Blades in the Sun

This is Vic Hurley's unpublished biography of Captain Leonard Furlong, a legendary figure in the Philippine Constabulary from 1903-1911. The book was started in 1935 by Hurley at the behest of Charles Wellington Furlong, the brother of Leonard Furlong. After nearly twenty years of writing and trying to find a publisher, efforts by the two men to bring the book to print were abandoned. Nevertheless, ten years later, Hurley still worked on a second draft in the late 1960s, but this too languished. Fifty years after that, in 2011, one hundred years after the death of Furlong, the typed onion skin manuscript was found in a cardboard box in a garage, and permission was given by Suzanne Hurley Kersh, Vic Hurley's niece, to attempt to publish this abandoned biography, using easier on-line publishing options. The book is an edited compilation of the two drafts written by Vic Hurley, with supplementary editorial notes, maps and period photographs. Primary sources were utilized from the Vic and Betty Hurley Collection at the Burke Museum of Natural and Cultural History in Seattle and from the papers at the Philippine Constabulary Collection at the Special Collections at the University of Oregon.