Michael Zimmer, Leaving Yuma

I was drawn to this recent novel by its theme—a perilous journey into Mexico, which as a subgenre of the western in both fiction and film continues to fascinate me. I already mentioned this a while ago in a review of The Wonderful Country. As a theme, it can be traced back at least as far as Stephen Crane, whose story “One Dash—Horses” (1896) tells of an American adventurer’s scary encounter with Mexican rurales.

Plot. In this nerve-jangling novel, the central character is a Yuma Prison inmate, who gets early release to lead a party of men into Sonora to deliver a ransom. The ransom is in the form of machine guns and ammunition for a brutal bandit, Chito Soto, who has taken over a garrison town during the revolution against Porfirio Díaz. The man is holding a man’s wife and two children, kidnapped from a train. The year is 1907.

J.T. Latham has been doing time at Yuma for smuggling consumer goods across the border. He knows the forbidding terrain south of Nogales from three years as a young captive of Yaqui Indians, who bear a savage intolerance for both Mexicans and norteamericanos. Capture means almost certain death by gruesome torture.

Sonoran desert

Getting the guns to Chito Soto is confounded by the high-handed demands of Davenport, the wealthy businessman paying the ransom; an ill-tempered and distrusting Arizona deputy sheriff; an Irish driver (the novel involves early motorized transportation); and two viciously untrustworthy Mexican indios. Latham is joined by an old friend, Luis Vega, the only man among the lot he can trust not to betray him.

Tension mounts as Latham and Vega deliver the first gun. But all well-laid plans soon begin to unravel as the novel spins into a downward spiral of treachery and sudden death. Before long, the two men are rescuing the remaining prisoners and making a punishing run for the border, pursued by Chito Soto’s soldados.

Storytelling style. While the storyline is not original, Zimmer fills it with so much suspense and so many surprises that he seems to be inventing the form. One of the least predictable is the character of Davenport’s wife, Abigail. In the routine hands of a lesser writer, she would have been sexy and copeless or a weepy, awkward burden.

Instead, Zimmer makes her bravely fearless and the possessor of unexpected skills that get Latham and Vega out of more than one life-threatening predicament. With the introduction of a woman, the novel also avoids the tempting prospects of steamy romance. Intent on saving their skins at all costs, they have no time to waste on hints of amorous attraction, so love does not bloom, not even in the end when safety is reached north of the border.

Sonoran desert mountains

And Zimmer has more than one trick up his own sleeve. There are cleverly ironic twists in the presentation of the story that nearly bend it in the direction of literary fiction. Not satisfied with a simple first-person narrative account of Latham’s adventure, which would have been finely told all by itself, Zimmer invents for it what can be called a rhetorical situation.

Latham is supposedly telling his story some 30 years later to a collector of people’s personal narratives for the Federal Writers Project. What we are reading is a verbatim transcript, with interruptions caused by a power outage during the recording and his comments about the recording equipment. The 1930s feel of the text is heightened by the editorial “bleeping” of Latham’s coarser language (h---, d---d, and so on).

Passing itself off as a long monologue, the novel also rambles believably at times, with flashbacks and digressions. Along the way, there are loose ends, unanswered questions, guesses and speculations, much as there are in anyone’s recollections of the past. There are also moral quandaries as Latham wonders aloud years later whether choices he made were right or wrong. He obviously remains haunted by them. All of which give the story a tone of credibility.

So do the occasional editor’s notes that appear in the flow of Latham’s account and the excerpts from historical records providing background and filling in the gaps in Latham’s knowledge of the Mexican Revolution and Mexico’s Indian tribes. In the end is a brief obituary for Latham, revealing a surprising life that began as a young runaway in the borderlands of the Southwest before the turn of the last century.

Aranguez, Sonora, Mexico

Logistics. Unlike other writers who can lose me at times in the description of an action scene where the logistics matter, Zimmer expertly sets up the layout beforehand. I felt I was always seeing it exactly as he was. No confusion about where anything was in relation to anything else.

An example would be the physical layout of the garrison town held by Chito Solo. You need a mental map of it to thoroughly enjoy the daring prisoner rescue and escape. Zimmer has that well in place before the action begins. And he has done it seamlessly as part of the flow of the narrative—nothing obviously methodical or deliberate about it.

Weapons. Western fiction today, much more so than in the formative years of the genre, gives considerable attention to the make, model, and caliber of weapons carried by characters. To me, this is a habit akin to name-dropping that seems often little more than a nod to the gun enthusiasts among readers. As such it often comes across as window dressing and a distraction that slows the narrative.

Zimmer is the first western writer I’ve read who actually takes the time to let his narrator explain, for instance, why such details matter—why one gun is preferable to another in a given situation. And since situations are not always clear-cut, that moment of calculation adds to the unpredictability of what lies ahead. I liked that.

Wrapping up. Leaving Yuma is one heckuva western novel. It is a well-crafted, well-paced, high-tension adventure by a gifted storyteller. If it were a movie, the excitement at times would have you under your seat. It is currently available in hardcover at amazon and Barnes&Noble.

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Interview

Michael Zimmer

Michael Zimmer has generously agreed to spend some time here at BITS to talk about Leaving Yuma and his writing. And so I turn the rest of this page over to him.

The perilous journey into Mexico has been a sub-genre of western fiction and movies from early on. What drew you to this material?

I don’t have a simple answer for that. I’ve always been intrigued by transitional periods in history, and certainly the two decades immediately following the turn of the 20th century were rife with change. The industrial revolution was in full swing, automobiles were creeping into places where they had never ventured or been seen before, and war was becoming even more brutal with the advent of powerful new weapons.

It was a time of immense change, clashing cultures, and social upheaval, and that was especially true of the U.S./Mexico border. A fascinating time with a lot going on, and researching a novel is a great way to learn more about an era or event.

Did the story come to you all at once or was that a more complex part of the process?

My ideas usually come to me piecemeal. One image that stands out in my mind, and that was instrumental in this story, was a painting I saw many years ago of a 19-teens motorcycle pulled up in front of an adobe trading post. I remember a bedroll and canteen, and there might have even been a rifle in a scabbard hanging off the side.

Another image I had was from reading about automobiles capable of carrying up to a dozen passengers taking over the old stagecoach routes. I also read an article, probably a couple of decades ago, about smuggling merchandise across the border. Not guns or whiskey, but just common trade items like bolts of cloth or lanterns or shoes, to avoid paying a tariff.

So I had a lot of scenes like that just floating around in my mind, along with partial stories that lacked either a beginning or an end, and what I thought were interesting characters but with no place to put them. And then out of the blue, it all starts falling into place.

The Wonderful Country (1959)

Based on Tom Lea’s 1952 border novel of the same name, this Robert Mitchum western tells a story of a man without a country, wonderful or otherwise. Fleeing to Mexico as a boy, after killing the man who murdered his father, he becomes a pistolero for a powerful Mexican family, the Castros.

Plot. Older now, he  crosses the border into Texas, where a broken leg keeps him from returning to Mexico with a shipment of contraband rifles. Recovering, he befriends a German immigrant, is offered a job with the Texas Rangers, and meets the newly arrived commanding officer (Gary Merrill) at a nearby Army post. He also meets Merrill’s discontented wife (Julie London).

When it looks like Mitchum is about to start a new life, gainfully employed and reclaiming his lost identity as an American citizen, he finds himself in deep trouble and fleeing once more across the border. There is no real sanctuary for him this time in Mexico. The shipment of rifles has been stolen, and he is held responsible. Also, a power play between two bothers of the Castro family leaves him caught perilously in the middle.

Elmore Leonard, The Bounty Hunters (1953)

This was Elmore Leonard’s first published novel, written in his late twenties. In it, already fully developed, is the trademark edge that he brings to his fiction. With its opening scene in a barbershop in Contention, Arizona, we get just that—an exchange of contentious dialogue that’s both bristling and funny. It’s the same mastery of verbal dispute between people at sharp odds with each other that makes “Justified” so much fun today.

Plot. Leonard’s central character is an Army scout, Dave Flynn, who escorts a fresh young lieutenant south of the border to bring back a renegade Apache chief. Flynn is a Civil War veteran who resigned his commission, disillusioned after witnessing a commanding officer’s act of cowardice. For the lieutenant, Bowers, the story tells of a fledgling officer learning how to use his wits and his own natural cunning instead of going by the book.

In Mexico, a bounty is being paid for Apache scalps. What the two men find is a gang of norteamericanos who are killing Mexicans and presenting their scalps for payment by chief of rurales, Lamas Duro. The rurales are a police force made up chiefly of untrained law enforcers and former bandits. Duro is a contemptible, terrified man, subduing his fears with steady drinking. The gang leader, Curt Lazair, is a soulless murderer of innocents, who has taken a young woman captive and is keeping her at the gang’s hideout.

Flynn rescues the girl. Meanwhile, Bowers discovers that Duro’s second in command, a veteran of the revolt against the French, is shamed by how he is being used as an instrument of injustice and incompetence. The novel’s climax involves both an Apache attack and armed retaliation by the men of the village against Duro. Motivation for all that happens in the closing chapters produces awkward and not so plausible complications.

Character. Flynn makes an enjoyable hero, much as Raylan Givens in “Justified.” He is sharply intelligent and steady, an individual too independent to take orders from men he can’t respect. He is his own authority, with a knowledge of the world and others learned the hard way. Yet he doesn’t venture all that far from social connections. Unwilling to give himself to a career in the Army, he still accepts a job as a scout for that same organization.

Flynn has seen it all. He’s witnessed the dishonorable behavior of men, shirking duty with impunity. Though disillusioned he could be utterly cynical, but he’s not. There is a man or two he still admires. Chief of scouts, Joe Madora, is one of them. He is astute, trustworthy, and a reliable friend. He also has a sense of humor. The Indian chief, Soldado Viejo, also wins Flynn’s respect. When the two meet, the scene evolves into a long match of wits that ends at best in a draw.

The Wild Bunch (1969)

Preview audiences reportedly were roused by such strong reactions to this film that many left the theater in protest. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch immediately won a reputation for its graphic violence. Because of or in spite of that, it quickly found a place on most western fans’ top 10 list. Over 40 years later, it remains a powerful and absorbing story.

Plot. Part of the impact of the story is its simplicity. Without a lot of twists and turns, it follows a gang of thieves led by William Holden from a failed railroad robbery to a successful one and then on to their deaths. In a parallel subplot, they are followed into Mexico, where most of the story takes place, by a raggedy group of hired guns, led by Robert Ryan.

That’s pretty much it.

It’s 1913 or thereabouts, and Mexican federal troops are fighting a losing battle against revolutionaries led by Pancho Villa. Holden and his gang (Ernest Borgnine, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Jaime Sanchez) agree with a Mexican general to steal a shipment of arms from a train just north of the border. The train is guarded by a contingent of U.S. soldiers.

William Holden

A half hour in the middle of the film is a hold-your-breath portrayal of the train robbery and an escape with the guns across the border, Ryan and the troopers in hot pursuit. The sequence is beautifully shot and edited, with moments of both nail-biting suspense and comedy.

Character. With over two hours at its disposal, the film has time to thoroughly explore its characters, and it does. We first see the members of the gang disguised as cavalrymen. In Mexico, they gradually shed the uniforms and dress as very different individuals. From a distance you can tell them apart by the hat each has found to wear.

William Holden is especially strong as Pike Bishop (wasn’t there a famous Bishop Pike in the 1960s?), a man of easy stature who happens to be an outlaw. By the way he carries himself, you can see he has the intelligence and the experience to command this group of men. He seldom needs to raise his voice, but when he does, it keeps them in line.

Without question, he is the most admirable man in the film. His leadership of the gang is both firm and fair. When Johnson and Oates want to cut Sanchez’s share of the take, because he’s young and Mexican, Holden sets them straight. The deal was equal shares for everybody, period.

Robert Ryan

By comparison, Harrigan the railroad man (Albert Dekker), is a cheap bastard who hires Ryan to bring in Holden’s gang, but hamstrings him with the support of incompetents. The townsfolk are a pious bunch of temperance advocates. The U.S. Army troops are no more than unseasoned and disorganized young recruits. The Mexican general is a drunken, womanizing despot, and his men are no better.

Sympathy, where there is any in the film, goes to the poor villagers who are at the mercy of the Mexican federales. And we are meant to sympathize with Ryan. He and Holden are former partners in crime. Saddled with an impossible job, Ryan is threatened with being sent back to Yuma prison if he fails. From the look on his face, we know that his respect for Holden gives him feelings that are more than mixed.

Evil. Peckinpah’s wild bunch is not so much wild as they are simply day-by-day survivors in a dark and amoral world. In the opening scenes, a gathering of small boys and girls watches with fascination as two scorpions are being tormented by a swarm of ants. Far from being sweetly innocent, they’re shown as happily participating in human cruelty. 

Major Dundee (1965)

At some point, ambition has a way of overreaching itself. Sam Peckinpah’s first big-budget western is a lesson in that old observation. Its story tells of an officer in the U.S. cavalry who takes on a job of fighting Indians that is too big for him. Meanwhile, the film itself is the result of an ill-fated attempt to make an epic-scale movie against odds that nearly overwhelmed it.

Plot. Major Amos Dundee (Charlton Heston), with a company of U.S. cavalrymen, is in charge of a prison in New Mexico in the last year of the Civil War. It is full of Confederate soldiers, Army deserters, and civilian prisoners. From among them he gathers a contingent of volunteers to capture an Apache chief, Sierra Charriba, who has been ravaging white settlements.

They follow the Indians into Mexico where they are surprised by Charriba in an ambush and sustain considerable losses. Next they encounter troops of the French Foreign Legion, who currently occupy Mexico and object to American invaders. Heston’s men liberate a village, which throws a big fiesta in their honor. In the village, they find a beautiful widow (Senta Berger) with whom Heston becomes romantically involved.

Charlton Heston

From the start, Heston has commanded a fractious group of men, including black cavalrymen, civilians, and Confederate prisoners. Among the Southerners is an officer, Captain Tyreen (Richard Harris), who has agreed to follow Heston’s command until Charriba is captured. The celebration in the village temporarily unites the men and brings a truce between Heston and Harris, who have been at odds.

When one of the Confederates (Warren Oates) tries to escape, Harris defends him but keeps his word to obey Heston’s orders and executes the deserter himself. Berger then joins the band of Americans, having escaped reprisals in the village by the French garrisoned in nearby Durango.

Everything goes downhill for Heston when he is struck in the thigh by an Apache arrow. Treated by a doctor in Durango, Heston descends into a slough of defeat and self-pity. Berger discovers him with a whore who’s been keeping him company. Harris finds him literally drunk and in the gutter.

Richard Harris

Back on his feet, Heston rallies the men for a retreat to the border. Before leaving Mexico, they lure Charriba’s Apaches into a trap, killing many including the chief. Then they have to do combat with the French to cross the Rio Grande. In this climactic battle, fighting on horseback in the water, Harris and many others are killed. Only a couple of dozen men survive to escape into Texas, leaving behind the bodies of the dead.

Contingencies. Thus summarized, the film sounds a good deal more coherent that it is during its 2+ hours of running time. The “extended version,” released in 2005, reconstructs the film as cut by its producer Jerry Bresler. It had later been recut by the studio before its theatrical release to make it shorter. Peckinpah did not have a hand in either version.

Given the scale of the film, it is arguable that Peckinpah’s version would have run much longer. The story goes that his original budget of $4.5 million was cut by one-third before the film went into production, but he went ahead to make a $4.5 million movie anyway. There are numerous characters and plot threads, much as we find in a John Ford western. Shot on location in Mexico, in color and Panavision, Peckinpah clearly intended to produce an epic.

Senta Berger

A budget cut wasn’t the only obstacle. Many of the film’s problems can be traced to its being started with only a half-finished script. Writing while they were shooting, Peckinpah allowed the story’s central plot to shift away from its original conception. Part of that shift is due to the studio’s hiring Senta Berger, a European actress who would help the film sell in the international market. A major role not envisioned in the original storyline needed to be created for her.

Much of this behind the scenes material can be learned on the audio commentary that accompanies the DVD release of the film’s extended version. There, several film historians generally agree that Major Dundee works well during the first half, but while the second half has remarkable moments, it generally lacks coherence. The best that can be said is that learning from his mistakes, Peckinpah was able to make a much better film with The Wild Bunch, which followed in 1969.

James Coburn

The Young Land (1959)

There must have been high hopes for the young Patrick Wayne when this film was made in 1959. Son of Hollywood star John Wayne, gifted with good looks and already experienced in front of the camera in several John Ford westerns, he was ready to launch his own screen career.

From the first scenes of this film, however, you can tell that something is amiss. You feel the need for the guiding hand of a John Ford to bring life to the performances and the action. Except in rare moments, the film never really seems to be more than a walk-through of the script.

Plot. The entire story takes place in an Old California village just after the war with Mexico. The population, a mix of Anglos and Mexicans, is still getting used to being part of the U.S. Old animosities continue as before. And now, when a gringo (Dennis Hopper) kills a Mexican in a gun duel, there’s some question of whether it was self-defense or homicide.

Circuit Judge Isham (Dan O’Herlihy) arrives in town with U.S. deputy marshal Stroud (Cliff Ketchum) to hear the case. Acting sheriff in the village (Patrick Wayne) has already jailed Hopper. He is then pressed by O’Herlihy to maintain order as Hopper’s friends get drunk in the cantina and vaqueros from surrounding ranches ride in for the trial.

Patrick Wayne

To make sure we don’t miss the trial’s significance in this time and place, a local don (Roberto de la Madrid) arrives to see how “American justice” works. He and O’Herlihy, a stuffy Yankee patrician, provide a commentary on the proceedings. As a handpicked jury hears the case and then takes a long time behind closed doors to come to a verdict, the two men exchange politely thoughtful observations.

Outside the courtroom, tensions mount, and de la Madrid’s daughter (Yvonne Craig) attaches herself like glue to the otherwise preoccupied Wayne. Now that she’s an “American girl,” she’s eager to exercise her liberties. Hopper’s friend (Ken Curtis) first picks a fight with Wayne and then reluctantly agrees to be a guard in the jail as Hopper awaits the verdict of the jury.

When the verdict is delivered, Hopper and Wayne are called upon to provide an action-packed ending in the streets of the village. Justice is finally done, but it’s Old West-style, with guns and horses.

Dennis Hopper

Performances. The standout performance in the film is Dennis Hopper, who burrows into his character so deeply he never once leaves you doubting the guilt of his character. Cocky and ill mannered, he is a grinning sociopath. Ken Curtis is entertaining as a congenial outlaw. Cliff Ketchum is believable as a lean and crag-faced marshal.

Wayne is affable as the young sheriff but doesn’t have (or wasn’t given) much range to enliven the role. In some scenes, he seems to be working hard just to remember the lines. You wish, too, that he’d been given a better hat. The one he got from costuming makes him look more like a plantation owner than a western sheriff. For Yvonne Craig, this was one of her first feature roles. She would later become known as Batgirl in the final season of TV’s Batman (1967-1968).

Gordon Shireffs, Trail’s End (1959)

The journey into Mexico is a frequent storyline used in western fiction. Its origins no doubt go back to mythology and stories like Orpheus’ trip into Hades. Countless examples exist from Dante’s Inferno to Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. Mexico is a land of death and danger, a dark terrain like a nightmare that won’t let the dreamer wake up.

Mexico in western fiction is a proving ground and a right of passage. There, without the protection of the law, a man survives by his wits and his weapons. More so than in the Wild West north of the border, he is truly on his own. As the Mexican police detective says in answer to Sean Penn’s protests in The Falcon and the Snowman, “This is not America.”

Plot. Trail’s End by Gordon Shireffs (1914-1996) takes its central character, Clint Buell, into that same world. Not quite in pursuit of a kidnapped lover, he’s looking for a younger brother once stolen by Apaches. While twelve years have passed and everyone tells him the boy is surely dead, he will not be satisfied until he knows for sure.

His journey takes him from Texas to New Mexico to Tombstone. Finding men who still remember the bad old days of the Indian Wars, he determines that his brother was taken by an Apache chief, Coletto Amarillo. That band of Indians now inhabits a forbidding region in the deserts of Sonora.

But an obstacle prevents Buell from finding the chief, who can tell him the fate of his brother. The band is now being led by the chief’s son, known as El Fiero, who is even more murderous than his father. He rules a wide territory where he exacts a heavy toll on peaceful villagers, who must provide him with food, horses, and women.

With the help of a proud young villager, Yndelicio Madera, Buell plots to locate El Fiero in his stronghold. When the man orders up a wedding feast to observe his pick of the village’s women, Buell and Madera follow the departing wedding party into the hills. There, after a chase on foot, El Fiero meets his end and Buell learns the fate of his brother.

Returning to civilization, Buell is met by a prospector he’s befriended along the way and a persistent young woman who has followed him to Tombstone. Now that he’s put his past to rest, she is happy to learn that he is ready for marriage.

Women. In a story that is about a test of manhood, the women seem pasted into the plot as if required by formula. Ellen, the girl Buell leaves behind, comes across as a tag-along little sister who won’t go back home no matter what he says. She has a nagging manner that cancels out any possible appeal she might have for him.

Madera’s half-sister is the tempestuous Teresa, who hangs out with the boys at the cantina, drinking and dancing. She throws herself at Buell in a desperate attempt to get him to take her away. Rubbing up against him both figuratively and literally, she is the stereotypical hot tamale.

Wrapping up. This is a straight-up western without embellishments. It does little to keep a reader from guessing long before Buell that his long-lost little brother has become the depraved Indian, El Fiero. While you wait for that recognition scene and get curious to know what will then happen between the two men, the novel leaves that aspect of the story undeveloped. The brother who shares a bed with Buell in the opening chapter has become a “good Indian,” i.e. dead. That seems to be enough.

Max Brand, in South of Rio Grande (1936), reviewed here a while ago, tells a similar story of brother searching for brother in Old Mexico. The twists and turns of that plot, the suspense, and the romance, show a masterly hand at work. Shireffs writes with a steady hand, for sure, but to compare the two writers beyond that would be unfair. So I won’t.

For a short bio and an appreciation of Shireff’s prolific output as a writer of western fiction, read Jon Tuska’s essay in Twentieth Century Western Writers. Tuska commends Shireffs for his his attempt to draw characters more believably human in their strengths and failings and for his historically informed portrayal of the West. This novel was apparently inspired by the disappearance of a boy in an 1883 Apache raid and the discovery in Mexico years later of a band of Apaches led by a blue-eyed redheaded chief.

Tuska recommends a series featuring a man hunter, Lee Kershaw, beginning with Showdown in Sonora (1969). He has high praise for a trilogy about Lee’s Indian grandfather, Quint Ker-shaw, which includes his “masterpiece,” The Untamed Breed (1981). Two of his novels were made into films, Oregon Passage (1957) and A Long Ride From Hell (1968). Trail’s End is currently available at amazon, Barnes&Noble, and AbeBooks.

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Sources:

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Geoff Sadler, ed., Twentieth Century Western Writers, 1981

Coming up: Martin Allerdale Grainger, Woodsmen of the West (1908)

The Last Sunset (1961)

Start with two men in a Texas town, facing off at sunset for a gun duel. Then imagine a story about both of them that leads up to it. This one involves a cattle drive, the soon-to-be widow of the cattle owner, and a teenage charmer of a daughter. The cattle drive has Indians, bad weather, Mexican vaqueros, and three brigands with human trafficking in mind. It’s a full house.

Writers. This one was written by Dalton Trumbo, after his return to credited work, which followed over a decade of uncredited screenplays as a blacklisted Hollywood writer. The story is based loosely on a novel Sundown at Crazy Horse (1957) by Vechel Howard Rigsby.

A reading of the synopsis of the novel (found here) reveals some interesting differences. The film sets the story in Mexico, with the end of the trail on the Texas side of the Rio Grande, a far cry from the Texas-to-Wyoming trek in Howard’s novel.

Of the two men who meet at sundown in Rigsby’s novel, one is a gunman with a modified firearm to accommodate the lack of a trigger finger. A kind of Billy the Kid, he’s a devil-may-care sort, ready to sing and joke. The other man, dressed in black, is a sheriff with a warrant for the killing of his kid brother.

Smitten by the ranch owner’s wife and two young children, both men declare a temporary truce and agree to help drive the cattle to market. And so events are set in motion. 

The film. The filmmakers dress the gunman in black, slick back his hair, and give the role to Kirk Douglas. All ten fingers are intact. The man with the warrant is played by stalwart and dependable Rock Hudson. The victim of the killing, we learn, was the husband of his sister, and there were further consequences. Grief-stricken, she hanged herself.

The ranch owner’s wife is the gorgeously blonde Dorothy Malone, and her two young children have morphed into the pretty and headstrong Carol Lynley. Douglas and Malone have some history, we learn. They were teenage sweethearts. Meanwhile, her daughter, about to turn sixteen, falls head over heels for Douglas herself.

Hudson also takes a tumble. As soon as the ranch owner (Joseph Cotten) has met an untimely end during a dispute in a taverna, Hudson offers a soft shoulder to the not-very-grieving widow. Rescuing her and her daughter from three hired hands (Jack Elam, Neville Brand, James Westmoreland), who try to abduct them, Rock wins her heart.

The alliance between Douglas and Rock remains an uneasy one. Like a card game, each plays his trump cards and seems to hold the advantage for a while. When Douglas shoots an Indian, Rock saves the day by trading away cattle instead of taking on casualties in a firefight. Finding Rock and his horse sinking into quicksand, Douglas rides off at first, only to return with a rope to drag him out. We lose the horse, though.

Max Brand, South of Rio Grande (1936)

This exhilarating adventure south of the border first saw light as a serial, “Tiger’s Den,” in Western Story Magazine in 1930. The author, John Frederick, was of course one of the many pen names of Max Brand.

Plot. There’s so much to enjoy in this novel, it’s hard to know where to start. Tightly plotted, it tells the story of two men who travel together from a Texas border town into Mexico. One of them, a lawman Joe Warder, is on a suicidal mission to capture a bandit known as El Tigre. The other, a young tenderfoot Dennis MacMore, is looking for his older brother.

Turns out the brother has been profiting from a close relationship with El Tigre. As soon as Denny starts nosing around town, he gets himself into trouble, and Joe is quick to follow. Much of the story takes place in a single night as the two men are pursued by El Tigre’s henchmen.

A heart-stoppingly pretty local girl, Carmelita, then gets into the action. She is being unwillingly courted by Denny’s brother. When Denny finds her, he falls in love with her himself, and by novel’s end, she has joined the two men in a daring escape from town.

This may all sound hopelessly contrived and clichéd, but Brand tells this story masterfully, as if discovering every element of the plot for the first time. What makes it work is a wry sense of humor that wonders at the incredibility of the story even while it’s being told. 

Rio Grande, Texas, 1899

Characters. Joe Warder, the first-person narrator, is something of an anti-hero. He may represent the law, but he’s done time himself. He’s 42 years old and has a busted up face, with no prospects for a life headed anywhere but a dead end – assuming he even gets back to Texas alive.

Denny is the complete opposite. Young and full of energy, he can’t shoot straight, but he is handsome beyond measure. And he has learned to trust the good luck that always seems to attend good looks. Impulsive, and therefore daring, he is undaunted by obstacles that would stop anyone with an ounce of common sense.

The two men make an entertaining combination. Instead of having their differences keep them at odds for comic effect, Brand bonds them with a mutual respect and affection. And the plot whirls them on, sometimes together, sometimes separated, into and out of one tight spot after another.

Robert Olmstead, Far Bright Star

As I read this book, I thought of the many pulp fans and writers getting their “education” here in the blogs. Olmstead uses the dark material of pulp fiction and remixes it as chilling poetry. Think of a meeting between Jim Thompson and Ambrose Bierce.

Set during the Mexican Revolution in 1916, the novel centers on a detail of mounted American soldiers in northern Mexico. Once again the U.S. Army is in full force south of the border. This time they are after Pancho Villa, following the rebel leader’s nasty cross-border raid in Columbus, New Mexico (which you can read about here).

At the opposite end of the spectrum from flash fiction, Olmstead writes with the deliberate patience of a raptor waiting for a kill. The slow unfolding of the story reflects first the stifling heat under the desert sun and the blinding boredom of the soldiers’ routine – then the moment by moment grisly fate that awaits them.

Pancho Villa Expedition, infantry columns, 1917

Plot. In the single day that much of the novel takes place, Napoleon Childs is the commanding officer of a detail of mostly inexperienced men. Their job is to find and kill a half dozen wild cattle to be slaughtered for Army rations.

Childs is as hard-boiled as they come. He knows nothing but the life of a career soldier and has an easy contempt for any man whose courage is less dependable than tempered steel. He’s well aware that there are few men like himself. The one exception is his brother, who serves with him. The bond between them is one of blood, muscle, and undying loyalty.

On the day in question, it is Napoleon’s luck that the men under his command include three unseasoned and poorly disciplined men. Only one other is a hardened soldier he can count on. The fifth is no more than a boy.

Far from camp, they discover that they are being surrounded by enemy, and after a long pursuit through a whirling sandstorm, the men make a stand in a canyon. The violence that ensues is described at the same slow-motion pace, and it is horrific. You soon get your fill of it, and yet it is far from over.

Napoleon is taken captive, fully expecting to die in an ordeal of humiliation and torture. And rest assured, I’m glossing over the details. Olmstead’s is an imaginative world of extremes, yet thoroughly grounded in this one. It is pulp fiction with real rather than stylized violence.

The Professionals (1966)

This popular film from the mid-1960s put together three big stars along with Woody Strode as a kind of A-Team sent into Mexico to retrieve a kidnapped wife. Lee Marvin, an artillery expert, leads the group. Burt Lancaster is a dynamiter. At one time, both fought with the revolutionary forces (there were several, Villa, Zapata, and others). Both have become disillusioned and a bit cynical.

Robert Ryan is the horse wrangler, and Woody Strode is skilled at archery. All these actors have lengthy western credits. Writer-director Richard Brooks was better known for dramas like Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Sweet Bird of Youth. The following year, he’d hit a homerun with In Cold Blood. But he seems right at home with this western adventure.

The structure of this film is almost exactly like Garden of Evil (1954), reviewed here. There’s a perilous journey by a small group of men who perform a mission and then return to safety with a band of adversaries in hot pursuit. A woman joins them, but this time only on the return trip.

Like that movie, most of the action takes place outdoors – about 95%. This time, it’s the arid terrain of northern Mexico, where it’s hot in the day and cold at night. There are desert, rocks, sand, and slot canyons. A movie like this makes the frontier town settings of a film like The Proud Ones, reviewed here last time, hardly qualify as westerns.

The film was, in fact, not shot in Mexico but in Death Valley and Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada.

Garden of Evil (1954)

The more I watch old westerns, the more I appreciate that they were made for grownups. The kids in the audience were there to learn, not to be entertained. If they paid attention, they’d learn how adult men and women behaved, for better or worse. There was excitement at appropriate intervals – for the kid in everyone – but the meaning of what came in between was chiefly for the adults, and for kids to ponder.

Garden of Evil is maybe a strange name for a western. But given to a story of how greed, self-interest, and sexual desire get people into trouble, it is not far off the mark. The set-up is simple. A woman enlists the help of four men to rescue her husband, who is trapped in a gold mine deep in the mountains of Mexico.

The men have been set ashore indefinitely after their ship founders on its way to the gold fields of California. There’s Gary Cooper, a man of few words who reveals only that he’s been a sheriff. There’s a talkative gambler, played by Richard Widmark, who befriends him.

Tagging along is an impulsive and quick-tempered younger man played by Cameron Mitchell. Joining them is a tall, dark, and handsome hombre played by Mexican actor Victor Manuel Mendoza. He and Cooper converse in Spanish, and with your Spanglish you can easily follow along. (The ubiquitous Whit Bissell was apparently not available for this film.)

The woman (Susan Hayward) packs a pistol and means business. She is Anne Baxter’s counterpart all over again (see my review of Yellow Sky), better dressed but holding her own against a tag team of men. When the Mexican hombre secretly leaves marks along the trail to the gold mine, she gets rid of them. When the “youngster” makes a pass at her, she puts up a good fight.

Risk factors. A real test of everyone’s mettle comes early in the trip as they ride a narrow trail along the face of a cliff. It’s unnerving enough for someone with acrophobia like me, but they have to leap their horses across a place where the ledge has fallen away completely. That’s where I would have turned back. But nobody does.

The risk factor is ramped up by the presence of “hostiles,” referred to as Apaches in the film. There’s not much evidence that Apaches ventured this far into subtropical Mexico, so you may have trouble taking this as seriously as the film’s characters. But no one seems to have told the Apaches. They eventually show up anyway. And wearing Mohawk haircuts.

The DVD commentary notes that the original script, called The Fifth Rider, was set in Arizona. Then Darryl F. Zanuck decided that Mexico would make a more picturesque location for a widescreen western. The Apaches seem to have come along for the ride.