gather there were some memorable scenes. I would very much like to see the movie, but the chances seem slim as it is very rare. The book, however, I will keep as it is, in my mind, a stand-out Western.

I didn't know the film is rare - maybe it's not available as DVD -, but I think I know at least one person who has it on VHS. I'm not sure if I've seen it myself, probably not.

Monte Hellman: The Shooting

I just saw Monte Hellman's enigmatic western film The Shooting, for the first time on big screen, I think. I had seen the movie earlier at least two times, but both times from television only, and with a wrong picture ratio. I'm loving the film more each time I see it.

There are lots of things to like about The Shooting. It may not suit any western fan's tastes, and I believe there are more people who are not into westerns, but like Hellman's film, than there are people who love westerns and still like Hellman's film. Get it? That might've been a bit convoluted... The atmosphere is very eerie, nothing is ever very clearly explained and there's a feel of absurd theatre. The photography is great, with people running in a distance from one edge of a picture to another. There also lots of extreme close-ups, like when we see Jack Nicholson's eyes for the first time. There's not much action and when there is, it's not exactly very thrilling, but that's not what Hellman has set out to do.

Someone might ask: "What has set out to do then?", and I have to admit the answer is not very clear. There's not much symbolism in the film, which coincides with the feel of absurdism. Someone might get some clues from the names of the characters, which may - or may not - point to some moments in American cultural history. Hellman himself said that the shooting in the end is meant to resemble the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby - there's a newsreel grittiness to the picture, alright, but otherwise I find it pretty far-fetched.

What's the most important thing about this film, to me, at least, is that it's a perfect embodiment of American cinematic art, emphasis on "American". The Shooting, regardless of the absurdist feel to it, is essentially an American film. There are no elements of French New Wave brought to it. The Shooting is not self-reflective, as something by Jean-Luc Godard might be. Even though it's a piece of absurdism, The Shooting is still a B-western, populated with smirking hired guns, saloons, horses, saddles, six-shooters, Indians, a tough lady, deserts. You could watch this in a drive-in and, well, feel cheated, but you wouldn't be able easily to recognize it as art.

The later American art films, of the late sixties and early seventies, have a European feel to them, and I've always thought there's something phony about it, starting from Bonnie and Clyde. Not so with The Shooting. Hellman's western is something Budd Boetticher might have done had he gone on directing westerns in the sixties, and it's also something Elmore Leonard's western novels, like Valdez Is Coming (which admittedly came a bit later), were going to. The idea of one man suddenly standing alone in the desert (take a look at how Leonard's "The Captives", the basis for Boetticher's The Tall T, starts) is something essentially American.

The same could be said about Hellman's other 1966 western, Ride the Whirlwind, and even more so, but The Shooting remains the most important of the two.

This isn't very good, but check it out anyway: a later-made trailer for The Shooting.

Great western illo for the weekend

I emptied my cell phone and found this, a photo of a mid-to-late sixties Finnish western digest mag, called Lännensarja (The Western Series). The text is German in origin (forgot the writer and the title), but the illustration is clearly American. I don't recognize the artist - anyone? The picture is full of intense waiting and impending doom, even though it's "only" a picture of a man smoking his cigarette.

The - pretty inept - Finnish title means "The Left-Handed Man Disappears".

Reading doesn't pay: Gregg Hurwitz: The Program

As I mentioned, I've been silent here for some days now, mainly because I've been both working frantically and trying to spend some time with my kids. Ottilia - who, you may remember, is currently living outside of Finland - is spending her summer holidays here and since her school starts later than is usual in Finland, we've been keeping Kauto away from daycare. The result: how the hell am I supposed to work frantically?!

Anyway, it seems the zombie anthology I mentioned while back is finished and making its way into the printers next week. Another one bites the dust - or something to that effect.

What I meant to say was that reading doesn't pay. I bought The Program by Gregg Hurwitz, an American crime writer, a while back from a thrift store only because it was cheap (80 cents, it says - and it's a hardcover, no DJ though) and because I vaguely remembered hearing Hurwitz's name somewhere. Then I noticed he has a story in Jennifer Jordan's acclaimed anthology Uncage Me, and as I was looking for something to read, I decided to dip into The Program.

Not a wise move. You know, I've been busy. I should be reading more, I should be writing more, I should, I should, I should... The book seemed interesting, a bit hardboiled, a bit like a private eye novel. The premise was intriguing: a rich Hollywood producer asks a retired police officer to get back his adult stepdaughter from a mind cult, run by a charismatic mystery man. Okay, I said, this is original, even though, I think, Lew Archer had a similar case. I lingered on, when the action didn't begin. There were many interesting scenes, especially those that take place in the meetings of the cult.

But finally, after reading this for over a week, I had to confess: I don't care. The problems of the lead character and his wife seemed overworked (and they were continuation to a book I haven't read, presumably an earlier one in the same series). There wasn't enough action or suspense. There were scenes in which I was thinking: how can this happen, these guys, an undercover cop and a cult member who's being under surveillance, just get away and walk into a meeting with psychologies to help the girl? I think I stopped reading The Program something like 50 pages before the end, because it never seemed very believable, even though Hurwitz had been clearly doing his homework about how mind cults work.

This reminded me of 3:10 to Yuma, the new version from the Elmore Leonard story. The film was at times well made and it had some good action scenes (but too much posturing), but the most interesting thing about it was that it was about how mind cults work. Look at the scene in which Russell Crowe talks with his men about a member who got shot. It's exactly like the cult leader talks in Hurwitz's book. Crowe is a charismatic sociopath, who also gets to work inside Christian Bale's head. And here lies the problem within the film: it never resolves the questions it poses. Crowe is a scary psycho, yet he becomes like a father to Bale (and his older son). I don't understand what the writers were thinking. That becoming a father figure to a simple man who's had his share of tragedy (leg gone in Civil War) is something that can cure a sociopath? C'mon!

I digress. Suffice to say that I got finally to Allan Guthrie's Savage Night and we don't have the same problems there.

The cover for Reino Helismaa's western short stories

This book has been a long time coming - and it's not out for some time now. Perhaps in August. I'll let you know.

The book collects some ten of Finnish singer-songwriter Reino Helismaa's early western short stories, from the late 1930's and early 40's, and it will be published as a small paperback in a limited edition by the Finnish Western Society. The cover artist is Timo Ronkainen who delivered a great job! (I don't think I'll have to tell you who the editor of the book is.)

The book's title: The Village of the Outlaws and Other Western Short Stories.

Flemish 3D western

The most popular Flemish cartoon series ever, Suske en Wiske (Anu ja Antti in Finnish), has been made into a 3D animated film and it's a western! The characters look ugly, as they seem to always do in computer animation, but interesting nevertheless.

More Poika Vesanto

Instead of trying to write a Forgotten Friday entry, I'll post instead some more western book covers by the Finnish artist extraordinaire, Poika Vesanto.

I believe all the books depicted herein, with the exception of the Buxom Bill, are Swedish in origin.