REPRINTS AND NEW EDITIONS

Press, Volume CI, Issue 29994, 1 December 1962, Page 3

REPRINTS AND NEW EDITIONS

The Ox-Bow Incident. By Walter van Tilbury Clark. Eyre and Spottiswood’e. 238 pp.

The latest addition to Messrs Eyre and Spottiswoode’s “Frontier Library,” “The Ox-Bow Incident,” is likely to remain one of the most celebrated of Western novels. It was first published more than 20 years ago, and since then cowboy stories have tended to take a more serious turn. Long before that, when Mulford was writing “Bar-20 Days,” the ranch boys would be crouching behind boulders, squinting down the blued barrels of their Winchesters, and shooting it out with rustlers who were bad through and through. Everybody knew how bad they were; and when the shooting died away justice had been done. There was peace on the range until Hodder and Stoughton issued the next red-bound volume. “The Ox-Bow Incident” changed all that. The cattle had certainly been rustled; but this time the vigilantes probably hanged the wrong men. What is more, most of those taking part were aware of that; but Tetley, the man in charge, was a sadist and everyone was too frightened of him to make any protest. After it was over, they were all troubled with a fearful sense of guilt. Young Gerald Tetley hanged himself, and his father committed suicide bv falling on an old cavalry sabre. “The Ox-Bow Incident” is not pleasant reading; but it is well written, and will probably find a modest place in literary history as the first psychological western.