Need Some Summer Reading? Check Out Queen of the North
High horsepower, big thrills, and your favorite bumbling salesman are back to scale snowy mountains with hand-built crawlers in the fourth volume of the Alexander Botts series, Queen of the North. The saga continues as Botts again faces seemingly insurmountable obstacles, hostile management, and hirings and firings. Set in the 1930s and 1940s, farm machines have taken hold across America and Botts finds himself competing for sales more than ever. He tackles a variety of tricky sales situations, including promising power and performance that is not yet in existence. Unwilling to backpedal on a promise, he outfits a sturdy Earthworm tractor with an aviation motor and creates a beast equipped to conquer Canada’s deep snow and steep mountains.
Alexander Botts is a salesman for the fictional Earthworm Tractor Company and stars in a collection of humorous short stories introduced during a time when motorized equipment was one of the wonders of the era. Debuting in 1927 in The Saturday Evening Post, Botts was the crawler tractor’s biggest champion and proved he was willing to pull off any number of stunts to garner a sale. The Queen of the North is the fourth book in a series that will be the first to present the short story collection in its entirety, along with their original illustrations and five stories that did not appear in The Saturday Evening Post.
For nearly 100 years, readers have found the stories intoxicating. They became a worldwide phenomenon, spawning book collections and movies. Each story is inventive and combines wholesome, charming characters with uncomplicated, pleasurable storylines. The results are pure entertainment.
The author, William Hazlett Upson, was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, on September 26, 1891. Upson became a farmer then enlisted in the field artillery in World War I. After the war he worked for several years as a service mechanic and troubleshooter for the Caterpillar Tractor Company. He learned the art of salesmanship, which would inspire his later writing. In 1923, he began writing short stories and in 1927 created the character Alexander Botts, who has appeared in over a hundred stories. In each tale, Mr. Botts goes to great lengths to make a sale, and more often than not, his plan goes awry. He always pulls through in the end, keeping readers coming back for more.
A theme throughout the series is Botts’s ambition and cleverness. Present-day readers enjoy his resourcefulness and his ability to tinker with his machines. He never hesitates to get his hands dirty and dig into the guts of his crawler tractors, relying on skills less utilized in the time of cell phones and the internet. Botts’s ingenuity and mechanical nature are part of the allure of the stories.
Botts may be a bumbling salesman, but he never does anything half-heartedly and attacks every challenge with limitless enthusiasm. Underneath the satire and salesmanship of Botts lies the solid ground of core American values.
The Queen of the North is available June 1, 2022, from Octane Press or anywhere books are sold.
