By Juri Nummelin
[Editor's note: Juri Nummelin, 32, is a Finnish writer and journalist specializing in old pulp fiction, both in literature and film. He has written two reference books on American pulp fiction in Finnish. Pulpografia (2000) deals with the crime and mystery fields, and the recent Six Guns (2004) covers 110 American Western writers. Nummelin has also written two books on rare first names with his wife. He has one daughter of five and will soon have a boy.]
The Western has been widely read and published in Finland for a long time. It has been a popular genre with the working classes and, even though it has not always been accepted by the literary elite, it has been a popular genre with young readers. Many classics have been translated into Finnish, and they have influenced many Finnish writers.
Bret Harte was probably the first western writer to be translated into Finnish. His stories about the California Gold Rush were published in Finnish as early as 1874 in a two-volume edition. James Fenimore Cooper followed soon after and became one of the most-read American adventure writers in Finland. Many of these translations were abridged to suit better the young readers.
In independent Finland after the First World War, Finnish nationalism raised its head and Americanism wasn’t eagerly welcomed by the literary elite. In the 1920s, however, some Finnish publishers found a niche for American western writers, such as Peter B. Kyne and Stewart Edward White. Max Brand (Frederick Faust) was also translated. Some of these publications came from small, local publishers and were large paperbacks. Some of the books came from the prestigious hardback publishers, such as Gummerus, which published lots of White.
American pulp fiction came to Finland via a magazine called Seikkailujen Maailma (The World of Adventures), which was published in the city of Lahti from 1937 to 1963. The magazine’s first western short story with an author’s name on it was by Stone Cody in 1937. The story was called “The Sheriff of the Damned”; I don’t know what it was originally. Earlier some other short stories had been published anonymously. Some other magazines had used some pulp writers -- for example, Novellisto (A Treasury of Short Stories) had published some stories by Alan LeMay, Nels Leroy Jorgensen and Jackson Gregory.
The stories that Seikkailujen Maailma published came mainly from the Popular Publications line of pulps and therefore many of the western stories were originally from Dime Western and Adventure. In the fifties the magazine printed stories by such classic authors as Clifton Adams, Cliff Farrell and Gordon Shirreffs. Also many stories by Walt Coburn were translated, but they were from the legendary author’s bad era.
The British series Western Library that was published by Amalgamated Press came to Finland in 1955 under the name Lännensarja (The Western Series). The series was long running and was still published in the early nineties. Lännensarja featured such writers as Max Brand (also as George Owen Baxter), Stone Cody, Clarence E. Mulford and Norman A. Fox. There were also lots of British authors, like James Marshal and John Hunter. When the original Western Library came to an end, the series was taken over by German and Australian westerns and featured the likes of Paul Wheelahan, who wrote under the aliases of Emerson Dodge and Brett McKinley.
There were also other magazines during the same era, but in the early 1960s they were pretty much replaced by the paperbacks, as in other parts of the Western world.
The first novel-length western paperback published in Finland was Homer Hatten’s Eagle on His Wrist (Fawcett 1953). It came out in 1955. The series in which it was published wasn’t very successful, but in the sixties came the series called Montana and Sheriffi. They were the most prominent of the Finnish western series and published many American paperbackers, such as Clifton Adams, Todhunter Ballard, Will Cook, William R. Cox, Giles Lutz and several others.
The Walt Slade series also started out in the early sixties, but the stories came under the Jackson Cole byline even though the books had originally been published as by Bradford or Leslie Scott.
The Montana and Sheriffi series received fierce competition from Mustang and Caliber 45. They published tougher, mainly British westerns, such as those by George Gilman, but also the Fargo series by John Benteen (a.k.a. Ben Haas). The western writer Marshall Grover (Len Meares) got his own long-running series with Bill and Ben (originally Larry and Stretch).
One of the most popular western paperback series, however, came from Norway: the Morgan Kane books by Louis Masterson, real name Kjell Hallbing. Hallbing also originated the soft-core series Clay Allison.
The paperbacks ran dry in the 1980s. They were replaced by VCRs and other audiovisual media. Almost all the earlier paperback series came to an end. Some other publishers tried with ultraviolent British westerns (John J. McLaglen, for example), but with no particular success.
In the early nineties only one publisher, Viihdeviikarit (The Entertainment Rascals), dared publish westerns. They had in their line Leo P. Kelley, Jory Sherman and Jon Messmann writing as Jon Sharpe, but it was no good. The Finnish audience stopped reading paperback westerns. No one has tried to recapture these series -- and probably never will.
Copyright 2004 Juri Nummelin
Posted by ds at June 16, 2004 08:11 AM
