Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Laurie York Erskine was in the forefront of living authors who reached a wide audience. He was also incredibly prolific: 20 full-length novels, over a hundred short stories in such magazines as Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post, articles in the New York Herald-Tribune and Life, eight motion pictures, major network radio broadcasts, a number of stage plays for boys, texts for United States Armed Forces Institute courses in citizenship for enlisted personnel, and a war memoir selected for the Library of the Imperial War Museum in London.
There can be no debate that his greatest success was Renfrew of the Mounted, the dramatic series of a Canadian Mountie who was more than a match for the wiliest and most hard-boiled of criminals. The cry known as the Renfrew call — which children all over America imitated, heard daily on the long-running radio program — echoed through city streets and alleys. In an era when brutality and bloodshed seemed to be exerting a baleful influence on young and old, Renfrew was unusual in that he dealt with his enemies without stooping to torture, dishonesty, and third-degree methods. In consequence, a greater strain was put on his courage and moral behavior, and he was respected, even revered, by the underworld. At the peak of his popularity, the followers of Erskine’s stories, books, and radio programs could be counted in the millions.
The Renfrew novels were written and published partly out of necessity; Erskine donated the profits from his handiwork to the funding of a private boys’ school. The school needed what money Erskine could chip in — far more than it needed his presence — which kept him busy at writing, and often took him away for prolonged absences. He always came back, and everyone on campus recalled his writing always played second fiddle to his interest in the educational influences of the school. It was this financial responsibility that sustained unceasing production of Renfrew of the Mounted adventures in both short story and novel form.
For a few short years Renfrew of the Royal Mounted reigned supreme as the top Canadian Mountie in both popularity polls and as a nationwide pop culture franchise. Such adventure stories of a frozen Northern territory in which Mounties replaced the heroic sheriffs and gunslingers of the American Western, exoticized locales such as the Yukon, offering the local color of dogsleds, fur thieves, trappers, drunk gamblers, and foolish gold prospectors. With the majority of the Canadian Mountie novels written prior to 1920, and the first Renfrew novel published in 1922, his stories were (historically speaking) belated entries in the sub-genre that proliferated in the early 20th century.
By the late 1930s, every movie studio in California attempted to cash in on the popularity of the Canadian Mounties. Cowboy stars Kirby Grant, Russell Hayden, and Charles Starrett swapped riding chaps and six-guns for scarlet coats with shiny brass buttons. As multiple film critics pointed out, Saskatchewan might as well have been in Texas. Laurie York Erskine, however, continued to write for the magazines, mapping out the plots for future Renfrew novels, and found continued success with Renfrew on radio for three separate incarnations over two different networks.
To add to Erskine’s troubles was Challenge of the Yukon (later re-titled Sergeant Preston of the Yukon) which was syndicated across all 48 states. There was room for only one Canadian Mountie in a market that was oversaturated with cowboys and private detectives. Summed up, Erskine’s contribution to the war cause resulted in the demise of Inspector Douglas Renfrew, as well as any and all future income from the franchise.
To add insult to injury, the fictional Mountie was left largely to Hollywood. By the late fifties, Mounties in Canada were rarely portrayed from historical studies but rather ironic or satiric sketches on radio and television. Today the Royal Canadian Mounted Police remains the federal and national police service of Canada, but not (in general) an active provincial or municipal police structure for local policing. Few today can tell you who Inspector Douglas Renfrew was, but many can instantly picture the comedic efforts of Dudley Do-Right.
Sadly, despite multiple attempts to revive the franchise from the 1950s through the 1980s, Renfrew of the Mounted fell victim to hard times. Fewer than a dozen of the almost 400 radio broadcasts are known to exist in recorded form. Erskine himself bequeathed the rights to his character to a university who chose not to renew the rights or trademarks, as did a defunct low-budget movie studio that (in the late 1930s) produced a series of eight Renfrew motion-pictures. As a result, the franchise fell into orphaned status and — until publication of this book — was bound for obsolescence.
It is my hope that this reference will rectify that oversight and, at the very least, preserve what remains of Renfrew of the Royal Mounted. After consulting a number of archives across the country, reading all of Erskine’s printed prose, and reading all of the radio scripts and thus documenting the plot summaries for your convenience, this book should plug in a gap that sorely needed to be filled. Look at it as an act of preservation, so to speak, which provides a major one-stop reference to all things related to Renfrew of the Royal Mounted, and to Laurie York Erskine.
I launched a Kickstarter to pre-sell copies of the book, with a special "thank you" gift for those to pledge to buy a book -- a CD with 13 "lost" episodes of the radio program (including two unaired audition recordings) that have never been heard since their initial broadcasts (from 1936 to 1957).
You can click the link below to make a pledge. And in advance, I thank you.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tallulahbankheadbook/renfrew-of-the-mounted-project
