“I’m not a literary writer but a first-class commercial hack with a certain amount of talent.” — Gordon D. Shirreffs, circa 1984

“[Shirreffs’ novels] are lusty works, in every sense of the word. Pulpy goodness.” — Jim Cornelius, at the Frontier Partisans blog

“[Calgaich the Swordsman] is an excellent historical novel dealing with the clash between Celtic barbarians and Roman civilization during the fourth century A.D. —D.M. Ritzlin, the DMR Books blog

“Calgaich the Swordsman is a book that I buy whenever I see it used and give copies as gifts to friends.” — Morgan Holmes, the Castalia House blog

I just found out that Tuesday, February the 9th, marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of Gordon D. Shirreffs’ death. Respects must be paid. Gordon was a successful pulpster who made the jump to paperbacks. Before he reached his seventieth birthday, he'd seen seventy-nine of his novels published. One of those novels was Calgaich the Swordsman, which enjoys a healthy reputation in sword-and-sorcery/historical fiction circles, as the quotes above demonstrate.

Gordon Donald Shirreffs was born in Chicago in January of 1914. Some of the info I've found online seems to imply that he might've been conceived in Scotland and then born here in the US of A. His parents, George and Rose, were both definitely recent emigres from Scotland the Brave.

Gordon got his first inklings that he might make a career as a writer in high school:

"I never intended, especially, to write. An English teacher at Austin High School in Chicago named Miss Maher—a handsome woman—would give us a phrase and we’d write an essay. I still remember one: “The cold grey sea washed against the black rocks." I don't remember what I wrote, but I could see those rocks. Afterwards, she told me "Gordon, if you don’t write for a living you'll waste your life." That was in 1932."

Shirreffs graduated and, as he put it, "worked at a lot of two-bit jobs". Then, World War Two happened:

"I was working at Union Tank Car Co. and taking night classes at Northwestern University when my National Guard regiment was called up for the National Emergency in September 1940. I went to Ft. Bliss near El Paso, Texas—a fabulous military post a hundred years old. [My wife] and I were married there in the Chapel of the 7th Cavalry."

He loved the Southwest--which would figure in many of his later novels--but Gordon was also itching to see action in the war.

"After the war started, I volunteered for overseas duty and was sent first to Alaska and then the Aleutian Campaign. The weather was horrible. We had no air support, and the Japanese bombed us from Kiska. All the time I was there I was observing and absorbing what happened in combat, what a man felt like in the field. I wrote two vignettes there which sold to the classic old magazine Blue Book for $25.00 each."

Blue Book, along with Adventure and Argosy All-Story, was one of the Cadillacs of American pulps. Shirreffs started right at the top in his pulp career.

After demobilization--he left as a Captain in the U.S. Army--Gordon began selling to the pulps regularly, as well as magazines like Boy's Life. Upon moving to California, Shirreffs also got into writing Western comics for several titles, including Roy Rogers and Rin Tin Tin. Here's how Shirreffs described that period.

"We were living off the comics, but I started [writing for] the pulps and boy’s stories again. By 1953 I had sold ninety-five pulp stories. They paid a penny a word, but you were limited to length so you couldn’t pad. I’d start a short story at 7:00 a.m. and drive to San Fernando and mail it off at 4:00 and get $35.00 to $50.00. I finally got a raise to three cents a word, and the bottom fell out of the pulps. I became very disheartened with writing and thought I had made a great mistake. With the old markets gone, I thought of writing a novel. I didn’t know what else to do to make a living. All I had done before was the Army and selling."

The pulps were going away, but Shirreffs found a fellow Scots-American to help him out:

"I contacted Donald MacCampbell, a New York agent who was coming to California. I trotted down to Pasadena with my manuscript under one arm. He took the manuscript and sold it to Fawcett for a Gold Medal Original book. Fawcett was the acme of paperbacks then, and it was really something to sell a first novel to them for the breathtaking sum of $2,000.00. It was called Rio Bravo (Fawcett. 1956).

After Rio Bravo I averaged the sale of six novels per year for ten years. I wrote one in three weeks flat. At first they were really polished up longer pulps with a better touch. Then I began to write off-the-trail stories, a loose term meaning you don’t follow the pattern of the standard adult Western."

Did you catch that? "Six novels per year". That's writing at 'pulp speed', sword-brothers, and writing well in the bargain. Many of the drag-ass TradPub authors writing today could learn some lessons from Shirreffs. Also, Fawcett was the mainstream publisher at the time. Fawcett published everyone from Mickey Spillane to Louis L’Amour.

When asked why he was still writing when he was almost seventy years old, Shirreffs had this--Howardian--response:

"I think it's the creative urge. I’ve always had it and not just in writing. (...) It’s the same with all the creative professions, actors, poets, composers. If you’ve got it, you’ve got it, and you must get it out of your system and express it. I think that’s why—when I’m almost seventy years old and have sold seventy-nine novels, hundreds of short stories, movie scripts, and a whole bunch of other stuff—I’m still at it. It’s part of a process and you never get away from it. There’s also a point in your life with writing, when you’re nearing the end and you think “I can still do it." Others, like athletes, must feel the same way. It’s not egotistical but something you’re born with; a feeling you can still do it.

When you get good, it flows naturally. I don’t question where the stories come from. Sometimes I think my room is haunted. Maybe it’s the ghost of an ancestor, old Andrew Fletcher. Whenever I’m stuck for a story or an idea, I think he communicates with me from over in the corner. I’ve never really seen him, but once, when I moved my head suddenly, I saw something, a Scottish soldier in a pilgrim hat and a dark cloak, carrying a sword."

Doesn’t that ring a bell? Much like Conan ‘looking over’ Robert E. Howard’s shoulder. In a quote I didn’t use, Gordon talks about constantly thinking back to the soldiers, lawmen and Native Americans he’d known when he had to come up with a character for his novels. All very Howardian.

Much of Gordon’s inspiration—throughout his career as an author—came from his time spent in the Southwest. As he put it:

You can read the same thing from Robert E. Howard in his letters. REH grew up in the aftermath of the period Shirreffs describes, and then saw its twentieth-century shadow in the oil-fields and boomtowns of central Texas.

Shirreffs was a Scots-American. His name—first, last and middle—is Scottish. Whether he was actually conceived in Scotland or not, the man was raised by Scots and he felt that Scottishness. The majority of the protagonists in his tales are Scottish or, at least, have Scottish surnames—just as well over half of Robert E. Howard’s protagonists had Irish names or surnames.

Both men felt—in their bones—that Gaelic waywardness…and the Gaelic passion for answering wrongs, directly, with violence.

As has been pointed out numerous times, the gap between sword-and-sorcery and post-war Western novels by the likes of Elmore Leonard, Louis L’Amour and Shirreffs himself is not that wide. Robert E. Hoiward was a pioneer in the depiction of a more ‘hard-boiled’ Wild West. Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote Wetserns. A, Merritt was buddies with Max Brand. Both genres tell tales of tough, lethal men who live by their own code. Many of the stories in both genres take place in frontier regions, wastelands and various other “no-man’s lands”. where one man can impose his will…if he has the guts and the prowess to back it up.

Gordon Shirreffs wrote tons of Western novels. Morgan Holmes recommends Rio Bravo—Shirreffs’ first novel—as well as Bugles on the Prairie and Apache Hunter.

Jim Cornelius at the Frontier Partisans blog is a big fan of the ‘Quint Kershaw’ trilogy

:”For my money, his best work was a trilogy of novels featuring the Scots-Canadian Mountain Man, Quint Kershaw: The Untamed Breed, Bold Legend and Glorietta Pass. The series takes Kershaw from the close of the golden age of the Mountain Men into the Civil War in New Mexico. (…)

Kershaw is a badass, a friend of Kit Carson — a descendant of ancient Celtic warriors who carries their spirit, fortitude and fury unadulterated in his blood. Yep, Shirreffs was as Celtophile as Robert E. Howard.”

Around the same time that Gordon wrote Calgaich the Swordsman for Playboy Press, he also wrote a pirate novel for his old standby, Fawcett Books: Captain Cutlass. Set during the same general period as REH’s Vulmea yarns, this novel makes me wish that Zebra had approached Shirreffs to do a Vulmea pastiche.

Raise a healthy dram of whiskey to the shade of Gordon D. Shirreffs, sword-brothers. He did more than his share to provide us with bloody, lusty, pulpy adventures for over fifty years.