Sudden - Plot

Plot

Sudden's background story is not explicitly detailed but it is mentioned several times that as a young man, he promises his dying foster father that he will find the two men who cheated him and take revenge. In Sudden—Outlawed, which goes back to the beginning of his story, he has returned to Texas from an Eastern education, but sets out on his quest for revenge on the death of his foster parent, using the name James Green. Almost at once, he himself is wrongly accused of murder and robbery and becomes an outlaw. In Sudden (1933), he is pardoned by the Governor of Arizona, Bleke, made a US deputy marshal, and subsequently sent on (typically undercover) missions to maintain law and order. In The Range Robbers, in fact the first book to be written, his story is resolved. He is revealed to be Donald Peterson, son of one of the men he has been hunting, and he marries Noreen, who turns out to be the abducted daughter of his foster father. The other object of his search is the villain of this story, whom Sudden exposes and kills.

The second story to be written, The Law o' the Lariat, follows on from The Range Robbers. In it Sudden, this time calling himself Jim Severn, has temporarily left his wife and family to go and help another rancher. However, the original situation outlined in The Range Robbers, of a once-outlaw turned undercover lawman, forced to move from place to place on his own quest for vengeance, provided a framework for any number of more or less self-contained stories, and Strange devoted the rest of the series to these earlier adventures.

The stories in the series follow very conventional and repetitive plot lines. A plot line typically revolves around Sudden arriving in a town that either has several unlawful elements or recent conflicts and mysterious deaths. Sudden earns the respect of the townspeople, fights against all odds, defeats the villains, protects the wronged, and then rides out into the sunset to continue his search.

Many events are repeated in all the stories, for example, fist fights in which the cowboy faces a bigger adversary without using any weapons, and emerges victorious; gun fights describing Sudden's lightning speed; and kidnapping-cum-rescue-cum-chase sequences as the climax. Often he acts as a detective, piecing together clues, and revealing the villain in a well-attended denouement, leading to a violent resolution. Further, in every book, Sudden befriends a young man who acts as a capable sidekick, and this young friend falls in love and inevitably wins the hand of the girl he loves; the only exception is The Range Robbers where the romantic involvement is that of Sudden himself and Noreen. Another typical set piece is a Shaggy dog story told by Sudden in an implausible representation of his Texan speech.