Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

126 was written by Hex himself, but from that point on the fiction was all co-written with his mother until November Joe in 1913, which was Hex on his own. Parker attempts to work out who contributed what but with little success, though it would seem that the original idea was usually Hex’s. Srdjan Smajic 65 in a note to Ghost-Seers, Detectives and Spiritualists quotes Jack Adrian in the introduction to a 2003 edition of Flaxman Low as suggesting that ‘Hesketh did most of the writing and that his Oedipal attachment to his mother explains why he credited her with co-authorship.’ Smajic goes on to say that ‘there appears to be no real evidence for this theory.’ Jack Adrian is mostly known as an anthologist and occasional science-fiction writer. Don Q first appeared in the Badminton magazine in January 1898 in a short story entitled Don Quebranta Huesos . The name refers to a vulture, and when the stories were translated into French he was known as Le Vautour . Interestingly, he is not an over-sympathetic character, being something of a stereotype of the haughty Spanish hidalgo , cruel and impulsive. But then Sherlock Holmes was not an over-sympathetic character either. The Don Q stories first appeared in magazines, mainly in Pearson’s . They were then collected as The Chronicles of Don Q, in 1904, and later The New Chronicles of Don Q (which appeared in the USA as Don Q in the Sierra ): Don Q’s Love Story appeared a few years on in response to a demand for his return, after the manner of Sherlock Holmes, and at the end of that novel his fortunes are restored and he need wander Andalusia no more. Don Q is an abbreviation for his nickname, Quebranta Huesos or the bone- smasher , the local name for the ‘bone-breaking vulture’, the lammergeier. He haunts the highlands of Andalusia: every official attempt to capture him fails, ‘and the parties of guardias civiles came back fewer in numbers, having built cairns for their dead.’ He does work to a code of ethics, belonging to a class of robbers, the sequestradores , who hold their captives to ransom, but if the ransom is paid he is meticulous in releasing his captive. One modern website devoted to Pulp Heroes 66 says Don Q, aka Don Quebranta Huesos, is a grim Spanish thief who is vicious, even sadistic, toward the rich and evil but occasionally kind to the poor and good. He’s a Spaniard of Spaniards, having the qualities of his race in excess. He was quite fearless, proud to distraction, unsurpassed in the kindly courtesy of a nation of aristocrats, and cruel beyond belief. He’s not a pretty man: his features – ‘the livid, wrinkled eyelids, the white wedge-shaped bald head narrowing down to the hooked nose, the lean neck, the cruel aspect’ comprise ‘all the distinct features of the quebranta huesos transmuted into human likeness.’ He was active at the end of the nineteenth century, his headquarters 65 Smajic, Srdjan, Ghost-Seers, Detectives and Spiritualists, Cambridge University Press, 2010 66 See http://www.reocities.com/jjnevins/pulpsd.html The Legacy