Books: Western

BITTER CREEK—James Boyd—Scribner ($2.50).

Nearest that James Boyd has come to a modern novel was his Roll River (1935), a story laid in his home town, Harrisburg, from 1880 to 1920. It is his theory (like that of James Branch Cabell) that good novels cannot be written about the present age; a writer needs “the perspective of years to know what most of it amounts to—if anything.” Not because his theory is necessarily correct, but because he has written good U. S. historical romances (Drums, Long Hunt, et al.), readers will be glad that Bitter Creek returns to the past. Set in the West of the ’70s, it is a historical close-up which confirms James Boyd’s high stand in the historical-romance industry.

An engaging hero, red-headed Ray Talcott, son of an Illinois storekeeper, was only 13 when he headed West. He was equipped with a fish line, jackknife, agate shooter, $13, a strong will not to return until he was big enough to thrash his browbeating father. His adventures along the way might have been told by Mark Twain —capture by a mean reward-hunter, whose precocious daughter petted him, stole his $13; escape and recapture and escape again; apprenticeship to a kindly windbag who dyed Ray’s hair black, stained his face, billed him in his medicine show as Little Yuma the Captive Child, kidnapped by hostile Sioux.

But the main story concerns Ray’s life on the range—punching cows with such picturesque partners as Absolute Jones, Greasy Oscar, Springtime, hunting with the Piegan Indians, getting mixed up in an Indian war. It is cowboys-&-Indians romance plus a heroine. But Author Boyd’s cowboys, Indians, adventures, “cussing ladies,” homesteaders, plains and hills are as real as oldtime calico, make the Wild West almost as gripping for grownups as it once was in the dime novels of one’s youth.