Warlock

© 1958 by Oakley Hall


Let me say right off the bat that this classic Western was a hard one to grade. I’d give it either a C-plus or an A-minus, depending on what factors I choose to weigh. I did enjoy reading it. Though it took me a lot longer than I thought it would (about three weeks at an average reading time of 30 minutes a night), I loved every minute spent reading about the ill-fated town of Warlock and its struggle with law and lawlessness. Yet it left me quite unsettled in an unsatisfying way afterward.

Perhaps a synopsis should be the first order of business.

The relatively young desert town of Warlock – named after one of the mines which burrow into the surrounding mountains along the Mexican border – is having a sheriff problem. They don’t last. Whether they’re run out of town or shot dead in the street, being the law in Warlock is about as hazardous as fighting the Apaches was a decade earlier. The town is effectively run by Abe McQuown and his gang, a shifting group of no-goods most adept at rustling, holding up stage coaches, drinking, carousing, and shooting up the local businesses.

The Citizens Committee has decided this must come to a stop.

So they do what any 1880s Arizona town did: hire themselves a gunslinger. In this case, it’s a famous – or infamous – hired gun name of Clay Blaisedell. A “man among men,” as it’s noted more than once in the novel. Blaisedell accepts the job and by page 30 we’re having our first showdown in the Lucky Slipper saloon.

But Blaisedell, strangely enough, is not really the protagonist of the story. The novel fields a huge supporting cast, a half-dozen of which share the spotlight as the novel moves, chapter-wise, from one point of view to another. There’s Blaisedell’s friend and partner from way back, Tom Morgan, himself much more obviously of a checkered past than the new marshal. There’s Bud Gannon, a young man who enlists somewhat suicidally as a deputy after his gunfighter wannabe younger brother, Billy Gannon, is killed in the “Gunfight at the Acme Corral.” There’s Miss Jessie, the Angel of Warlock, who tends to injured miners in the town’s makeshift hospital. There’s Kate Dollar, a woman of mystery recently come into town on the stage, looking for revenge, revenge best served in the death of Clay Blaisedell. And there’s a shopkeeper named Henry Goodpasture, whose journal entries serve as background exposition so we’re always aware of the implications of what’s been transpiring.

The bad guys are also front and center, and they range from the somewhat amiable and amusing Curly Burne to the dangerous back-shooter Jack Cade to the distasteful Dad McQuown, Abe’s paralytic father. There is also Tom McDonald, owner of the mine and cruel taskmaster over the miners (he specializes in cutting their earnings retroactively right before pay day). All in all, there are probably a good two to three dozen characters in the novel if you thrown in the townsfolk and politicians.

Most of the bases are tagged in the novel. We have stage coach robberies, showdowns in the mud of Main Street, lynch mobs, drunken judges, bluffing, the U.S. Cavalry, stand-offs, death threats, saloons being burnt to the ground, a lamed horse, laudanum, the prostitute with a heart of gold (well, at least she wants to go good by novel’s end), badges being thrown down in the dirt, gold-plated six shooters, the businessmen from East getting their comeuppance. We also have a miners strike, a court room trial, lots of soul-searching and lectures on jurisprudence, 1880-style territorial governance politics, a senile general, and the world’s most awkward courtship.

All that being said, you could further say I’d liked all that. That’s all well and good.

Here’s what left me unsatisfied:

The theme of the novel, I suppose, for lack of a better term. After reading ten or twelve Westerns over the past two years, a notion is forming in my mind. If you allow me a cinematical analogy, those of writer Louis L’Amour (and perhaps, to a lesser extent, Zane Grey) seem to me like the John Wayne Westerns that have all become classics over the years. Hall’s novel Warlock, on the other hand, struck me as something that might have been filmed in the 70s. In other words, it came off very anti-tradition, in the sense that it set out to turn all those Western-isms upside down. Now, I don’t expect every Western I read to be Shane and I wasn’t expecting this novel to be akin to it either, but I do want something uplifting, even if it’s something found in the final paragraph on the final page.

Hall keeps the plot moving along unconventional lines, and after a while I felt he was just trying to keep the reader off-kilter rather than satisfy him with effective closure of a scene or a particular area of tension or a plot line. He’s a forerunner of George R. R. Martin, whose Song of Ice and Fire books (seen on teevee as Game of Thrones) continually and endlessly subject characters to emotional and physical brutality and abuse only to … subject them to more emotional and physical brutality and abuse.

Every hero is flawed to a greater or much greater extent. True, there are no completely good guys in real life or real literature, but I spent half the novel seeking one character I could sorta admire, and when I discovered I couldn’t, spent the second half hoping one would redeem himself or herself at the end. And, yeah, maybe one does, kinda, but then we’re informed in a coda that the character was quickly murdered in cold blood off-screen. Depressing.

Another analogy that keeps coming to me comes from my interest in Thomas Aquinas (no segues necessary here on the Hopper). A big part of the saint’s philosophy deals with Act and Potency … actuality and potentiality. You’ve heard it before: the acorn in potential becomes the tree in action. Well, I couldn’t help thinking as I finished Warlock that the novel had so much potential that was squandered in act. The potential payoffs in the novel – primarily in the main possible payoff, that of a showdown between Blaisedell and McQuown – are never satisfactorily consummated. They never come to fruition. The story, like the town of Warlock and its future, simply goes on, as is stated somewhere in the novel.

So that’s why I’m torn evaluating the book. In setup, I have to give it an A-minus. But in execution, I just can’t give it anything higher than a C-plus.

For what it’s worth.