I’ve seen the name Robert Ormond Case many, many times on the covers of Western pulps and on their Table of Contents pages. He wrote the lead novella in the August 1934 issue of STAR WESTERN, which I featured recently in a Saturday Morning Western Pulp post. Thinking I really ought to read something by him, I checked to see if anything was available in e-book editions, and to my surprise, the very novella I’d just mentioned was not only available as an e-book reprint, I already owned it and had completely forgotten that I did.
Well, I’m not one to ignore an omen like that, so I promptly read “The Rider From Hell”, which is almost long enough to be considered an actual novel, as it’s billed in its STAR WESTERN appearance.
If I had to guess, I’d say this yarn is set somewhere around the turn of the Twentieth Century. Two adventurers from Texas, seasoned frontiersman John Thurston and his young friend Dal Givens, are captured south of the border while smuggling ammunition to Mexican revolutionaries. They’re put on trial and thrown into a Mexican prison from which no gringo has ever come out alive, let alone escaped. The commandant of the prison has an idea, though: he knows the prisoners have stashed $5000 in gold somewhere north of the Rio Grande in Texas, so he’ll set up an “escape” for one of them, who will retrieve the gold and then return to the prison to ransom his friend. Dal Givens is the one who will go, leaving John Thurston locked up in the hellhole for the time being.
Of course, things don’t work out that way. Givens never returns with the ransom, and a spy for the commandant brings back the news that the young man has rejoined the outlaw gang with which he and Thurston used to run. Filled with hate at being double-crossed and abandoned like this, Thurston vows to escape for real, track down Givens, and have his revenge on his former partner.
I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to reveal that Thurston does get away and try to carry out his plan, but since this is one of those stories where very little is what it first appears to be, Case throws in plot twist after plot twist on the way to an inevitable showdown. Do some of these twists stretch credibility just a tad too much and verge on melodrama? Well, yeah, they do. Did I care? Not at all. Case makes the reader want to believe these things are possible, and so they do.
“The Rider From Hell” reminds me very much of the work of Case’s contemporary Frederick Faust, especially the physical and psychological torment through which he puts his characters. In fact, if I hadn’t known who wrote this one, I might well have believed it’s a previously unknown Max Brand yarn. This really makes me want to read more by Case. I didn’t know anything about him, so here’s some biographical info I found on-line.
Robert Ormond Case was a well-known Oregon author and a prominent, long-time resident of Portland. He was born in Dallas, Texas in 1895 and moved to Portland as a boy. He graduated from Tualatin Academy in Forest Grove, Oregon and went on to attend the University of Oregon.
In 1917, while a sophomore at the University, Case enlisted in the U.S. Army. He served 22 months with the 65th Artillery, CAC, including 52 consecutive days at the front. Case returned to U.O. and received a B.A. in 1920. During his years at the university he was a member of the Delta Tau Delta social fraternity, Sigma Delta Chi honorary journalistic society, and Sigma Upsilon honorary fiction society. In addition he was a member of the Cross-Roads philosophical society and founder of a campus humor magazine.
After his graduation from the University of Oregon. Case went to work as a reporter for the Portland Morning Oregonian. In 1921 he served as financial editor. From 1922 to 1925 he was involved in the Oregon State Chamber of Commerce. His career as a free-lance writer began in 1926 and soon thereafter published his first western, historically-inspired stories. He is best remembered as a writer of western stories, his most well-known dating from the 1930s through the 1950s. He wrote fourteen books and over 200 novelettes. In 1944 he received a Peabody award for the radio scripts of Song of Columbia. Most of Case's serials and short stories were written for national magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's and Country Gentleman.
Case spent most of his mature life in Portland, Oregon with periods of residency in New York and California. In Portland he was a member of the school board as well as the City Club and the Rotarians. He was a prominent member of the state Republican Party, particularly as a leader of the Conservative wing during the time of Wayne Morse. He spent the final years of his life in Oakland, California, where he died on 27 March 1964.
“The Rider From Hell” appears to be Case’s only fiction available in an e-book edition, but used copies of some of his novels are readily available and fairly inexpensive, and there are quite a few pulps containing his stories to be found on the Internet Archive. Like a lot of other Western fiction from that era, his work may not resonate with some modern readers, but I flat-out loved this story and give it a very high recommendation.
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