Clarence E. Mulford (1883–1956)

So, I was reading a book about a schizophrenic, alcoholic Englishman who was totally besotted on a small-time actress, Hangover Square. Either he wanted to take her to a stone cottage in the country, or else kill her. For her part, she was totally indifferent to him.

Anyway, the schizo/alky was on a train and got out a book, The Bar-20 Rides Again, to read. I figured it was a made-up name, but I checked anyway. It wasn't. It turns out that back some century ago, a guy named Clarence E. Mulford wrote a series of western novels featuring Hopalong Cassidy. Naturally, I knew Hoppy from his portrayal by William Boyd in old black and white films in the early days of TV. I never knew that Hoppy originated from a set of books. Nor did I ever know that Hoppy was a red head with a limp.

Anyway, Hoppy and his gang have long since broken up (this book is the 17th of the series), and a number of them have taken up ranching and gotten themselves a wife. One such, Johnny Nelson, was living happily in north Texas or Colorado or somewhere and doing just fine. Then suddenly, out of the Snake Buttes, came a bunch of cattle rustlers who stole his cattle, and that of some friends, and also shot Johnny. Johnny's wife wrote Hoppy about it. Hoppy and a bunch of the old crew were ranching together up in Montana.

So, they come south to help out their old buddy. They get another old friend, Tex Ewalt, the slickest gambler that ever was, and a guy who was also pretty slick with a gun, to come up from Texas to wherever the Snake Buttes were. Tex infiltrates the gang of rustlers, led by a guy named Nevada.

So, anyway, we have guys riding horses, guys gambling, guys drinking, guys gibing each other, and of course, guys shooting each other. All the good stuff of old fashioned westerns. Believe it or not, this book wasn't half bad. Much more entertaining than the more literary piece about the schizo/alky.
… (mais)

Hopalong Cassidy is one of the most famous -- if not the most famous -- Western heroes in the world. Created by Clarence E. Mulford, the first Hopalong Cassidy novel, Bar-20 (whose full title is Bar-20: Being a Record of Certain Happenings that Occurred in the Otherwise Peaceful Lives of one Hopalong Cassidy and His Companions on the Range), appeared in either 1906 or rel="nofollow" target="_top">1907 (although the Library of Congress lists two 1907 editions, one of them, from The Outing Publishing Company, is currently missing), appears to collect a group of stories first published in 1904, but the character would go on to greater fame in a series of 66 movies, as well as his own radio and television programmes.

There is precious little in the way of character development in Bar-20: the characters associated with Hopalong are scarcely distinguishable from one another (indeed, Hopalong's -- he's never called "Hoppy" here, unlike in his other media appearances -- closest friend, Red Connors, is distinguishable from Hopalong primarily by his preferred weapon: a rifle, as opposed to Hopalong's partiality for the six-shooter; both men are redheads), although one might be better at roping steers and another might be better at "broncho" busting, while the foreman of the Bar-20 ranch, Buck Peters, is slightly less impulsive than the brawling, yowling, over-grown schoolboys he rides herd on much as they ride herd on the ranch's cattle due to his age; in terms of personality, there's not a hair's difference between most of them (although the lugubrious Billy stands out as the Eeyore of the group), and thus it's difficult to form a preference for one over the others. Here Hopalong is a 23-year-old who acts more or less how one would expect an actual twenty-something male in the late 1800s to act in his milieu, to wit: he curses (these are largely elided, save for the occasional "damn" or "hell;" more common are semi-humorous, sometimes esoteric, euphemisms, such as, in Chapter XI ["Holding the Claim"], Hopalong calls a calf a "'trellis-built rack of bones'" [p. 112] and his friend Red a "'pie-eating doodlebug'" [p. 113]), smokes, drinks, uses his ferocious skill with firearms to kill when necessary (and sometimes, perhaps, when it's not strictly necessary), and willingly makes the acquaintance of ladies of easy virtue; this is in marked contrast to his other media appearances. Thanks to William Boyd, a white-haired actor whose previous claim to fame was having proposed marriage to his co-star Elinor Fair while filming the 1926 movie The Volga Boatman (she accepted, although they divorced three years later), Hopalong became "'a veritable Galahad of the range, a soft spoken paragon who did not smoke, drink or kiss girls, who tried to capture the rustlers instead of shooting them, and who always let the villain draw first if gunplay was inevitable,'" according to Time magazine. Boyd became so identified with Hopalong Cassidy that he frequently wore his all-black cowboy outfit (Mulford makes no mention of Hopalong being clad entirely in black) in public; he was shrewd enough to buy the rights to the films and novels, and he licensed the character and his image to numerous child-oriented products, while NBC edited the films down to episodic length, making Hopalong Cassidy the first television western series. Indeed, Mulford himself revised his earlier work so that Hopalong and his friends were more consistent with their onscreen portrayals; Hopalong here has no very great regard for the finer points of the law, as when he dismisses Buck and Frenchy's cautionary tale of the sheriff of Topeka requiring all firearms to be turned in to the bartenders before their owners can be served with a rousing, "'To blazes with th' law!'" (Chapter IX: "The Advent of McAllister"; pps. 98-99).

There appear to be four or five stories comprising Bar-20; beyond dividing the stories equally into named chapters, with no other demarcations (such as "Part I," "Book I," or the name of the original stories) to indicate where one story ends and the next one begins, there is no other attempt to convert them into a seamless novel. The first five chapters are the most awkwardly written, with the stiff, formal, Victorian-style prose of the omniscient narrator sitting uneasily side-by-side with the more modern, though stylized, colloquialisms of the dialogue (the characters cannot usually be distinguished by their speech patterns); Mulford doesn't seem to find his voice until the sixth chapter ("Trials of the Convalescent"). (Another oddity: the hats worn by the cowboys are called sombreros, which was apparently what cowboys called any broad-brimmed hat instead of the specific headgear associated with the vaqueros and banditos of Mexico.) After roughly the halfway mark, the writing markedly improves, to the point of implying far darker deeds than Boyd or the Hays Office would ever allow: the conclusion of Bar-20's strongest episode, an all-out range war against a gang of exceptionally crafty rustlers who have successfully preyed upon half a dozen different ranches, strongly implies that one of the supporting characters, Frenchy, tortured and/or mutilated one of the chief rustlers before administering the customary "frontier justice" meted out to rustlers (i.e., hanging; see Chapter XXII: "The Showdown"; p. 213). This tantalizing hint of what Bar-20 could've been -- something more interesting than the gory and obvious Peckinpahesque revisionist western that most obviously suggests itself -- was enough to make this reader grind his teeth in frustration.

The violence in Bar-20 in the early chapters is cartoonish, reminiscent of a parody of the 1980s TV show The A-Team: characters who are fatally shot die immediately and bloodlessly, while characters who are wounded, even to the point of having been shot in a limb, are able to continue fighting without impediment until the fight is over. One only has to have read a couple of H. Rider Haggard's books published twenty years prior to Bar-20 to realize that Mulford didn't have to write his action scenes this way. While the violence never quite rises to the zest and pungency of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard at their best, it does improve over its earliest appearances.

The provenance of Hopalong's byname is explained Chapter VII ("The Open Door"), where it is revealed that Hopalong "had received the wound that crippled him [really, left him with a slight limp] in saving the sheriff [of Albuquerque, Harris] from assassination" (p. 61); "..from this episode on the burning desert grew a friendship that was as strong as their own natures" (ibid). Mulford ascribes some of the characteristics to Harris that Boyd would claim for Hopalong -- "No profane word had ever been known to leave his lips, and he was the possessor of a widespread reputation for generosity" (p. 62) -- but, two pages after he's introduced, he's killed off, obviating the potential for the portrayal of an odd-couple friendship between Hopalong and Harris.

The appetite for new Hopalong adventures was such that a young pulp author named Louis L'Amour was commissioned to write four of them, under the house name "Tex Burns," by Doubleday in 1950; these were originally published in bowdlerized form in keeping with the portrayal of Hopalong in film, comic books, radio and television, but were posthumously republished with L'Amour's original "adult" writing restored.

If one has a keen interest in the development of the western serial hero, or if one is interested in a slightly more nuanced version of the goody-two-shoes character portrayed by William Boyd, then Bar-20 is worth a read; for the mildly curious reader, such as myself, it's less certain that further perusal of Mulford's work will offer greater rewards than a deeper dive into, say, the work of Rider Haggard, Howard, Talbot Mundy, or Harold Lamb.… (mais)

Johnny Nelson reached up for the new, blue flannel shirt he had hung above his bunk, and then placed his hands on hips and soliloquized: "Me an' Red buy a new shirt apiece Saturday night an' one of 'em 's gone Sunday mornin'; purty fast work even for this outfit."
He strode to the gallery to ask the cook, erstwhile subject of the Most Heavenly One, but the words froze on his lips. Lee Hop's stoop-shouldered back was encased in a brand new, blue flannel shirt, the price mark chalked over one shoulder blade, and he sing-songed a Chinese classic while debating the advisability of adopting a pair of trousers and thus crossing another of the boundaries between the Orient and the Occident. He had no eyes in the back of his head but was rarely gifted in the "ways that are strange," and he felt danger before the boot left Johnny's hand. Before the missile landed in the dish pan Lee Hop was digging madly across the open, half way to the ranch house, and temporary safety.
Johnny fished out the boot and paused to watch the agile cook. "He 's got eyes all over hisself—an' no coyote ever lived as could beat him," was his regretful comment. He knew better than to follow—Hopalong's wife had a sympathetic heart, and a tongue to be feared. She had not yet forgotten Lee Hop's auspicious initiation as an ex-officio member of the outfit, and Johnny's part therein. And no one had been able to convince her that sympathy was wasted on a "Chink."
The shirtless puncher looked around helplessly, and then a grin slipped over his face. Glancing at the boot he dropped it back into the dish water, moved swiftly to Red's bunk, and in a moment a twin to his own shirt adorned his back. To make matters more certain he deposited on Red's blankets an old shirt of Lee Hop's, and then sauntered over to Skinny's bunk.
"Hoppy said he 'd lick me if I hurt th' Chink any more; but he did n't say nothin' to Red. May th' best man win," he muttered as he lifted Skinny's blankets and fondled a box of cigars. "One from forty-three leaves forty-two," he figured, and then, dropping to the floor and crawling under the bunk, he added a mark to Skinny's "secret" tally. Skinny always liked to know just how many of his own cigars he smoked.
"Now for a little nip, an' then th' open, where this cigar won't talk so loud," he laughed, heading towards Lanky's bunk. The most diligent search failed to produce, and a rapid repetition also failed. Lanky's clothes and boots yielded nothing and Johnny was getting sarcastic when his eyes fell upon an old boot lying under a pile of riding gear in a corner of the room. Keeping his thumb on the original level he drank, and then added enough water to bring the depleted liquor up to his thumb. "Gee—I 've saved sixty-five dollars this month, an' two days are gone already," he chuckled. He received sixty-five dollars, and what luxuries were not nailed down, every month.
Mounting his horse he rode away to enjoy the cigar, happy that the winter was nearly over. There was a feeling in the air that told of Spring, no matter what the calendar showed, and Johnny felt unrest stirring in his veins. When Johnny felt thus exuberant things promised to move swiftly about the bunk-house.… (mais)