Elisabeth Grace Foley

Historical Fiction Author

Trails of Thought, III: Outlaws and In-Laws

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A series of occasional bite-sized musings on the history of the American West.

I have never been interested in famous outlaws, but over the last couple years I’ve ended up reading a couple of nonfiction books about them, because I am fascinated by the fact that the demise of two of the Old West’s most famous outlaw gangs—the James-Younger gang in Northfield and the Dalton Gang in Coffeyville—took place at the hands of ordinary citizens rather than famous lawmen. I don’t know why the significance of this in overall Western history and culture doesn’t get more attention. That, however, is a bigger topic for another day.

Reading about the outlaws themselves, it strikes me that the most successful ones—meaning those who avoided capture longest—achieved that success largely through having plenty of friends and relatives who were ready to give them a meal and a fresh horse and say “nope, haven’t seen them” to anyone who came around asking questions. These allies might be of the variety who knew exactly what was going on or simply those who made a policy of not inquiring too closely into where Cousin Bill had been lately.

This seems like a reality that wouldn’t fit too tidily into Production Code sensibilities, and also one a little too prosaic for the sensation-craving moviegoer or magazine-reader. Romantic outlaws, of course, have always been in fashion, and Production Code morality never hindered the embellishment of their legends in the slightest—witness the plethora of glossy Technicolor productions from the 1940s and ’50s that portrayed figures such as Jesse James, Belle Starr, Billy the Kid, the Daltons et al as noble Robin Hoods or tragically misunderstood victims. But depicting ordinary folks aiding and abetting outright villains, or plain garden-variety crooks, wouldn’t have quite the same effect. And where the most dastardly villains were concerned, to admit that their success in villainy depended largely on the ability to go to ground at Cousin John’s farm would make them seem much less powerful and threatening, wouldn’t it. Therefore in the most dramatic stories anyone who aids an outlaw must be at least slightly unsavory and threatening themselves.

Having gotten this far in my reasoning, I received some support for my theory from an unexpected source. In Performing Flea: A Self-Portrait in Letters, a volume of letters by P.G. Wodehouse to his friend and fellow author William Townend (an author of sea adventure stories), I came across the following passage of advice:

Mogger (my Heaven! what names you give your characters!) whom you have established as a sinister menace, is weakened by that scene where Teame hits him. It is an error, I think, ever to have your villain manhandled by a minor character. Just imagine Moriarty socked by Doctor Watson. A villain ought to be a sort of scarcely human invulnerable figure. The reader ought to be in a constant state of panic, saying to himself: ‘How the devil is this superman to be foiled?’ The only person capable of hurting him should be the hero.

…You must not take any risk of humanizing your villains in a story of action [emphasis mine]…Taking Moriarty as the pattern villain, don’t you see how much stronger he is by being an inscrutable figure and how much he would have been weakened if Conan Doyle had switched off to a chapter showing his thoughts. A villain ought to be a sort of malevolent force, not an intelligible person at all.

The key point here is that Wodehouse is talking about a specific type of story, the action/adventure genre, and in that context, he’s exactly right. And, like it or not, for most of its lifetime as a genre the Western story has been relegated to the category of action-and-adventure, where the target audience wants and must get thrills and spills rather than subtlety (or even too large a helping of historical fact). In that context, a malevolent force who is only able to elude the obscure deputy marshal who’s hunting him by hiding in Cousin John’s hayloft just wouldn’t do.

image: “The Pitcher and the Well” by W.H.D. Koerner

Previously: Law and Lenience

My Year in Books: 2023

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Time for my yearly roundup of books read in the past year! As always, this post hits most of the highlights (and a few lowlights); if you’re interested in the full list of everything I read this year you can browse it on Goodreads. Books that made my top-ten list for the year are marked with an asterisk.*

Officially, I read 69 books in 2023, including logged re-reads, which feels like an almost shockingly low number. However, I do know that I did a bunch of re-reading which I never bothered to log, so the actual number is probably higher. (For example, I know that sometime in the autumn I blazed through three or four books by Grace S. Richmond that I’d read before, but never noted it in my book diary or on Goodreads.)

Most of the re-reads that I did keep track of were classic novels: I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (which I think may be his masterpiece) and Martin Chuzzlewit (which remains my personal favorite, in spite of a whole skeleton of bones to pick with the American segment) and Jane Austen’s Emma and Northanger Abbey. I did not really read any new-to-me classics this year—aside from Anthony Trollope’s The American Senator*, which made my top-ten list—but I think that was because I covered that department so well with classic re-reads!

There was a handful of Westerns. Open Range by Lauran Paine* was a slightly surprise standout, sneaking onto my top-ten list. Unfortunately Paine was also responsible for my Worst Book of the Year, which has to be a record of some sort—I find it hard to believe the same author who penned Open Range could have been responsible for the so-called prose in Halfmoon Ranch. Let us hope the stories that made up the latter were very early works. I also finally caught up with Eugene Rhodes’ Bransford of Rainbow Range, which was enjoyable, but not by any means my favorite Rhodes book in spite of its being one of his best-known. The Daughter of a Magnate by Frank H. Spearman was pretty good, Desert Brew by B.M. Bower just okay. Mystery Ranch by Arthur Chapman was a rare example of a genuine whodunit in a Western setting: interesting, though not a particularly scintillating mystery in the end!

Plenty of mysteries, of course. The highlight of the year was The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey*—even better than I expected, though bittersweet to finish her all-too-short oeuvre. I also finally finished the Felse Investigations series by Ellis Peters (actually, not technically, since I still haven’t read the first book). Rainbow’s End was admittedly a slightly anti-climactic finish; the second-last book, City of Gold and Shadows, was better. And I’m almost through the Henry Gamadge series by Elizabeth Daly…I have just one book left and I’m rather putting it off because I hate to see the series end! Death and Letters was probably my favorite of the Daly titles read in 2023. I also tried out the first two books in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series, to see if I liked it any better than I did on my one attempt years ago, and I have to say that neither Wolfe himself or Stout’s style/tone in general are really for me (though I admit I was a bit partial to Archie Goodwin after two books).

A couple of non-series mystery titles I found modestly enjoyable were Arrest the Bishop? by Winifred Peck and There May Be Danger by Ianthe Jerrold. To Catch a Thief by David Dodge, which is in many ways quite different from the famous Hitchcock movie, was…interesting, though unsatisfying in some ways. And I read a couple more of the British Library Crime Classics themed anthologies of short stories edited by Martin Edwards—Murder at the Manor: Country House Mysteries was just okay (although the final story, “Weekend at Wapentake” by Michael Gilbert, packed a punch I did not see coming), but Silent Nights: Christmas Mysteries was much better, great fun in fact. On the nearer side of the Atlantic, Alibi For Isabel and Other Stories by Mary Roberts Rinehart was good as well, though only a couple of the stories in the collection could honestly be called mysteries (the connecting theme for most of them is the WWII home front).

I already mentioned Halfmoon Ranch as the worst book I read, but it swooped in fairly late to claim the title from either Death in Cyprus by M.M. Kaye or Air Bridge by Hammond Innes (the latter I think was even more a disappointment than it would otherwise have been because it had been on my to-read list for so long based on an intriguing blurb). I also may be in the minority on this, but I failed to be much moved by The Princess Bride.

A large part of this year’s nonfiction was made up of books linked to nature and gardening: Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life by Marta McDowell* was a top-ten pick, and I also enjoyed Unearthing the Secret Garden from the same author. Also falling in or near this category were Seasons at Eagle Pond by Donald Hall, The God of the Garden by Andrew Peterson, and Twenty Days With Julian and Little Bunny, by Papa by Nathaniel Hawthorne. I also greatly appreciated Simple Money, Rich Life by Bob Lotich*, a book on managing finances from a Christian perspective. There were a couple of good historical nonfiction titles: the immensely entertaining Birdmen: The Wright Brothers, Glenn Curtiss, and the Battle to Control the Skies by Lawrence Goldstone*, and The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History by Stephan Talty. The Brasspounder by D.G. Sanders was an entertaining memoir of life as a railroad telegrapher in the early twentieth century.

The catch-all category, of novels and short stories in various or no particular genres, was responsible for an unusual amount of top-ten picks this year! Miracles on Maple Hill by Virginia Sorenson*, A Tale of a Lonely Parish by Francis Marion Crawford*, The Provincial Lady in America by E.M. Delafield*, and An Episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden* all made the cut. Also enjoyable were The Red House by Edith Nesbit, Poor Dear Theodora! by Florence Irwin, Cheerful—By Request by Edna Ferber, and Yours, Constance by Emily Hayse.

Previous years’ roundups: 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012

Top Five Movies (and TV) Watched in 2023

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The Pirates of Penzance (1983)

The Pirates of Penzance (1983)

I had read the libretto to the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta before and thought it amusing, but it turns out that seeing it performed is another level of hilarity altogether. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen something so utterly un-self-consciously cheesy and goofy—it’s like everybody involved said “we are going to play this Victorian-era satire with a completely straight face and endless pratfalls and not care who laughs at us,” and the result is great fun.

Note, there is a live filming of the Broadway production from just a couple years before, with mostly the same principal cast, on YouTube, and though some of the choreography and singing is a touch more polished in the movie, I actually found the stage version to have even more charm in spite of the low film quality! (The comic timing in the scene following “My Eyes Are Fully Open” is simply screamingly funny.) It also has the advantage of not cutting “How Beautifully Blue the Sky” and verses from several other major songs (plus the Major-General’s speech about his ancestors at the beginning of Act II, which I can’t understand leaving out of the movie).

Out of the Past (1947)

Out of the Past (1947)

I couldn’t make a steady diet of genuine film noir, but I had often seen references to this one as a classic of the genre and was curious to see it, and it fully lived up to expectation. The quintessential noir plot of a man unable to escape his past, of one bad decision pulling the protagonist into an ever-downward spiral of frame-ups and blackmail, it’s gorgeously shot, and keeps you engrossed with wondering just how many more twists and double-crosses can be fit into one story. (Without giving any spoilers, I’m honestly surprised Jane Greer’s performance didn’t rate some kind of award nomination.)

A Few Good Men (1992)

A Few Good Men (1992)*

CAVEAT: I watched this movie with its (plentiful) strong language aired out and one brief scene skipped. In that state, I found it a really fine, absorbing courtroom drama with good character development and fine performances. (I couldn’t help reflecting that, with the omissions for content I mentioned, you could have shot the same exact script in the 1950s and come up with an equally powerful film. And really, the same could have been done in 1992 if the filmmakers so chose.)

Bleak House (2005)

Bleak House (2005)

A solid, entertaining adaptation of what I’ve come to believe is one of Dickens’ finest novels (a lengthy miniseries is definitely the format to go with when adapting a book of this size). Its one chief drawback is a very distracting filming style, with a lot of abrupt cuts and zooms and ‘sinister’ sound effects. I re-read the novel after watching it, and was able to appreciate way Andrew Davies’ screenplay nips and tucks a hugely sprawling plot into a sufficiently streamlined narrative while remaining essentially faithful; though there are necessarily depths to the book which don’t translate to the screen. Like a lot of Dickens adaptations, especially recent ones, it does focus in more on the darker elements and sideline the comedic a bit (and one doesn’t always get the sense of how a few subplots, for instance the Jellyby/Turveydrop scenes, are connected with the main body of the story). The central performances are all excellent, though—and Mr. Guppy steals the show; probably the most Dickensian personality in it.

The Magic of Ordinary Days (2005)

The Magic of Ordinary Days (2005)

I finally got around to seeing this, and found it really lovely and enjoyable. A simple story set on the World War II home front, about an educated young woman who enters a marriage of convenience with a quiet, considerate young farmer to avoid the scandal of an unwed pregnancy, it’s homey and heartfelt and incidentally chock-full of the loveliest 1940s costumes you’ve ever seen (check out this post from Heidi at Along the Brandywine if you want to feast your eyes on all the screencaps).

Honorable mention for best re-watch: All About Eve (1950)

Runners-up:  The Solid Gold Cadillac (1956), Northanger Abbey (2007)*, Evelyn (2002)*

Previous top-5 lists: 2022, 2021, 2020. (You can see top-ten lists for earlier years, plus everything else I watched during the year if you’re interested, at my Letterboxd profile.)

* watched a version edited for content