Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Introducing “Bridge to Trouble”

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“Well, this is a fine time to tell me,” said Keith, but without rancor. “I suppose it would be too much to hope that she might simply settle into domestic life and not notice the gangsters playing hide-and-go-seek under her window?”

“Who, Mother? Goodness, no, she doesn’t miss a thing. She’ll be onto it sooner than I was.”

If I was a superstitious person, I’d swear that talking about one of my WIPs on social media was as good as jinxing it. I had a great first week working on my new novella, then in a rash moment posted the title and a brief description on Twitter and Facebook—and immediately a combination of household tasks and nasty headaches limited my productivity this week to a handful of hard-won sentences.

However, I am not a superstitious person, and so in pursuance of my original plan, I shall tell you a bit about this new WIP, Bridge to Trouble. It’s a romantic-suspense novella set in Montana in 1920, involving a girl, some guys, gold, gangsters, and a ghost town. And some sheep. (Lest I be guilty of raising hopes only to dash them, I should warn you that the ghost town plays only a small, though key role in the plot.)

What pleases me about this story is that it’s a dramatically made-over version of an old concept that I’d hung onto for years in a binder full of scraps, because I always felt it had a grain of promise in it somewhere. I wanted a new novella for a particular reason (I’ll tell you about that in a moment), and when I realized that this old concept would work, I was thrilled.

What pleases me even more about this story is that it’s turning out to be full of Witty Banter and I am having a ton of fun with that.

The particular reason I wanted a novella? Well, if all goes well this is going to be a free treat for my newsletter subscribers. Since I’m focusing on historical mystery/suspense, I wanted to write something that would be a nice introduction for new readers—and writing it is a nice way to get into the swing of the style and themes I want to explore from henceforth. And yes, current subscribers will get the novella for free too—it’s every bit as much a gift for you as it is a welcome for new readers! I’m not making any promises on the release date, but I want it to be sometime this winter.

Until next time…

Snippets: September – November

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As writers everywhere are plunging into the race of NaNoWriMo, I am sitting back and taking a short breather after having just wound up a race of my own. I wanted to finish typing the second draft of Land of Hills and Valleys by the end of October—and I finished on November 1st, which is close enough for me. It’s a bit more ragged in places than I had expected, so it’ll require some more work before I’m ready to hand it over to beta-readers; but I want to let it sit for at least a few weeks before I look at it again.

I have another project in line that I’m looking forward to starting soon—a novella—of which more in a future post. But this week I’ve taken to just rest, breathe, and catch up on a few little household tasks I kept putting off until I met my self-imposed deadline.

Meanwhile, snippets! Here’s a few short excerpts from the second half of the book:

“How do you know so well what they thought?” I said, feeling again that unhappy prickling of resentment at the differences in how much we knew. Why her and not me? When I’d thought they all liked me and meant well towards me?

“Oh, things get around. In a place like this they always do. Tony Gleason’s not the most discreet person alive, you know, even though he was always on Ray’s side.”

*

By the time we got back to the courthouse it was dusk. The sky above the buildings in the cul-de-sac was pale, and there was a burnt-orange glow along the horizon in the west. The street lamps had come on, shedding small circles of glare over the dusty hoods of automobiles parked bumper to bumper along the curb.

*

“Oh, let him do what he wants!” I said sharply. “It’s certainly better than anything you people achieved by looking the other way and keeping your mouths shut because you were afraid of whose toes you might step on.”

In the utter silence that followed—Carol being flabbergasted, I imagine—I realized that Carleton Kent’s eyes had fastened on my left hand. I wanted to move it, to drop it out of sight in my lap, but I couldn’t bring myself to such an obvious action…even though I knew, once a few seconds had passed, that Carol must have seen what he was looking at too.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” said Kent quietly. He got up from his stool, reached in his coat pocket for a dollar and put it on the counter, and walked out of the dining-room.

*

The first rider wore no slicker, and his clothes were soaked and dark. Tim’s face was set like a flint, as he drove the other ahead of him—had he had a gun with him all that time, since we left the house? The other man’s shoulders were slumped; he was leaning over sideways in the saddle with what might have been drunkenness or exhaustion, or abject terror.

“Get down,” said Ray in a hard voice I had seldom heard before, and he laid his hand on the man’s shoulder and almost dragged him out of the saddle. The man staggered as his feet touched the ground, as if Ray’s hold on his collar was the only thing keeping him up.

*

“A much simpler way of putting it,” said Mrs. Crawley with some acerbity, “is that a guilty conscience spoils one’s aim.”

The Pen is Mightier Than the Six-Gun…Most of the Time

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When I set out to choose a subject for Legends of Western Cinema Week, I found that I kept wanting to write about Western books instead of movies. But it’s supposed to be about cinema, right? And then it hit me that there was a way I could do both.

More classic Westerns than you might realize were based on books—novels, novellas, magazine serials, and short stories alike. And in all but a few cases the movie versions seem to be better known than the original stories. Only a few Western writers have achieved the lasting popularity that means reprints and easy name recognition. Of course, with some authors it’s understandable. Not every pulp-magazine story was of lasting quality, even if some of them did manage to spawn a memorable movie. But on the other hand, there is quite a fair mix of the pulps and more “serious” fiction among the source stories for Western movies.

So today, let’s give the writers their day. Here’s a list of Western movies paired with the titles of the books and stories they were based upon (with intermittent opinionated commentary by myself). Some of them you may know well, but other titles and authors might surprise you!

It isn’t an exhaustive list—I’ve stuck mostly to films that are fairly easily recognizable, at least to Western fans, and covered only the “classic” era (for the purposes of this post, the cutoff date is 1965). And I’ve made a few deliberate omissions: (A) Owen Wister and the various adaptations of The Virginian, because most everybody knows all about that, and (B) Zane Grey, because I’ve yet to hear of a film adaptation that borrowed anything more from its Grey source besides a title and some character names.

I also called it quits at only a couple of Louis L’Amour titles, because reading the descriptions of some other “adaptations” (term used loosely) basically had me going like this:

Whoever managed to turn Heller With a Gun (not a half bad book) into something called Heller In Pink Tights deserves an award from relatives of the people who give out the Bulwer-Lytton Prize.

But let’s get on to the good stuff.

Stagecoach (1939) / short story “Stage to Lordsburg” (1937) by Ernest Haycox

(Probably one of the best examples of how a short story can be “opened up” into a film by fleshing it out with added material, without changing the core plot.)

Destry Rides Again (1939) / novel Destry Rides Again (1930) by Max Brand

(Only the title belongs to Brand. Trust me.)

Dark Command (1940) / novel The Dark Command (1938) by W.R. Burnett

The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) / novel The Ox-Bow Incident (1940) by Walter Van Tillburg Clark

Tall in the Saddle (1944) / magazine serial “Tall in the Saddle” (1942) by Gordon Ray Young

Canyon Passage (1946) / magazine serial Canyon Passage (1945) by Ernest Haycox

Red River (1948) / magazine serial “The Chisolm Trail” (1947) by Borden Chase

Three Godfathers (1948) / short story “The Three Godfathers” (1912) by Peter B. Kyne

Blood on the Moon (1948) / magazine serial “Blood on the Moon” (1941) by Luke Short

Whispering Smith (1948) / novel Whispering Smith (1906) by Frank H. Spearman

(Haven’t seen or read this one, but I loved Spearman’s two short story collections about railroading, The Nerve of Foley and Held For Orders.)

Four Faces West (1948) / novella “Paso Por Aqui” (1926) by Eugene Manlove Rhodes

(I wrote about this adaptation at some length a while back. It’s a nice movie, but Gene Rhodes deserved better. But hey, at least his story wasn’t murdered in cold blood like some other authors’ have been! And as a writer who was always at daggers drawn with “the movies” even in their infancy, I’ll bet he would have been tongue-in-cheek philosophical about it.)

the cavalry trilogy

Fort Apache (1948) / short stories “Massacre” (1947) and “The Big Hunt” (1947) by James Warner Bellah

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) / short stories “Command” (1946), “The Big Hunt” (1947), and “War Party” (1948) by James Warner Bellah

Rio Grande (1950) / short story “Mission With No Record” (1947) by James Warner Bellah

(A note at the bottom of this page, which lists sources and tie-ins for John Wayne films, explains the background of the “trilogy” in relation to Bellah’s cavalry stories. I haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy of Massacre yet, but I’d like to—and see how he measures up to my favorite genuine frontier-fort-alumnus Charles King.)

The Furies (1950) / novel The Furies (1948) by Niven Busch

Stars in My Crown (1950) / novel Stars in My Crown (1947) by Joe David Brown

Branded (1950) / novel Montana Rides (1928) by Max Brand

Singing Guns (1950) / novel Singing Guns (1928) by Max Brand

(*cough* This doesn’t sound like the book I read…)

Man in the Saddle (1951) / magazine serial “Man in the Saddle” (1938) by Ernest Haycox

High Noon (1952) / short story “The Tin Star” (1947) by John M. Cunningham

(No relation, incidentally, to the 1957 movie The Tin Star, which had an original script.)

Bend of the River (1952) / novel Bend of the Snake (1950) by Bill Gulick

Shane (1953) / novel Shane (1949) by Jack Schaefer

(The best novel-to-film adaptation in the genre, of the ones that I’ve personally read and watched.)

Hondo (1953) / short story “The Gift of Cochise” (1952) by Louis L’Amour

(Psst…can I tell you a secret? I think I actually liked the original short story better than L’Amour’s novelization of the movie script! Aren’t I a little rebel?)

The Man From Laramie (1955) / magazine serial “The Man From Laramie” (1954) by Thomas T. Flynn

The Searchers (1956) / novel The Searchers (1954) by Alan Le May

3:10 to Yuma (1957) / short story “Three-Ten to Yuma” (1953) by Elmore Leonard

(I’ve already written about this one in-depth too, but I’ll give you spoilers: I like the short story better. *dives behind water trough*)

The Tall T (1957) / short story “The Captives” (1955) by Elmore Leonard

Night Passage (1957) / novel Night Passage (1956) by Norman A. Fox

The Big Country (1958) / magazine serial “Ambush at Blanco Canyon” (1957) by Donald Hamilton

Apache Territory (1958) / novel Last Stand at Papago Wells (1957) by Louis L’Amour

(Based on my favorite L’Amour novel. Since they didn’t consult me, naturally the casting is all wrong. While fairly unremarkable in the larger scheme of things, it provides insight on the Hollywood attitude toward Westerns: if the book isn’t exciting enough, let’s throw in some dynamite. Literally.)

The Hanging Tree (1959) / novella “The Hanging Tree” (1957) by Dorothy M. Johnson

(Johnson is one of the best Western authors out there for my money. The novella is captivating…the movie synopsis made me ask “Why?”)

The Unforgiven (1960) / novel The Unforgiven (1957) by Alan Le May

(After liking the novel, I read the movie synopsis and it made my blood boil with its changes to the very heart of the story. I may still watch the movie one of these days and get steamed up again.)

Two Rode Together (1961) / magazine serial Comanche Captives (1959) by Will Cook

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) / short story “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1949) by Dorothy M. Johnson

(I’ve written a lengthy piece on this one too. This is another good example of opening up a very brief and crisp short story into something bigger, and where the three central characters are concerned it’s not a bad job—it was the fudging and over-simplifying of the history element that got under my skin.)

* * *

You know what strikes me most strongly about this list? Almost all of these adaptations closely followed their source material, most of them just a couple years after the original book/story was published. Kyne, Spearman and Rhodes are the only real “old-time” authors on this list. So at best, classic Hollywood was receiving its vision of the West at second- or third-hand. You have to wonder, why didn’t the movie-makers of the 1930s-60s ever dig back into the wealth of Western stories in what’s now our public domain for source material?

For the fun of it, let’s do a little unofficial survey here. I’ve seen 20 of the movies on this list, read 14 of the source stories, and I’d heard of all but three of the authors (Flynn, Fox, and Cook) before I compiled the list. How many of the titles on the list have you read, as opposed to the number of the movies you’ve seen? How many of the authors had you heard of before? And of course, if I’ve left any notable book-based titles out by accident, let me know!