A. B. GUTHRIE, JR. – No Second Wind. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1980. Bison Books, softcover, 2010.

   Best known for his skillful novels of the westward expansion — among them the Pulitzer Prize-winning Big Sky (1948), A. B. Guthrie, Jr., is also an accomplished crime novelist. His first book, Murders at Moon Dance (1943), is a western mystery: so are four others written in the l970s and 1980s, all featuring the likable detective team of Sheriff Chick Charleston and his young “Watson,” Deputy Jason Beard, of the small town of Midbury, Montana.

No Second Wind is perhaps the best of the    Charleston / Beard adventures. In the middle of a particularly icy winter, the town and its citizens are being heated up by a strip mining feud between local ranchers who don’t want their land destroyed and a large mining conglomerate and its transient workers. The conflict erupts into fisticuffs and then into murder at a local miner’s hangout called the Chicken Shack.

   But murder and strip mining aren’t the only things complicating the lives of Charleston and Beard; among others are what appears lo be the ritual slaughtering of local cattle, an apparent influx of wolves, Jason falling in love, and one of the oddest (and funniest) justice-of-the-peace cases on record.

   The sum of all these parts is a deceptively simple, easy-going, and satisfying mystery, populated by people instead of cardboard cutouts. If you like slam-bang action and plenty of blood and gore, this is not your book; but if you prefer characterization, unusual situations, and a vivid portrait of small-town western life, No Second Wind is definitely for you.

   The other novels featuring Charleston and Beard, all of which share the same attributes as this one, are Wild Pitch (1973), The Genuine Article (1977), and Playing Catch- Up ( 1985).

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   Reprinted with permission from 1001 Midnights, edited by Bill Pronzini & Marcia Muller and published by The Battered Silicon Dispatch Box, 2007.   Copyright © 1986, 2007 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust.