Trails of the Wild

This collection of western stories from David Cranmer’s Beat to a Pulp imprint is a welcome addition of new short fiction to the genre. As followers of his online zine already know, Cranmer has a fine eye and ear for picking writers with a gift for storytelling.

Beat to a Pulp readers will find some familiar names here. For sheer volume of output and award winning, that list would be led by James Reasoner and quickly followed by Patti Abbott, Chuck Tyrell, Wayne D. Dundee, Kieran Shea, and Evan Lewis. They are joined by the notable talents of relative newcomer Matt Pizzolato.

Patti Abbott deserves mention first for not only representing her gender in a genre that has long thought of itself as rightly dominated by male writers—and second for venturing into western territory from her usual fictional domains, which I always think of as being situated somewhere in or near Detroit. (I’m sure someone will correct me if I’m wrong about that.) Her offering here, “The True Story of Boy Kaleen,” is an entertaining tour de force of Old West vernacular.

James Reasoner’s “Rattler” works a tight situation between two men with guns and a rattlesnake with opinions of its own. For someone with a snake phobia, the story has probably the surest opening for grabbing attention: “Cobb had been holed up in the rock for about an hour when the big, diamondback rattler crawled over the back of his legs.”

"Go It, You  –   –  "

Evan Lewis in “Too Many Crocketts” plagues a grandson of Davy Crockett with a talkative ghost of the man “born on a mountaintop in Tennessee.” Chuck Tyrell’s spooky “Line Rider” spends time with a cowboy too long alone and too long deprived of female company. It’s an erotic tale best described as a waltz into darkness.

Well into the spirit of western realist noir, you’ll find the expert hand of Kieran Shea. His story “A Decent Man” is a grimly melancholy account of a man attempting vainly to repay another man’s wrong. Matthew Pizzolato’s gunslinger Wesley Quaid is more successful as he confronts some bullies in “Day of Reckoning.”

That leaves the long story, “The Empty Badge,” by Wayne D. Dundee, who brings us another tale of the outlaw marshal, Cash Laramie. This one, set on the high plains borderland of Nebraska and Wyoming involves a traveling medicine show, a case of amnesia, bank robbers, and a Cash Laramie impersonator.

Together, I can say from firsthand experience, the stories collected in Trails of the Wild make for great bedtime reading. They are currently available in ebook format for kindle and the nook. 

Tweet

Further reading:

BITS reviews and interviews

Patti Abbott

James Reasoner

Chuck Tyrell

Matt Pizzolato

Wayne D. Dundee

David Cranmer

Image credits:

Illustration by F.W. Schulz, 1907

Coming up: Richard Widmark, The Law and Jack Wade (1958)

One sentence journal, Dec. 1-7

The neighbors' Christmas lights

Time marches on . . .

 12/1, Sunday. Looking over the backyard fence after nightfall and watching the slow crawl of headlights along the interstate, folks headed home from the holiday.

12/2, Monday. So great seeing Clark Johnson again in a TV series (amazon’s Alpha House), and in a comedy with John Goodman.

12/3, Tuesday. Nicked my thumb carving Thanksgiving turkey with a newly sharpened knife, and the darn thing still wants a bandaid.

12/4, Wednesday. Getting yet another Privacy Notice from yet another service provider, I have to wonder whether I have any privacy left.

12/5, Thursday. There’s a mesmerizing light show on the wall as late afternoon sun slants through the window blinds, throwing flash-dancing shadows of the windblown palms outside.

12/6, Friday. I guess it was time for a remake of that recurring dream of missing a flight—always either to or from Heathrow, and this time a little red sport car I once owned figures into the plot.

12/7, Saturday. The neighborhood Christmas light show has begun.

Tweet

Image credit: Ron Scheer

Coming up: Trails of the Wild

Glossary of frontier fiction: F(facer – flannel band)

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

facer = an unexpected problem or obstacle. “A facer lay ahead of them beside which the mere receipt of the five letters was nothing.” Edgar Beecher Bronson, The Red-Blooded.

fade = to put at a disadvantage. “‘Twas a foight av his own pickin’, an’ he knows ye’ve got him faded.” James Hendryx, The Promise.

Faille

fagging = to tire, weary. “It was his way to pick out the roughest possible path before him, to settle within himself that it was that of duty, and to follow it without fagging or complaint.” Gwendolen Overton, The Heritage of Unrest.

faille = a slightly ribbed, woven fabric of silk or cotton. “I’ve had things ’most as fine as Lutie’s. Satins, brocades, failles, grosgrains, taffetas, all kinds, anything I wanted.” Nancy Mann Waddell Woodrow, The New Missioner.

Caroline Norton

“Fair Bingen on the Rhine” = a sentimental poem by British poet Caroline Norton (1808-1877) about the death of a soldier in Algiers. “By his side was his wife, Amelia, the reigning favourite, who could play the piano and sing ‘Fair Bingen on the Rhine’ with a dash that was said to be superb.” Harry Leon Wilson, The Lions of the Lord. Full text here.

fairy lamp = a small, glass candle lamp that gained popularity during the 1880s and '90's. “A fairy lamp burned over the great open fireplace, and by this he saw her go to the child’s little crib.” Frances Charles, In The Country God Forgot.

fairy well = a small pool of water or spring into which visitors dropped pins or buttons for wishes to be granted. “Judith, going to her favorite pool to bathe, saw that it had shrunk till it seemed but a fairy well hid among the willows.” Marie Manning, Judith of the Plains.

fakir = a street salesman of cheap goods. “It’s but a little phrase, ’tis true, / ‘ Its meaning well each ‘fakir’ knew.” William De Vere, Jim Marshall’s New Pianner.

fall into snap = achieve success easily. “Brother Josh, now he was little fellow, fell right into snap t’once.” Frances Charles, In The Country God Forgot.

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?

Tweet

Image credits: Ron Scheer

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