Fishin' Hole Blues

Cutthroat Gulch
Richard S. Wheeler
Signet, April 2003

Wheeler takes a break from his successful and long running Barnaby Skye series to give us one of his “traditional” westerns. I’ve never read Wheeler but found his prose in Cutthroat Gulch easy to read but prosaic. His suspense is never really suspenseful, though, and the mystery he sets up never pays off.

We meet Blue Smith, an old-time sheriff who’d long ago cleaned up the county and is now at the end of his career. He’s about 50. His eyesight is going and so is his hearing. His young deputy is covetous of the top spot. He’s an ornery sort, and his roughness goes deeper than just the edges. His wife loves him, though, and the town has respect for him. Smith’s vice is fishing. He goes to a certain pond with some regularity and it’s been made clear to just about everyone in the town of Blankenship that this is Blue’s fishing hole. It’s here that Blue finds the body of a dead man.

Taking his time, Blue investigates and cannot find out who the dead man was. He’s a stranger, unknown to anyone. Blue figures that the body was left at the fishing hole as a message to Blue himself, left for the sheriff to find. Just what that message might be is unclear. He finds a trail leading away from the murder scene and follows it. In almost no time his horse and packhorse are killed by a sniper. The shooter, Blue reasons, is toying with him.

Shortly we’re introduced to Blue’s daughter Tammy, her two children, and her husband, Steve. They live close to where the tracks lead. It occurs to Blue that the killer knows him and is leading him somewhere. He worries for his daughter. That worry is borne out when Steve is murdered.

Leaving his daughter in the care of a trusted friend, Blue continues his search. It’s about then that he’s told that Jack Castle has been released from prison. Castle, once a favorite in the Smith household, had turned wild and went to prison. He had been the son Blue had always hoped his own son would be. But things went bad.

Slowly, he begins killing Blue’s family. Steve is first, then Blue’s wife, then Tammy. The children are left unharmed. Blue realizes that Jack is saving him for last and sets a trap of sorts by his fishing hole. There, he confronts Jack with the children in tow. With stern understanding Blue tells Jack that someone has to take care of the kids once he is gone. Either that, or Jack will have to kill the kids, too. Unable to murder children Jack rushes off and commits suicide.

Aside from the all too common bloated story telling in today’s fiction, the story is obvious with no twists or turns. The characters act ridiculously. Jack has promised to kill Blue and all his family, but his daughter and son think little of this threat, even after Tammy’s husband is murdered. Toward the end, Blue’s son, Absolom, charges down on Jack with clearly no chance of surviving. It’s a stupid thing to do, and a bit of foolishness the character has never displayed. He’s killed instantly. It is at this point that Blue realizes he’s been a bad father. He didn’t give Jack the kind of support he needed, and he didn’t give Absolom space to become his own man.

In fact, the whole book ends up being about how Blue has screwed up. Yet he’s the only one left alive, except the children. And he hides behind them when Jack came gunning for him. I understand what Wheeler was trying to do. He was, in effect, slapping Jack in the face with reality. While that may work in real life, western fiction needs a more explosive confrontation. Wheeler ignores this to give Jack a “noble” end. Yet he pretty much ignores Jack’s death. We never see it. We barely see the result of it. And Blue doesn’t care how Jack died, either. Nor does Blue (or Wheeler, for that matter) care about the murdered man that started the book – who he was, where he came from, why he was killed. Ultimately, neither do we.

Ballard's Two Tons No Heavyweight

Two Tons of Gold
by Todhunter Ballard
Leisure Books, November 2003


This is one of the most violent westerns I have ever read. Apparently Two Tons of Gold was not published in Ballard’s lifetime. He died in 1980. His one-time associate and friend Sue Dwiggins Worsley writes an excellent introduction about a writer who is unknown today, giving a glimpse of a fascinating method of creating fiction. Dwiggins, however, offers no date for this novel. We’re left to examine clues.

Two Tons of Gold has some pulpy elements. There’s plenty of action. Some of the characters are fairly thin and straightforward. Ballard uses a pulp standard: elaborate disguises that thoroughly fool even friends. The disguises are in the form of full head masks that our hero is able to weave seemingly out of air; masks that Jim Phelps and his IMF team would envy. We get the sense that this book was written in the midst of the pulp era – except for some themes, which move the origination of the writing possibly into the 1960s or even the 1970s.

Mark Dorne, The Major, late of the Civil War, comes home to greedy industrialists and bankers who are taking over everything by force. Dorne’s parents are killed and this sets The Major on a course of vengeance. Alone for most of his reign of terror, Dorne uses his skill as a self-taught demolition man manufacturing the newly invented and not widely known explosive called dynamite. Along the way, Dorne picks up a few allies as they steamroll over the evil barons of big business and destroy their mining, banking, and logging interests.

The violence in the novel is two-fold. Dorne uses dynamite more than he does a gun. There is one scene where, after dynamiting closed a box canyon, he proceeds to drop TNT into the canyon and kill the posse trapped there. Ballard describes bodies flying about as a result of the explosions. He doesn’t stop, even when the trapped men throw down their guns and raise their hands. A lot of people are killed by dynamite throughout the book. Dorne often tries to avoid killing those he considers innocent – men who are just doing a job for the evil robber barons; men who aren’t really themselves evil. Yet he kills others who meet the same criteria. Dorne guns down a lone defender of the two tons of gold (which shows up very late in the story), yet warns a dozen men chasing him with ax handles and guns that a boat is about to explode. In the end, innocent or guilty, most of the characters die, even Dorne’s own lumbering aid.

The second level of violence is what is perpetrated on the little people – the miners, the loggers, the small investors. These people are trying to make a living and Dorne destroys their ability to feed their families. Ballard give short shrift to these people. He paints them all with a rough brush and with very thin paint. There’s no depth to any of them. However, he writes his character, The Major, as clearly justified in going on the vengeance trail after his innocent parents are murdered. But Ballard draws the trail all over the map. There is no real sense throughout the book that Dorne has a purpose other than to attack and kill big business. There is a nominal evil titular figure but he is not really shown as a scheming, menacing person. Instead, as his end is nearing, he is convincingly portrayed as a man who is confused as to why he is being attacked. He believes that all of his business efforts were made to better the community in addition to making him richer. And the truth is, he wasn’t evil. Ballard himself points out that by destroying the villain (who commits suicide as his world crumbles around him) Dorne has hurt the community. The Major admits that he cannot return the two tons of gold he stole to those small investors who were wiped out when the bank failed. To make amends he decides to give the gold to another man of big business who is portrayed rather thinly as a man of the people. This other mogul will use the money to build a giant tunnel that apparently needs building.

The novel has a modern feel in that it is incredibly distrustful of big business. Granted, strikebreakers are used to bust head – all of it off-camera – but other than that, the businesses are engaged in positive growth for the community. Ballard pays lip service to his anti-corporate beliefs (which may only extend to this novel) and expects the readers to follow along. It’s hard to do that when he gives none of these characters depth.

Another modern aspect is Ballard’s use of an anti-hero. The Major is clearly not a good guy. He may be a good man, but he’s really doing bad things. He kills wantonly, violently, and gives no indication of remorse. He is a model for anti-establishment, a rebel with a cause. He could easily have worn a black leather jacket with his hair pomaded into a pompadour, a knowing sneer cracking his face. That’s the mold from which Mark Dorne was cut.

There is a Billy-the-Kid-Syndrome kind of hero worshipping here. While employees of the corporation are after Dorne’s head, the down trodden and those who have lost their personal battles with the corporation find secret ways to help The Major. As the novel progresses, he becomes a cult figure, even loved by some of the bad guy’s henchmen. Dorne is surprised by this, and later astonished that one of his cadre would sacrifice his own life to save Dorne. But Ballard doesn’t really explore the nature of this universal phenomenon that played out in similar fashion for a number of real western characters. He uses it simply to get The Major out of many of the jams in which he finds himself.

All of this is minor, really. Ballard is a good writer who keeps you interested and the pages turning. Two Tons of Gold is a fast-paced, full on action story cut out of the classic pulp cloth. Simply for fun it’s worth reading. The question, then, is why it was never published. I think this was a story written during the pulp era and was rejected for one simple reason. The character of Dorne is a terrorist.

While justified in seeking revenge, Dorne’s plan is too broad. He kills too many people. In classic pulps the hero is in fact a hero who stands against amazing odds and wins, ultimately facing down the villain. Dorne faces similar odds but he attacks the workers, not the mastermind. He terrorizes a sweeping area, kills men who are not evil, destroys an entire economy, and feels no emotion about any of it. The last line of the book shows a television influence: “They had no idea what they would do next, but something would turn up. It always did.” You can hear the laughter and see the fade to black just before the final commercial. Dorne should have been moved by what he did, felt some emotion, looked back on the carnage and wondered if he had done the right thing. Something other than simply walking away.

Leisure has put out several other Ballard books over the past few years. It will be interesting to see if these themes are carried through in other stories.

McGuire's Gold a bit Tarnished

Texas Gold
by Tim McGuire
Berkeley – August 2004

There’s an old standard device popularized by Zane Grey in westerns. It’s the one where a girl – for a variety of reasons – pretends to be a boy and joins up with a trail herd. Grey used several variations on this theme. Of course, there was precedent in the old west. In the 1850s Charley Parkhurst began working as a stagecoach driver and became known as a reliable and tough customer. With one eye covered by a patch, Charley handled a team, smoked cigars, did a little drinking, played cards and dice, and even voted for Ulysses S. Grant in 1868. It wasn’t until Charley’s death that he was revealed to be a she. Such happenings were, though, incredibly rare. Even Annie Oakley and Bell Starr, homely as they were, could never have been mistaken for anything but women.

McGuire uses this device earnestly and, to his credit, lets us in on it very early. Young Leslie Turnbow – an orphan living with a kind but cloistering guardian – has big dreams which are fueled by the musings of a man set to hang. Leslie, who goes by the name Les, is told that there is a cache of Confederate gold hidden in Texas, and the condemned man kindly tells Les how to find it. Of course, being a young girl, heading out on the 500-mile trip from Kansas to Texas is not something she can undertake alone. But with the convenient help of the town whores Les is given a disguise and teamed up with a couple of drovers taking a cavvy of cow ponies back to the home ranch.

Along the way, Les is beset by all manner of problems and conflicts – the standard fare in a trail story. Throughout, though, she is constantly faced with exposure as opportunities to strip bare seem to grow on trees. Eventually she is unmasked and the travelers discover the gold’s hiding place. But to their disappointment they find only gold certificates issued in Confederate currency, all of it worthless.

Because this is ultimately a journey story, Les is made to learn many things. You need to buy into the fact that she’s a complete idiot and wouldn’t even know to bring dry, seasoned wood for a fire or how to cook up a plate of beans. This is a little hard to believe, frankly. While Les lived in Abilene, Kansas is still part of the frontier. The time is 1870, or thereabouts, so people are using wood stoves. Les would have had ample opportunity to learn about firewood and cooking. That she doesn’t know some trail practices, however, is perfectly reasonable and McGuire exploits these fairly well.

Being a journey story, Les meets many people along the way. There is a spiraling mix of characters, in fact, that all seem to meet around Les’s campfire. There is the itinerant gambler/lady’s man, the rustlers, the angry husband chasing the gambler, and the lone wayward family heading west in a covered wagon. There is, in fact, a whole mess of free travel through what would have been some of the deadliest territory in the west. In 1870 the place was swarming with warring Indians and it wasn’t very safe to travel alone. McGuire’s characters move with little thought to Indians except when they have to pay tribute – in horses or cattle – to some very cultured braves collecting a toll.

The biggest problem is that Texas Gold is an unfulfilled promise. The first chapter tells us that we’re going to have a search for gold. That kind of the story suggests a different set of struggles than McGuire used and a concentration on the gold. Instead, we get the journey/coming of age story and the gold is used as a Hitchcockian McGuffin. By the end we get a TV-style epilogue where everyone has a laugh over finding worthless paper and they decide to head off into another adventure.

A Somewhat Hazy Gunsmoke

Joseph West is a good writer. He plots well, he turns some good phrases, and he lets you see the world in which the story takes place. He’s taken all of these skills and applied them to the new Gunsmoke novel, Blood, Bullets, and Buckskin.

We are firmly in the Festus era with this book. The author sets the date at 1878 through the use (and eventual overuse) of a letter from the governor requesting Dillon’s help on a trivial matter.

For the most part I enjoyed the story. There were problems, but when I started reading I didn’t want to nitpick. Although I hadn’t read the three previous Gunsmoke books (penned by Gary McCarthy), online reviewers lambasted the novels with comments about the wildly out of character behavior by Dillon, Kitty, Doc, and Festus.

Yet, the further I read West’s book, the more those small problems grew. You get the feeling that West probably saw a few episodes, most likely of 1970s vintage and not the superior 1950s and 1960s black and white stories. He’s got Festus talking fairly accurately, even if he uses a few too many “Matthews”. Matt’s characterization, though, is uneven. At times West seems to have Dillon down pat. Other times he’s considerably off the mark.

A bit of irony leads off the novel. In James Arness’ introduction he recounts a time when he told writers to cut down on his dialog. This echoes sentiments directors (especially John Ford) had about John Wayne. The Duke’s dialog was usually pared to the bone and that simple action, as much as anything else, helped make him a star. Arness benefits from minimal dialog, too, by his own admission. But West often has Matt Dillion prattling on.

One of the biggest characterization problems with Dillon takes place before the main story opens but is recounted in a long bit of dialog in the first few chapters. In short, five years ago Dillon was unable to stop a man from nearly beating another man to death because he was convalescing from injuries sustained in another adventure. Dillon is shown raging impotently while Kitty cuddles him, crying. This is not Dillon. We’ve seen him shot, near death, rising from his sick bed to take care of the bad guys. Kitty and Doc always argue with him, but once he’s on his feet, they stand beside him.

Two other problems exist in this scene. First, it should have been told in flashback so Chester could have had a scene rather than a passing mention. This is just laziness on West’s part. The second problem is that Festus, who is hearing the story from Dillon, says he knows of but never met Chester. In the show, however, both men met several times. There was, in fact, a transition period as Chester was phased out and Festus came in. The two characters even had a number of scenes together.

Miss Kitty is off-key, too. West tries to explore the relationship she and Matt share. He starts with the premise that Dillon and Kitty love each other. That much is true, but the attempt at sexual tension, while trying to keep the relationship in a neutral position, doesn’t work. Kitty flies off the handle over nonsense. While Amanda Blake’s Kitty could boil over (and on occasion use a gun with deadly accuracy), it took a lot for her to get red mad at Matt.

Doc is nowhere to be seen and one wonders if West decided he couldn’t capture the character’s unique quality. Quint makes an appearance, but it is a perfunctory one, which is a shame. Festus is kidnapped at one point and Matt spends days looking for him. In the television show, Dillon would have engaged Quint as a tracker abilities. In fact, Quint would have volunteered.

The biggest problem, though, comes early, and is in fact signaled by the cover. We are treated to a big shot of Marshal Dillon in the foreground with an action sequence (which does not take place in the book) in the background. Dillon is dressed appropriately, the big US Marshal’s badge pinned on his shirt. The background image – a shootout on Front Street – shows Dillon’s office with a sheriff’s sign clearly in view. It’s an unnecessary confusion.

The misunderstanding of Matt’s authority is reinforced within the first few opening pages as we see Matt riding out far from Dodge, alone on the Kansas prairie. He’s chasing after some killers, and ready to close in for the capture. [West berates us here with a page or so of Matt’s introspection (something we get a lot of), but I don’t fault him for this. I’m sure he needed to get the word count up to appease the publisher.] Taken by surprise, the badmen don’t draw right away when Matt enters their camp. They bide their time. Yet they don’t seem all that concerned. They know Matt is a town marshal and he doesn’t have any jurisdiction outside of Dodge. Matt acknowledges this but tells the killers he’s going to take them in anyway.

Well, you know what happens, of course. But the story is tainted by this grievous error. West continues to pound home the point that Dillon is a town Marshal, and it has an enormous effect by the end of the story. I could have glossed over it if West had ignored Dillon’s jurisdiction, but he used it to provide Matt with an internal conflict at the climax.

No one who has ever seen even a few Gunsmoke episodes could mistake Dillon for a town marshal or a county sheriff. West made the choice deliberately because he was attempting to do something that should never have been done. He was trying to marry the television Dodge City with the real one.

For those of us who love the old west, we know that Dodge, while being a fairly wide open town for years, was not so homespun and rustic as it appeared on the CBS television show. We’ve seen photographs of the famous saloons with their rich, polished wood bars and green-baized gambling tables. We’ve seen the expansive rooms where gambling and live music played out every night. We know that the likes of Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp were town marshals, and that Doc Holiday came to town on occasion to fleece the hiders and trail hands. We know that Dodge was a fairly good-sized town, split down the middle – respectability and law and order to the north, and wild debauchery to the south. We know that in addition to a town marshal there was a county sheriff who lived within the city limits, too – and that one of the men to serve multiple terms was in fact the owner of the Long Branch Saloon.

The television Dodge is vastly different. It is, for the most of its years, a cow town. It’s rustic, Spartan in appearance and design. The only shot we get of the size of the town is the forced perspective painting on the back studio wall in the opening credits. Kitty’s Long Branch Saloon is a pine board affair with few embellishments. Rarely is there gambling. The entertainment is provided by percentage girls (women who seduce men into drinking), not by soiled doves. Matt Dillon’s Dodge is compact, perennially dusty, and it only has one lawman – the US Marshal.

West tries to bring these two disparate images together and it doesn’t really work. He brings historical fact into the story, and while such things make other novels ring true, his Gunsmoke has the hollow clunk of falsehood. For twenty years (and a few more with the reunion movies) we knew a special kind of Dodge City. It was a place where human stories played out on a dirt and rough wood stage. It was a place where one lawman could keep the fickle populace in line with a hard-spoken word and, if necessary, a single shot of a Colt .44. West wants the best of both worlds and doesn’t really capture either.

The end of the story is a fairly big mess. This is a tale of revenge with some range war overtones. The town divides out for the two factions, Gatling guns are brought in, lots of people die. Matt chooses one side, the lesser of two evils, and manages to put down the fighting.

This was way over the top and not at all in keeping with the show. Thematically, Gunsmoke dealt with very human, personal stories that tended to center around the seven deadly sins. The consequences were always devastating – but only for one person. These were morality plays, not action movies. West tries to imbue his story with the old values of the television show, but ultimately abandons those sentiments in favor of the modern perspective of moral ambiguity and unrealistic pyrotechnics. Shades of gray may have been as prevalent back then as they are today; that’s real life. But it’s not Gunsmoke.

Untamed is Raw L'Amour

Bantam has had a death grip on all things Louis L’Amour for decades. Without knowing the numbers, it wouldn’t surprise me if the (arguably) most famous writer of Westerns were responsible for a large percentage of the company’s profits. So it’s a bit of a surprise to find that Leisure Books – the only steady, indefatigable publisher of Western novels – corralled another one of L’Amour’s stories for the anthology, The Untamed West.

It turns out that the novel (the longest of the three stories included in this, the second compilation to include the triumvirate of popular Western authors) is a reprint of a 1950 pulp novel from Giant Western. Max Brand’s “Black Sheep” is fairly short. It sports the cloak of restoration that is popular now in which the pulp editor’s often heavy handed bowdlerization is removed in favor of the author’s original text. The results of such restoration are not always for the best. Zane Grey’s Ladies Home Journal short serial, “Cañon Walls,” is included, and it is also in its original form.

L’Amour’s Showdown on the Hogback is reprinted as published in the pulp. It is an early version of what would become Showdown at Yellow Butte.

I’ve read both and, honestly, I don’t recall much of Yellow Butte. Hogback is not particularly memorable either, but it is at least fresher in my memory.

This story appears toward the end of the pulp era when the only magazines to hang on were westerns and science fiction, many of them converting to digests. Much is made in Jon Tuska’s introduction of L’Amour’s writing – and not a lot of it flattering. With veiled language, Tuska calls L’Amour a hack – a man who played fast and loose with facts, was forgetful of his own story continuity, benefited from savvy and lucky marketing, and virtually forced Bantam to take his work in first draft and unedited.

L’Amour’s stories have many flaws, but it’s the rare story that is not entertaining. Hogback is certainly entertaining. More than that, though, it is interesting to see the author developing in long format. L’Amour is often best in brief. His short stories have punch and the action carries the reader along at breakneck pace. When he keeps his novels to less than 60,000 words, his writing benefits a great deal, and so does the reader. Hogback is one of his early “novel” length stories. Soon after its publication he would write the Hopalong Cassidy pulp tales, and from there go on to publish more than 75 novels.

In Hogback, you get to see some early themes developing – the honest, intrepid hero of few words who takes a great deal of physical punishment; the extolling of the building of the West; the hard man who makes deep, lasting friendships; and the dogged adherence to a moral code regarding women. But in this novel you see L’Amour experimenting with the themes and methods of the writers who came before. You can see the influence of Grey and Ernest Haycox (and probably others) in his plotting and characterization. L’Amour was playing with all of these as he searched for the voice that would become very clear and eventually tower above the rest.

The story revolves around a range war. L’Amour’s hero, tough guy Tom Kedrick, is the only man who can come into the territory and put an end to the greedy land owner’s troubles with squatters. But Kedrick is an honorable man. He investigates and discovers that the squatters are in the right. When he switches sides, the greedy land owner snaps and orders Kedrick and all the squatters killed.

The ending is obvious, but that’s not a criticism. All traditional westerns end in a fairly obvious yet satisfying way. Kedrick has to fight against great odds, overcome many obstacles, and nearly die to see that justice prevails, and he does.

What’s most interesting, though, is L’Amour’s use of character types and depiction of the land paralleling some of his predecessors. Zane Grey was famous for lofty descriptions of the natural world. But he also used a couple of tricks that had thematic import in his stories. The one L’Amour borrows here is the secret canyon. In this canyon, the hero is trapped yet securely hidden. It’s a place no white man has ever seen. It is narrow and remote, yet there are ways in and out of it that only a clever and brave man can negotiate. L’Amour’s canyon in Hogback is a refuge for Kedrick as he recovers from wounds and escapes to think and to plot.

L’Amour also uses a device to build romantic tension of which Ernest Haycox was a master. Where Zane Grey would use one man and one woman (or at times two men with two women – using the different monogamous relationships to show parallels of development as well as express romance according to the characters’ maturity levels) Ernest Haycox liked to pit two women against each other for the love of one man. These women would be very different in nature. The sexier one would represent lust and desire, an unattainable prize that the unsuspecting hero suddenly had access to. She, too, would lust – not just for the man but for what riches or rewards he could bring her. The other woman, lovely yet simple, represents goodness, true love, and the finer desires of a wandering cowpoke’s heart, namely hearth and home. Although deeply attracted to the femme fatale, the hero would ultimately choose the better angel by the end of the story – a stark contrast to the noir stories of this time where the hero would always choose the dangerous dame early, and suffer for it for the rest of his short life.

In Hogback, L’Amour sets up these two characters and turns them loose on Kedrick. He follows true to form and is attracted to the glitzier of the two women. But very quickly he decides she’s not the one for him. The nice girl is the one he wants, and he spends much of the story proving himself to her and protecting her.

L’Amour’s use of these two characters is rather perfunctory, like he’d read similar scenes in a number of stories and decided to put one into his. But he doesn’t develop either woman very well, even in pulp terms, and doesn’t seem interested in playing out the type.

Still, you can see him experimenting – with characters, with descriptions, and with the themes that would stay with him for the rest of his life. The story is mildly enjoyable and it’s interesting to watch L’Amour as he begins the process of maturing and defining his unique voice.

Big Names Eulogize Moody

The Funeral of Tanner Moody
Special to the New York Morning Telegraph

FORT WORTH, TEXAS – Tanner Moody is dead. Long live Tanner Moody.

Some of the brightest stars in the western firmament gathered here to eulogize Moody, a one-time “pistoleer” and noted Wild West reprobate. Although not nearly as well known as his famous mourners – Elmer Kelton, John Jakes, Peter Brandvold, James Reasoner, Robert Randisi, and others (inveterate liars all) – Moody’s exploits reverberate even today, many years after his death.

Framed and put into perspective by contemporary Bat Masteron (the text of which was edited by Randisi), Moody’s wake occasioned the telling of many stories of his life, some of which conflicted. Was he a hated gunman and a murderer of women? Did his father chase him from his home just ahead of the law or did his father help him escape? Each biographer offers a different point of view of this complex, uncompromising man of the late 19th Century.

These stories about Moody were plentiful during the multi-day wake at Fort Worth, Texas’ White Elephant Tavern. Marthayn Pelegrimas relates the story of “Poor Ole Moody,” which reveals a rare glimpse of the honoree’s tragic youth. Pelegrimas insightfully offers evidence as to why Moody, on occasion, turned to what is affectionately remembered as the “owlhoot trail.” Blamed for the murder of his abusive stepmother, Moody was forced to leave his family and home, one step ahead of the law.

Fellow mourner, and Moody contemporary, Elmer Kelton retells the tale of a youthful Moody on the Texas-Mexico border during the early cattle days before the War of Northern Aggression. Headstrong and audacious, Moody’s personal feud with Mexican land baron Don Carlos helped spread Moody’s growing celebrity and was widely reported in the newspapers of the day. The wild, irresponsible print accounts, however, are quickly dispelled in Kelton’s short, poignant history.

Comfortable in his well-worn seat – a chair that is part of the charm original owner Luke Short invested in the White Elephant in the late 1800s – Peter Brandvold recounts the circumstances surrounding Moody’s first, foolish love affair. With a bloody ending that got remarkably little attention in the newspapers at the time, a still young Moody was crushed as his lover and her father battled to a Faustian death.

James Reasoner reveals a somewhat older Tanner Moody who is suffering the consequences of his youth. A sheriff in a town called Flat Rock during the war, he is respected and reviled in turn. With a rich reputation, Moody is suspected of stealing gold from area miners even as he searches for the culprits.

Hundreds filed in and out of the White Elephant over the course of several days. Whether mourners or celebrants, it is sometimes difficult to tell. Other names that signed the funereal guest book included L.J. Washburn, Jory Sherman, and Kerry Newcomb. Many of their remembrances are collected in The Funeral of Tanner Moody (Leisure Books, July 2004).

Enjoyment Factor (out of 10) - 6

Troubled Sharpshooters

Trouble Man by Ed Gorman (Leisure Books 1998)
The Sharpshooter: Brimstone by Tobias Cole (Harper 2003)

I began these two titles with two very different expectations. Trouble Man is by an old hand, Ed Gorman, and has a very simple set-up that promises excitement. For some reason this book called to me from the Borders bookshelf for months before I picked it up and for months after I brought it home. Maybe it was the title in heavy, raised typeface or the cool blue cover of a lone rider. Certainly the back cover blurb enticed me. I started reading eagerly, finally, and by the end of its 312 pages I was fairly disappointed.

Ray Coyle is an ex-gunfighter come to town to claim the body of the son he barely knew. He realizes immediately that his son’s death is suspicious and goes about investigating. Of course, he stirs up a hornet’s nest. This sounds good, doesn’t it? But the book is all over the map and, like the one that follows, is full of touchy-feely crap when decisive action is needed. There’s a lot of fluff in this – conversations that ramble on endlessly, scenes that repeat, that kind of thing. There is some dramatic potential here, but it is not well handled.

By contrast, Brimstone was bought on a whim and with low expectations. It was clear from the beginning that this was supposed to be the first in a series of stories about the eponymous sharpshooter. The font size was large so it promised to be a quick read. Looking carefully at the copyright page we find that the actual author is Cameron Judd. So, it seemed worth a shot, even if it was just a dashed off effort.

Dashed off is exactly what this book was. There is little real character development, very limited action. The story is described in very bland terms. It is ostensibly a mystery so its first person narration is not a bad voice to use. But the character is a whiner, as are most of the characters. The mystery is feeble and badly laid out. The entire plot revolves around the Andersonville Civil War prison, and the horrors within its walls. Apparently 13,000 of the 45,000 Union Soldiers to pass through its gates died of disease and other causes. By the time the story starts the war is years in the past but it is still affecting the characters. That, in and of itself, is not a problem. War affects people for many years. But the coincidences in the story that rely on Andersonville are just too much to take. And, the worst offense, at least to my mind, is the unmitigated fluff and air throughout. Scenes are elongated to ridiculous lengths. Useless scenes are added. While the story starts out – literally – with a bang (albeit one described rather lacklusterly), it never again achieves that level of movement or action. This is one to avoid.

Both of these books suffer from what is becoming, for me, a persistent pet peeve: they’re bloated. These books should be lean and hard but they’re puffed up and ultimately impotent.

Enjoyment Factor (out of 10) – 4

Not So Steady in the Saddle

The Mexican Saddle by Bennett Foster
(1941, Western Story Magazine, reprinted 2003, Leisure Books)

I was looking forward to this book for a few months since I first heard about it coming out. There are so many of the old pulpsters that are not reprinted while folks like Max Brand have their laundry lists published. I like Max Brand, but I ’m looking for variety.

And the back cover blurb promises an interesting story. Unfortunately, Foster does not follow through well. Perhaps it’s just his writing style I don’t like, but I felt that there was so much filler that the story got a little lost.

The premise is that a man dies trying to protect a family secret just after he delivers the saddle of the title to a friend. Others immediately take an interest in the saddle and trouble ensues. But the saddle is really an old Hitchcock "macguffin" ploy – and one done badly. While Foster mentions the saddle frequently it seems that he does it simply to justify the title. Yes, people are after it but pretty half-heartedly.

There’s a map to a gold mine and some whites are running guns to a faction of Mexicans in revolt, there’s a deputy who’s pretty crooked, and a girl who’s shoe-horned in just to take a rough stab at a love interest. It all becomes fairly muddled.

Foster’s writing style doesn’t help matters either. The writing is pretty loose and colloquial. He has some wild plotting, too, and he too often backtracks on the story to tell another angle. This last is not a bad technique – I use it occasionally myself – but it seems very jarring in this story.
Overall, I was disappointed – and my disappointment was doubled because I had had high hopes for the book.

Enjoyment Factor (out of 10) – 3

Hamilton's Fever Tepid

Texas Fever by Donald Hamilton (1960, Fawcett Gold Medal Books)

Donald Hamilton – author of the Matt Helm spy series and the super-taut thriller Line of Fire – usually writes better than this. Maybe it isn’t his writing. Maybe it’s just the plot. But something seems a bit off.

Young Chuck McAuliffe is peeved that his father and brother are home from the Civil War and ready to take back the ranch that he kept running while they were away. He is shunted aside and treated like a kid, not like a man who’s tended the family business alone. On a drive north from Texas they run into a Kansas militia that won’t allow Texican beef to cross the territory line. A fight and a rustling attempt ensue and both brother and father are killed. Chuck loses the herd to the law, and has to stand by as plans are made to sell off the beef for a fraction of its worth.

Chuck has a problem. He’s hot and ready to fight, but this being a new breed of western, his anger is tempered by a woman and his own reluctance to have people think ill of him. Instead of using the ready gun talent of his drovers, he eventually seeks the aid of the law in regaining some of what’s due him for the forced sale of his beef.

Along the way, we meet a mercenary woman who really doesn’t have a heart of gold, a vicious and ruthless psychopath, and a whole passel of greedy folk. The girl is pure enough, and her father, the lawdog, is honest if somewhat impotent.

All in all, this was not a satisfying read. It may have been "accurate" enough, but not only do the bad guys have to be punished, the heroes have to win out – and they have to be heroic. Texas Fever lets you down on both counts.

Enjoyment Factor (out of 10) - 3

Black Tolts a Bright Star

The Black Tolts by William McLeod Raine
(Popular Library, 1986)

Having read Zane Grey, I was prepared for William MacLeod Raine’s rather stilted, old-fashioned style in The Black Tolts. While flowery in his language, Raine doesn’t waste a lot of time extolling the virtues of landscape, as does Grey. His purplish prose is reserved for expressing human emotion – albeit torridly. This practice seemed to be going out of style by the 1930s in favor of the terser language of the gangster.

Despite this, Raine is truer than Grey is his use of themes and characters. Grey is kind of like Shakespeare in that his people are idealized characters: good, bad, tormented, or whatever, they seem to be the very epitome of that single characteristic. Raine’s characters – at least in this novel – are rougher, less perfect in their foulness or virtue, regardless of the flowery language.

The Black Tolts was originally published in the September 1933 issue of Complete Western Book Magazine. For some of its later book printings it carried the title of Pistol Pardners. This is one of those rare times when a pulp proclaimed accurately that the story enclosed was "novel length." My copy is a 1986 Popular Library reprint with a rather bland cover.

The story inside, though, is quite enjoyable. Raine deals with three themes, one of them effectively, one fairly well done, and the other not so well. He wonders (through his heartbroken Ellen and bedeviled Dave) about the nature of free will and whether or not human beings can control their foul deeds. This comes rather late in the story, but at least there were thin suggestions of it from almost the beginning. There is also the discussion of celebrity and how people elevated robbers and even murderers to lofty status. While the Tolts are chased and every effort is made to perforate them, in the end the clan survivors escape without punishment. In fact, Dave goes with a blessing and a hope that the future will change him. The primary theme deals with loyalty, and just how long a friend should stay loyal even after one of the friends turns to crime.

Dave Tolt is the youngest of six brothers and feels left out of the loop. The family is called black because they stem from a less than savory branch of the good name of Tolt. The brothers run a ranch but have a side hobby of robbing stages and banks. Young Dave is kept away from the family recreation until he overhears plans to rob a train. He beats the brothers to the punch and is reluctantly taken into their confidence. After committing some more crimes, they decide to rob two banks in a town called Burke. It’s a foolish venture and three of them are killed. The other three, including Dave, are shot up and go into hiding.

In the middle of all of this is a love triangle between Dave, Ellen, and Dave’s best friend Allen, who is secretly in love with Ellen. Both Allen and Ellen realize that something is wrong with Dave from early on and begin to rely on each other and grow closer. Eventually Ellen ’s eyes open to the fact that it’s the stalwart Allen she loves and not the reckless and criminal Dave. Along the way, though, both she and Allen torture themselves over Dave’s fall from grace and their desire to help him avoid the hangman’s noose.

What makes this novel enjoyable is that the characters are not wholly one thing or another. They are conflicted, they make mistakes, they are foolish, and ultimately some of them regret the paths they’ve chosen. No one is truly happy at the end of the book. Ellen and Allen have found each other and are looking forward to a good life and the respect of the community. But there are echoes of sadness, too, reminders of the pain left behind in the wake of good men gone bad. Despite the language, this is a surprisingly modern story that is very true to human nature.

Enjoyment Factor (out of 10) – 8

Double Your Pleasure

Sixgun Duo by Ernest Haycox
Pinnacle Books, 1990

When I first experimented with reading westerns some years ago I started with Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey and Max Brand. These were all known names and promised to give the best opportunity for me to understand the genre. Eventually, I wanted to branch out. Ernest Haycox was the first author I tried beyond the ubiquitous triumvirate. His worked seemed more realistic, honest, and delved into gray areas that other authors did not use.

The two stories in Sixgun Duo are from his earlier days, and may have been run as short serials. In "The Gun Singer," a 1931 novelette of about 30,000 words, drifter Bill Keogh stumbles into a bad situation. A 20 year feud over a woman long dead and a ranch empty of cattle. While the motivation for enmity and the impetus for character and plot movement are similar to Coburn’s "Coffin Ranch," the set-up is cleaner and the characters seem more real, grittier.

The main combatants die early leaving Keogh and the daughter of one of the feuders, Helen, to carry on. Like most of Haycox’s women, Helen is no shrinking violet: "I was born into this trouble," she tells Keogh, holding a .44 on him. "Raised on it. What do you expect me to do now – faint, scream, be ladylike?" The prose and the dialog is as clean as the plot.

The rival, Shadders, a skunk if ever there was one, shoots up the town and Helen and Keogh retreat to her ranch. The foreman doesn’t like the newcomer and the few men he has left set out to drive Keogh away. The fail and scurry off, and ever watchful Shadders decides to make his move to take over the whole territory.

Keogh admits to Helen that he’s a "gun singer," a man meant to face trouble with a gun in his hand. He makes no apology for that – it’s something he’s long since accepted. For her part, Helen accepts it, too. A bold woman, she understands that some troubles have to be solved with lead. This is a far cry from Haycox’s contemporaries, especially, that often preached abstinence from drinking whiskey and a female disdain for gunplay. Haycox’s Helen is made of sterner stuff and is far more practical. In fact, most of Haycox’s women share not only that practicality but a strength borne of the frontier that other authors can’t always capture.

The story ends satisfactorily, if predictably. That really doesn’t matter, though. Our taciturn hero has proven – even in a short novelette – that he had the mettle and the moral fiber to face high odds and win out against the dirty dogs.

"Night Raid" is slightly short and written two years earlier, appearing in the April 1929 issue of Frontier Stories. (Pinnacle, like other publishers at the time, didn’t realize readers were interested in a story’s pedigree so, like "Gun Singer" they offer no publication history. The pulp community, though, responded to an online inquiry.) Reading the story I got the idea that the leads, Indigo Bowers and Joe Breedlove, were series characters or, at the very least, Haycox planned them to be.

Because it’s an earlier piece, it suffers (as did many of his earlier works) just a little from the same older style of writing that often marred Zane Grey’s work. (This is not a slight against Grey, but his language often was stilted and not very modern.) Yet the story moves and the dialog is not saddled with the hard-to-follow colloquialisms used by Grey, Clarence Mulford, and occasionally by Walt Coburn.

The plot relies on a simple conceit that, if you accept it, allows the rest of the story to develop in a fairly natural way. If it seems preposterous, or just downright stupid, then the rest of the yarn suffers somewhat. I say somewhat because Haycox writes great characters and action with plenty of excitement and tension no matter the plot.

The conceit is this (and, oddly enough, I recently saw it used on a Gunsmoke episode): the heroes Bowers and Breedlove are not men to go and inform on others. This comes into play early when their camp is invaded by rustlers expecting to meet up with two expert movers of stolen beef, unknown by sight. The boys con their way (for their own safety) into making the rustlers believe they are the experts sent for. Plans are made to meet up again the next day.
At this point most men would go to the sheriff and let him know of the criminal activities being planned. But not our men. They won’t inform. So they concoct a plan to receive the stolen cattle then sneak the beeves back onto their home range – then ride for the hills. Well, of course, things don’t go smoothly. The rustlers begin to suspect them, gunplay begins, and our heroes are captured. After their somewhat unlikely escape, the pals split: one to go for help (about time), the other to hold back the tide of rustlers angry at having their play busted by these interlopers.

Our heroes win out but it looks like a bust for the pals who just might split up over a gal. But, of course, saddle pards ride together forever and finally move on, one assumes, to new adventures beyond the sunset.

Enjoyment Factor (out of 10) – 8

Solid Story from Old Pro

Gateway House by Wayne D. Overholser
Leisure Books,

There is a shock in Gateway House that has nothing to do with the plot. Written in 1953 for Better Publications, and appearing in Giant Western’s February issue, this is a redemption story. Ed Morgan’s brother is dead but his last request was that Ed return to Gateway House, find a hidden cache of $50,000, and give it to his fiance, Honey Travers. But Ed is warned: one look at Honey and he’ll never want another woman. This proves true and after some fisticuffs, gunplay, and chases, the bad guys die and Ed and Honey ride off into the sunset.

It’s a fast-moving story filled with uncharacteristic emotional angst, for a western. Ed rarely knows the right course to take, always doubting Honey and just about everyone else. The writing is excellent, as you would expect from Overholser.

What you don’t expect are two very strong words, words you would not expect from Overholser or from a pulp story. He uses the B word several times referring to women in the story, and once he uses the F word. This is quite shocking and sent me scrambling to figure out how these words got into the final manuscript. A notation at the front of the book, however, held the answer to the mystery. It says "An earlier version, ‘shorter’ [sic] of this novel ….", and the copyright was renewed in 1980. Apparently, Mr. Overholser revised his novel to more reflect modern sensibilities, or perhaps he returned to his original manuscript. Regardless, the addition of these words is jarring and totally unnecessary. Still, they don’t really detract from the enjoyment of this excellent western novel.

Enjoyment Factor (out of 10) - 8

Wilderness Offers History, Excitement

Wilderness: King of the Mountain by David Thompson
Leisure Books, 1990

This is a quiet little series that comes out pretty much when it feels like it. Wilderness has been around since 1990 but as of next month there will be only 40 entries into the series. Thompson (aka David Robbins) is one of the myriad of writers who steps into Mack Bolan’s shoes every once in a while. According to some reviews, this is the best-researched mountain man series in existence.

I’ve never read William Johnstone’s series (a more well-known "Mountain Man" series) so I don’t know if Thompson’s work compares favorably. What I do know is that this first book in the series (just reprinted by Leisure along with other entries), is an okay read.

Thompson starts out in territory mined by Max Brand nearly a century ago. His hero, young Nate King, is a neophyte and a cosmopolitan, living in New York City in 1828. He yearns for adventure but his fiance wants wealth and position. A mysterious letter from an estranged uncle gives Nate the chance to fulfill both needs. He heads out west to meet his uncle in St. Louis where the two trek into the Rockies ostensibly for the uncle to show Nate a treasure beyond measure. Along the way they share many adventures and Nate grows.

While the writing is pretty good, it is also very obvious. The adventures are cliched: proud or murderous Indians, grizzly bears, that sort of thing. This would be forgivable if there weren’t a couple of large problems. The first is that Nate shows absolutely no aptitude for the life he ultimately chooses. He stumbles into success. There’s nothing that he inherently knows or can do that helps him along the way. The second is that he makes a life choice in an instant.

Throughout the entire novel he has only one desire and that’s for gold. But at the end he decides to stay in a hostile environment and leave behind the only world he knows. This should have been built up better. The last problem is that he is so damned gullible. He falls for the same ruse several times without ever learning.

Frankly, after reading this first volume I’m surprised Nate King (an historic figure) actually survived long enough to have 40 books written about him.

Enjoyment Factor (out of 10) - 7