Fri 14 Jun 2024
A Western Fiction Review by Dan Stumpf: LUCAS WEBB – Eli’s Road.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western Fiction[7] Comments
LUCAS WEBB – Eli’s Road. Doubleday, hardcover, 1971. Popular Library, paperback, no date stated.
I recently went back to a 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 first 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.
June 14th, 2024 at 9:32 pm
I have been trying to find out more about Lucas Webb but without much success. There is a Lucas Webb on IMDb with a handful of credits as a producer, and a Lucas Webb who wrote a book titled STRIBLING, which is not a western. (Part of the front cover shows a girl singing into a microphone.) This latter author is said to be a pen name of Stephen Longstreet.
All the same guy? Well, maybe. And maybe not.
And BTW, Doubleday really went all out on the cover of this one, didn’t they? This time, definitely not.
June 15th, 2024 at 1:27 am
Lucas Webb is a pseudonym. The man behind the mask is Michael Roy Burgess, the owner of Borgo Press. Used a number of pseudonyms, “Robert Reginald”, “R. Reginald”, “C. Everett Cooper” and of course “Lucas Webb”.
His obituary
June 15th, 2024 at 10:58 am
Hi Sai, and thanks! Of all the people who might have been Lucas Webb might have been, Burgess/Reginald would have been in the last .0001 percent.
His CUMULATIVE PAPERBACK INDEX complete through 1959, which came out in the early 1970s completely turned my collecting life around. I wanted them all!
June 16th, 2024 at 9:47 am
Happy Father’s Day!
June 16th, 2024 at 10:12 am
Thanks, George, and likewise to you and all the other fathers reading this!
June 16th, 2024 at 2:46 pm
> His CUMULATIVE PAPERBACK INDEX complete through
> 1959, which came out in the early 1970s completely
> turned my collecting life around. I wanted them all!
Did you get them all? 🙂 .
June 16th, 2024 at 4:08 pm
That’s a good question, and the short answer is No. I kind of tried, but do you know what? I might have had a good percentage of the mysteries, SF and westerns, but there was a lot of dreck those old paperback companies also published. I decided early on that I wasn’t interested, and my days as a completist ended very very quickly.