I took another day off (I've been having back problems and my masseur told me to rest for a few days) and read some non-work books. Well, nothing I read is absolutely non-work, but at the moment I'm not writing a reference book on Australian Western writers.So it was like rest to me when I picked up a Finnish translation of Clint McCall's Half Breed. McCall is a pseudonym and I think this was written by Keith Hetherington, one of the best Australian paperbackers - who's still working full time. I don't know when Half Breed was first published, but I believe it's a product of the sixties. It might also be from the seventies, since the hero is a half-breed and the portrait of him is certainly sympathetic, even though the guy is a born crook, a sociopath and a killer. Furthermore, I believe that the original publisher is Cleveland, which has been the foremost publisher of Australian Westerns. All their books are, I believe, 96-page booklets. Someone really should compile a bibliography of Australian Westerns! The Finnish translation (roughly Doomed To Be a Criminal) is from 1981 (I read a 1990 reprint which I bought for 20 cents recently) and belongs to the long-lived Lännensarja series. [Lännensarja = The Western Series. Not very imaginative, huh?]
Half Breed is a tale of Billy Slaughter who's given no slack, because he's a half-breed, and he's fast living the life of crime, smuggling rifles to Indians, robbing banks and trains and finally killing someone. He takes another identity and even ends up married, but then he's recognized and he's sentenced to jail. He gets out for good behaviour, but after getting his revenge he starts all over again.
The story is episodic, but it doesn't lack dramatic impact. McCall writes solid hardboiled prose and moves things along swiftly. Even without any padding he creates a sympathetic picture of young Billy and finally, it seems, has him a happy future.
I've been wondering about one thing: how come Australian Westerns are always so solid and good, when their crime fiction with series like Larry Kent and Marc Brody is so awful? Of course they had Carter Brown, but I don't think he really is up there with even his second-rate American counterparts. (It's been years since I read anything as by K.T. McCall, so won't say anything about theose books.) Now, of course they have writers to be taken seriously, such as Peter Corris and Shane Maloney.
I also read a Finnish Western from the early eighties. It was part of the FinnWest series, also published as a booklet (shorter than 96 pages, though), and published anonymously. My bet on the writer's identity is Juhani Salomaa, who also created the character in the mid-seventies. Clint McCall was definitely better, I'm sorry to say. It had impact, while this lingers on for ages, before it speeds off and then it's over too fast.
By the way, here's a link to a bookseller's collection of Australian paperbacks.
My contribution to Patti Abbott's Friday's Forgotten Book series. (Posted already on Thursday, since I don't know if I have the time tomorrow.)
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