LOU CAMERON – Guns of Durango. Dell #4694, paperback original; 1st printing, April 1976.

   Doc Travis, a native of Texas, went to Harvard Medical School, as it so happened, but before he was able to make his way home, the War Between the States broke out. Drafted by the Union army, he managed to escape and join up with Colonel Nichols’ Irregular Cavalry.

   Unfortunately, when the war ended Travis never received his official discharge papers, and not having them, he can’t go home to Texas without them.

   Unfortunately, Colonel Nichols is both a scoundrel and a criminal, with perhaps more emphasis on the latter, and he is somewhere now down in Mexico, where another civil war is going on, this one between the troops of Maximilian and the men still loyal to ousted President Benito Juárez. Nichols, as Travis soon discovers, is holed up in Durango with Maximilian and his forces.

   And so, reluctantly, that is where Travis, who tells his story himself, must head as well. Once on his way, though, he bounces like a pinball between various encampments of the two opposing sides, with a band of hostile Apaches as a noninterested but still deadly third party. Luckily, for a medical man, Travis is fast with a gun, but even more than that, he has a glib tongue and a fast-thinking mind, all three finely tuned aspects of his being that he’ll need in abundance if he’s going to survive.

   Travis leaves a lot of death and destruction in his wake, but it’s his brain-work and cleverness that makes this book a lot of fun to read. It’s also, albeit briefly, a work of detective fiction, too, a fact worth mentioning, even though the relevant passage comes and goes within a page or two.

   All I’m saying is that you will need all your wits about you as you’re reading, or you may miss something. Some concentration is needed, more than you can say for the occasional other western you may have recently read. The ending, while satisfactory in most regards, is also left open, suggesting that more adventures of Doc Travis might be in the offing. If so, I don’t know if it ever happened, but it would be welcome news if it did.

[UPDATE] Later the same day. I have discovered that there was an earlier book in the series: Doc Travis (Dell, Sept 1975).