I met Stan Lynde, a writer of western mysteries, just last month . . . on Facebook. At the time, I didn't know who he was.
Oh, the name Lynde rhymes with the verb "wind," not the noun "wind."
So I read up on him and discovered he had created the comic strip "Rick O'Shay" that I had once followed faithfully in the newspapers more than four-tenths of a century ago.
Wow.
Meet the man behind cartoon legends Rick O'Shay and Hipshot Percussion
Rick O'Shay, a deputy sheriff in Conniption—a town too small to have a real sheriff—and his buddy, gunslinger Hipshot Percussion, don't have the cachet or the fame of Batman and Robin, another pair of cartoon heroes . . . except among people like me who love all things western.
And there are a lot of us.
Stan Lynde, as genuine a Montanan as they come—he grew up on sheep and cattle ranches, and cowboyed in the summers during high school and college—created O'Shay and Hipshot and Conniption in 1957, when there were two dozen westerns running on network television.
Initially, he used his strip to satirize those shows. But after a couple years, Lynde changed the look, the time period, and the thrust of the strip, and he did so dramatically.
I never saw those early strips when O'Shay, Hipshot, gambler Deuces Wylde, saloon owner Gaye Abandon, local doc Basil Metabolism, and banker Mort Gage were indeed cartoon figures. And those names—and the names of everyone else in Lynde's cast—were puns, giving you a pretty good clue what was up.
This was a humor strip.
A gag a day.
Then Lynde started developing story lines for his characters. To do that well, he needed a bigger canvas.
So he dropped the open style of the traditional cartoon and daily created for more detailed drawings in the style Harold Foster used in his Sunday full-page telling of the story of "Prince Valiant."
"The incredible artwork and color (of Foster) set a standard I admired and tried to emulate," Lynde says.
He also moved his strip back in time, from the present day to the 1880s, when Montana was a territory.
His cartoon people became more fully real. And his backdrops, particularly his western vistas, were nothing if not spectacular.
Still there was the humor and the spoof. In the 1960s, Lynde parodied the James Bond movies and the old TV show, "The Untouchables."
In time, Lynde left the parodies behind for story lines that more fully represented his point of view and his philosophy of life, both of which were shaped by the ranching community in which he grew up.
So powerful was his personal stamp on "Rick O'Shay" that, when Lynde left it in 1977—the Chicago Tribune Syndicate and he couldn't arrive at a new contract—no one could carry the strip on. The syndicate tried. It hired a new writer and two new cartoonists—three people to do the work that Lynde had done—to keep the strip going.
At the strip's peak, Lynde had a weekly readership estimated at 15 million people.
Lynde got a flood of letters from fans, many asking him how could he quit drawing "Rick O'Shay."
But there was one letter that stood out from all the others, from actor Charlton Heston.
Wrote Heston, "I cannot help regretting that we will see no more of the beautifully drawn and engaging characters with which you populated Conniption. . . . As an actor, I valued the high quality of your dialogue. Believe me, not many writers have your ear for spoken English. I always noted with additional pleasure the pains you took to emphasize the right words, too. The lines were read well."
A friendship grew from that note.
The Tribune Syndicate's three newbies shouldered on, but newspaper after newspaper dropped the strip—it just wasn't Stan Lynde's work—forcing the syndicate to retire "Rick O'Shay" in 1981.
Yes, Lynde created the strip, but he didn't own it.
The Trib Syndicate did. Took ownership in the deal back in 1957 to distribute "Rick O'Shay" to newspapers around the country. A standard practice at the time.
So when Lynde quit, his paycheck was gone. And he didn't have a job waiting in the wings.
The telephone rings
A year or so later, the Field Newspaper Syndicate called to ask Lynde if he'd like to create a new western strip they could distribute.
Would he like to . . .
The strip became "Latigo", and, at its peak, it appeared in just under 100 newspapers, running from 1979 to 1983.
"Readers were not as willing to wait ten to thirteen weeks for a story to unfold in their daily newspapers" as they once were, Lynde says of the death of his second strip. "Mini-series on television told their stories in three or four nights and feature films told theirs in two hours. Gag-a-day strips would become the norm in newspapers, and story strips would fade out."
There are a couple story strips left, the best of them being "Prince Valiant" and "Doonesbury."
No one was syndicating an editorial cartoon to weekly newspapers, so Lynde thought, why not gin one up for them? That was in 1984.
But he didn't get enough newspapers to sign on for "Grass Roots," so, after a couple years, he dropped it.
Next, Lynde and two fellow Montanans spent a several years organizing the Great Montana Centennial Cattle Drive.
In the fall of 1989, 100 drovers pushed 2,812 cattle 60 miles from Roundup to Billings. Two hundred eight covered wagons trailed the drive, along with 3,337 horses for 2,397 people, and 79 horse wranglers to keep all the extra horses herded along.
The whole thing got international news coverage.
Still Lynde had to make a living. He might have gone back to the ranch had his wife not told him, Stan, you oughtta write a book.
"She encouraged me," he says.
The first effort
The manuscript was a coming of age story of a boy trying to deal with his father's murder.
And it was awful.
Lynde discovered he didn't know how to write a novel.
So he studied up, re-read the books of western writers he admired.
And Lynde went further. He asked bestselling author Larry Delaney to be his coach.
A couple years and he had mastered the craft of writing a novel.
His first book out of the chute this time—in 1995—was The Bodacious Kid, a mystery set in the Old West.
In Montana, of course.
It featured a young cowboy, Merlin Fanshaw.
Fanshaw would grow older and wiser in the next six books and become a U.S. deputy marshal.
Lynde voiced Vendetta Canyon, the sixth novel in the series, for the audio book . . . and won a Spur award from the Western Writers of America for the quality of his work. The Spur is the highest award the association bestows.
There is a book number eight in the Merlin Fanshaw mystery series. Just when Lynde will have it finished and out for you and me to read, he won't say.
© Jerry Peterson.
