A Hopalong Spin-Off

Last week, I wrote about the 1937 Hopalong Cassidy film Texas Trail. According to the credits, it was based on the 1922 novel Tex, by Clarence E. Mulford--one of the many original Hoppy novels.

This is one of the few novels in the series I had never happened to read. When I looked it up, I discovered that the plot was completely different from that used in the movie. I wasn't completely surprised by this--the movie Hoppy is a completely different character than the book Hoppy. But I was curious if there was any plot point, character or action sequence that carried over into the movie. So I downloaded the novel and read it.

Well, there isn't even the vaguest simularity. In fact, the book is a sort of spin-off from the Hoppy series, giving a supporting named Tex Ewalt day in the limelight.  Tex is a reformed bad guy whose back story includes an Eastern education and a stint at medical school. Alcohol and gambling led him down the wrong path before an encounter with Hopalong straightened him out.

Tex is a fun character, who often uses the Western vernacular to hide his education, but is likely to spend a page or two abruptly pontificating about subjects like the difference between reason and instinct.

Tex ends up in the open town of Windsor, Kansas, where the miners and the ranchers don't like each other and a gambler named Gus Williams (an old enemy of Tex) pretty much runs things. It's been twenty years since Tex had a run-in with Williams and the gambler doesn't recognize him. Tex uses the name Jones and proceeds to make friends with a few worthwhile citizens, while essentially running a con on the bad guys to gain their trust.

The novel is very episodic without a strong, central plot and I think that it suffers somewhat because of this. It's short (my edition is 124 pages), but it probably would have worked better as a novella than a novel. As fun as it can be to hear Tex randomly lecture about something, it happens a little too often, bring the action to a dead stop a few too many times.

And, as I mentioned, there's nothing in the novel that was brought over into the movie version. To a large degree, this is understandable. Hoppy, after all, isn't a character in the novel at all aside from a brief cameo near the end. But dropping Hoppy into the lead role and having him clean up a wild town would have been a perfectly suitable plot.

But, as I mentioned last week, the movie simply expands the title out to Texas Trail and creates an entirely original story to go with it. It's just as well, because the movie itself is enormously entertaining. And perhaps the episodic nature of the novel would have poorly translated into a screenplay anyways.

The book is in the public domain, so you can find it HERE.