Trumpets West

I believe the Western to be the father of the hard-boiled detective story--it was the Western that made the laconic and/or snarky loner a hero in so many stories. This template eventually became an important part of the hard-boiled P.I. That's why Robert Parker, who reinvigorated the hard-boiled P.I. story with his Spenser novels starting in the 1970s, was able to so smoothly add Westerns to his bibliography later in his career.

"Trumpets West," a novella by Luke Short that was originally published in the July 1945 issue of Argosy, is another good example of this. It's a Western--a story that centers around a conflict between the Cavalry and the Apache. But its also a crime story involving corruption and ruthless double-crosses.

The protagonist is Lt. Burke Hanna, who begins the story with good reason to be angry with his commanding officer. He had been out looking for Ponce, an Apache chief who had left the reservation with a large band of warriors. The local Indian agent had been shorting the Apaches on beef and pocketing what he saved. Ponce had left to raid surrounding settlements simply to get his people enough food.

Hanna, with a troop of soldiers, tracked Ponce down and gave the chief most of the troop's rations as part of an inducement to return to the reservation. But then he receives orders to remain on patrol despite a lack of food, with requests for more rations refused. By the time Hanna's men get back to the fort, they've had to eat most of their horses to survive.

The trouble is heightened by the fact that the C.O. is engaged to the daughter of the corrupt Indian agent, so blocks any efforts by Hanna to see that justice is done and the Indians get the beef they were promised.

The resultant shenanigans end with Hanna in the brig. But when Ponce breaks out of the reservation again, Hanna is the only person who has any real chance of running him down. He's released from the brig and allowed back in the field. But when Ponce is cornered and a pitched battle begins, the corrupt Indian agent has plans to make sure Hanna does not return alive. It's a plan that might get a lot of other soldiers killed as well. "Trumpets West" has a Film Noir-ish feel to it even while it also does its job as a traditional Western.

The climatic battle is fantastic, with Short doing a great job of explaining the tactical situation while still keeping his prose fast-moving and exciting. I've written about Luke Short several times this year, because I've only recently discovered how good a writer he was and I'm enjoying delving into his work. "Trumpets West" is perhaps my favorite so far. The characters are well-defined, with a strong protagonist and despicable but believable villains. I especially like Hanna's attitude towards Ponce--he respects the chief and will risk his career to see the Apaches are treated like human beings. But when Ponce breaks reservation, Hanna doesn't hesitate to do his duty as a soldier, even if it means fighting.

Dell's Four Color #875 (Feb. 1958) brought us a really good adaptation of "Trumpets West," written by Paul S. Newman and with interior art by Mike Roy. (Sam Savitt painted the wonderful cover you see to the left.) It's interesting to compare it to the original story.

The novella begins with Hanna bringing his hungry and exhausted patrol back into the fort. Short then gives us the background information we need through conversation and when Hanna reports to his C.O.  

This is all done smoothly and effectively, but Paul S. Newman realized that a comic book story

needed a more visual bang out of the starting gate. So he shows us Hanna's patrol, negotiations with Ponce and the brutal necessity of shooting horses to get meat for his men. When we do get to dialogue-heavy pages, it's handled well without slowing things down because not as much dialogue is necessary as was used in the original prose. It's a neat example of how different mediums can have different storytelling requirement to tell the same story.

The comic book also drops a character completely. Short gave Hanna a fiance named Calla. She's a strong character in her own right--intelligent and supportive of Hanna no matter what he is accused of over the course of the tale. But, as much as I like the story, it is true that Calla simply doesn't get to do anything that actually affects the plot. Her disappearance from the comic book is a wise decision--making more room for the actual story.

The final battle is slightly edited as well, with the action condensed to fit the entire story into the required page count. It means we lose a couple of really cool bits from the novella, but artist Mike Roy expertly lays out of the action that remains and it follows the same logical pattern as it did in the novella.












Roy's art is clean I really like his compositions. To my eye, his figure work can sometimes be a little bit stiff, but I do like his art here.

So "Trumpets West" is worth reading either as a prose story or a comic book tale.

Hauling Freight Down a Narrow Mountain Trail

I reviewed the novel Ambush, by Luke Short, a few months ago. Short has a great reputation as a writer of Westerns. That’s a genre I enjoy,  but  I just never happened to get around to reading his stuff. But I enjoyed Ambush so much that it wasn’t long before I dug up a copy of another of Short's novels.

Dead Freight for Piute was serialized in Western Story Magazine in November & December of 1939. It has a nifty premise. Rather than dealing with cattle drives, outlaws or Indians, it deals with freighting companies.

Hauling freight was, of course, an important part of building the West, but it doesn’t quite have the romantic flair of driving cattle over the Chisum trail, forming a posse to chase outlaws, or a last stand against Apache warriors. But Short demonstrates in this novel that the freight business is a rich source of drama and adventure when placed in the hands of a good writer.

Cole Armin shows up in the mining boom town of Piute, looking for a job with his Uncle Craig’s freight business. His trip to Piute was not without incident, though. The stage he rode in on was robbed and a pretty lady passenger named Celia Wallace is robbed of the $10,000 in cash she was carrying. She was bringing this money to her brother Ted, who is running his own freight company in competition with the Monarch—Craig Armin’s company.

Celia knows who Cole is and assumes he’s in on the robbery, which was engineered by Craig to wipe

out the competition. But Cole finds out his uncle is a crook, wins a fight against a teamster he recognized as the stage robber, then blackmails Craig into returning the cash. Soon, Cole is working for Ted and Celia with the Western Freight company.

Craig is determined to be the one-and-only freight company, though. What follows is a convoluted but well-told story in which Craig, his top thug Wade Billings and dishonest sheriff Ed Linton plot to destroy the Western company while also plotting and counter-plotting to double-cross each other

Cole is a great protagonist. He’s unfamiliar with the freighting business (something that’s used as an effective plot point several times), but he’s smart and intensely loyal to anyone he befriends. He has a temper, though, which is directed at the bad guys but can sometimes rise to a frightening level. That’s also an effective plot point on a few occasions.

So Short writes a Western that—like many Westerns—mirrors the hard-boiled fiction that the Western genre helped spawn.  And he keeps the action moving with some superbly written action set pieces. Cole’s fist fight with Wade Billings, involving a bull whip (which is why one edition of the book was titled Bull-Whip) is truly exciting. A sequence in which the Cole, still inexperienced as a teamster as he navigates a large wagon full of ore down a mountain trail, turns equally exciting when he discovers someone sawed through the brake lever.

The final gunfight, with Cole carrying an injured Ted Wallace over his shoulders while Ted shoots at the bad guys and fumbles in Cole’s belt for more bullets, is one of the best I’ve ever read.

Dead Freight for Piute was made into a movie in 1948 and re-titled Albuquerque.  Starring Randolph Scott as Cole, it’s a pretty good Western, though the plot was streamlined and more straightforward, making it less interesting that Short’s more complex novel. Still, it’s got Lon Chaney , Jr. as one of the bad guys and Gabby Hayes as Scott’s sidekick, so it’s still fun to watch.

"The troop was beat into utter stillness by the savage heat of the afternoon."

This Saturday Evening Post cover doesn't exactly scream "Western!", does it? But that's okay. The Post was an anthology magazine that covered a lot of ground and a Norman Rockwell cover is never a bad thing.

This is the December 25, 1948 issue and it contained the first of eight parts of a new Luke Short Western, which would run through the Feb. 12, 1949 issue. Short's real name was Frederick Dilley Glidden, who sold his first Western to the pulps in 1935. His pen name, by the way, is the same as the name of a real-life Western gunfighter--but, according to his Wikipedia entry, it's not clear if the writer knew that when he picked the name.

Short's Westerns are excellent, combining tense, slam-bang action with sharp characterizations. His popularity allowed him to eventually graduate from the pulps to the better-paying slicks such as the Post. This particular serial, titled Ambush, was republished as a novel in 1949.

Among Short's fans, this is considered one of his best. The protagonist is a scout named Ward Kinsman, an intelligent and capable man who likes the solitude of the Southwestern desert. When the novel opens, he's mining for gold in a lonely spot. A fellow scout finds him, telling him that the brutal Apache leader Diablito has left the reservation with a band of warriors. Unfortunately, this scout has also inadvertently led some of Diablito's men to Ward's location. Ward and the Apache are old enemies.

This allows Short to construct an action sequence right at the novel's beginning that serves two purposes--it provides excitement and it gives us insight into Ward's personality as he improvises an escape plan that depends on his detailed knowledge of the terrain. He never loses his head and he is constantly analyzing the overall situation.

The two scouts do reach the local fort, where Ward is told a woman named Mary Carlyle has been captured by the Apaches. We also meet Mary's sister Ann and several Calvary officers who will be key supporting characters. Short begins several sub-plots at this point: an officer is in love with the abused wife of an enlisted man; while Ward and another officer both develop a thing for Ann.

A less skilled writer might have allowed the story to dip into melodrama, but Short ties it all together

through his fast pacing (it's never too long before we get to another action scene) and his strong characterizations. The conflict between Ward and Captain Loring (his rival for Ann) is particularly good. Both men have admirable qualities. At first it seems as if Ward (and even Short as the writer) is being overly critical of Loring. The initial impression is that maybe Short is trying a little too hard to make sure the right person ends up with the girl. But as the climatic battle approaches, we realize that Loring has a flaw in his character (something that had been subtly foreshadowed) that justifies the criticism.

That climatic battle is a doozy--a fight in the early morning light as a small detachment of troopers is used to lure Diablito's band into an ambush.

As you can tell from the quote I use in the post title, Short is also skilled at creating vivid ways to describe the desert setting, using sentences such as that one to quickly pound into our heads just how hot, desolate and savage the area can be.

I actually haven't read a lot of Short's stuff. Picking up Ambush pretty much at random at the public library was a real find and a reminder that--no matter how much you read--there will always be another writer out there you have yet to really discover.