“It is a wild, savage, bitter story, I repeat, for no story of the Legion deals with life in a Boston drawing-room. Quaintly enough, this story has to do with a glass eye. And a live eye, too. You know that grim saying from the Bible: ‘An eye for an eye’? But yes. This is the story of an eye for an eye. And a grim little story it is.” – Thibaut Corday
Whether in life or in the pulps, old soldiers tell some of the greatest tales. And, in the pages of Argosy, from 1929 to 1939, there were none older that Thibaut Corday, an eighty-year-old legionnaire of the French Foreign Legion whose cinnamon beard has yet to run completely white. Written as told to Theodore Roscoe, the old legionnaire would recount twenty-one adventures in that time.
As for Roscoe, a trip to the Caribbean and North Africa in 1928 and 1929 inspired an interest in old voodoo tales and the French Foreign Legion, both topics he would explore in the pages of Argosy to great acclaim. Per Gerd Pilcher’s introduction to the Better Than Bullets collection, “reading an ordinary pulp story was compared to ‘reading in black and white,’ reading a story by Roscoe however as to ‘reading in technicolor.’” Roscoe’s countless encounters with Legion officer and veterans no doubt fueled the authenticity of Corday’s tales, and covered for the occasional lapse. After all, a good storyteller is concerned more with the appearance of reality.
Like many writers in the Forties, Roscoe would leave the pulp world, this time for the more lucrative true crime tales. Thanks to Altus Press (now Steeger) reprinting Thibaut Corday’s tales, readers can still find the old legionnaire in an Algerian café, waiting to tell his tall tales.
In Corday, Roscoe captures perfectly the voice of a veteran and a veteran storyteller. Corday is a master entertainer, able to keep rapt audiences at the café–and those reading–with nothing but the spoken word. Word choice, rhythm, cadence–all the tricks of a master orator, captured neatly on the page. You can almost hear the old soldier’s laughter in each paragraph Roscoe expertly captures the flair of a verbal storyteller in Corday’s first-person tale to the point where a reader can almost hear the legionnaire. These are stories that beg to be performed in audio, not merely read, to recreate the effect of listening to a master of tall tales over a cup of coffee. The descriptions also are vivid and tight within Corday’s voice, with the little descriptive tangents falling into place where a café storyteller would naturally make such. No doubt, Roscoe spent time listening to storytellers in addition to reading them.
Corday’s stories are quick and action-packed reads, and honest ones as well. Veterans recognize the little trip-ups, mistakes, and catastrophes that litter the battlefield. And if the story behind a story relies heavily on coincidence and chance meeting, it is not the first to do so, and the coincidence only heightens the eeriness that saturate these war stories.
For Roscoe has created naturalistic weird tales, full of exotica, dread, and uncanny occurrence. He just provides a convincing natural explanation for the events. Corday is known to embellish his stories–as is common for a tableside storyteller–he just never stretches credulity. The normal passions of men are dark and mysterious enough to provide the backdrop to his tales. Even the twists at the end fit perfectly into the traditions of the Weird.
The world itself might be plenty strange enough for Corday, but his tales are some of the most approachable of the adventure pulps, even now, where desert sands invoke Black Hawk Down instead of Lawrence of Arabia.