Beyond the Sound of Guns

By -
Anachronistic 1962 cover!
Beyond the Sound of Guns, by Emilie Loring

My brother got me this great little paperback romance novel for Christmas (off his work book-trade table; we don't really buy gifts for adult siblings, just for the kids).  It was published in 1945, but as you see, my copy is from 1962.  The blurb on the back is irresistible:
As the Second World War raged across the world, lovely, raven-haired Kit Marlowe and her brother sought peace and quiet at her brother's Double-H Ranch.  Then war came to this remote cattle country. Enemy agents were stealing the Double-H beeves needed to feed our fighting men. And Kit knew her luck was bad when she stumbled on the identity of the head of the saboteurs, for this fanatical enemy would use any means to silence her forever. Irrevocably trapped, only one man could help her - bold and charming Colonel Rex Danton, the man who had stolen her brother's fiancée - the man she had sworn to hate!
 Cattle-rustling Nazis, who doesn't want to read that?  In true paperback fashion, however, the plot is not really quite like the blurb.  Kit's brother, an ex-Army officer suffering from war trauma, has bought the ranch as his new career and Kit is there to look after him.  An evil, conniving ex-fiancée, dodgy cowhands, an overly-persistent suitor, and many other elements combine to make Kit's life a lot more exciting than she bargained for.  Are escaped German POW's plotting to high-jack (sic!) the Double-H beeves?  No they are not!  That's a cover-up for their much more dastardly plot.

The text is bizarrely educational in spots, citing (for example) the exact number of acres of Wyoming ranch land taken over by the military for training grounds, or what the most important industry for Our Fighting Men is.  There is a lot about Our Fighting Men!  There is also, less surprisingly, a lot about fashion; Kit looks beautiful in everything, and since this is a romance novel, she has WAY more clothes than your average young woman did in 1944.  Otherwise, she is a model young woman who is desperate to help with the war effort, and has to keep reminding herself that the job she's doing is valuable too.

It was an entertaining historical artifact, so I had fun.  Emilie Loring was pretty popular back in the day (so I gather) and it was neat to see what people read for light pleasure back then.

Comments

  1. FaithJanuary 8, 2019 at 8:34 AM

    Very interesting! I love reading stuff like this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Michelle AnnJanuary 10, 2019 at 3:30 AM

    This sounds fascinating! I'd definitely pick it up if I found it in a book sale.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more