Quickshots: Chick Bowdrie

Thanks for the intro, Beverly Garland!

I highly recommend The Collected Bowdrie Dramatizations. The audiobook versions of these come in three sets of six stories. They’re full-cast, with interviews with Louis L’Amour interspersed throughout—he talks about his writing style, his history, and the people he met while doing research. There’s a little bit of music, some great voice acting, and overall they’re just good, friendly, wholesome fun stories.

The series follows the eponymous Bowdrie, who starts off as a young man on the frontier, edging his way from the wildness of the world toward life as an outlaw. But the man manages to correct himself and, with the help of the famous Ranger McNulty, becomes a Texas Ranger. The rest of the stories are about his time as a ranger—investigations, law enforcement, that kind of thing.

Bowdrie’s career mixes classic western flavor with a bit of police procedural, and a good deal of fieldcraft, woodcraft, tracking, and survivalism. If you like any good western, imagine taking your favorite detective thriller—gritty city stuff—and setting it out in the backend of nowhere, Texas. The main character’s just a bit more wholesome than your average private dick.

These really are feel-good stories. There’s action and suspense, sure, but they’ve got that good old-fashioned “right wins over wrong” vibe I usually don’t go for. And honestly, you don’t see it that often unless it’s coming from some preachy alt-right source. But boy—these hit different. Great background listening, great to have with you on a hike or a long drive. Just overall excellent work.

Smart, Horny, Foolish, Outdoorsy

I started writing in this blog years ago as a way to define what I liked most about westerns.  While my enthusiasm to write regularly has waned, my enthusiasm for westerns has not.  My definition of a “western” is quite wide, meaning almost anything taking place between the late 17^th century and the early 20^th century on a North American frontier.  It was while reading The Dakota Cipher, third in William Dietrich’s series about Napoleonic era rapscallion Ethan Gage, that I stumbled upon the recipe for a perfect western.  A perfect western should take place in the time and place described above, and have a hero who is smart, horny, foolish, and outdoorsy.   

Allow me to explain.  A good yarn should allow the audience to identify with the characters and at the same time have elements of wish fulfillment. 

I have a fondness for main characters that are smart and horny, because, well, that’s me.  It sounds pompous to say that I’m smart, but it’s true (despite what a lack of solid proofreading in this blog might suggest).  As to horny, a quick tour through this blog (particularly anything tagged Randy Cowpoke) will show that is an apt description as well. 

Foolish?  Let’s instead call that prone to acting with without thinking, and the start of the wish fulfillment phase.  I typically think before acting, drink very little, never gamble, and rarely exceed the speed limit.  Frankly, it’s boring, and in fiction I love when otherwise smart characters leap into danger without forethought as I long to do, especially when their boldness is rewarded when danger slaps them upside the head.

Let’s turn outdoorsy into at home in the wilderness.  The older I get the more handy I become in the woods, the desert, the mountains, the river, and with a kayak, tent, fire, and axe.  I’m still no mountain man and would probably go under after a week alone in the woods (mostly because of my cardiac issues).  In my dreams, though, I read the wilderness like the back of my hand as I stride through the plains and can capably fell deer and owlhoots alike with a smokestick, tomahawk, or my bare fists.

So let’s take a look at some of my favorite characters and how they stack up.

George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman

Smart, stupidly horny, undoubtedly foolish, but although his adventures often take place in far flung frontiers he is much more at home in the parlor. 

Any hero in a Louis L’Amour story

Smart and outdoorsy to a man, but rarely horny and seldom foolish.

Robert E. Howard’s Breckenridge Elkins

Somewhat horny, very foolish, so outdoorsy he barely fits between four walls, but Breck can hardly be considered smart (I’ve mapped him out as a D&D character many times, never with an intelligence greater than 7).

William Dietrich’s Ethan Gage

Now this is the stuff.  Gage is smart.  He’s a savant, a scientist of the Ben Franklin persuasion, known as a master of electricity in a world still lit by candles.  After a spell at Harvard he spent time as a fur trapper in the Great Lakes, learning woodscraft, sharpshooting, and tomahawking.  Gage then made his way to Paris during the Revolution, and picked up the habit of leaping into danger, usually also involving first leaping between the legs of whatever woman happened to available at the time.

Gage is “lazy as an aristocrat, but without the manners,” and finds himself in various adventures across the globe, often as not tied to ancient mystical conspiracies.  In one spectacular tale (the aforementioned Dakota Cipher) Gage tumbles in and out of Louisa Bonaparte’s petticoats before hightailing it to the wilderness of North America, running from cultists and British spies while searching for, of all things...

 

Don't fuck with Thor's hammer

Sadly, I don’t believe that Dietrich managed to take Ethan Gage back to North America over the course of the series, which was cut short at eight books out of a planned fifteen.  Gage does set a high bar for the smart, horny, foolish, outdoorsy hero that I love to read about.

Jubal Sacket’s Multishot Flintlock

As I have said in an earlier post, I wasn’t a fan of Louis L’Amour until I got around to checking out Jubal Sacket, the story of the mystic wanderer of the far traveling Sacket clan.  One of the side items in that fascinating book that postulated a number of crazy ideas (like a much larger European influence on 16^th & 17^th century America than previously known and the continued existence of mastodons into that time) was the occasional availability to multi-shot flintlocks and wheel locks, forerunners of the iconic wild west sixgun.  Today I found a neat YouTube video that shows a similar piece, the Lorenzoni repeating flintlock.  Watch, enjoy, and dream of running the wilderness with Jubal, the “Ghost in the Woods”.

Louis L'Amour Killed the Western

When you go to a book store and look for the western section, you find two things: first, there are hardly any westerns there.  Second, they are at least half Louis L’Amour books.  I can’t help but think that the two are related.  The sci-fi and fantasy sections are not big, but they are lively and always changing.  Tolkien and Howard only wrote a handful of books between them, and at the pace he’s going George R.R.R.R Martin isn’t going to take up a whole bookshelf of Game of Thrones volumes any time soon.  The shelves have gone from being full of military sci-fi, to paranormal romance, extra-planar horror, and now sexy steampunk volumes.  Sci-fi and fantasy keep changing.

The western section, by comparison, tends to be dominated by a single author- L’Amour.  Take a look at the two (that’s right, only two) shelves of westerns that I found recently at a fairly large used book store in New Hampshire.  L’Amour’s books are all of the paperbacks and most of the hardbacks.  Hugely success, yes, but by dominating the western market for so long did he in fact narrow it and crowd out new and exciting directions for the genre?

I have gone from being an elitist snob about L’Amour to really enjoying his writing.  I’ve been listening to a collection of full cast production Chick Bowdrie short stories from Audible, and love them.  L’Amour isn’t as sentimental as I’d suspected (frankly no western authors have, to my surprise as I noted in this post).  Some of the dialogue from Jubal Sacket, in fact, stayed with me as I went into and out of heart surgery last year. 

So I have grown to enjoy L’Amour, but also regret his place in the genre.  With 89 novels and 14 short story collections taking up the shelves, there isn’t room for much more, and fewer new finds to entice readers.

Jubal Sackett: This Thing That Is Me Is Not Yet Finished

I find myself early in my blogging life facing a fairly frightening, anxiety inducing situation involving my future health and well being.  Last night as I drifted off to sleep, facing the long dark night, my mind kept coming back to a single phrase that anchored me: this thing that is me is not yet finished.

It is a somewhat inexact quote from Jubal Sackett, one of the Louis L’Amour Sackett series, detailing a family’s history from the 16^th century Fenlands of England to early America and eventually into the 19^th century West.  The series is 17 books long, covering the lives of 13 main family members.  I have been an indifferent reader of Louis L’Amour for many years, never quite enthralled but never disappointed enough not to pick up another novel every few years.  The Sackett series in particular has always appealed to me, as the year I spent living in the East Anglian Fenlands was the year that I consider myself to have become an adult.

Last year I sought out a just opened used bookstore in a local college town, intent on buying something off of their western shelf.  The shelf was a total of four novels, one of which was Jubal Sackett.  I had a vague memory of reading that Jubal was the quiet and introspective member of the otherwise raucous and adventuresome group, so I selected that novel and set about reading.

It turns out that Jubal Sackett was the last of the series that L’Amour wrote, and one of the last novels written in an amazingly prolific career towards the end of his life.  Jubal Sackett seems to be a departure from his previously formulaic books, where L’Amour clearly had some things to say.  Jubal, the “ghost in the woods”, the proto-mountain man, is loner, wanderer, natural philosopher, who drops lines like the following throughout the course of the novel:

“It is not enough to do, one must also become.  I wish to be wiser, stronger, better.  This… this thing that is me is incomplete.  It is only the raw material with which I have to work.  I want to make it better than I received it.”

This thing that is me is incomplete.  This thing that is me is not yet finished.  Thank you, Jubal Sackett.