Will Carney didn’t set out to get a reputation as a gunman,
but that’s the way things have worked out. He drifts through the Southwest,
looking for a place where he won’t have to use his gun. He’s in Tombstone at
the time of the famous shootout at the O.K. Corral, but although he knows most
of the participants (he sits in on a poker game in the Oriental Saloon where
Doc Holliday regularly plays), he manages to avoid getting involved in that
violent confrontation. However, when he kills an hombre who’s trying to attack
a young woman, he winds up with the dead man’s powerful family after him and
decides it’s time to move on. Unfortunately, he rides north to a settlement
where an old acquaintance is trying to take over and wants Carney to throw in
with him. Complicating things, an Apache medicine man has convinced a number of
warriors to leave the reservation with him and set off on a series of bloody
raids. And then Betsy Gaye, the girl Carney rescued back in Tombstone, shows up,
and so does the brutal patriarch of the family that wants him dead . . .
That’s the setup of THE GUNSHARP, a Gold Medal paperback original novel from
1967 by William R. Cox, a prolific contributor to the Western and detective
pulps who went on to a long, successful career as a paperbacker, most notably
by taking over the Buchanan series under the house-name Jonas Ward after series
creator William Ard died and there were a couple of fill-in novels by Robert
Silverberg (finishing a manuscript Ard started) and Brian Garfield. Cox wound up
writing more Buchanan novels than anybody else, and he had a series of his own
about a sheriff named Cemetery Jones. He also wrote a Gold Medal Western
entitled BIGGER THAN TEXAS in 1963, which holds a special place in my heart
because it was the first adult paperback I ever bought, plucking it off the
spinner rack in a drugstore in Goldsmith, Texas, while we were there visiting
relatives. I have a replacement copy of that one and plan to reread it one of
these days.
But back to THE GUNSHARP . . . There’s a nice hardboiled tone to this one that
becomes almost noirish as it seems that Carney has a new problem everywhere he
turns. Cox also does a good job with the Arizona landscape, and a long scene in
which Carney and Betsy are pursued by the Apaches through a nighttime
thunderstorm and flash flood is excellent. The supporting cast, including a
married couple with problems of their own who run a hotel and café, is
interesting. My only real complaint is that a little too much of the action
takes place off-screen, so we get people talking about what happened instead of
seeing it for ourselves. But there’s not enough of that to slow down the book
too much, so for the most part things roll along quite nicely.
Cox was never in the top rank of either Western or mystery writers as far as
I’m concerned, but he was always a solid second tier author, dependably
entertaining. THE GUNSHARP is worth reading if you come across a copy like I
did. Mine came from Recycled Books in Denton, like last week’s Forgotten Book,
and is in excellent shape except for that blasted sticker the store stuck on it
and a little damage to the spine, both of which you can see in the scan.
