Wild Wild West (Bookhounds)

Last post before I fly. I'll be offline for two weeks; won't see you again till the beginning of June.

Reminder: I'm one of the hosts of a Friday panel at the UK Chaosium thing in Cranfield. Come say hi!

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Wild West shows were a big thing, once upon a time. Buffalo Bill is supposed to have started the first, after Ned Buntline's novel made him famous, but in their day they were the Great Big Thing of entertainment. By the 1880s there were several troupes travelling the US and making a big splash abroad. They began to die out around about the 1890s, and the biggest and the best, Buffalo Bill's, fell to bankruptcy shortly before the First World War.

Broadly speaking, the format was the same across the board. Daring displays of horsemanship, shootist talent, and glammed-up frontier life, capped with an Indian raid on some burning cabin or other, repulsed by the brave cowboys and their allies. Historical accuracy was so far from the point as to be living in another country under an assumed name. Buffalo Bill and his fellow entrepreneurs knew one thing and one thing only:

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

This is why Stoker uses a cowboy stereotype in Dracula. Not that he gives a damn, but he knows what his audience likes. They knew cowboys. Dime store novels and Wild West shows told them everything they needed to know about the heroes of the prairie. 

In the 1930s, Wild West shows are dead and gone. The West as a genre of entertainment is still alive and well; the riders and daredevils move on to film. There are still novels, just not dime novels.

There are collectors who want those novels.

Ghost Woman

The Hounds know that someone out there wants all the copies of Doc Cantrill's Burning Sagebrush they can get their hands on. It's not clear why.

Burning Sagebrush is a tell-all that first saw print in the States back in 1908, went out of print for a while, then saw a new edition in 1931 as a tie-in for a Tom Mix flicker. Mix's film wasn't a faithful adaptation of Burning Sagebrush, which is just as well since the novel's next door to pornography. At its release, there were calls for it to be banned under the Obscene Publications Act.

Sagebrush is the story of a wild west desperado who rides with a Wild West troupe, having adventures across the US and, in the final chapters, in Europe. Bedroom antics made it notorious, in its day. Cantrill's tour of the boudoirs of Europe, in company with his ride-or-die Indian queen Ghost Woman, kept boys awake at night. 

In the film, much is made of the final chapters in which Cantrill and Ghost Woman restore a Ruritarian monarch to the throne, in the guise of a thrilling Wild West show which is actually an excuse to smuggle guns to the rebels. In the novel, this bit takes up less than a chapter and is capped by a daring raid and 'rescue' of Princess Kinbote from an unhappy marriage. Kinbote joins Cantrill and Ghost Woman in the show. This never happens in the film.

There's a lot of money on the table, but why is someone so eager to get all the Burning Sagebrush they can handle?

Option One: Hollywood. The buyer is a studio executive who realizes that the novel is actually coded for some sort of 'kookie European cult'. The executive wants in on the cult and figures that they can curry favor by presenting them with a gift: covering up their deeds. The cult in question is the Keirecheires, which the executive thinks is some kind of upper-class supper club. The Keirecheires is the inspiration for the Ruritarian romance. The cultists don't mind the book so much, but they become concerned when Hollywood comes knocking on their door. Surely this little man doesn't want to film their activities?

Option Two: Kinbote. Formerly Annie Love, a star of the British stage who happened to go round with Cantrill's show for a while as the poor victim rescued from the clutches of wicked Ghost Woman. There's a bit in the British version of Cantrill's novel that Annie Love, now a woman of leisure living in Brighton, really would rather the world not know about. Turns out those clutches were clinches, and there are photos to prove it in the British version. Unfortunately for Love the ghost of Cantrill is just as eager to see his work in print as she is to keep it out; it's a struggle between a dead man and a living woman as to who will come out on top.

Option Three: Ghost Woman. Formerly May Lillie, a kid from Brooklyn who saw the world on horseback and ended up running cabarets in Soho through the 1920s after Cantrill's show went bust. She supported herself during the war with unsavory photographic displays; very artistic, but not the sort of thing she wants publicized. However, the Keirecheires, who took those photos, are keen to get them back out there for cult reasons of their own. May Lillie knows the cult of old and is gathering friends from her Wild West days to put a stop to it. She's willing to use the Hounds to find out where the Keirecheires is hiding, but the Hounds aren't friends of hers. She'll sacrifice them to get the information she needs.

That's it for this week. See you in a bit!