Black saddle is one of those western television series that were all the rage in the fifties and sixties. It follows a gunslinger-turned-lawyer named Clay Culhane.1 He’s a classical hero, strong and without obvious faults, who helps people and fights for justice, sometimes with a law book, sometimes with his colt. In this particular episode, a woman named Starkey comes to town looking for her husband.2 Naturally, Clay is immediately on her case and he wants to find out more abut the missing person in the archives of the local newspaper. And that’s where I come in.
He finds the editor in deep thought, hunched over a chessboard. It turns out he’s playing postal chess with someone in Denver. He has black and we have a good view of the board, allowing for a perfectly reliable reconstruction of the position.
Well, almost perfectly reliable. I’m not a hundred percent sure about the identities of the pieces on e4 and h7, but the following seems the most likely option by far:3
The board is set up wrongly, but I’m not allowed to complain about that because they cleverly set the series at a time the current convention wasn’t in vogue yet.4 I can say for sure that a white bishop is the only piece next to the board, so my reconstruction has at least that going for it.
After some thought, black plays Qb4+.
Black: Let’s see him get out of that.
He probably won’t, although taking the knight on f3 would have been simpler. Still, if white saves his piece with Nd2 or Qd2, his position is far from enviable. Better to have lost a husband, I’d say.
Realism: 2/5 Very strange things are afoot here. The knight on h7, for example, or the king on d8. Or the fact that white is a piece down and has just hung another.5 Or the fact that black didn’t take it.
Probable winner: Black. He has a piece and the eponymous saddle is named after him.
1. [If he stays out in the heat of the sun for too long, he turns ceramic.] ↩
2. [Hutch, presumably.] ↩
3. [Client: diagram editor.] ↩
4. [It wasn’t even in Elle yet!] ↩
5. [I could have used ‘hanged’ here, too.] ↩