NP Warlock (1959)

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Hey Keith

I actually liked the book, and enjoy pulp novels and serials too. I'm 
not the one setting up the elitist distinction between "pulp fiction" 
and "literature", nor is the reviewer.

And I'd be pretty sure O'Brien actually read the book before passing 
judgement about it.

best

> Excerpts from:
> 'The Design of the West' (review of _Warlock by Oakley Hall) by 
> Geoffrey O'Brien.
> _Artforum_ 12.4 (Bookforum supplement). New York: Dec 2005/Jan 2006, 
> p. 47.
>
> America's great cowboy epic consists of a hundred thousand simulacra 
> (cast in forms ranging from novels and movies to model kits and lunch 
> boxes) of an imaginary original. At that primal point where other 
> cultures find their Ramayana or Iliad or Le Morte d'Arthur, we make do 
> with rumors and fabrications, replicas of wanted posters and tintypes 
> of miners' shacks, Owen Wister and Zane Grey, and the deathless 
> ideogram of a man on a horse crossing an empty space [...]
>
> So successfully does Warlock enact the necessary moves of the classic 
> western that it was itself turned almost immediately into a very 
> effective movie (directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Henry Fonda 
> and Richard Widmark) which, though it drops significant chunks of 
> Hall's convoluted narrative [...]
>
> The hiring of a celebrated gunslinger -- Clay Blaisedell, with his 
> goldhandled Colts, an enigmatic character already half-legendary 
> thanks to the efforts of a burgeoning dime-fiction industry -- to 
> defend the town against the cowboys initiates a series of violent 
> confrontations and brutal reversals of loyalty that at each turn 
> promise the town a redemption that never quite arrives.
>
> It's the kind of town where men are given to saying things like, "I'm 
> going out and drink some of the meanness out of me," or, "Never heard 
> a man make such a fuss over getting shot." The desultory dialogue that 
> fills the long stretches of waiting between sudden bursts of violence 
> plays a choral role in this novel, which at times feels like some long 
> and strange stage play. [...]
>
> Warlock lives by its language, which sustains a through-line of pulp 
> narration and a heightened version of B-western repartee ("You are 
> like a hellfire-and-damnation preacher gone loco on bad whiskey") 
> [...]
>
> best