Arthur O. Friel (1885–1959)

This volume contains Friel's early Lourenco and Pedro short stories plus one novella, The Jararaca. They all appeared in Adventure, the leading pulp magazine for this genre, between late 1919 and 1921. As with most of his work, the setting is the Amazonian jungle of Brazil. And the two heroes, Lourenco and Pedro, who are featured throughout, are workers on a rubber plantation. But being born adventurers, or bush men, as they identify themselves, they are continually called upon to scout the immense property holdings of their employer, Coronel Nunes. The stories and novella are loosely connected, although they can be read independently with no need to worry about the earlier works.

But here is what I find intriguing about Lourenco and Pedro. Essentially, they are a South American reworking of the mountain men of the American West. They blaze new trails and pathways. They encounter new Indian peoples. And they are able to facilitate civilizational connections through their speaking of Portuguese, Spanish, various Indian languages, and English. They are twentieth century Brazilian versions of Jim Bridger or Jedediah Smith. Or at least it seems so to me. Friel, born in 1887 just as the American Frontier was coming to a close, likely grew up well versed on dime novels about the West and its adventure heroes. Once in South America as a newspaper editor, again, I am supposing, he heard stories and tales and found fertile ground to incorporate this American genre into an entirely new culture. Later, Friel would make his own adventure, exploring the Orinoco. Not much seems to be known about Friel, but I'd bet my last dollar this brief sketch of mine of his inspiration is pretty close to the truth.

The technique for the stories is a recurring one. Lourenco begins his tales, usually referring to the sighting of some demon, devil, or other mystical or mythological creature. Then, the flashback begins and the reader hears of how Lourenco and his explorer companion, Pedro, encounter the monster. It usually occurs through some mechanism that combines discovery, revenge, and rescue. In the process, the creature or demon reveals itself as either a false monster or something easily explained as nothing more than an exceptionally dangerous version of a natural occurring reptile or animal or some individual adopting the characteristics of the animal.

This latter point also allows Friel to give vent to his suppositions about biological evolution. He appears to be something of a Lamarckian. For the Indians and renegades he encounters are people who assume the characteristics of their environments. Tribes and individuals adopt the features of apes, snakes, and spiders. Some go further, seeming to be hybrid races.

Such an intriguing view of a land and time now gone forever. Friel managed to encounter it all while it was still a mystery. And the wonder of that encounter fills each page in an almost routine manner. Shadows along the shore hide canoes from discovery by enemies on Amazonian lakes that shimmer under the brilliance of a full moon at night. And underneath the placid surface, piranhas, alligators, and river snakes lie in wait. Meanwhile, one step from the canoe into the bush brings the chance of abduction, venomous bites, seductions, poisoning, and sickness. Danger abounds. Yet you long to experience it, if not in your own shoes then through the bare feet and arms of Lourenco and Pedro.… (mer)

What makes Tiger River interesting is not so much its standing as a work of literature but as a sort of social document of its times. That's not to say it's poorly written. Friel is a competent writer and he plots out an intriguing storyline. And there are fewer instances of purple prose in this entire book than in the average chapter alone of a Zane Grey novel. But it's what he tells about American popular culture and concomitant national character one hundred years ago that is striking.

Popular culture can explain a great deal about a society. Look at the films, television, and popular novels of today and you see high-tech adventures on one end and grimy, debased urban noir on the other. Plots dependent on smartphones have replaced those of yesteryear that featured a six-shooter. Hordes of Navy SEALS with their body armor, satellite connected headsets, and drone guided missiles take the place of men on horseback, explorers climbing mountains, crossing rivers, and discovering the hidden recesses of remote lands. High-tech reliant protagonists directed by wheezy, overweight old women and men back in DC war rooms dominated by big screen monitors supersede independent, self-reliant range hands and explorers.

Friel's Tiger River exemplifies the earlier America. Like the aforementioned Zane Grey, his heroes are marking out new territories, discovering new people, lusting after adventure. (And, by the way, the valley of gold in Tiger River should remind readers of the lost valley in Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage.) It's not hard to imagine a generation of young men (it would mainly be young men) who were just a few years too young to have experienced World War I directly looking up from their desks in 1923 and hoping for romance and something better than the workday in the city or small town. For them, McKay, Ryan, and Knowlton, the World War I veterans and heroes of Tiger River, may have seemed like big brothers or even father figures. People who provided dreams of exploration that were just imaginably true enough.

Tiger River has a torpid beginning but soon casts off into an engaging tale. Its story is a conventional one: explorers taking on the wilderness, an encounter with unknown Indian peoples, and the journey to find a secret treasure of gold, hidden away in remote mountains. It could be an American Western. But Friel has relocated the action to South America and the rivers and mountains of Peru and Ecuador. This displacement of the American frontier to South America would go on to become something of a staple in adventure novels and especially films up until the middle 1950s.

All in all, the novel is a nice read. It makes you want to pick up another volume in the series. Apparently, Friel himself was a newsman turned adventurer in South America. And it seems he used his own experiences (while borrowing imagery and plot devices from The Odyssey and Zane Grey) in his work.… (mer)

The first in Friel's series of McKay, Ryan, and Knowlton novels, The Pathless Trail, proves that the author is a cut above the usual writers in the adventure genre. An earlier reading of his second book in the series, Tiger River, only reinforces that view. He is a step and more beyond Grey and Burroughs, just below Haggard and Forester, and clearly not in the same league as London. He is more on a par with John P. Marquand at his best--I'm thinking of Marquand's adventure set in South America, It's Loaded, Mr. Bauer. Friel's deftly drawn images of the rivers and jungles of Brazil and Peru stay vivid and memorable. It's a clear picture of a time and place now gone.

That time and place? South America in the early 1920s and a group of World War I veterans on an expedition to capture an American millionaire lost among Indian tribes in the Amazon. Whereas the more notable and "reputable" members of the Lost Generation of American writers went to Paris and Europe at this time--Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, and Dos Passos--another set of less well regarded expat American writers followed Melville's, Stevenson's, and Jack London's footsteps in the South Seas, South America, and Far East--Nordhoff and Hall, Robert Dean Frisbie, and Frederick O'Brien.

Friel fits well among this latter group, despite being somewhat less "literary." As a genre writer for pulp fiction, his work is given little to introspection and psychological study, although it does pop through in a few instances but not for long. Friel's characters are all about catharsis, putting the reader into the shoes of his protagonists, giving them a virtual taste of the air, rivers, jungles, and skies of the tropics. At that, he is second to none.

About Friel personally, I cannot find much. How much firsthand acquaintance did he have with the Great War? There is a little too much of Tim Ryan in this book, but his renditions of Mademoiselle from Armentières produce a nice feel for the era. And I did see that Knowlton was his wife's maiden name. Otherwise? Prolific during the 1920s, his output ebbed during the 1930s and all but disappeared towards the end of that decade. His participation in World War II? Unknown. And nothing until his death in 1959. Certainly, this man left correspondence or a diary somewhere. It would be interesting if someone researched him. For the adventure writers of South America and the Orient always seem a bit more attractive than the besotted bunch on barstools in Paris.… (mer)