"The more you know, the shorter your life is."- Electra (Cowboy Bebop: Knockin' On Heaven's Door, 2001)
John
Russell Fearn hardly requires an introduction on this blog,
especially after the past year-and-a-half, but for the benefit of the
uninitiated I'll very briefly go over his career again.
Fearn
was an astonishingly prolific writer of science-fiction, westerns and
detective stories, published under a legion of pennames, which
largely appeared in such popular periodicals as the Toronto Star
Weekly, Astounding Stories and Amazing Stories –
marking a British success story in the American pulps. However, he
was more than just a remarkably productive writer of magazine
stories.
If
you look at his bibliography,
you'll notice that Fearn churned out full-length novels as fast as
his short stories and they practically covered every single form of
popular genre-fiction. So far, I primarily looked at his regular
detective stories, like Except
for One Thing (1947) and Death
in Silhouette (1950), but also reviewed a science-fiction
novel, The
Lonely Astronomer (1954), which transported the classic
locked room mystery to the distant, far-flung future. Earlier this
year, I discovered Fearn might have done something similar with one
of his westerns and thought of it would be a nice followup to my
previous review
to take a look at a western-style mystery novel.
Ghost
Canyon (1950) was originally published under one of Fearn's many
pseudonyms, namely "Matt Francis," and was based on a lengthy
plot-outline written by a friend, Matthew W. Japp, who was a
greengrocer and was decorated World War II veteran – who fought in
Normandy, the Netherlands and Germany. Japp also wrote a western
solo, titled Jackson's Spread, but the lion's share of his
literary endeavors consisted of plotting six westerns for his friend.
Ghost Canyon looks to have been their third collaboration and
has an impossible disappearance mystery at the heart of the story.
The
protagonist of the story is "a saddle tramp," Jerry
Carlton, who arrives at a small outpost in Arizona, called Verdure,
which has "an oddly deserted aspect" and resembled a ghost
town. There were, however, strips of lights visible between the
cracks of the wooden shutters that had been placed across every
window in town. So there were people living there.
Carlton
stops at the gateway of a "solitary wooden dwelling" and
is met at the doorway by a woman with a gun, named Hilda Marchland,
who lives there with her old father. It's from them that Carlton
learns that the town is regularly haunted by the ghosts of four
horsemen, "like they came out of the Apocalypse," clad in
spectral white and the townsfolk have become too frightened to leave
their homes after dark – some are now considering to abandoned the "hag-ridden" town. Even though the town is surrounded by
rich, green patches of pastureland. Carlton has done enough riding
under a clear sky and in the wind to start believing in spooks.
Hilda
is delighted to have finally found someone who shares her skepticism
and together they decide to tail the phantom horsemen to see what,
and who, are behind the haunting, but they find more than they
bargained for.
Each
time the horsemen were seen, they rode into Star Canyon and staking
out the mouth of the gorge yields immediate result. Carlton and Hilda
saw the phantom horsemen appear, "dead in line with each other,"
slowly riding into the canyon and they followed behind to see where
they were heading, but in the narrowest part of the canyon the
hoof-prints came to a halt. As if they had ridden into a portal to
the Other World! The walls at that point are smooth, and steep,
without any rockery niches, acclivities and umarred by a single seam,
which appear to be completely immovable "except by blasting"
- which had all the potential of a first-class impossible problem.
Regrettably, the gentlemen who wrote and plotted this story were not
playing entirely fair with their readers.
You
see, they early one discarded one possibility, a tired old trick, but
the ending revealed that this discarded trick is exactly how the
ghost-trick was accomplished, but by that time I had already grown
fond of my own explanation.
My
solution was based around the narrow passage and three hundred feet
high walls. I imagined that, on the flattened top of the rocky
canyon, a (movable) ramp-lift, like a mine-shaft elevator, stood that
could be operated with a hand-winch and the horsemen were simply "air-lifted" out of the narrow passage by an accomplish. On top
of the canyon, out of sight of everyone, the horses could be put away
for the day in a tiny, makeshift stable. Nobody from the town below
would dare to come there anyway. Sadly, the actual answer to the
seemingly impossible disappearance of the horsemen turned out to be
more prosaic, unfair and very, very dated.
So
the only detective-element of any interest proved to be a monumental
letdown and the remainder of the story was more reminiscent of a
hardboiled western than a cowboy-detective.
For
one, there's no real mystery about who's behind the business of the
ghostly horsemen. Verdure is under the control, and run, by a small
circle of men: Sheriff Harrison (who has an eye on Hilda), Mayor
Burridge and the owner of the Black Coyote Saloon, Grant Swainson,
who have clear motive for pulling this Scooby Doo stunt. So the
primary problem for Carlton is how he has to deal with these men and
trying to convince the towns people that they're being frightened out
of their property.
A
task slightly complicated when the people behind the swindle start
murdering people who knew too much. Tragically, one of the victims is
Hilda's father, but the villainous sheriff is also shot in the most
stereotypical manner imaginable. After the death of Old Man
Marchland, Carlton was roughing up the sheriff in the office,
promising him he would stop when he starts talking, but a bullet
whizzed through the open window to permanently silence him. By the
way, it would have made more sense for the murderer to have shot
Carlton, because he was physically attacking the sheriff and
therefore could be passed off to the people of the town as a
justifiable homicide.
So,
yeah, the crime-elements are pretty sub-par in Ghost Canyon,
but this is slightly made up by the action-scenes towards the end.
Such as a very memorable scene when a destructive animal stampede
passes through the town. I also snickered at the scene when the
murderer is confronted by the angry towns people, ready to lynch him,
but tells him he's entitled to stand on his constitutional rights. As
to be expected, the people of Verdure were not having any of it.
Well,
Ghost Canyon is a very readable and even fun story to read,
but the plot is decidedly second-rate and can not be recommended as
an example of the western-style detective story like Edward
D. Hoch's Ben Snow stories. So I'll probably stick to Fearn's
regular detective-fiction for the foreseeable future. Luckily, he
wrote enough of those to last me a while.
A
Note for the Curious: Fearn's collaborator on this book, Matthew
Japp, passed
away in January of this year at the grand old age of 102. Only
four days short of his 103rd birthday!
