Francis Lynde, Empire Builders (1907)

There are train spotters and railroad enthusiasts, but so far as I know, no one today writes fiction for this particular market. Anyway, not since Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express (1933). Travel by railway was still novel enough at the turn of the last century, however, to keep writers like Francis Lynde (1856–1930) selling books with plots about railroading.

This one is typical of his others and concerns a young superintendent of a line running from Denver into the Rocky Mountains. Stuart Ford is an ambitious fellow, who hatches a plan to extend the line to eventually connect Chicago and the West Coast. His chief competitor is the Transcontinental with its eye on hauling freight to and from the same regions of the West, profiting from the mining and crop-raising industries. In other words, there is a lot of money to be made for the railroad that can first lay its tracks there.

Francis Lynde, The Grafters (1904)

Francis Lynde came to fiction writing in mid-life and brought to his first published novel a worldly knowledge of business, law, finance, and politics. This novel of political intrigue in an unnamed state on the western plains also shows a gift for tight plotting, believable characters, and suspenseful storytelling.

Plot. A young lawyer, David Kent, takes a job as corporate attorney for the western division of a railway, the Western Pacific. A gang of corrupt politicians takes the governor’s office on a populist wave of discontent with the state’s eastern-owned railroads. They engineer legislation calling for state regulation of the industry. Then, with the help of a pliable judge, they get Kent’s railroad thrown into receivership.

The rest of the novel recounts Kent’s attempt to recover the railroad and put a stop to the “grafters” of the title. Added motivation comes with his loyalty to one of the railroad’s investors, Mrs. Brentwood. He wants to preserve her net worth for the sake of her two daughters, one of whom he has loved ever since a summer dalliance with her some years before.

Elinor Brentwood had fallen in love with the idealistic small-town lawyer, despite her mother’s wishes that she marry a much wealthier man. To acquire wealth and raise his stock in the eyes of Elinor’s mother, Kent came west to turn an inheritance into a fortune. Alas, he lost most of it instead. And now Elinor is being courted by a multi-millionaire, Brookes Ormsby.

Kent and Bucks grapple for a pistol

As the novel gets underway, Mrs. Brentwood has come west for her health, with her daughters and Ormsby in tow. They take up residence in the capital city, where Kent works against all odds to regain control of the Western Pacific before the receivers run it into the ground. Ormsby, unexpectedly, befriends his rival for Elinor’s heart and helps with his millions to undo the criminals and restore the railroad to its rightful owners.

Character. Kent is an idealistic young man, with a New England sense of fair play that makes him easily the prey of the unscrupulous and greedy. Lynde sets up the story as a journey of his growth to manhood. Cautious and resigned in the opening chapters, he learns that he can take risks and play hardball with the best of them.

Ormsby, meanwhile, shows some qualities of character himself, though he’d gladly win Elinor away from Kent. A prime example of the idle rich, with a yacht and winters in Florida, he is an easy candidate for being the novel’s hated and despicable villain. Instead, Lynde surprises us by casting him as a decent chap who decides to support Kent’s effort to save the railroad—all the time hoping that Elinor will come around.

There are other men of character appearing at key points throughout the novel. There’s Hildreth the newspaper editor, eager to help Kent expose the scoundrels in office. Marston, a high-ranking member of the Party provides a “Deep Throat” kind of encouragement to Kent during a chance meeting in the smoking car of a train. Several loyal trainmen and crew of the Western Pacific risk all in an exciting railway chase that finally ends with the arrest of the governor.

FFB: Francis Lynde, The Taming of Red Butte Western (1910)

Hat tip to Walker Martin who put me onto this author. Francis Lynde (1856-1930) was a prolific writer, with short fiction appearing in magazines like Munsey’s as early as 1894. A decade later, he began a long relationship with The Popular Magazine.

By 1910 when The Taming of Red Butte Western was published by Scribner’s, he’d already published six novels, plus a couple dozen titles in the magazines. In later years, three of his stories would find their way to film. I’ve now told you all I know about the man.

The plot. This is not a cowboy western, but an adventure story set in the west. The Red Butte Western of the title is a railroad line that runs across expanses of desert and mountain in the Southwest. You might call this one a rogue railroad, as it has been run rather fast and loose by dishonest men. Howard Lidgerwood, in chapter one, is reluctantly persuaded by the railroad’s new owner to whip it back into shape.

Lynde’s is a men’s world. There are 40-50 named male characters, nearly all of them employed by the railroad. Many have a checkered past. All that’s required of a man to survive in this outpost is “nerve and a good gun” (p. 35). Lynde swiftly sets up the initial conflict, and tensions quickly build. For starters, there is mystery aplenty. The railroad is the victim of sabotage and there’s only circumstantial evidence pointing to the perpetrators.

Trying to enforce reforms, Lidgerwood earns the ill will of many of the employees. He is first lampooned by them, then threatened and shot at by a gunman whose brother he has fired for dereliction of duty. Then he begins uncovering fishy details about a building and loan scheme that has left disgruntled investors empty-handed. All of this is just a sample.

Character. Lidgerwood is in the West partly of necessity, but Lynde is vague on the details. What we do know is that he is haunted by a sense of inadequacy and failure – in a word, cowardice.

He struggles with his temerity, while holding to a code of civilized behavior. He will not, for instance, fire another man simply for having a bad attitude. The man has to be guilty of some malfeasance. Likewise, he will not carry a gun, though frontier conditions clearly prevail in the settlements along the railroad.

Finally, the West is both the education and testing of the man. In attempting to “tame” the railroad, Lidgerwood is determined to set right what is wrong, no matter the consequences. And he will do it without compromising his principles. Proof that he is not a coward comes when he is willing to surrender his life rather than yield to murderous and uncivilized villains.