Steven S. Drachman

My new novel, The Ghosts of Watt O’Hugh, features a hero born in 1842.  A former orphan of New York’s slums, and a Civil War veteran, Watt O’Hugh does what many young desperate men from the 19th century East did – he goes West. He works on a cattle run, fights a range war, becomes a dime novel hero, then an outlaw, all the time determined to save Lucy Billings, the socialite-with-a-past whom he loved and lost in New York City before the War. I carefully researched the history and delivered a rip-roaring Western adventure.

So far so good, except that I also delivered a novel filled with what I like to call the magic of the old West.  So, while one blogger calls my book “a Western with some flashy fantasy heels,” an Amazon reviewer stated flatly, “Despite the cover art and the main settings, this isn’t really a ‘western’ or ‘cowboy’ book … It’s sci-fi and fantasy mixed up in the vein of Vonnegut.” He liked it,  but to like it, he had to deny that it was a Western.

Is Watt O’Hugh a “real” Western? And, more importantly to those of us who love and revere Westerns, is the mini-trend in which I am playing a small role – mixing a Western setting with science fiction/fantasy elements (or even with magical realism, á la Gabriel García Márquez) – good or bad for the survival of the genre?

Let’s face facts – many people think of “Westerns” only as something they don’t read or like, without really knowing why. Many agents and editors in Jeff Herman’s definitive guide list “Westerns” as the only genre they won’t even consider, and one reason I went the Indie route was my trepidation over the idea of even trying to sell a Western to editors in 2011. (I really should have added some vampires!)

Why did stories about the West between 1860 and 1900 win their own “genre” in the first place? New York during that same period was a fascinating place, and while it has inspired more than a few great novels (think The Alienist and A Winter’s Tale), it cannot lay claim to its own genre. (Or for that matter, Paris between, say, 1690 and 1735.) But Westerns are more than a time and place. They are Arthurian legends of roaming knights in a lawless land, updated first for Eastern dime-novel readers in a 19th century staggering through a boom and bust economy, and then for War-shocked movie audiences dreaming in the ‘teens and ‘20s of what was already a heroic, mythical past. Douglas Fairbanks fondly lampooned this trend way back in 1917, in his Western spoof, Wild and Woolly.

A real Western must have a respect for historical accuracy mixed with a recognition of the American myths of the last hundred-fifty years. But no matter how much we may deconstruct them, and no matter how grounded in fact, Westerns – like pirate stories, or the Knights of the Round Table before them – are myths. The further the old West drifts from living memory, the more fantastic, magical and impossible even its truths will seem.

Available on Kindle and Nook and paperback

Steven S. Drachman has written on film for The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Village Voice, Entertainment Weekly, The Chicago Sun-Times and The Boston Phoenix. You can read more about his novel at http://www.Watt-OHugh.com. (He would not mind if you bought it.)

The Ghosts of Watt O’Hugh

NAMED TO KIRKUS REVIEWS’ BEST OF 2011: Watt O’Hugh III is a self-made man, Civil War vet, Time Roamer, former orphan of the New York slums and dime novel hero of the lost, magical West of the 1870s, and his adventures mark one of the most original, riotous literary fantasy novels in recent memory.

List Price: $ 14.00

Price: $ 13.23

Canadian Lt. Harry Lanyard, British Army, leads a mounted patrol of hard-bitten Colonial troopers into the veld to recover $10-million worth of gold bullion hidden by President Paul Kruger during the Second Anglo-Boer War.

To do it, Lanyard must battle tough burgher commandos, murderous bandits, hostile civilians, and an enemy spy sworn to kill him, while his own men have turned mutinous. He also strives to regain the love of his Boer-American ex-sweetheart who now is allied with a ruthless Czarist secret agent.

Based on many actual events, KRUGER’S GOLD is meticulously researched in historical details. It reveals the horrors of concentration camps and ruthless guerrilla fighting, while innocent civilians and black Africans suffer during the “last of the gentlemens’ wars”.

Cover illustration, “Saving the guns at Liliefontein”, by Peter Archer, courtesy of the Regimental Trust, Royal Canadian Dragoons.

BOOK REVIEW:

“Kruger’s Gold: A novel of the Anglo-Boer War” by Sidney Allinson.

Quite simply a wonderful book

Reviewer: R. Cox, Vancouver, BC, Canada

Sidney Allinson’s books are surprises. They can start off unassumingly and build up to rip snorting sagas of ceaseless adventure. In his finest work yet, Allinson doesn’t even start off slowly. “Kruger’s Gold” grips the reader at once and the pace never slows. As I read this action tale of the struggle a century ago between South Africa’s Boers, and England and her “colonials,” I was repeatedly struck with the idea this would be and should be a wonderful movie. Allinson’s experience as a television producer may have given him that hot-shot cameraman’s “eye” or it could simply be that any good yarn so stirringly told lends itself to theatre in the best sense. Well delineated male and female characters live out their intertwined destinies, amid authentic combat descriptions galore, balanced by gentle interludes, and lyrical descriptions of Southern Africa.

On these pages, a segment of history that was soon obscured by two ensuing, bloodier world wars leaps to life. It is really the twilight of an era, with Europeans jostling for power and position and, in this case in particular, South African gold Allinson fills in the historical perspective while following a Canadian soldier and his colonial troops who, late in the war, have been assigned to find the legendary government cache of gold that departing Prime Minister Paul Kruger was said to have stashed before leaving in 1900 for virtual exile in Europe.

Allinson writes sympathetically of the brilliant Boer commandos fighting to retain their homeland and their way of life. His story is not overly revisionist: the Boers have seized this land from the native tribes, after all, and even the most principled among them want to keep the blacks and “coloureds” in their place, lest their vast numbers overwhelm the white settlers. Even through the more politically-correct prism of today, we must admire the self reliance of these men whose surprise tactics and talented marksmanship enabled them to strike at the enemy, melt away into the bush, and return to attack another day. Many if not most of the men have lost wives and children to the war; yet, while they can be ruthless, they treat surrendered prisoners with a decency and respect that arouses a sense of nostalgia in the reader. Their English counterparts do as well with their own prisoners.

The book reveals unpalatable facts about both sides, including the racism of Boers, and an unblinking description of the British concentration camps where stranded Boer families and prisoners were placed to wait out the war. Allinson paints a grim picture of these horrors where women and children and some men languished in filthy conditions with poor diets and disease and death dogging every step. A few selfless medical workers do their best, but there are no facilities and their supplies are woefully inadequate.

No less than four romances in the book provide a lusty and pleasing counterpoint to military derring-do . Even the horses get to play a heart-warming role. And throughout the book, Allinson has peppered the story with fascinating historical minutiae, such as the Boer heroine not being allowed to play ragtime music, then the rage, because it was produced by black performers.

Read this book. It is a treat. — R. Cox.

About the Author

Sidney Allinson is a Canadian novelist and military historian, author of six books, film scripts, and numerous magazine articles. His military history, “The Bantams: The Untold Story of World War I,” was highly acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. He wrote “Jeremy Kane” a Canadian historical adventure novel of the 1837 Mackenzie Rebellion and its brutal aftermath in the Australian penal colonies. Sidney Allinson served overseas with the Royal Air Force, was creative director of two international advertising agencies, and communications policy advisor to the Ontario Government. He is a past director of the Royal Canadian Military Institute, and received the Boulter Award for outstanding writing. Born in England, a long-time resident of Toronto, he now lives in Victoria, British Columbia, working on a novel about the 1942 Dieppe Raid. E-mail:   allsid [@] shaw.ca

Vancouver, BC, Canada

Sidney Allinson’s books are surprises. They can start off unassumingly and build up to rip snorting sagas of ceaseless adventure. In his finest work yet, Allinson doesn’t even start off slowly. “Kruger’s Gold” grips the reader at once and the pace never slows. As I read this action tale of the struggle a century ago between South Africa’s Boers, and England and her “colonials,” I was repeatedly struck with the idea this would be and should be a wonderful movie. Allinson’s experience as a television producer may have given him that hot-shot cameraman’s “eye” or it could simply be that any good yarn so stirringly told lends itself to theatre in the best sense. Well delineated male and female characters live out their intertwined destinies, amid authentic combat descriptions galore, balanced by gentle interludes, and lyrical descriptions of Southern Africa.

On these pages, a segment of history that was soon obscured by two ensuing, bloodier world wars leaps to life. It is really the twilight of an era, with Europeans jostling for power and position and, in this case in particular, South African gold Allinson fills in the historical perspective while following a Canadian soldier and his colonial troops who, late in the war, have been assigned to find the legendary government cache of gold that departing Prime Minister Paul Kruger was said to have stashed before leaving in 1900 for virtual exile in Europe.

Allinson writes sympathetically of the brilliant Boer commandos fighting to retain their homeland and their way of life. His story is not overly revisionist: the Boers have seized this land from the native tribes, after all, and even the most principled among them want to keep the blacks and “coloureds” in their place, lest their vast numbers overwhelm the white settlers. Even through the more politically-correct prism of today, we must admire the self reliance of these men whose surprise tactics and talented marksmanship enabled them to strike at the enemy, melt away into the bush, and return to attack another day. Many if not most of the men have lost wives and children to the war; yet, while they can be ruthless, they treat surrendered prisoners with a decency and respect that arouses a sense of nostalgia in the reader. Their English counterparts do as well with their own prisoners.

The book reveals unpalatable facts about both sides, including the racism of Boers, and an unblinking description of the British concentration camps where stranded Boer families and prisoners were placed to wait out the war. Allinson paints a grim picture of these horrors where women and children and some men languished in filthy conditions with poor diets and disease and death dogging every step. A few selfless medical workers do their best, but there are no facilities and their supplies are woefully inadequate.

No less than four romances in the book provide a lusty and pleasing counterpoint to military derring-do . Even the horses get to play a heart-warming role. And throughout the book, Allinson has peppered the story with fascinating historical minutiae, such as the Boer heroine not being allowed to play ragtime music, then the rage, because it was produced by black performers.

Read this book. It is a treat.         — R. Cox.