A Personal Story of Black Horse Writer Keith Chapman
WHERE THE TRAIL BEGAN

Keith Chapman

Giving some thought to it the other day, and rummaging through a box of souvenirs stored in the basement of my New Zealand home, I pinned down exactly when I began earning money from my pen—at the princely rate of one old British penny a word.

It was July 1955, and I was living with my parents and sister in the cramped, very modest rented flat in suburban Enfield, north of London, where I'd been born 12 years previously. The payment came in a small brown envelope from a boys' weekly story paper called Adventure. It was addressed to "Master Keith Chapman, 54 Hertford Road" with a blue typewriter ribbon. A printed paragraph at the the top left corner gave a return address of 12 Fetter Lane, which is off Fleet Street—London's famous "street of ink". But the postmark was "Dundee, Angus", where Adventure and a stable of companion papers had their editorial offices. As one commentator on those times has put it, Dundee was the "home of jam, jute and journalism".

Inside the exciting envelope was a postal order and a card that said, "Dear Chum, Congratulations on being a winner in Smiler's Cash Prize Page. I have much pleasure in sending you your prize postal order, and wish you all good luck in the future. Your Editor."

I guess I walked on air for a day or two!

The issue of Adventure that contained my contribution was dated July 16, and on the page facing the week's prize jokes was the latest installment of a western serial, "The Strange Quest of the Coward Cavalry". On the preceding page—the cover—and the back page was another western serial, "Solo Solomon". In 1955, westerns might have been just past their peak of popularity in the British story papers, but they were still going strong in Adventure.

Who is the hooded crook? Dan is using a six-gun to find out!

Hero Dan Carr and his band of ex-soldiers had all belonged to a troop of the 13th Cavalry of the Union Army during the American Civil War, but after the war they'd been accused of cowardice and dismissed in disgrace because they'd been captured by the enemy. Determined to wipe out their tarnished record, the soldiers had resolved to stay together under Dan's command. To prove they weren't cowards they were willing to take on any dangerous jobs offered to them.

The man who'd been responsible for their capture was the story's ongoing villain, Bart Shooler, a colonel of their own forces, who'd accepted a bribe to leave a gap in the Union defences.

"Solo Solomon" was an illustrated serial—10 pictures a week with eight lines of text under each picture. "Outlaw-hunter" Solo and his two trail-pards, Doc Milligan and Windy Waters, had answered an SOS from ranchers in a Wyoming valley battling land-grabbers who'd dammed up their water supply and were holding them to ransom.

"I'm beginning to smell a pretty big rat," hissed Solo . . . Before they could move, a weighted net came swishing down upon them.

In today's terms, Adventure's westerns were simplistic, traditional fare, but the Scottish editors insisted that the stories they wanted were "not kiddy stories, but well worked-out, developed dramatic situations . . . what everybody and anybody can read with enjoyment and interest." They also told their potential contributors a story "should create enjoyment and hold interest by its shapeliness as a story, its characters, its dramatic tensions and suspense."

Today Adventure, and its three pulp-era companions, The Wizard, The Rover and The Hotspur, are long gone. So, too, are the picture-strip papers that came after them from the same publisher, D. C. Thomson & Co. Ltd. If I remember rightly, the late J.T. Edson was one of their anonymous scriptwriters.

But while we might grow sentimental about the loss of the story papers' version of the Old West, those in the know are not altogether despondent. In the same venerable tradition of British-published westerns, we have Robert Hale Ltd's books. In the pages of many of their Black Horse Westerns you will find the same spirit—albeit modified slightly for a modern adult audience—that breathed such vigorous life into characters like Solo Solomon and Dan Carr and his Coward Cavalry.

As a writer of Black Horse Westerns, I'm sure the early influence of those action-packed Adventure serials is still helping me today.