Denver Don Quixote

SALUTE TO YESTERDAY--Gene Fowler-- Random House ($2.50).

The legends of Gene Fowler's newspaper life, his bawdy ballads, crotchets and Hollywood adventures, have put his career on the same picturesque level as the subjects of his antic literary works (Shoe the Wild Mare, The Great Mouthpiece, Timber Line). In Salute to Yesterday, his first novel in six years, Author Fowler legend for legend backs his own career well into the shade. A frankly sentimental salute to the brave past, evolving around the doings of a Denver die-hard pioneer, the yarn is calculated to send readers into gales of merriment and reduce them to beery tears. Cinema producers were reported in friendly negotiations with Author Fowler, who is holding out for $100,000.

Captain James Job Trolley is a tall, leathery pioneer eccentric, complete with cape and beaver hat, whose "monstrous antics" and windy wit have made him for half a century the liveliest landmark in Denver (called Goldtown). Nominally he is the mining editor of the Rocky Mountain Herald, at a life salary of $15 a week; in practice his daily pieces automatically go in the managing editor's wastebasket. His real mission in life is to fight the 20th Century. Tourists, those "fleas on the world's back." who always go for him with cameras, he always goes for with his swordcane. But tourists are small fry. His real enemy is 83-year-old Colonel Anthony Steele, who 50 years ago squeezed Captain Trolley out of a rich mine and married his girl. When Trolley's beautiful, talented son killed a man for striking his horse, it was the Colonel's posse that lynched him. On that day Captain Trolley declared there was no God, only the Devil in the person of the Colonel.

Story opens with Captain Trolley delivering a typical blast against the Colonel's latest philanthropy, consisting of 46 cathedral chimes. "There are thieves, he trumpets, "mark you well, who are trying to exchange their loot for the moldy perfume of sanctity. They are hypocrites and gold-plated scoundrels of the first water, damme!" To spoil the chimes-presentation ceremony, the Captain distributes handbills announcing a counterceremony at which he will dedicate his own tomb to the death of the West. The philanthropist strikes back by demanding Trolley's arrest. From this beginning Author Fowler more than makes good a recent promise that his next novel would have "some Hollywood sequences in it.''

Some of the characters who people these sequences include a sardonic anthropologist named Dr. Thumb, who involves himself joyfully on Trolley's side; Newshawk Kilgallon, Trolley's satirical, hard-drinking crony, a World War hero and onetime child prodigy singer who has been trying to commit suicide since adolescence; Gus Popolos, a Rasputin-like fanatic who wanders around in a moth-eaten bear rug, proclaims Colonel Steele the new Messiah, finally marries an outsmarted chorus girl; Moussa, a notorious Arab pickpocket, whom nobody understands except Captain Trolley; the mayor's katzenjammer son, whose snooping in Dr. Thumb's traveling bag is rewarded by a small mummified head which turns out to be that of the mayor's long-lost missionary father-in-law.

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