Lives in Cricket No 26 - HV Hesketh-Prichard

127 lying in ‘the Andalusian highlands stretching from Jerez to Almeria and beyond.’ He rules his band of thieves through sly cunning, total fear and great cruelty, but he is not unfair to them, and he does bring them profits. ‘He is possessed of a strict code of honour, so that if his demanded ransom for a prisoner is only 75% met, he will return 75% of the prisoner to the authorities. But if that same prisoner is given the chance to kill Don Q and passes it up – Don Q engineered it, of course – Don Q will release him unharmed.’ After the first story it seems that Don Q was mostly to be found in Pearson’s. In this case the original illustrations were by Stanley L.Wood, now seen as one of the first of the great comic-book illustrators. Kate says that both Hesketh and I: believed that the illustrations were so original and so exactly suited to the character and spirit of the stories that they owed not a little of their popularity and success to them. And no-one could well forget the hooked face that stared out from Pearson’s pages, with its strong and abnormal personality, and the extraordinary nervous energy of the slight, odd figure. Kate adds, mysteriously: ‘Stanley Wood was a very odd sort of man but we liked him. His health was bad and he had a failing which hindered success.’ You can still buy prints of Stanley Wood’s pictures, at a price, but for an explanation of his failing you will search in vain. It is a fairly frequent comment that Don Q’s popularity rivalled that of Sherlock Holmes, but it may be something of an exaggeration. Certainly, though, he was widely read. The later stories were syndicated across the United States, though not apparently to the extent of November Joe , which seems to have been syndicated to every small-town paper in the country. Kate says that they had letters from all over the world about Don Q: ‘Men from Australia in the back blocks told us that they clubbed together on adjoining farms and as one man read the mag for the month, he rode to the boundary fence and passed it on to the next man.’ Meanwhile however, Don Q took on another life of his own in France. In her notes for 1906, Kate refers to the stories in France: ‘Hex found out they were given another shade of meaning upon which he stopped selling. But that was later.’ As with Stanley Wood’s weakness, we are left wondering exactly what was meant! In 1906 the French magazine Nos Loisirs syndicated the Chronicles , with Georges Clavigny, a popular novelist in his own right, translating. Clavigny seems to have known a good thing when he saw one, and carried on: ‘Georges Clavigny s’est inspiré des chroniques de don Quebranta recueillies par H. et K.Pritchard pour ecrire cette série.’ Then, in 1923, the stories were reissued in the pulp series Vautour de la Sierra . After the first series Clavigny continued to write his own stories about Don Q. To quote George Fronval, Vautour de la Sierra was about ‘a gentleman crook who commanded a band of faithful companions. They took refuge in the Spanish Sierras and fought to protect the poor and The Legacy