Illustrators of early frontier fiction:J. N. Marchand

J. N. Marchand, Outing Magazine, 1906

J. N. (John Norval) Marchand (1875-1921) was born in Leavenworth, Kansas. After high school in St. Paul, Minnesota, he worked for the Minnesota Journal, and later was a staff artist for the New York World. A painter and sculptor, he provided numerous illustrations for magazines, such as Munsey's and Outing Magazine (see more examples here), and for as many as 35 books, mostly featuring western themes and subject matter.

Below are his illustrations for several novels set on the frontier. My favorite is the faro scene from Alfred Henry Lewis's Faro Nell and Her Friends, where players cluster in a hubbub around the dealer, and in the foreground is the relaxed figure of a cowboy in leather chaps and boots, smoking a cigarette, long legs crossed, his big hat beside him on the table.

Bump in the road

Winter sunrise

I don’t feel much like posting today. It’s a gloomy, drizzly day in the desert. Mostly I’m dealing with the news this week that my oncologist believes my tumor is showing signs of growth, and we’re looking at a change of treatment. She wants me to get a second opinion from a specialist at UCLA. As the day for that appointment draws closer, a handful of CDs with all my MRIs in a shoulder bag ready to take with me, I feel a little apprehensive. I continue being positive, but I’m not as strong as I’d like to feel.

Naguib Mahfouz, Karnak Café (1974)

Bit of a change today at BITS, from West to Middle East. This short novel by Nobel-winning Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz is a sadly melancholy story of the crushing of youthful hope. Set in the 1960s around the time of the 1967 war with Israel, it describes how a generation of young Egyptians, the children of the revolution of 1954, were betrayed and lied to by their government, while being subjected to interrogation and imprisonment by secret police.

Their story is told by an older man (and stand-in for the author), who befriends a gathering of them who are regulars at a Cairo café, Al-Karnak. There they talk of politics and express their idealistic aspirations, both for themselves and their country. Abruptly disappearing for periods of time, they return shaken and demoralized. While in police custody, kept in windowless cells, they have endured harsh treatment and false accusations.

Eventually it’s revealed that they have been coerced into becoming informants, which corrodes their trust in each other and eventually leads to the death of one of them. Two, a loving couple at the story’s start, are driven apart by their guilt and shame.

Karnak Café is a troubling vision of life in a modern police state, and it sheds light for Westerners on the recent struggles in Egypt for freedom and justice. Novella-length, it takes a stand somewhat distant from political events, while clearly throwing its sympathies to the young people who speak on its pages. It is currently available in paper and ebook format at amazon, Barnes&Noble, and AbeBooks. For more of Friday's Forgotten Books, click on over to Patti Abbott's blog.

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Coming up: Robert Randisi, ed., Livin’ on Jacks and Queens

Richard Prosch, Devil’s Run

If there’s such a thing as comic violence in the western, Richard Prosch is a gentle master of it. There is shooting and fighting enough in his Devil’s Run—and work for the undertaker—but it’s a story told with a wry and barely suppressed grin.

The central character is Prosch’s “Peregrine,” John Coburn, a gun for hire who’s taken the job of escorting a man improbably named Tie-Down Sam Gustaffson, from Missouri to Nebraska, where he is to appear as a witness in a murder trial.

Family ties, however, produce an obstacle as the two men stop overnight at a river town called Bindlestick, and for a while it looks like they won’t make it out alive. They are joined in their attempt to escape by Margo Blaze, proprietress of the town’s hotel and whose bed was warmed the previous night by our man Coburn.

Illustrators of frontier fiction:W. Herbert Dunton

Taos Society of Artists, 1915 (Dunton, 3rd from left)

William Herbert "Buck" Dunton (1878-1936) was born in Maine. An outdoorsman from an early age, he travelled frequently to the West. After working in New York as a magazine and book illustrator, he eventually settled in Taos, New Mexico, which had become a thriving artists colony. There he gave up a career as an illustrator and took to painting and hunting. He was an original member of the Taos Society of Artists.

Like the writers Zane Grey (1872-1939) and Will James (1892-1942), Dunton had a nostalgic regard for the Old West, preserving and celebrating in his work and pastimes the mythology of frontier scouts, cowboys, and other singular figures who lived independently off the land as it was before westward settlement. Here are a number of his book illustrations from the years 1904 - 1919.

Quoth the raven

Wind farm at the foot of San Jacinto

This will be a little short. I have been having too much fun to get serious about posting to this journal today.

About the nicest thing that has happened to me during this whole past year is the receiving of two greeting cards signed by colleagues from the department where I used to teach. Such warm and generous comments they made, I must’ve had a grin from ear to ear. On top of that, they passed the hat and sent me a very generous gift card from Amazon. I’m totally touched. Writers, artists, and musicians who teach writing are the best on Earth.

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.