Max Brand, Destry Rides Again (1930)

1930 edition

This is my new favorite Max Brand novel. Neatly plotted and briskly told, it illustrates Brand’s remarkable gift for storytelling. It begins with the usual western conventions and then quickly posits a premise that strikes off in one unexpected direction after another. Maybe most remarkably, it defies convention by presenting an indomitable but flawed hero whose estimation of himself is mightily revised by the end of the novel.

His first flaw is a nearly fatal blind spot in his choice of friends. The second is his unshaken belief in his superiority to all other men. His becomes a soul-purging lesson in humility and brotherly love.

Plot. Forget the plot of the movie. At nearest, Destry Rides Again (1939) is a sequel to Brand’s novel, with James Stewart as a lawman who has given up the use of a gun. The idea may have been sparked by the final sentence of the novel:

But, as Ding Slater said, the whole county should have been present, because it meant the end of the old days and the beginning of a new regime in Wham, for Harrison Destry had put away his Colt.

There’s no evidence that the screenwriters had read any of the preceding pages.

2009 edition

Character. Max Brand’s Destry is a man that other men live in fear of. He is tougher and stronger and faster with a gun, and he knows it. When a train is robbed of $72,000, the crime is wrongly pinned on him, and a jury of his peers, tired of his bullying, happily finds him guilty.

Released after serving six years of a ten-year sentence, Destry determines to take vengeance on each of the 12 men who put him away. Two he kills in self-defense, and the rest live in terror or flee for their lives. Meanwhile, he is unaware that the true villain is a man he believes to be his best friend, Chet Bent.

By the end of the novel, only four jurymen are left, but Destry has learned the error of trusting the murderous Bent. A boy, Willie Thornton, has been witness to Bent’s skullduggery and gets word of it to Destry, who then confronts the villain. The final chapters are a revelation of self-knowledge that throws Destry into an identity crisis. At the end, marriage to a long-time sweetheart marks the start of a whole new life.

The Far Country (1954)

James Stewart and director Anthony Mann made several westerns together, and this one is unusual for being not all that great. The location photography in the snowy mountains of Alberta is impressive, but the casting seems often wrong, and credibility gets a painful stretch if you know much about geography and the Klondike gold rush.

Plot. The film opens in Seattle in 1896, where Stewart arrives with a herd of cattle he has driven from Wyoming to deliver by steamer to Skagway, Alaska. There, he and his sidekick (Walter Brennan) plan to take them over a difficult trail to Dawson in the Yukon. They expect the cattle to sell for enough money to buy them a ranch in Utah.

The whole journey is fraught with difficulties and obstacles. On the way from Wyoming, Stewart has already shot two drovers who attempted to make off with some of his herd. For that he’s wanted for murder and is hidden aboard the departing steamer by a Skagway saloonkeeper (Ruth Roman).

Skagway, Alaska, 1897

In Skagway, his herd disrupts a public hanging, and he’s brought up before a crooked judge (John McIntire, in a role that may have been modeled after Soapy Smith) for disturbing the peace. The fine is his herd of cattle, which Stewart and Brennan steal back under cover of darkness and spirit across the border into Canada. But there’s more trouble before reaching Dawson, as the two men are witness to the robbing and killing of miners returning from the gold fields.

Roman relocates in Dawson to open another saloon, and McIntire follows her there, along with his gang (Jack Elam, Robert J. Wilke). Both Roman and an Austrian ingénue (Corinne Calvet) take a romantic interest in Stewart. He is polite to each but not one to complicate his life with a woman.

Stewart and Brennan try their hand at placer mining and accumulate enough gold to buy that ranch in Utah. Attempting to avoid arrest in Skagway, they take another route out of the Yukon. But they are ambushed as they start to raft down a river to Juneau. Brennan is killed and Stewart is disabled.

Mark Mitten, Sipping Whiskey in a Shallow Grave

Review and interview

This is a heckuva western novel that more than lives up to its unusual title. Mitten knows the conventions of the genre and then turns them inside out to create a sprawling narrative that ranges all over the state of Colorado. The cast of characters includes working cowboys, the worthy citizens of several Rocky Mountain settlements, and the members of an outlaw gang.

Their lives converge on a fatal day in 1887 when a stage hold up is interrupted by a cattle drive. A traditional western might start with an incident like this, but Mitten puts it squarely in the middle of his story. The first half of the novel is prologue to it, as we meet his characters and get into the rhythm of their lives, both for good and ill.

The second half portrays the aftermath as it follows a dozen or more characters as they disperse in all directions. Their lives intersect with those of multiple other characters, and for a while Mitten is tracing their adventures along eight different storylines. The cast of characters eventually numbers 75 or more men, women, and children. That includes cameos by the likes of Doc Holliday and Soapy Smith.

Leadville, Colorado, c1880

Plot. Mitten’s novel is a tightly plotted chain of cause, effect, chance, and coincidence. Complex as a chess game, it mimics the unpredictability of life itself. And it continually discovers that nothing is ever as simple as the conventions of western genre fiction would have us believe.

The title of the novel refers to a scene in which cause, effect, chance, and coincidence meet again as they have before in the novel. One of the outlaws escapes being shot for a horse thief by hiding in a grave he is digging for another man. He happens to have a bottle of whiskey with him.

In the end, the incident that begins it all—the shooting of a sheriff—is finally resolved and justice is served. And not without some ironies. Meanwhile, life goes on for the other characters (at least those who survive), as the events and incidents of the novel take them onward, leaving the past behind. Mitten seems to be saying, nothing ever really ends, and a reader may sense the possibility of future sequels.

Style. Mitten shows a gift for dialogue and the vernacular. When a cowboy sees a man in a slicker (something new in 1887), he admires it and says, “Need me one of these.” That’s the kind of line you can hear being said.

The narrative also shows an unusual appreciation for the impact of death. Characters experience shock and grief when someone is killed, and the feelings do not soon wear off. Mitten notes how death hits hard those least accustomed to it. A bunch of young cowboys are shaken as the posse they are riding with comes upon the bodies of two men shot dead.

One sentence journal, Nov. 24-30

Prickly pear, amputated

Time marches on . . .

11/24, Sunday. I fetch out a stack of Christmas CDs to set by the kitchen stereo: Oscar Peterson, Ray Charles, Dave Brubeck, King’s College Choir, J. S. Bach, Chanticleer, Diana Krall.

11/25, Monday. After the prickly pear in the front yard got its overdue trim, the ground around looks like it’s strewn with amputated limbs.

11/26, Tuesday. Tell me, what retired person who rarely goes out except to walk the dog needs 10 sweatshirts, 13 pairs of jeans, 16 polo shirts, 18 tee shirts, and 26 pairs of white athletic socks?

11/27, Wednesday. The smell of wood smoke in the air outside on an overcast day, and I don’t have to wonder this time of year if there’s a brush fire somewhere.

11/28, Thursday. Thanksgiving: a gentle, tranquil, and quiet day that begins with a scattering of flamingo-tinted clouds at sunrise and pecan pie in the oven by mid-morning.

11/29, Friday. A rain cloud gathers over this desert valley and, disbelieving, we go for a morning walk with the dog anyway, arriving home 45 minutes later—still disbelieving and wet.  

11/30, Saturday. How can two people and a dog manage to fill a recyling bin in just two weeks?

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Image credits: Ron Scheer

Coming up: Mark Mitten, Sipping Whiskey in a Shallow Grave

Glossary of frontier fiction: E

Below is a list of mostly forgotten terms, people, and the occasional song, drawn from a reading offrontier fiction, 1880–1915. Each week a new list, progressing through the alphabet, “from A to Izzard.”

earthen and iron pots = a fable in which an earthen pot is shattered by an iron pot, the moral being that one should keep the company of one’s own kind. “Nothing will satisfy them but a human sacrifice on the altar of a questionable nobility, and a repetition of the old fable of the earthen and iron pots.” Willis George Emerson, Buell Hampton.

eat dog = to suffer humiliation and insult. “You needn’t think we are specially keen for eating dog on this kind of a job!” Agnes C. Laut, The Freebooters of the Wilderness.

Edward Eggleston, 1912

ecarte = a two-player card game similar to whist and closely related to euchre. “I just got nicked for a hundred in your ecarte game.” W. C. Tuttle, Thicker Than Water.

Eggleston, Edward = American author and historian (1837-1902), best known for novels set in Indiana. “This serial (which involved my sister and myself in many a spat as to who should read it first) was The Hoosier Schoolmaster, by Edward Eggleston, and a perfectly successful attempt to interest western readers in a story of the middle border.” Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border.

Electrolier, 1910

electrolier = a fixture, usually hanging from the ceiling, for holding electric lamps; analogous to chandelier, from which it was formed. “Society’s gradations, markings and distinctions, were measured by the number of electric bulbs in a merchant’s window, the size of the gaudy ‘electrolier’ on the table in his newly-plastered dining room.” George W. Ogden, The Long Fight.

elevate = to execute by hanging. “‘We’ve got a half-breed here,’ said he, ‘who’s got to be elevated.’” John Neihardt, The Lonesome Trail.

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Writing in 1913, H. L. Mencken called Mark Twain (1835–1910) “the true father of our national literature.” In 1934, Ernest Hemingway ranked the author with Henry James and Stephen Crane and opined, “all of American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”

More interesting from the viewpoint of frontier fiction, F. Scott Fitzgerald ventured in 1935 to call Huckleberry Finn “the first journey back.” He says of Twain, “He was the first to look back at the republic from the perspective of the west.” And it’s worth remembering that Twain himself had traveled in the West by the time he wrote this novel of life on the Mississippi, set during the years of his own boyhood before the Civil War.

One of many ways to read the novel is to see it as a prequel to a tide of frontier fiction that followed. Huck’s is the backstory of the typical hero of the cowboy western. Think of how many of them have a central character who started out like him, either an orphan or a runaway, who has come west—"lighting out for the Territory," to use his words for it.

Cover of first edition

Consider the basic elements of the mythic cowboy:  his preference for drifting and living outdoors, carrying a rifle and shooting game for food, getting in and out of scrapes while relying on his wits and knowledge of survival skills. These elements of the myth, along with visits of loneliness and attachment to a "pardner," are already there in Huck.

Huck’s basic decency is another parallel. Unschooled and unadulterated by pious religious beliefs, he does the right thing, even when he suspects that it is wrong. He is haunted with guilt that he has broken the law by helping the slave Jim run away from his owner, Miss Watson. While reason may not lead him to question slavery itself, he gradually comes to acknowledge Jim’s worth as a human being—and as a friend.

Plot. For anyone who hasn’t read any or all of the novel, you no doubt know the novel’s basic plot. Huck Finn and Jim take a ride on a raft down the Mississippi River. Along the way, they have several adventures (for a full plot synopsis click over to wikipedia).

After separations and reunions, Huck eventually winds up on a plantation far down river, where Jim has been captured as a runaway slave and is being held captive. There they are joined by Tom Sawyer, who happens to be visiting relatives on the very same plantation.

Ride Lonesome (1959)

This Budd Boetticher western filmed from a Burt Kennedy script is a classic. Shot in Cinemascope entirely in the Alabama Hills of Lone Pine, California, it’s a low-budget movie that looks as high-gloss and polished as any 1950s western.

Plot. Like their other films, e.g. Seven Men From Now (1956), the storyline is spare. Four men and a woman cross an arid landscape to get from point A to point B. One of the men (Randolph Scott) is a bounty hunter, another is his prisoner (James Best), and two others (Pernell Roberts, James Coburn) are partners with an outlaw past. The woman (Karen Steele) is the widow of a stagecoach relay station agent.

They are followed first by Indians, who have killed the woman’s husband and seem bent on making more trouble. Then they are being followed by the prisoner’s brother (Lee Van Cleef) and his gang, determined to rescue the young man before he is turned over to be hanged. That’s it.

Characters. The marvel about a script like this is how much tension and suspense these two filmmakers could create with so few elements. The film illustrates perfectly the dynamics of a story driven more by character than plot.

Randolph Scott

At first the differences between the characters seem only to do with temperament and personality. Then as the story unfolds, we learn that each of them has some key incident in the past that accounts for what they are doing at this moment in their lives and what they want.

This rounds them out as characters and also puts them at uneasy cross-purposes. The more we learn about them, the harder it gets to predict what they will do, as when the prisoner surprises Randolph with a rifle he’s taken from Roberts. While he holds Randolph at gunpoint, Roberts draws his sidearm and persuades him there’s no shell in the firing chamber. For a long moment, we don’t know whether it’s a bluff, whether the prisoner will believe him, or even Roberts’ real intentions.

The economy of the scene is so uncomplicated and simple, but it’s turns like this in the plot that build tension and uncertainty. And the source of the uncertainty is in the characters themselves, Scott being a prime example.