Above you see a cover for Showdown, which is a terrible name for this novel. It’s evocative of nothing, a failing that’s particularly egregious considering the story is set in the exotic South Seas. You may not have known that Errol Flynn was a novelist, but indeed he was, writing this and Beam Ends, plus his autobiography My Wicked, Wicked Ways, which you can consider fiction due to all the sticky episodes from his life it omits. Flynn was the equal of most popular fiction authors of his era, possibly even better than most, however Showdown, besides a better title, could have used an edit for conciseness in the first half. He goes into what we feel is unneeded detail into secondary characters, but even so, everything he writes is confident and steeped in tropical atmosphere.

In the tale, a British boat captain named Shamus O’Thames plies the waters around New Guinea, falls in love with a nun named Granice, and eventually takes on a charter of Hollywood types shooting second unit footage for a movie. It’s an ill-advised trip, but he agrees to it mainly because it will take him near his nun’s isolated jungle mission. Of course the voyage aboard his boat Maski does not go as planned, as the group end up stranded in headhunter territory. We could offer more details, but we don’t want to spoil it for interested readers. We’ll just say that it’s a fantastic tale with unexpected turns, some of them hard to believe, but with the whole lent credibility by the fact that Flynn, who was from Tasmania, had numerous real life adventures in New Guinea before he became a star.

Showdown probably couldn’t be published today due to its casting of native New Guinean people, known as Papuans or sometimes Melanesians, as either loyal servants or depraved villains. The book was originally published in 1946, a time when most white men didn’t think of native peoples as owners of their own land, nor deserving of self determination. It’s difficult to know exactly how Flynn himself felt about colonialism. We suspect, based on the narrative, that he might not have been entirely on the side of the forces of so-called civilization, but we’d have to re-read his autobiography to know for sure, and that book, sadly, vanished somewhere into the heart of darkness during one of our international moves. Flynn’s adventurer O’Thames is certainly kinder than most, but can’t be called enlightened by any stretch.

Anyway, Showdown is worth reading, bad title and all (by the way, we totally get the inference of a showdown not only between characters, but between cultures—it’s still a bad title). Flynn covers land and sea, love and hate, race and racism (however inadequately), and ultimately, like other authors in this sub-genre (see here and here), asks whether white men should be in the tropics at all. He doesn’t have any new answers, but he certainly says what he wants to with some style and an abundance of conviction. He was open about the fact that he preferred being a novelist over being an actor. His personal foibles and failings aside, it’s too bad he didn’t write more.