Dan was laughing. At least that chuckling murmur was near to a laugh. Yet there was no mirth in it. It had that touch of the maniacal in it which freezes the blood. Silent halted in the midst of his rush, with his hands poised for the next blow. His mouth fell agape with an odd expression of horror as Dan stared up at him. That hideous chuckling continued. The sound defied definition. And from the shadow in which Dan was crouched, his brown eyes blazed, changed, and filled with yellow fires.
If the passage above, taken from Max Brand’s novel The Untamed, seems a little turgid to you, I am in agreement. The book was free for Kindle, and I’d never read any Brand, so I thought I’d give him a try. I don’t think I’m going to be a fan. The prose is labored, and dialogue (though the slang is probably authentic, since the author actually worked as a cowboy for a while) clunks like a counterfeit double eagle.
And yet… considering how literary tastes change, I could see how this could have been an extremely popular book in its time. There’s a mythic quality to it, especially toward the climax, where the image of a mysterious rider in the dark, whistling a weird melody as he approaches with death in his hands, evokes a scene that could have inspired Sergio Leone.
The hero is Dan Barry, an original sort of fellow who rides a black horse no other man can touch, and whose constant companion is a dog that may possibly be a wolf. Found wandering in the desert as a boy and raised by a kindly rancher, he seems as much a wild animal as a human being. The whole plot turns on him tasting his own blood, and being compelled, like a wolf, to kill the man who struck him in the mouth. There’s also an excessively complicated love story.
The scene is a very odd Wild West, identified at one point as being in the 20th Century, but where justice still seems to mostly be in the hands of posses and lynch mobs.
A question occurred to me at the end (this isn’t a spoiler, because it concerns the anticlimax) when Dan is suddenly overwhelmed by the cries of the wild geese.
“The wild geese—” he said suddenly, and then stopped.
“They are flying south?” said Kate.
“South!” he repeated.
His eyes looked far away. The wolf slipped to his side and licked his hand.
“Kate, I’d like to follow the wild geese.”
Could that passage, possibly, be the inspiration for Terry Gilkyson’s song, “Cry of the Wild Goose,” which became a big hit for Frankie Lane?
The web gives no clue.
Fun fact: Max Brand was one of the most prolific and popular pulp writers of the 20th Century. He also wrote for the movies (Tom Mix starred in the silent version of The Untamed), and created the characters of both Destry and Dr. Kildare.
I enjoy older westerns. I haven’t read much Max Brand, but have gone through just about the entire catalog of Louis L’Amour. Lately I’ve been getting into a few Zane Grays. I like the old westerns that highlight the character qualities of honesty, perseverance and industriousness. While L’Amour was not a Christian that I know of, he often presented a very Biblical understanding of human nature, that everyone must fight to overcome the corruption within. He also portrays a good understanding of the nature of evil. My favorite example is a story where people are cooperating with the bad guy, thinking they can benefit from his evil without doing evil themselves. He observes that invariably they end up doing that which they had purposed never to do, joining the bad guy in doing evil. The Bible calls that the Deceitfulness of Sin.
On the other hand, every time I’ve picked up a more modern western, they have been discarded after just a few pages. If the author thinks he’s going to draw me in by sending the hero on a quick trip to the brothel, he’s just earned his place in the round circular file and its nice white plastic liner.
I’ve read most of L’Amour, and enjoyed it very much. There are points, however, when he takes shots at Christianity, by implication, as when he scoffs at the idea of turning the other cheek. Other than L’Amour, my knowledge of western fiction is pretty spotty.
I agree. He presents every other religion, whether the Paganism or Druidism of our European ancestors or the various forms of nature worship of the American Indian tribes as superior. That’s one reason I prefer his earlier works to his later works where his praise of pagan religion became much more overt.
BTW, I’d like to see you review The Blight Way by Patrick McManus or one of his other Sheriff Bo Tully mysteries. I can’t decide if his characters are shallow caricatures of small town personalities or in depth portrayals of very shallow people. Either way his dry humor left me chuckling over depictions of many of the people I’ve met in my years of small town ministry.
You’re not the first person to suggest Patrick McManus to me. I probably need to check him out.
He was a humor columnist for Field and Stream for something like 20 years, so most of his books are just collections of columns. The Blight Way was his first actual novel.