William Brockie was an author found in North-West Romances. Under his name it claims he is Ex-Constable, Royal Canadian Mounted Police. This insider knowledge of the force allowed him to pen such tales as “The Caribou Murders” (Winter 1947/48), “The Terror of Skeleton Valley” (Fall 1947) and “Murder Without Penalty” (Winter 1950/51). He appeared in other magazines as well such as Adventure, Complete Northwest Magazine and The Danger Trail. There was only one problem. It was all a lie.
William Brockie was actually prolific Western writer, Charles Victor Tench (1892-1963). While Mr. Tench was not a Mountie, he did move from England to British Columbia in 1930. In B.C., Tench found plenty of material, writing a fantastic version of the Slumach case, a native man hung for murder, with connections to a fabled lost gold mine. He also latched onto the Cariboo Gold Rush (1858-1861) that centered around Williams’ Creek and later Barkerville with stories like “Feud in the Chilcotin”, Dynamic Western Stories, October 1942.
“The Terror of Skeleton Valley” was reprinted in Texas Rangers (December 1958) as “The Terror Valley” by C. V. Tench. Brockie is no longer the author but only the character. Superintendent Courtney of the RCMP calls in Detective-Sargent Brockie when a weird case comes up. There are tensions in the Cariboo district of BC. The ranchers don’t like the farmers moving into their range. Something is killing farmers, coming in the night and savaging them and even eating them. But this can’t be the work of animals because the tracks are mysteriously obliterated after the deed. Is a werewolf on the loose in the Cariboo?
Courtney suspects the people behind this know all the local cops so they bring in Brockie undercover. He hangs around, bragging and generally painting a target on his back. At night, Brockie waits for the killers to come. The first night he piles pots and pans as an alarm. The beast comes. It can’t get past his barred door, though Brockie smells and hears its animal presence. The next day he tracks the sweeping marks until he comes across a cow pond where the trail is cleverly lost.
The next night Brockie waits outside his cabin. The monster shapes come again but when he jumps out of the bushes, a man-shaped one flees. Inside the cabin there is a terrible noise as animals tear the cabin apart. Eventually they get out and go after the human shape. The Mountie fires at the fleeing forms.
When the Mountie hears a voice call out he investigates. A man dressed in a bear skin is bleeding to death (not from a gunshot wound). Brockie takes him back to the cabin to hear his dying confession. The man killed the three farmers because he wanted to scare them off. He was a hermit who put up with ranchers but wouldn’t allow farmers to take up his lands. The two animals were cougars he had raised from kittens. Angry and wounded, they had turned on him. He dies without telling the cop his name.
This story is part of the false monster tradition found inside Northern fiction. As with so many strange Northerns, the ghost, the sasquatch, the Windigo turns out to be a guy in a bear costume. The degree to which each writer plays up the horror angle depends largely on the magazine. North-West Stories or Texas Rangers will start with it but drops it quickly while Thrilling Mystery keeps it up to the end. Mystery fiction enjoys the tantalizing hint of horror but can’t really go there. Quickly Hercule Poirot or Sherlock Holmes must explain the locked room and keep us in the real world.
Tench didn’t limit himself to British Columbia. He also wrote about Alberta in “At a Cowboy Carnival. Calgary’s Annual Week of Festivities” in The Boy’s Own Paper, April 1925 and “Mail Carriers of the Frozen North” (Boys’ Life, January 1929) which meant Tench had come to Canada before deciding to move there. “Death on the Yukon” appeared in Detective Fiction Weekly (June 22, 1940), showing he could tailor Northern material for Mystery magazines as well.
The Fall 1946 issue of North-West Romances features an article under his own name of V. Tench, “Wolves Can Be Tough”. The piece gives four different wolf encounters in Northern Alberta, each segment telling how wolves attacked horses or people. I suspect Tench got these stories firsthand or secondhand. The only location he gives specifically is Lac La Biche, Alberta and the story of Martin Allan. While cutting ties for the railroad, wolves sneak into his camp and ate his cayuse pony. Tench’s style is that of fiction, making these supposed actual events read like exciting anecdotes. The final tale is of a trapper named Boyde who tries to shoot a wolf in the night and ends up with one in his cabin. The desperate struggle with the large beast makes for fun reading.
Later when the Pulps died out, Tench moved into the “men’s magazines” with pieces like “Man Meets Grizzly”, The Man (UK) (October 1954) and “Grizzly Bear-Hunt” in Man Junior (October 1964). He died in Vancouver at the age of 71. (Doc Savage writer, Laurence Donovan, also ended up in Vancouver around the same time. I wonder if they knew each other?)
The work of C. V. Tench is of particular interest for me since I have lived in many of the places he writes about in his Northerns. That he wrote at least one strange Northern makes it even better. (Of course by the time I lived in Lac La Biche or Williams Lake, they were must less wild places. Still, their beauty can’t be denied.) I haven’t read a good B.C. locale story since “The Phantom Cougar”. Unlike that story, Tench doesn’t really describe any particular place in the Cariboo, which weakens it some.
All artwork is by unknown artists.
