A lot of you probably know the name Hopalong Cassidy (well, fewer than knew it fifty or sixty or seventy years ago when the Hopalong Cassidy movies and TV show and comic books were hugely popular), but I’m guessing that not many of you have read the Hopalong Cassidy novels by Clarence E. Mulford. The gritty, somewhat profane Hoppy character in the books was considerably different from the clean-cut movie hero played by William Boyd. For the record, I like both versions just fine.
HOPALONG CASSIDY isn’t the first book in the series, but it’s my favorite. I read it for the first time during the summer I turned 11, which was a great time to do so. It has some of that mushy love stuff in it, as Hoppy meets and falls for a girl named Mary, if I recall correctly. Mainly, though, it’s about fighting rustlers who are after the Bar-20 cattle (Hoppy doesn’t own the Bar-20 ranch in the books, he just works there), and there are gunfights galore. Those shootouts take a back seat, though, to the final battle between the Bar-20 cowboys and the rustlers, who are holed up on top of a mesa. I’m going by memory here because I haven’t reread the book in a number of years, but it seems to me that this epic conflict takes up something like the final hundred pages of the book and approaches Homeric heights before it’s over. My blood’s racing a little faster just thinking about it and remembering what it was like to read it for the first time when I was eleven years old. I’ve read it a couple of times since then and remember enjoying it both times, although it’s hard to match that first thrill.
Mulford was an Easterner who hadn’t been to the West when he began writing these yarns, but he was acquainted with genuine Westerners and was a diligent researcher, eventually amassing a card file with more than 10,000 entries covering Western history, geography, language, weapons, etc. His first Cassidy novel, BAR-20, is a fix-up of magazine stories published in 1907, and the characters continued appearing in novels and stories until Mulford’s death in the Forties. He also wrote a series about a rancher and deputy sheriff named Bob Corson, as well as several stand-alone Western novels. I haven’t read everything he wrote, by any means, but I’ve read quite a bit and enjoyed all of it. Yes, the prose and the plotting are a little old-fashioned, but if that doesn’t bother you I don’t think you’ll go wrong with just about anything by Clarence E. Mulford. A number of his books were reprinted by Forge during the Nineties, so they’re not that hard to find.
18 comments:
I read the Louis L'Amour Hopalong Cassidy books. They weren't too bad.
I love the line in your post where you state: "My blood’s racing a little faster just thinking about it and remembering what it was like to read it for the first time when I was eleven years old."
That's a great feeling -capturing those days....
I never knew about these novels. Thanks.
As a kid I can remember being baffled by the differences between Hoppy on TV and Hoppy in the Mulford books.
Today, of course, I prefer the latter. Last year, I was on vacation at beautiful Lake Taupo (New Zealand) when a big charity book fair was held. Dodging between the dealers, who were stuffing books into their big bags (no doubt to sell later on the Net at inflated prices) I was able to snap up a half-dozen, UK-edition Mulfords in their original, very distinctive H&S "Yellow Jackets".
Great bargains, great reading!
The L'Amour Cassidy books don't have quite the same flavor, but they are good traditional westerns with the author steering a line somewhere between Mulford's character and the black-clad Boyd character.
I picked up a recent mention of the latter Cassidy by researcher Steve Holland and put it in the current Hoofprints at blackhorsewesterns.com
Keith, I was going to make the same comment about L'Amour's version of the character falling somewhere between Mulford's and Boyd's. Most people who are fans of the movies like the early ones, but I sort of prefer the shorter, later ones with plots that almost turn Hoppy into a Western version of a hardboiled detective, and great titles like THE DEAD DON'T DREAM.
I thought L'Amour's Cassidy books were okay.
On the subject of the L'Amour Cassidys, my brother-in-law, at sixty-five, has been going to class to learn to read. By the house one day, he spotted one of the L'Amour's Hoppy novels and wanted to borrow it. Always happy to encourage reading, I sent him home with all four. He carried them to class and the teacher worked with him until he'd gotten through all of them.
This one sounds interesting, James.
I've been getting recommendations from here and on Ed Gorman's blog. Yesterday I picked up Steve Frazee and Clifton Adams titles. I use our library system or else they'll cull out the books. (Charles Williams' last novel was removed a few years back.)
Ed Lynskey
Randy,
I never thought about it until now, but L'Amour seems like a really good choice for adults who are learning to read. Good, fast-moving stories told in fairly simple language.
Ed,
I hate to think about the wonderful books that have been weeded out by the libraries around here. I'm sure that with some of the books I read from the libraries, I'm the only one who's checked them out in years.
I'm calmly waiting for them to weed one book out of my county's library system. The Plunder Squad. I'm the only one who's read it in years and it's only one of two Parkers I don't own. The price for both on the used book sites is beyond my means. The other, which I haven't read, is Butcher's Moon.
Our library culled the Charles Williams novel after I'd checked it out. I guess I was the bad luck. It's really too bad that happens, but I love those library folks. I mean that, too.
Ed Lynskey
I love libraries and the people who work in them, too. Couldn't do without 'em. At one time in my life I even planned to be a librarian.
These are being reissued - I've got a 1992 Tor edition in paperback. I only bought it a month ago and it says that the publishers are reprinting all of the bar 20/20 stuff. I was totally new to this book and enjoyed it greatly.
Tor/Forge never got around to reprinting all the Hoppy books, but they did quite a few of them and I'm going to start looking for them in the used bookstores.
Call it serendipity if you like, but I'm visiting this blog just after listing on eBay several copies of an item that's relevant to the subject at hand: the out-of-print 2005 edition of Lone Pine in the Movies, an annual journal I produce every year for distribution at the Lone Pine Film Festival. The 2005 edition featured a centennial tribute to Hoppy in print and on film. My contribution to the issue was a 4000-word piece on the first Hoppy movie, which was adapted from Mulford's 1910 novel and shot at Lone Pine (a small high-desert community in the Sierra Nevada foothills). I compared book to film at some length; that initial William Boyd starrer -- also titled Hopalong Cassidy but later reissued as Hopalong Cassidy Enters -- was one of the few that bore any significant resemblance to its ostensible source.
Ed, TRAIL DUST also follows the plot of Mulford's original novel fairly closely.
I picked up the Forge editions of three Mulford novels at Half Price today: THE COMING OF CASSIDY, TEX, and BUCK PETERS, RANCHMAN. Looking at them, it occurs to me that Forge only reprinted the books that were in public domain, which explains why they never finished the series.
want to know about the tex burns books louis l'amour didn't write
I love the novels, too. I have not seen the TV shows. I want to preserve what I've read in the books: a sort of Cyrano de Bergerac-style Western Cowboy.
Do you recall in which novel it was that Hopalong lost a good friend, and rode out alone to some secluded spot and cried for his friend -- then picked up his rifle and went back to work? Or maybe I'm confusing it with some Louis L'Amour novel. I have not read any of them for over a decade.
You can get some of the Mulford books as eBooks free on the Gutenberg Project.
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