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! 

  

Not Quite Review Corner: Kolchak the Night Stalker

Kolchak: the Night Stalker Kino Lorber blu-ray 2021 edition, first filmed by CBS way back in the mid-70s.

Sourced from CINE CLASICO DE TERROR

My collection grows apace. I've known about this for a long time. Pretty sure I first heard of it when Stephen King referenced it, probably in Danse Macabre. I'd never seen it, so when Kino told me a sale was on (I think Kino has my number) I figured I could spend a few bucks and find out what the fuss was about.

Well. 

Hum.

It's ... interesting? I can't put myself in the 70s and imagine what it would have been like to see this on the small screen in a darkened living room. I think it hits differently under those circumstances. I can understand why the likes of Chris Carter (X-Files) cite it as an influence on their work. It has flair, even charm. 

Where it loses me a little is with the monsters. 

Carl Kolchak faces off against pretty much everything you can think of, from relatively ordinary beasties like zombies and vampires to the more esoteric aliens, ghost knights and killer robots. They're a grim bunch. Richard Kiel of Jaws fame plays the gribbly at least twice. Thing is, they lack personality. They exist to menace. But even the ones that might have a little something, like Jack the Ripper, are one-dimensional. This Ripper is a wooden slash-slash killer with almost no dialogue. There's a side character who reportedly has whole conversations with him, off-screen. But nothing out in the open where the audience can see it. 

It doesn't help that, since this is a 70s TV show and not a movie, the effects are minimal and there's no blood to speak of. Not that I like to wallow in gore, but if you're going to have a dog viciously attack someone on-screen there ought to be at least a hint of claret.

It's just about as cheaply made as you'd expect. Lots of clips sourced from other stuff with voiceover attached. Cardboard sets. Minimal fight choreography. There was one moment that stick in my mind, where Kolchak meets a source of information. This source is introduced, given a bit of background, but they never speak and you never see their face. It's almost as if they couldn't afford an actor so they dragooned one of the studio lot lice, put him in a dark suit, and said 'wave your arm around when I tell you to.' Somehow I don't think they had a union card.

But when it works, it works. This is due in no small part to the lead, Darren McGavin, who grabs the screen and doesn't let go. It's a treat to watch him scuttle around, fight his bosses with pop-eyed enthusiasm, dive after a story despite compelling reasons to run the other way. His Kolchak does what some Cthulhu investigators fail to do: he investigates. He actively goes after clues. Interrogates witnesses. Challenges authority. He's no angel, but fights on the side of the angels. 

I know McGavin didn't like working for TV. He felt the work was soul-destroying. If you know him at all, it's probably thanks to his role in A Christmas Story, not this show. Still and all, this is damn fine work from someone who didn't like television. He put it all out there, and in doing created a character that's fun to watch.

A neat little Kolchak trick: he's at a hospital, trying to get a photo of the patient in their hospital bed. The door between him and the patient is shut and a cop stands outside, not letting Kolchak in. Kolchak engages the cop in conversation, gets the cop to agree to have his photograph taken. At the fatal moment, the hospital door opens and a nurse comes through. Kolchak whips around, gets a shot of the patient. 'Thanks!' Off he scuttles. 

Another neat Kolchak trick. He has a recorder in a bag with a strap on it. The crime scene is on a stairwell. He knows he's not supposed to be at the scene, so he hides one floor up and lowers the recorder by the strap close enough to hear the forensic techs gossip. When caught, he loudly protests. When dragged away, his camera pointing at the ground, he makes sure he's dragged over the body on the stairs (which even in the 70s must have been a crime-scene no-no) and the viewer sees the flash go off.

That's Karl Kolchak in a nutshell. He finagles. He twists, he schemes. He does not bluster or start fights. He's no action hero. But he's got a lot of courage and he doesn't mind taking risks to get a story. 

The blu-ray set is the full TV series, but it does not include the movie version which kicks it all off in 1972. It has a couple of special features but nothing too fancy, no commentary track. Worth picking up if you like this kind of thing, but not something I'd call a must-have. More a might-if-on-sale.

Keepers want this to steal NPCs from. It's vintage 70s stuff. If you have an NPC or a situation set in that period, you want to watch shows like this. Players want this because Kolchak is their patron saint. He shows you what it means to be an investigator into the mystery, and he never gives up.

That's it for this week. Enjoy!