The Wrap Up

2025, like all the years before it, was a mixture of good and bad around here. Health issues became a little more challenging this year and took up more time, but I feel like I’m still in pretty good shape for an old-timer. My writing production isn’t what it once was, but I managed to turn out more than half a million words, which amounted to almost six novels. No short stories this year. Most importantly, I feel like the work is still pretty good quality. My schedule is fairly full again for 2026, but changes are looming. But when aren’t they?

Of course, reading is still very important to me, as it has been ever since I first visited the bookmobile when I was six years old. I read 149 books this year, a nice number but down some from last year. Here are my ten favorite books (not best, necessarily, but favorite) that I read this year, alphabetical by author:

SHARPE’S TIGER, Bernard Cornwell

GANGLAND’S DOOM: THE SHADOW OF THE PULPS, Frank Eisgruber Jr.

RANCHO BRAVO #1: CALHOON, Thorne Douglas (Ben Haas)

THE CHRONICLES OF HANUVAR, VOLUME 2: THE CITY OF MARBLE AND BLOOD, Howard Andrew Jones

LONGHORN STAMPEDE, Philip Ketchum 

SARA AND THE MAD DOG, Stephen Mertz

ROBERT E. HOWARD: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF A TEXAS WRITER, Willard M. Oliver

SOMETIME LOFTY TOWERS, David C. Smith

STORYTELLER: HELPFUL HINTS AND TALL TALES FROM THE WRITING LIFE, Carlton Stowers

’NADA, Daniel Boyd (Dan Stumpf)

At least a dozen more books could have made this list and some of them probably would have on a different day. I read a lot of good books. I believe all of those listed above are still in print and easily available except for the Western novel by Philip Ketchum.

So what does 2026 hold in store? Who knows? I plan to keep writing and reading for the foreseeable future, and I figure most of the other stuff will take care of itself. My thanks to all of you reading this, some of whom have been here for more than twenty years. We’ll see how long we can keep it going.

UPDATE: In response to a request in the comments, here are the other books I considered for my top ten list, in the order in which I read them: THE RULE OF THREES, Jeffrey Deaver; THE ART OF RON LESSER, VOLUME 2, Robert Deis, Bill Cunningham, eds.; ONCE A FIGHTER, Les Savage Jr.; SWITCHEROO, Emmett McDowell; GUN LAW AT VERMILION, Matt Stuart (L.P. Holmes); HAMILTON'S HAREM, William Kane (Ben Haas); THE JOY WHEEL, Paul W. Fairman; KNIGHT OF DARKNESS: THE LEGEND OF THE SHADOW, Will Murray; THE WILD ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, VOLUME 5, Will Murray; OVERBOARD, George F. Worts; THE BULLET GARDEN, Stephen Hunter; THE RED TASSEL, David Dodge; DREAM TOWN, David Baldacci; MARIHUANA, William Irish (Cornell Woolrich); and EYE WITNESS, George Harmon Coxe. Any of these books are well worth your time.

Review: Rancho Bravo #1: Calhoon - Thorne Douglas (Ben Haas)

Last week I reran a review of a Ben Haas novel from some years back, and that put me in the mood to read another Western by him. For decades, I’ve been meaning to read his Rancho Bravo novels, a five-book series published by Fawcett in the Seventies under the pseudonym Thorne Douglas. I know an omen when I see one, so I dug out my copy of CALHOON, the first book in the series.

Lucius Calhoon comes to Texas right after the Civil War. A former Confederate cavalry captain, he’s lost the plantation he owned in South Carolina and also lost his right hand to torture he was subjected to in a Yankee prison camp. The man responsible for that torture was a young Union officer named Gordon Weymouth. Weymouth is supposed to be in Texas, at a town in the South Texas brush country along the Nueces River. Unlike many former Confederates, Calhoon doesn’t head for Texas to make a fresh start. He’s there for one reason and one reason only: to kill Gordon Weymouth.

And of course, things don’t work out that way. Calhoon rescues a former slave from a lynching attempt and befriends a flat broke rancher who has a big spread of chapparal and thousands of mostly wild longhorns. The rancher, Henry Gannon, is going to lose the ranch to the corrupt Reconstruction judge the Yankees have put in charge of the area, who just happens to be Gordon Weymouth’s father. Calhoon throws in with Gannon and the former slave, Elias Whitton, and decides to help them achieve their dream of driving Gannon’s cattle to West Texas and establishing a ranch there, in the middle of Comanche country, to be called Rancho Bravo. The local commander of the Yankee occupation forces, Captain Philip Killraine, is sympathetic to their cause, as is his beautiful sister Evelyn.

Unfortunately, that may not be enough to allow the partners to stand up to the political corruption and greed of the Weymouths, father and son, and the violence of the brutal Regulators who work for them.

CALHOON is a flat-out superb Western novel. Haas manipulates his plot skillfully, piling up trouble and more trouble on his heroes. Lucius Calhoon, as the protagonist of this book, comes in for the most character development, and he’s a fascinating individual, very demon-haunted and not even all that likable at times, but always sympathetic to the reader. The other characters are interesting, as well, including the villainous Weymouths. And of course, there’s plenty of the great action you’d expect in a Ben Haas novel. He was one of the best there ever was at writing both close combat (fistfights and knife fights) and epic, large-scale battles.

I galloped through this book and enjoyed every page of it. I think it’s one of the best Ben Haas novels I’ve ever read. And it’s really just the opening chapter in a much bigger tale. I suspect I’ll be reading the second book in the Rancho Bravo series very soon. CALHOON is available in an e-book edition from the fine folks at Piccadilly Publishing, and so are the rest of the books in the series.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Alaska Steel - John Benteen (Ben Haas)

This is the second volume in Ben Haas’s outstanding series about soldier of fortune Neal Fargo. It opens in Hollywood in 1914, where Fargo is working temporarily as an actor, of all things, playing a villain in a silent Western movie directed by Thomas Ince. Ince is the only real-life character to make an appearance in this novel; the hero of the picture is fictional, as is a beautiful actress Fargo meets.

Ince wants Fargo to continue making movies and claims that he can be a big star, but Fargo isn’t interested in make-believe. Having lived a life of adventure, he needs the real thing. So when the actress, Jane Deering, asks him to go to Alaska and find out what happened to her husband, who disappeared there several years earlier while prospecting for gold, Fargo agrees without hesitation. He’s less enthusiastic about the idea of Jane coming along with him to look for the missing man, but she convinces him.

Naturally, things don’t go well, and Fargo and Jane wind up in all sorts of danger in the gold fields of the untamed Yukon country. There are vigilantes, a mysterious killer, blizzards, and assorted mushing around on dog sleds and snowshoes. As usual, Haas spins his yarn in tough, hardboiled prose without a wasted word to be found. He’s one of the best pure action writers I’ve ever run across. This one shows a few signs of hurried writing, but the story sweeps along at such a swift pace I didn’t really care. ALASKA STEEL is a prime example of a short, gritty adventure novel, and like all of Ben Haas’s work that I’ve ever encountered, it’s well worth reading.

(This post originally appeared on April 23, 2010. In the years since then, ALASKA STEEL has been reprinted in an e-book edition by Piccadilly Publishing, along with the other Fargo books by Ben Haas. The whole series gets a very high recommendation from me, even though I actually haven't read all of them, even at this late date. I need to get on that. Also, the copy pictured in the scan is the one I read, and I can tell from the price sticker on it that it came from the Used Book Warehouse in Rockport, Texas, which still exists but is in a different building now since its original location was heavily damaged by Hurricane Harvey. I spent a lot of very pleasant hours browsing through the place and still miss it.)

Review: Hamilton's Harem - William Kane (Ben Haas)

First of all, the fact that this book doesn’t have LUST, SIN, FLESH, SHAME, PASSION, WANTON, or ORGY in the title makes me suspect that Ben Haas, the author behind the William Kane pseudonym, came up with HAMILTON’S HAREM and the editors at William Hamling’s soft-core empire let it go. That’s my copy in the scan, and it’s in really good shape for a paperback that’s 60 years old, almost like it just came off of some bus station spinner rack. The artist hasn’t been identified.

The fact that Ben Haas wrote this means there’s a very good chance it’ll be a fine book. The protagonist is lawyer Gage Hamilton, a no-nonsense, abide-by-the-letter-of-the-law guy who finds himself administering valuable trust funds for a beautiful blond widow and her three equally beautiful, equally blond daughters (all of whom, not to worry, are of legal age). In addition, Gage also has a beautiful blond mistress who is more than a tad jealous. Sounds like a harem to me!

Gage’s life is complicated even more when each of his legal charges has some sort of soap operatic emergency that requires them to try to wheedle large sums of cash out of their trust funds. Gage has to approve such cash outlays, and in each case, the ladies pull out all the stops to convince him to go along with what they want. Throw in a lusty stable boy, a predatory lesbian, an embezzler, a hint of blackmail, and a murder, and you’ve got a book!

Some of Haas’s soft-core books are sexed-up adventure yarns, but HAMILTON’S HAREM is more of a romantic comedy, and a good one, too. I raced through it, since Haas’s prose is some of the most readable you’ll ever encounter, and there’s a great scene where a rat gets his comeuppance. The sex scenes aren’t very graphic, and most of the book is about Gage Hamilton finding some human decency under his hidebound legal exterior. I just had a really good time reading this book. It’s not much like Ben Haas’s other books, but at the same time, I think it’s one of my favorites of his so far. You’re not likely to run across a copy—Bookfinder shows only three currently for sale on-line, and they’re all pricey—but if you do, I recommend you grab it.

Sundance #6: The Bronco Trail - John Benteen (Ben Haas)

I recently read a couple of books that weren’t terrible, but ultimately, they were disappointing and I wished I had the time back that I spent reading them. With that bad taste in my mouth, I wanted to read something that I was absolutely certain would entertain me and make me glad that I’d read it.

Enter Ben Haas.

Over the years I’ve read most of the books in the Fargo series that Haas wrote under the name John Benteen, but there are still quite a few of his Sundance series that I never got around to. The next one I hadn’t read was #6 THE BRONCO TRAIL. This one opens with Jim Sundance, the half-British, half-Cheyenne professional fighting man, hunting down an outlaw gang in Utah and dealing with them in an explosive confrontation. When Sundance reports to the Mormon leader who hired him, he finds an old friend waiting for him: General George Crook. Sundance has worked for the army before, and now Crook wants him to find out who’s trying to stir up a new war between the Apaches and the settlers in Arizona. And while he’s at it, if he can convince Geronimo and his followers, who have fled to the mountains in Mexico, to surrender and make peace, that would be great, too.

It’s a job that puts Sundance smack-dab in the middle of danger from several different sources: the criminal ring smuggling ammunition and whiskey to the Apaches, the Mexican army, and Geronimo his own self. In addition to Geronimo and General Crook, actual historical figures who play a part in the story include scouts Al Sieber and Tom Horn. As Haas explains in an afterword, nearly everything in the book except Sundance’s involvement is based on documented history. It’s interesting and very effective.

Of course, the biggest appeal of these novels is the action, and I’m convinced that except for Robert E. Howard, nobody was ever better at writing close combat action scenes than Ben Haas. Whether it’s a brutal fistfight, a deadly battle with knives, or a close-quarters shootout, Haas’s skill at describing these scenes is breathtaking. The story races along at a breakneck pace, the settings are vividly (but not long-windedly) described, and Sundance is a great protagonist, if a bit dour.

So I went into THE BRONCO TRAIL wanting a book that I would enjoy reading, and that’s exactly what I got. Copies of the original paperback (with a cover by Mel Crair) can be found on-line, and an e-book edition is available from Piccadilly Publishing. I give this one a high recommendation.  

Lust Treasures - William Kane (Ben Haas)

Ben Haas, best known for his Westerns under the names John Benteen, Thorne Douglas, and Richard Meade, as well as thrillers and sword and sorcery novels under the Meade name, also wrote a number of soft-core sex novels in the early Sixties for William Hamling’s publishing empire, all of them under the name William Kane. I’ve read a couple of those William Kane books, and they were well-written, entertaining books. But the William Kane novel LUST TREASURES is something different, and it’s very much a precursor to the work that Haas would soon be doing.

The narrator/protagonist of this novel is Len Wolfe (any resemblance to the term “lone wolf” is probably not coincidental), a former Marine who currently works as a rather amoral soldier of fortune, taking any dangerous job that pays enough, anywhere in the world. As this novel opens, he’s recruited by a lawyer representing an American fruit company for a job in a South American country. The company, which has extensive banana plantation holdings in the country, hires Wolfe to deliver a $200,000 bribe to the leader of a rebel army. In exchange for the money, the man will call off the revolution that threatens the fruit company’s holdings. But the rebel leader insists on one condition: the money will be paid in the form of American silver dollars. So Wolfe’s job is to transport 200 grand in silver across a rugged jungle landscape teeming with bandits, while also dealing with the possibility of a double cross from the rebel leader. Not to mention the threat of the cruel dictator who runs the country and his beautiful but possibly unhinged sister, and the complication of the beautiful American girl who is the rebel leader’s mistress.

Now I ask you, move that plot back from the early Sixties to the early days of the Twentieth Century, and does that sound like one of Haas’s Fargo novels or what? That seems like exactly the sort of job Fargo would get mixed up in.

There’s enough sex in this book to justify it being published by Hamling, but LUST TREASURES is definitely more of an action/adventure novel than anything else. The setup is a little slow to develop, but once Wolfe starts through the jungle with a mule train loaded down with silver dollars, the pace ratchets up a notch and things barrel along to a final showdown in a dungeon torture room underneath the Presidential Palace. Haas was a master of colorful settings and great action scenes, and there are plenty of both of those things in this book.

I think anyone who’s a fan of Haas’s work would enjoy this novel, but unfortunately, it’s a little on the rare side and likely to be pricey if you find a copy. If you come across it, though, and it’s in your price range, don’t pass it up. This might be a good candidate for reprinting, one of these days.

Flesh Fix - William Kane (Ben Haas)

Political corruption, blackmail, bribery, and multiple murders all figure in the plot of FLESH FIX, a crime novel masquerading as sleaze as so many of those softcore books are. Ben Haas’s writing is smooth and fast, as always, and kept me flipping the pages in this tale of a formerly honest reporter trying to regain his self-respect after being roped into a crooked politician’s inner circle. And to be fair, there actually is quite a bit of sex in this novel, and it’s fairly graphic for 1964. It’s a good yarn and I enjoyed it.

Passion Web - William Kane (Ben Haas)

Years ago I owned a copy of this book, but I never got around to reading it before it was lost in the Fire of ’08. At that time, I had no idea who William Kane was, although I figured it was a pseudonym. I just bought all the Pillar/Ember/Nightstand/etc. books that I came across, especially if they were a reasonable price. I believe I paid a buck for that copy.

Time passed, and I never replaced that lost copy of PASSION WEB. Then I found out that none other than the great Western and adventure novelist Ben Haas wrote most of those William Kane books, including PASSION WEB. I’ve been on the lookout for an affordable copy ever since and came across one recently. I read it within a few days of getting it. Not going to miss out this time!

The cover by Robert Bonfils makes this look like a Western, and it sort of is a contemporary (1964) Western, set mostly on a dude ranch in West Texas and in the nearby small town. The protagonist is Lois Frost, a beautiful, ambitious young secretary at an oil company who has been promised a promotion to an executive job if she can weasel some vital information out of geologist Kirk Parsons, who works for a rival oil company. Lois is willing to do the job no matter what it takes, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. The dude ranch where Lois stays while pursuing her goal is owned by beautiful Tess Welch, who struggles not only to keep the ranch going but to control her burgeoning feelings for Lois. The neighboring ranch is owned by champion bronc rider Clint Sandifer, who has a violent streak, a fondness for whips, and a hankering for beautiful young Maria Galindez, who’s married to one of Clint’s ranch hands.

Most of the book is taken up by Haas’s skillful mixing and matching of those characters, plus a mystery of sorts over the location of a fabulously valuable pool of oil, before everything comes to a head at a rodeo. (Where else?) His smooth prose is a joy to read, as always, and keeps things moving along at such a fast pace that I raced through the book and enjoyed it quite a bit. There are a lot of sex scenes and they’re fairly graphic, but they’re well-written and actually have to do with the plot most of the time. Not only that, but there are several scenes of unexpected violence that would be right at home in one of Haas’s adventure novels, and his descriptions of the West Texas landscape are excellent. He’s just one of those writers whose work really resonates with me, no matter what the genre.

So I’m glad I finally got my hands on another copy of PASSION WEB. I really had a good time reading it. I found another William Kane book that wasn’t too pricey for my taste and ordered it. I figure I’ll enjoy it, too.

Forgotten Books: Executive Boudoir - Ken Barry (Ben Haas)

Before he became known as one of the best action writers of the Twentieth Century with dozens of Westerns, thrillers, and sword-and-sorcery novels under the names John Benteen, Richard Meade, and Thorne Douglas, Ben Haas got his start as a professional writer by turning out soft-core sex novels for Beacon Books and Monarch Books. He used the names Ben Elliott (which later became one of his Western pen-names), Sam Webster, and Ken Barry. I’d never read any of them until recently, when I picked up a copy of EXECUTIVE BOUDOIR, one of his Beacons under the name Ken Barry. Actually, I didn’t mean to read it right then, I was just looking at it, but after the first few pages, I was hooked. That’s because, no matter what the genre, Ben Haas was one of the best pure storytellers I’ve ever encountered.

As you might guess from the title, EXECUTIVE BOUDOIR is a mixture of corporate warfare and sexy, soap operatic romance. Jim Sloane is the hard-charging executive vice-president of Canady Industries. He’s in love with beautiful Lisa Canady, daughter of company president Mart Canady, who commits the company to a bad deal by buying a failing company and then immediately dying. Lisa takes over as president, she and Jim clash, both turn to other lovers for comfort, and Canady Industries teeters on the brink of ruin.

While there aren’t any plot twists in this book you won’t see coming, Haas spins the yarn with such great skill it doesn’t matter. He worked in the steel industry, and it shows, as the book has a real air of authenticity about it. There’s a good balance between the sexy romantic element and the corporate in-fighting element. Haas also has a sure hand with his characters and pacing. I stayed up later than I normally do to finish this one, that’s how much I was enjoying it. I recommend it, and I plan to read more of the books from this part of Haas’s career in the near future.

A Hack's Notebook - Ben Haas

 

I don’t recall the first book by Ben Haas that I read. I remember seeing Fargo and Sundance paperbacks, which he wrote under the pseudonym John Benteen, when I was in college, and I’m pretty sure I owned a copy of the movie novelization ROUGH NIGHT IN JERICHO, which he wrote under the pseudonym Richard Meade, even earlier than that, but I don’t think I ever read it. So it was probably sometime in the Eighties before I read anything by him. I know I started reading the Fargo novels then. The first one I picked up may have been VALLEY OF SKULLS, which is widely acclaimed as one of the best in the series. I know I loved it. I’ve read a bunch of novels by Ben Haas since then and enjoyed every one of them. I haven’t read them all yet, but that’s okay. That gives me something to shoot for.

Which is my long-winded way of saying that when I became aware Haas’s unfinished autobiography A HACK’S NOTEBOOK was published earlier this year, I had to grab a copy and read it right away.

I’ve been acquainted with Haas’s oldest son, the acclaimed sculptor Joel Haas, through the Internet for a number of years now. He’s provided me with some material regarding his dad’s work that I’ve published here on the blog. Joel edited A HACK’S NOTEBOOK, and the fine people at Piccadilly Publishing (who publish excellent e-book versions of many Ben Haas novels) brought it out in a very nice trade paperback edition. Ben Haas’s autobiographical manuscript comprises a little more than half the book and covers his childhood and adult life, providing a lot of details about his writing and his struggle to break in as a professional author, up to the point in the early 1960s when he’s finally starting to see some real success as a writer. It’s an intriguing, very readable mix of the personal and the professional. That’s a balance that a lot of author biographies and autobiographies fail to pull off, but not surprisingly, Haas—who could always juggle plot, character, and action beautifully in his novels—does a great job of it here, too.

Unfortunately, the manuscript ends at that point, so we don’t get to read what Haas has to say about his years of greatest success. But we do get fine reminiscinces by Joel Haas and by Ben Haas’s lifelong friend and occasional collaborator Jim Henderson, plus a selection of family photos and a complete bibliography of Ben Haas’s books. This is a really excellent volume and certainly one of the best books I’ve read this year. If you’re a fan of Ben Haas’s work or great action novels or 20^th Century genre fiction, or would just like a compelling look into the mind of a top-notch professional writer, A HACK’S NOTEBOOK gets a very high recommendation from me.

Classic Westerns: Taps at Little Big Horn - John Benteen (Ben Haas)

Although Ben Haas wrote a lot of books under a lot of different names (including some well-regarded mainstream novels under his real name), he’s probably best remembered these days as the author of two Western series from the Seventies, Fargo and Sundance, both of which he wrote under the pseudonym John Benteen. I’ve been a fan of his work for many years and have read most of the Fargo novels, but for some reason I read only a few books in the Sundance series. I intend to remedy that, starting with the fifth entry, TAPS AT LITTLE BIG HORN. (I read the first four years ago, plus another book or two from later in the series.)

Jim Sundance is the son of a Cheyenne mother and a British remittance man father. He’s a professional fighting man and is equally at home in either world, Indian or white . . . although if he had to choose, he’d probably stick with the Cheyenne. He’s a staunch defender of the Indians and uses the money he makes as a mercenary to fund efforts to combat the schemes of the Indian Ring, a notorious cartel of ruthless businessmen and corrupt politicians. This much is based on history, and actual events crop up in the novels from time to time.

TAPS AT LITTLE BIG HORN, as you’d expect, is a prime example of that. In an earlier book, Sundance met and fell in love with Barbara Colfax, the beautiful daughter of the president of the Northern Pacific Railroad. Barbara now lives with the Cheyenne and has adopted the name Two Roads Woman. But her father still wants her to come home, and he persuades Sundance to bring her to a meeting with him. The bait he dangles is a promise to use his influence to keep the army from trying to move the Cheyenne and the Sioux out of their hunting grounds in Montana.

Well, I think any reader of Westerns and men’s adventure fiction will know that things don’t work out as Sundance hoped. He winds up putting the white part of his heritage aside and throwing in with the Cheyenne as Colonel George Armstrong Custer leads the Seventh Cavalry on its fateful mission to force them out of their hunting grounds.

One of the problems with a book like this that’s so tied in with actual history is that the reader already knows a lot of what’s going to happen. The challenge to the novelist is to blend the fictional characters and events in with the real ones skillfully enough to create an interesting story that holds the attention. Ben Haas is more than up to this challenge. Sundance is a strong, likable protagonist, and even though we know things aren’t really going to work out for him in this book, we root for him anyway. And as always, Haas provides plenty of great, gritty action scenes.

Personally, I wouldn’t put TAPS AT LITTLE BIG HORN in the top rank of Ben Haas’s books, because while it’s as well-written as always and compelling enough that it kept me up later than usual reading, I’m just not as fond of books set during the Indian Wars, especially ones that focus on actual battles. It’s a good solid novel and I’m glad I read it, but I’m looking forward to some of Sundance’s more fictional adventures. Which I plan to be reading soon.

That's my copy in the scan above, by the way, complete with tape on the cover and price sticker from the Used Book Warehouse in Rockport, Texas.

My Favorite Western Authors

A friend of mine with a growing interest in Westerns who hasn't read much in the genre suggested that I do a blog post about my favorite Western authors. After some thought, I decided that I can do that, with one condition: I have to confine it to authors who are no longer with us. I know almost everyone who's currently writing Westerns, and I don't want any of them coming across this post and wondering why I didn't mention them. It's an unavoidable fact: some writers I love as people but don't care for their books. Others I love their books but don't . . . well, never mind. I'm going to confine the list to ten, with the usual warning that if you ask me again tomorrow, the selections might change. I'm also going to keep it to authors whose work is at least somewhat readily available. I love Harry Olmsted's stories, for example, but none of them have been reprinted and you'd have to buy the original pulps to read them. Some are acquired tastes, too, real love 'em or hate 'em authors, so consider that fair warning.

Enough qualifying. On to the list, which is in alphabetical order.

Walt Coburn – Maybe the most inconsistent Western author ever, capable of sheer, breathtaking excellence as well as utter mediocrity composed in a drunken haze. But Coburn at the top of his game captured the authenticity of the Old West probably better than any other author I've ever read. He also came up with some of the most complicated plots filled with raw emotional angst that you'll ever find in the genre.

H.A. DeRosso – The darkest of all the Western noir authors, the Jim Thompson of the Western. He wrote only a handful of novels, but they're all good. Several of them have been reprinted in the past fifteen years.

T.T. Flynn – Flynn's plots are pretty traditional, but he writes so well it doesn't matter. Also, his novels are often more emotionally complex than they appear at first.

Ben Haas – Writing as John Benteen, Richard Meade, Thorne Douglas, and Ben Elliott, Haas was the best action writer of the Twentieth Century other than Robert E. Howard. I've written plenty on this blog about him. Pick up anything he wrote. I guarantee you're in for a good time.

Elmer Kelton – The man picked by a poll of the Western Writers of America as the best Western author of all time. I have a hard time singling out one author as the best of anything, but Kelton was very, very good for a long time. Nobody was ever better at writing about the contemporary West. And he was one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet, too.

Lewis B. Patten – Patten's work is similar to DeRosso's, but his novels usually have happy endings that keep them from being quite as bleak. His books became more inconsistent as his career went along, so you're usually better off looking for novels from the Fifties and Sixties, although he was still capable of good work during the Seventies. If you run across a book you don't like, give him another chance.

Leslie Scott – Scott is one of those acquired tastes. He wrote many of the Jim Hatfield novels in the pulp TEXAS RANGERS under the house-name Jackson Cole. You'll be more likely to find some of his long series of paperback novels about Texas Ranger Walt Slade, published under the name Bradford Scott. His plots are repetitious, his prose is really purple at times (especially when he's describing landscapes), but he wrote great, over-the-top action scenes. His stand-alones, often based on historical incidents, are also good. But if you try one of his books and don't like it, there's not much point in trying another, except for the fact that his earlier books generally have better plots.

Gordon D. Shireffs – Almost the equal of Flynn, Haas, and Short when it comes to hardboiled action Westerns, and his depictions of the American Southwest are maybe the best of them all. He was also an excellent plotter.

Luke Short (Frederick D. Glidden) – Not quite noir, but his Westerns are definitely on the hardboiled side and often have some sort of mystery angle. He could write great action scenes as well. His books from the Forties and Fifties are the best as far as I'm concerned, although all his work is worth reading.

W.C. Tuttle – Really the only humorous Western writer I like, and that's probably because the comedy (which borders on slapstick at times) is balanced by plenty of action and complex mystery plots. Tuttle is best known for his stories and novels featuring range detectives Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens, but he also wrote a long series of novellas in the pulp EXCITING WESTERN about a similar pair known as Tombstone and Speedy. He's also famous for a series about a W.C. Fields-like vaudeville performer who winds up the sheriff of an Arizona town. His stand-alones are good, too.

I would have included Robert E. Howard if he had lived to write more Westerns, as according to his letters he planned to do. He actually invented the Western noir in stories such as "The Vultures of Whapeton", "Wild Water", and "Vulture's Sanctuary". If you haven't picked up the collection of his traditional Westerns from the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, I give it a high recommendation. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I wrote the outline for that collection.)

So there are ten Western writers and a sort-of bonus eleventh one you'd be well-advised to seek out if you're looking to broaden your Western reading horizons. You probably won't like all of them, but I think the chances are good you'll discover some new favorite authors among them. If any of you want to throw in recommendations for other authors, feel free to do so in the comments. If there are enough, I'll do a follow-up post based on them.

(The links below are just examples of some of the books by these authors. Many more are available on Amazon and other on-line booksellers and in used bookstores.)

Forgotten Books: The Black Bulls - John Benteen (Ben Haas)

One of the things that sets the Fargo series apart from other Western series is that author Ben Haas makes Neal Fargo a globe-trotting character. Fargo's adventures take him all over the world, from Panama to the Philippines, from Alaska to Argentina. That's where he is in THE BLACK BULLS, riding across the pampas, hanging out with gauchos, and learning how to use a bolas as he tries to recover a herd of valuable bulls used in breeding stock for bullfights.

Another thing that appeals to me about the Fargo series is that he's an expert in just about anything. In the last of these books I read, WOLF'S HEAD, he works as a lumberjack and can top trees like an old hand at the job. In THE BLACK BULLS, Haas explains that when Fargo was a young man he worked for a short time as a bullfighter's apprentice, so he's highly skilled in a bull ring, too. Having Fargo turn out to be an expert in whatever he needs to do in order to survive is a very pulpish touch and reminds me of Doc Savage. It's a testimony to Haas's skill as a writer that he makes all this utterly believable. If he says Fargo can be a toreador and survive in the ring against a killer bull, that's fine with me.

This series also reminds me a little of Ian Fleming's James Bond books. There's always a larger-than-life villain who torments Fargo before they wind up facing each other in a final showdown, even though they lack the colorful names that Fleming always tagged on his bad guys. Of course, with a larger-than-life hero, you've got to have a matching adversary for him. In this case it's German agent Wilhelm von Stahl, who is taking over ranches in Argentina to provide beef for the German army. (This book is set in 1917, right after the United States enters World War I.) Von Stahl is a Prussian dueling master, so you know he and Fargo are going to face off in a swordfight sooner or later. It's a good one, too. As is this entire book, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Fargo is one of the finest high adventure series ever written. I've said it before, but if you haven't read any of them, you really should.

UPDATE: Here's the cover for the forthcoming Picadilly Publishing reprint of this book.

Forgotten Books: Wolf's Head - John Benteen (Ben Haas)

This entry in Ben Haas's superb Fargo series finds soldier of fortune Neal Fargo in the Pacific Northwest. As a favor to his old friend, former president Theodore Roosevelt, Fargo signs on to help a timber company get a huge shipment of logs downriver to Puget Sound. A rival company will stop at nothing, up to and including sabotage and murder, to stop that from happening. But the bad guys hadn't reckoned on Fargo.

If you want to learn something about logging in the early 20^th Century, this is the book for you. Haas obviously knew a lot about the subject and communicates it in clear, easy to understand prose. This is no dry educational tract, though, because Haas mixes in the background with plenty of action scenes, and nobody, with the possible exception of Robert E. Howard, ever wrote action btter than Ben Haas. Shootouts, epic fistfights, a desperate duel with axes, large scale gun battles, forest fires, and millions of tons of logs rampaging down a flooded river . . . well, you get the idea.

And of course I loved every bit of it. The Fargo series is one of my all-time favorites. My only quibble about it is that Haas spends a little too much time in each book filling in Fargo's background and going over the weapons he carries. But that's a very minor point. The offbeat settings and plots, the relentless pace, and the smooth, action-packed prose much more than make up for it. Great stuff, and if you haven't read any of the Fargo books, you should.

Lynn Munroe's Ben Haas Checklist

For all you Ben Haas fans out there -- and I know there are a lot of you -- you need to head on over to Lynn Munroe's website right away. He's posted several new pages about Haas, starting with a fine biographical essay and including checklists of all of Haas's books under various pseudonyms, several of which are new to me. Not content to stop there, though, Lynn has also unraveled the history and authorship of the Lassiter series, to which Haas contributed one book. "Who wrote the Lassiters?" is a question that's been dogging me for years, and Lynn has done a spectacular job of uncovering a great deal of information. This is great stuff, and the Haas fans among you should check it out immediately.

More From Joel Haas

[Here's an excerpt from the email Joel mentions in his comment on the previous post, with a few additions from me in italics.]

Poking around in boxes and file cabinets while looking for something else, I came across an ancient photo copy of the instructions Dad wrote for me. I'd like to warn you it is possibly politically incorrect. In addition, it may well come through to some fans of Westerns that my father scorned the genre and the fans.   

To explain: at the time Dad was attempting to get one of his major novels for S&S finished, finish several other contracts, and still maintain the Westerns as a way of bringing in steady cash. He was paid about $3000 per Fargo and a similar amount would come in from the sales in Norway and much of the rest of Europe. Demand for Fargo and Sundance was there but there simply was not enough of Dad to go around. I do not recall the name, however, there was an author in upstate NY who started a number of pulp (non Western) series and farmed out the work to nearly 20 ghost writers on contract.  Dad was looking to build up something along those lines as well. [Joel and I have since established that he was talking about Lyle Kenyon Engel of Book Creations Inc. -- a company for which I wrote about 50 books.]

By this point Dad had written a lot of Westerns and other pulp to support a wife, three sons, and make a mortgage payment. He was just plain tired of writing Westerns for a while. The irony is, of course, his love of writing started because of his love of Westerns.  He faithfully followed the serials at the movie theaters and listened to the radio shows and read the pulp magazines of Westerns. It was with a sale of a Western story he got his start. He took annual trips to the West with my godfather and his best friend, Jim Henderson, an editor at the Norfolk Virginian Pilot. [Ben Haas wrote the comic novel THE BELLE FROM CATSCRATCH with Jim Henderson, both of them using pseudonyms, Richard Meade and Jay Rutledge, respectively. I have a copy of the book and hope to read it soon. The cover art, by the way, is by the great Jack Davis of MAD Magazine fame, and Joel sent me these scans as well.]

Dad craved recognition as a non pulp writer. Living well outside the orbit of NYCity and not able to teach at a university as he had no college degree, he probably never had the social connections for lightening to strike until the last four months of his life when a huge paperback sale of his final novel THE HOUSE OF CHRISTINA occurred. Even then, it was not reviewed widely by the major papers because it was a straight forward story. He remained a "mid list author" all his professional life and by the time he was 49, fat, and bald he was professionally interested in moving past writing paperbacks. 

[Another bit of irony is that many of the literary writers from that era are forgotten and unread, while at least some of us are still reading, enjoying, and talking about books by Ben Haas and other authors like him who were great storytellers.]

How to Write a Pulp Western - Ben Haas

Joel Haas was kind enough to send me scans of his father's instructions on how to write a Western novel. I think this is fascinating reading and contains much good advice. Many thanks to Joel for sending this document along. You can click on each of the scans to enlarge them enough to read. Warning: there are spoilers for several of Ben Haas's novels in these pages.

A Couple of Ben Haas Reviews

(Since I'm on a Ben Haas kick right now [the psychologically inclined among you will have noticed that I can be a bit obsessive], here are a couple of old reviews I excavated from the archives of the WesternPulps Yahoo Group. I wrote these reviews in March 2002, almost ten years ago.)

BIG BEND, Richard Meade (Ben Haas)

Doubleday, 1968

Sam Ramsey owns a horse ranch north of the Big Bend in Texas in 1914, at a time when there is much unrest and revolution across the border in Mexico. Ramsey is a loner and doesn't get along with his neighbors because of lingering resentment directed at his late father, a Union Army officer who commanded black soldiers posted in the area following the Civil War. When Ramsey's horse herd is stolen by outlaws who plan to take them across the border and sell them to Pancho Villa, he goes after the thieves on his own, despite the heavy odds against him.

Those odds are improved a little when he meets the giant black soldier of fortune called Concho and a young widow named Nora, who are on a mission of revenge of their own that takes them into the Big Bend. The trio of adventurers face a great deal of hardship and danger from Anglo outlaws and Mexican revolutionaries as they try to survive the badlands on both sides of the Rio Grande and catch up to the men they are pursuing.

Ben Haas is one of my favorite series writers (Sundance, Fargo, and at least one Lassiter as Jack Slade). He also writes excellent stand-alones, and this book is a prime example of that. Though the basic plot is made up of standard Western elements, Haas throws in enough wrinkles to make the book consistently interesting. The more modern-day setting allows the use of telephones, machine guns, and airplanes, but there's still plenty of traditional Western action. Haas gives his characters depth and writes such smooth, fast-moving prose that his books are always a pleasure to read.

Highly recommended.

CARTRIDGE CREEK, Richard Meade (Ben Haas)

Doubleday, 1973

Will Leatherman is as tough as his name, a former trail driver from Texas turned land developer, who comes to the railroad-owned town of Cartridge Creek, New Mexico, to size it up and see if he and his partner want to buy it from the railroad. Unwittingly, Leatherman has walked into a war about to erupt between two rival saloon owners, Fate Canady and Goldtoothed Bob Rigsby. Leatherman doesn't want to take sides in this trouble, although after a run-in with one of Rigsby's hired guns, both men try to hire him, thinking that Leatherman is a gunfighter himself. Leatherman's growing friendship for Tom Brand, the man who founded the town, and Bettina Grady, the pretty young widow who runs the local boarding house, finally forces him to take a hand in Cartridge Creek's troubles.

CARTRIDGE CREEK is not as good as Haas's BIG BEND, which I also read and reviewed recently, but it deserves a high recommendation anyway.

One More Reason I Love the Internet: Ben and Joel Haas Edition

Over the past few days I've been trading emails and talking on the phone with Joel Haas, the son of one of my all-time favorite writers, Ben Haas, who wrote dozens of Westerns under the names John Benteen (the Neal Fargo and Sundance series) and Thorne Douglas (the Rancho Bravo series), as well as historical and mainstream novels under his own name. Joel is a fascinating guy with artistic talents of his own. He's a well-known sculptor.

But in the course of our conversations he mentioned that he's a writer as well, and revealed something that as far as I know has never been suspected among fans of Western series fiction: Joel actually wrote the Fargo novels THE BORDER JUMPERS and DEATH VALLEY GOLD and was poised to take over the series from his dad while Ben Haas concentrated on mainstream novels. Unfortunately, legal wrangling with Harry Shorten, the publisher of Belmont-Tower, resulted in the premature end of the Fargo series and the turning over of the Sundance series to other authors. And it wasn't long after that that Ben Haas passed away while on a trip to New York to attend a dinner given by the Literary Guild for authors it had published. Ninety novels in seventeen years is a fine legacy, but it's a shame that there couldn't have been more.

I have a copy of THE BORDER JUMPERS and plan to read it and post about it soon. I think I have a copy of Joel's other Fargo novel DEATH VALLEY GOLD, but it's somewhere in the stacks and I haven't found it yet. He's also written a World War II novel that I look forward to reading. Meanwhile, Joel has an interesting blog that you can check out here. Ben Haas has long been one of my literary idols, one of the best action writers of all time, and it's been great to connect with his son and find out more about both of them.

Forgotten Books: Alaska Steel - John Benteen (Ben Haas)

This is the second volume in Ben Haas’s outstanding series about soldier of fortune Neal Fargo. It opens in Hollywood in 1914, where Fargo is working temporarily as an actor, of all things, playing a villain in a silent Western movie directed by Thomas Ince. Ince is the only real-life character to make an appearance in this novel; the hero of the picture is fictional, as is a beautiful actress Fargo meets.

Ince wants Fargo to continue making movies and claims that he can be a big star, but Fargo isn’t interested in make-believe. Having lived a life of adventure, he needs the real thing. So when the actress, Jane Deering, asks him to go to Alaska and find out what happened to her husband, who disappeared there several years earlier while prospecting for gold, Fargo agrees without hesitation. He’s less enthusiastic about the idea of Jane coming along with him to look for the missing man, but she convinces him.

Naturally, things don’t go well, and Fargo and Jane wind up in all sorts of danger in the gold fields of the untamed Yukon country. There are vigilantes, a mysterious killer, blizzards, and assorted mushing around on dog sleds and snowshoes. As usual, Haas spins his yarn in tough, hardboiled prose without a wasted word to be found. He’s one of the best pure action writers I’ve ever run across. This one shows a few signs of hurried writing, but the story sweeps along at such a swift pace I didn’t really care. ALASKA STEEL is a prime example of a short, gritty adventure novel, and like all of Ben Haas’s work that I’ve ever encountered, it’s well worth reading.