TIM CHAMPLIN – The Tombstone Conspiracy.

Five Star, hardcover; First Edition, Sept 1999. Leisure, paperback; August 2002.

   Imagine, if you would, a western novel taking place in Tombstone, Arizona, in which the Earp brothers, Doc Holliday, and the Clantons are all characters — and the O. K. Corral is never mentioned.

   Picture instead a tale straight from The Wild, Wild West TV show. A gang of thieves is running rampant over the territory, responsible for a series of stage robberies netting them a small fortune in silver and gold, not to mention the ambush of an army wagon train carrying a huge load of rifles and ammunition.

   Two men, one an army agent, the other working for Wells Fargo, team up undercover to solve the mystery. What is the significance of the small wooden disks with the unusual emblem all of the captured outlaws carry? Is the more-than-attractive woman who comes between the two lawmen up to no good? And who is the never-seen leader of the bandits?

   This would also have been the basis for a several months’ worth of great Saturday trips to the movies, serial fashion, complete with a cliffhanger ending every week. A nice brew of traditional western fare, that is to say, juiced up a notch or two.

RAMROD. United Artists, 1947. Joel McCrea, Veronica Lake, Don DeFore, Donald Crisp, Preston Foster, Arleen Whelan. Charles Ruggles, Lloyd Bridges. Screenplay: Jack Moffitt, Graham Baker & Cecile Kramer, based on the novel by Luke Short. Director: Andre de Toth.

LUKE SHORT – Ramrod. Macmillan, hardcover, 1943. Paperback reprints include: Popular Library 114, 1946; Popular Library 792, 1953; Bantam, 1977; Dell, 1992.

   Ramrod (UA, 1947) was the second noir Western, following RKO’s Pursued into release by two months, and it’s an all-around faster-moving thing, filled with shoot-outs, bar-fights, stampedes and chases, yet still dark and moody enough to rank solidly in the noir class.

   In conjunction with watching this, I took a look at the 1943 novel on which it’s based. Luke Short (real name Frederick Glidden) deals out his tale with a punchy prose style and generally fast pace, though he sometimes gets bogged down in details he ought to just ride around.

   What pulls the book out of the ordinary though, is his feel for character and how it shapes the plot. Ramrod starts up with a face-off between two ranchers motivated/manipulated by a woman who wants to get out of the fate her father has planned for her.

   When the face-off falls through, she falls back on the help of a disgraced cowboy trying to redeem himself — the eponymous Ramrod of the outfit — leading to Range War and the shoot-outs, bar-fights, stampedes, chases, et al.

   Three writers adapted this into a movie that stays remarkably close to the book, even down to details and dialogue, but it took a director like Andre de Toth to turn it into something really special. De Toth shows a feel for character equal to Short’s, but he evokes it visually; as the cowboy seeking redemption, Joel McCrea seems to be always climbing something (stairs, hillsides, porches…) as the perfect visual metaphor for his quest.

   Veronica Lake’ s cowgirl-fatale is photographed in sharp-focus, emphasizing her hard-edged drive, while the lesser characters — Preston Foster’s ruthless rancher, Charlie Ruggles’ well-meaning father and especially Don DeFore as McCrae’ s shifty partner — all come across surprisingly real. De Toth also has a flair for brutality suited to noir and a feel for pace perfect for the Western, a combination you just can’t beat.

LUCAS WEBB – Eli’s Road. Doubleday, hardcover, 1971. Reprint paperback: Popular Library, no date stated.

    I went back to the used book store to buy the copy of Green Ice they’ve had there for years, and got distracted once again. This time by a novel called Eli’s Road, by Lucas Webb.

    Considering the quality of this thing, I’m surprised Webb and his novel aren’t better known. It starts off a bit awkward, but soon gets the reader involved in a 1st person narrative spanning ante-bellum Kansas to 1880s Wyoming.

   Webb does a remarkable job of keeping his narrator believable from the time he writes as a callow teen-ager till he ends up in stoic middle-age, quite a feat of style, and the story: Bloody Kansas, rogue mountain men, orphan girls, pro-slavers, store-keepers, abolitionists, border ruffians, emigrants, freed slaves … and the mysterious Brother Frank.

   Seek it out.

[Editorial Comment]   I wish I had a copy of the paperback reprint to show you. The jacket of the hardcover edition, which perhaps sold to libraries and no one else, is rather plain and uninspiring, to say the least. The paperback is a lot more colorful and inviting, if you’re a fan of western sagas, and it has a quote from noted author Stephen Longstreet to boot:   “The Best Novel of the American West since The Big Sky.” No small praise.

     Lucas Webb is stated on the Web to be the pen name of Michael Burgess. Burgess is also well-noted as bibliographer R. Reginald (Cumulative Paperback Index, 1939-1959, among many others).

   But while Burgess did use Lucas Webb at least once as a pseudonym, an online bibliography for him does not include either Eli’s Road or one later novel under the Lucas Webb byline, a book called Stribling (Doubleday, 1973), about which I have found very little to date, only one quote:   “But there was no place to go to farm or settle; the farms were being deserted, the big combines tractoring out the shacks and the little fields…”

LAURAN PAINE – The Running Iron.

Five Star, hardcover; first edition, November 2000. Leisure, paperback reprint; 1st printing, April 2002.

   Lauran Paine isn’t a household name, but over the past 50 years he’s been a small powerhouse in the world of traditional westerns. His overall output, including mysteries and romances, includes over 1000 books published, many only in England, under nearly 100 pseudonyms.

   One difference between Paine and his younger contemporaries is that he’s lived closer to the time period he writes about, rather than learning about it second-hand. The characters in his stories are taciturn and close-mouthed. They don’t feel obliged to talk about what they’re thinking, what they’re doing or why. Newer writers seem to explain everything. Paine shows and often doesn’t tell.

   In this story, after Old Joe Jessup dies, his ranch is left to May, his Indian wife, and his adopted son, Little Joe. A neighboring rancher wouldn’t mind adding the land to his own spread. Can one boy, an old woman, and an even more ancient hired hand manage to hold on without him?

   In close conjunction to this, the army is called in to move a small tribe of Indians, May’s extended family, onto a reservation. In terms of action, there’s very little. Each chapter moves six inches forward, then five to ten inches back. The end result is a book that’s both frustrating and captivating.

[UPDATE] 09-16-09. This review appeared for the first time in a newsletter for the Historical Novel Society soon after the hardcover came out, and before Lauran Paine died in 2001. As I noted above, I reprinted it later in my western fiction apazine, where I didn’t do any rewriting, nor have I now.

   Some of the names Paine wrote under, besides his own, are (take a deep breath) John Armour, Reg Batchelor, Kenneth Bedford, Frank Bosworth, Mark Carrel, Robert Clarke, Richard Dana, J F Drexler, Troy Howard, Jared Ingersol, John Kilgore, Hunter Liggett, J K Lucas, and John Morgan.

   I haven’t done any counting, so I don’t know if the list of titles is complete at either Web location — there certainly doesn’t seem to be over a few hundred at either one — but at least you can find partial bibliographies on Wikipedia and the Fantastic Fiction site, the latter with many covers.

CAMERON JUDD – The Quest of Brady Kenton.   St. Martin’s, paperback original; 1st printing, January 2001.

   A clue from an ongoing serial in a dime novel series is enough to convince famed western reporter Brady Kenton that his wife, whom he always believed had died in a railroad accident years ago, somehow survived, and she may even still be alive.

   Alex Gunnison, the son of Kenton’s publisher, is the man assigned to keep him on schedule and out of trouble, which is a full-time job on its own, even before a young woman claiming to be Kenton’s daughter appears. More? On her trail in turn is a former Texas Ranger and now, quite remarkably, one of the world’s first private eyes.

   Intentionally or not, this novel reads like a dime novel itself, with lots of dialogue and action and precise, pinpoint characterizations of the varied westerners whose paths cross those of Kenton and Gunnison. Lots of humor, too, with a dark side that never manages to stay hidden. This particular phase of the chase ends in a wild-and-wooly shootout, but in true pulp fashion, there’s a strong hint of more adventures yet to come.

[UPDATE] 09-09-09.  Or were there? Further adventures, that is — in the plural. There was at least one more, Kenton’s Challenge (St. Martin’s, November 2001), but whether or not that concluded Kenton’s hunt for his missing wife, I do not know.

   I seem to recall that these two books came out around the time that the western lines at several paperback companies were canceled, with a few ongoing series left hanging. I don’t know if that happened here or not. If anyone can say, please email me or leave a comment below.

DUSTY RICHARDS – Servant of the Law. St. Martin’s, paperback original; 1st printing, December 2000.

   What this novel of the American Old West has is a severe case of split personality. On one side is the Coyote Kid, a born killer, a hired gun with no compunction at ending the lives of those he’s employed to eliminate.

   On the other is the title character, Marshal John Wesley Michaels, as upright and square-shooting as any of the cowboy heroes whose exploits I used to follow in the Saturday movie matinees of days (long) gone by.

   The Coyote Kid’s exploits are bloody and (seemingly) lovingly described in all of their gory detail. John Wesley is polite to women, kind to animals, and generally just a nice fellow to have around town. In all honesty, I imagine that most of the inhabitants of Arizona at this time of history fell somewhere in between.

   Aiding the marshal, in this which may become the first of a series, is Mrs. Arnold (as he calls her), the mother of a small boy accidentally shot and killed by the Kid, and she thirsts for vengeance. A male-female team of intrepid law-enforcers? It might make for interesting reading, but for historians, I imagine it’s going to take a few hefty swallows before it goes down, if at all.

[UPDATE] 09-02-09.  As it so happened, this book was actually #2 in a slightly different series, one of three books, I think, in Dusty Richards’ “Territorial Marshal” series. Here’s a description taken from Book #1, The Lawless Land (May 2000):

    John Wesley Michaels is one of those marshals, and I don’t believe that he or Mrs. Arnold made another appearance. Book #3 in the series was titled Rancher’s Law, and came out in July 2001. If there were more, I don’t know about them.

   Since Servant of the Law came out, Dusty Richards has also written one book in the Rodeo Riders series; four books in Ralph Compton’s Trail Drive series; two books about Herschel Baker, Sheriff of Yellowstone County; and five or so standalone westerns.

   From the looks of things, it looks like he’s doing a yeoman’s job in upholding the traditions of what I think of as the old-fashioned western. Even if I wasn’t as enthusiastic as I might have been for Servant of the Law, I think I should have been reading more of his work all along.

RICHARD S. WHEELER – Flint’s Truth.

Forge, hardcover; 1st printing, May 1998. Paperback reprint: October 2000.

   The first of itinerant newspaper printer Sam Flint’s adventures in the Old West was recorded in Flint’s Gift. This is the second; the third, forthcoming, is Flint’s Honor. And if this book is any measure, all three are worth tracking down and reading.

   Moving from settlement to settlement with a printing press, several cases of movable type, newsprint and ink is not a task or career for the faint-hearted, nor is setting up shop in a town such as Oro Blanco, where the powers-that-be prefer that certain secrets stay hidden.

   As Sam says on page 63: “You’d be amazed the amount of news that people don’t wish to see in print.” At stake is a fortune in land and gold.

   This is a morality tale written in the guise of a western novel, with most of the characters taking stock parts. In fuller roles, though, besides Sam himself, are the philosophical Mexican priest who befriends him, and Libby, the skinny 13-year-old girl who becomes his right-hand aide. Each in their own way becomes a key to the tale, which is brutally honest and takes an ironic twist or two before a form of justice prevails.

   Here’s a solid, picturesque glimpse into a unique time and place, one that rings a resonant chord of truth and right, and even better — as you can expect of all of Wheeler’s work — here’s a book that’s completely and compulsively readable.

T. T. FLYNN – Ride to Glory: A Western Quartet. Five Star, hardcover; 1st edition; 2000. Reprint paperback: Leisure, March 2004.

   I’ll list the titles of the four novelettes and short novels it contains, and that’s all you’ll need to have a perfect picture of what this book’s all about: “Ghost Guns for Gold”, “Half Interest in Hell”, “The Gun Wolf” and “Ride to Glory.”

   Action, that is, pure pistol-packing action. First appearing in the pages of old pulp fiction magazines such as Star Western (1935), Dime Western (1945 & 1949), and Western Story Magazine (1938), this marks the debut of these tales in hardcover.

   And whenever there’s room to breathe between the rounds of gunfire, there’s always a chance that romance will work its way into the story, one way or another. According to the creed of the day, or so it’s implied — if not outright stated — it’s the love of good women that gives men the courage to risk their necks against the crooked ranchers, conniving Mexican despots, and other assorted outlaws found inhabiting these pages, and by extension, the entire American west.

   If these stories succeed, it’s by sheer story-telling power, not by the grace or elegance of the writing. While T. T. Flynn was the contemporary of such western writers such as Max Brand and Zane Grey, it’s plain to see that he simply wasn’t in their league, at least not in terms of word-slinging ability.

   But if you can sit back, turn off your critical eye, and allow these yarns of yesteryear to simply take over, what you’ll be in for is four installments of the ride of your life — and I ask you: What could be better than that?

[UPDATE] 08-29-09.   I’ve recently had to drop out of a western fiction apa called Owlhoots — a pure lack of time — but in the ten or so issues I did for it, there are some articles and reviews I did that I’ll gradually be reprinting here on the Mystery*File blog.

   I regret to say that at the moment, I don’t have access to the book itself, and I seem to have made no record of it at the time. Right now, except for one story, I can’t tell you which one came from which magazine. When I come across the rest of the information, I’ll add it later:

       Half-Interest in Hell, Dime Western Magazine, July 1945.

      

[UPDATE #2]   Later the same day. Walker Martin has come to my rescue. See comment #1.

   The Black Horse Extra website is designed primarily to promote Western fiction, and Westerns published by UK publisher Robert Hale in particular. The latest issue, however, as editor Keith Chapman told me in an email from him earlier this week, has at least one item of considerable interest to mystery fans as well.

   The lead piece, though, is a long profile of western writer Gary Dobbs, aka Jack Martin, whose Tainted Archive blog is always worth a visit. Gary’s also a one man publicity factory for the revival of western fiction in general, making every effort he can to promote the genre and to keep it alive and well — and succeeding, too.

   The direct connection to Mystery*File is further down the page, and at this point, I’m simply going to quote:

   Some of the authors seem to be one side, while others are on the other. The consensus answer, if any is arrived at, appears to be “It all depends,” which although I’m not an author, would have to be the answer I’d give if I were one.

    Of course there’s a lot more to it than that. Since mystery writers face the same dilemma, I think most mystery readers will enjoy the far-ranging discussion that follows. (Follow the link in the first paragraph above.)

LES SAVAGE, JR. – Gambler’s Row.

Leisure, paperback reprint; 1st printing, February 2003. Hardcover edition: Five Star, February 2002.

   Yes, this is a western, and if you’re a mystery fan only, you can go right on to the next review, if you prefer. But over the past few years Five Star has been doing western fans a great big favor in publishing collections of vintage pulp stories like this one, and thanks to Leisure Books as well, many of them are now available in cheaper editions.

   There are three short novels in this one, all previously appearing in the badly flaking pages of Lariat Magazine, circa 1945-48. But where’s the crime connection, you ask? I’m glad you did, since I was coming to that. In “Gambler’s Row,” the title story, a wandering cowpoke named Drifter (well, yes) is hired by the female owner of the Silver Slipper to locate the sole witness to a murder.

   In “Brush Buster” the only crime is cattle rustling, but it does take some detective work on the part of small-scale rancher Nolan Moore to track them down (and win the hand of lush, full-bodied Ivory Lamar). And in “Valley of Secret Guns” one-armed bronc-buster Bob Tulare is suspected by a gang of rustlers and killers of being a private detective, working undercover to bring them to justice. There is, of course, a woman involved as well.

   As you can probably tell, Al Hubin isn’t likely to include this book in the latest edition of his Bibliography of Crime Fiction, nor would I if I were he, to tell you the truth, but like most westerns, it’s not all that far afield. The stories are melodramatic, especially the first one; humorous, especially the last one; romantic, all three of them; and, most importantly, authentic, again all three of them.

   If you read carefully enough, you can learn how to track someone on horseback without being spotted; how to retrieve cattle used to running wild in the mesquite and thick brush along the Mexican border; and how to break killer horses at five dollars a bust.

   There are cowboy terms in this book that I’ve never heard of, and I don’t think Savage made them up. From page 160: “Center-fire rig popping and snapping beneath him, Tulare unhitched his dally … he didn’t have to get too close with forty-five feet of maguey in his hand.”

   Savage also writes great fight scenes, a few that go on for pages. Not great literature, by any means, but for the market for which they were written, these stories are top of the line.