Review: Shootout at Hellyer's Creek - Chap O'Keefe (Keith Chapman)

SHOOTOUT AT HELLYER’S CREEK, recently reprinted in a new edition that’s available in e-book and paperback on Amazon, is the first novel in the Joshua Dillard series by one of my favorite Western writers, Chap O’Keefe (who is actually veteran author and editor Keith Chapman, of course).

In this novel, originally published in 1994 as a Black Horse Western by Robert Hale Ltd. in England, a stagecoach is on its way to the Arizona settlement of Hellyer’s Creek carrying three passengers and a very special cargo: $50,000 intended for the vault of the bank in Hellyer’s Creek. The passengers are a special agent for Wells, Fargo guarding the money, an English actress who’s married to the owner of the biggest saloon and gambling den in the settlement, and Clement P. Conway, a bespectacled Easterner better known as Nate Ironhorn, the author of dozens of popular Western dime novels who wants to interview the legendary lawman who’s currently the marshal of Hellyer’s Creek.

Not surprisingly, the stagecoach is ambushed by outlaws after the loot, which involves the rider who has been trailing the stage: Joshua Dillard, a former Pinkerton operative who is now a freelance gun for hire. Joshua is on a mission of his own, which he interrupts to save the passengers and help them escape from the bandits, which also brings into the story the tomboyish but beautiful redheaded daughter of a drunk who operates the next way station along the stage line. Eventually, everybody winds up in Hellyer’s Creek, trying to navigate and survive a twisty plot rife with corruption, betrayal, and violence.

As always, Chapman weaves together the various strands of his story with great skill and keeps the reader flipping the pages, eager to find out what’s going to happen next. The characters are colorful, downright eccentric in some cases, and interesting. Joshua Dillard, tough and smart but haunted by grief from a tragedy in his past, is a compelling and sympathetic protagonist.

As an added bonus in this book, Chapman includes an essay about the writing and original publication of this novel, including the fact that it wasn’t intended to be the first book in a series, but Joshua was too good a character not to bring back. Likewise, the young redheaded tomboy is a direct forerunner of Misfit Lil, the star of several later novels by Chapman and also a favorite of mine.

If you enjoy traditional Western novels that are fast-moving, full of action, and just a little offbeat, I give SHOOTOUT AT HELLYER’S CREEK a high recommendation, along with all the other Chap O’Keefe novels. I love a book with a distinctive, entertaining voice, and Keith Chapman always delivers.

#430

I just sent in my 430th novel. I used to confine posts like this to more significant milestones, but hey, at my age, every milestone is a significant one. My goal is to make it to 450 novels, which I believe is within reach barring any of the proverbial unforeseen circumstances. I got a good start on #431 while Livia was editing #430, so I had best get back to it. 

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: All-Story Detective, December 1949

ALL-STORY DETECTIVE was a short-lived Popular Publications detective pulp that ran for six issues in the late Forties. This was the last issue under that title. The magazine became 15 STORY DETECTIVE but managed only eight issues under that title. But many of the covers were by Norman Saunders, including this "What the heck is going on here?" number, and there were some good authors in its pages. In this issue, those authors include Frederick C. Davis, Bryce Walton, Bruce Cassiday, and Stuart Friedman, as well as lesser-known authors Robert Carlton, Ed Barcelo, and Robert F. Toombs. Like most of the short-run pulps, I'm sure many of the stories were good and the magazines failed for other reasons.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: New Western Magazine, March 1954

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I’m not sure who did the cover. It might be A. Leslie Ross. The hats look like his work, and so does the sketchiness of some of the details. But I’m not completely convinced it’s by Ross. As always, I’d love to hear what some of you think. NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE lasted only two more issues after this one, so it was on its last legs, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t still a good Western pulp.

I’ve come to realize that Roe Richmond was a pretty good hardboiled Western author despite my dislike for his Jim Hatfield novels in TEXAS RANGERS. His novelette “Bullets Speak My Name!” leads off this issue. The first half of this story is mostly domestic drama as Marshal Jim Elrod tries to reform his wastrel best friend Tucker Brody. Jim and Tuck grew up together, but then Tuck married the girl Jim might have. Now Tuck neglects his family to gamble and carouse with the bad element in town. A murder for which Tuck is blamed raises the stakes even more and leads to several gritty action scenes. Richmond keeps things moving along at a reasonably fast clip and wraps things up in a satisfying way. This is a solid story, nothing special but definitely entertaining.

Will Cook has a solid reputation as a Western writer, but I haven’t been impressed by what I’ve read from him. His story “The Devil’s Double” resembles Richmond’s novelette in that it’s mostly domestic drama. Instead of best friends, we have brothers clashing in this yarn. One is stalwart, the other a ne’er-do-well. The action is sparse, nobody in the story is particularly sympathetic, and I didn’t care for it. So it didn’t change my opinion of Will Cook’s work. Maybe the next one I encounter will.

“Death Rides My Guns!” is the cover story by Richard Ferber. It’s almost entirely very gritty action as a young man fights to reclaim the ranch that’s been stolen from him by his three half-brothers. I’m not sure if it was intentional, but this is the second story in a row in this issue in which the conflict is between brothers. I liked Ferber’s story considerably more than Will Cook’s.

H.A. DeRosso is well-known for the emotional, and sometimes physical, torment he heaps on his characters. In “Two Bullets to Hell”, railroad troubleshooter Sam Lane returns to his home to seek revenge on the man he blames for the murder of his brother-in-law, while at the same time keeping the ranch going that his widowed sister now owns. It’s a very well-written yarn, as you’d expect from DeRosso, and has several twists and turns in the plot. The only real problem with it is that none of the characters are the least bit likable, even the ones you’d think would be sympathetic. It’s a bleak, bitter story. I admire the writing, but I didn’t find it particularly enjoyable.

William Heuman is one of my favorite Western authors, but I don’t think I’ve ever read a cavalry vs. Indians story by him. He generally wrote about lawmen, outlaws, and gunfighters. His story in this issue, “Dead Man’s Pass”, is a cavalry story with a slight twist. It’s set in Oregon instead of somewhere in the Southwest, as such stories usually are, and the Indians are Modocs, not Apaches or Comanches. A group of cavalrymen are pinned down and outnumbered, and the only way for them to escape involves a daring plan almost certain to result in the death of the officer who leads it. However, one of the lieutenants who would normally lead such a breakout is the son of the major in command of the troops. It’s a compelling moral dilemma, and Heuman comes up with an interesting way to solve it. The writing is excellent. I thought the ending might have been a bit too abrupt, but overall “Dead Man’s Pass” is a very good story.

Stone Cody’s novelette “The Kid From Hell” was published originally under the title “The Lost Gunman” in the November 1937 issue of STAR WESTERN. Cody was actually Thomas E. Mount, who also wrote under the pseudonym Oliver King. Mount is one of my favorite Western pulpsters and was also a pretty interesting character in real life. You can read more about his background here in my review of his novel THE GUN WITH THE WAITING NOTCH. “The Kid From Hell” is an amnesia story, something that you come across now and then in the pulps. Young Dave Walker and the old-timer who raised him are gunned down by hired killers working for the range hog who wants their ranch. The old-timer is killed, and Dave is thrown into an empty boxcar on a passing train. The gunmen figure he’ll be dead by the time he’s found. But he survives, of course, except he doesn’t remember who he is or how he got shot. And when he recovers, he falls in with a gang of outlaws . . .

Mount packs enough plot into this novelette for a novella or possibly even a novel. In fact, I think it would have been even better at a longer length since he has to cover quite a bit of ground in a hurry at times. But it’s still a very, very good yarn. I really like the way Mount writes. The characters are interesting, the dialogue is good, the action is plentiful, and even his shorter stories have an epic feel to them. I definitely intend to read more by him.

The stories by Mount and Heuman are certainly the highlights of this issue, but Richmond and Ferber turn in pretty good stories, too. The DeRosso was slightly disappointing but still readable, and the one by Will Cook was the only story I didn’t like. So I’d say this is a good issue of NEW WESTERN MAGAZINE, worth reading if you have it on your shelves.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Gentlemen of the Road - Michael Chabon

I was prepared to like GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD for a couple of reasons: it looked like the sort of historical adventure novel that I usually enjoy, and I knew that author Michael Chabon has an appreciation of and fondness for genre fiction despite being known as a literary author. And with a couple of quibbles, I did like it, quite a bit.

Despite the fact that he’s working with a historical setting here, rather than a fantasy one, what GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD most resembles are the stories of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser by Fritz Leiber. Zelikmann and Amram are a couple of traveling adventurers, mercenaries, and con artists. Zelikmann is an angst-ridden Frank with medical training (and in his description he bears a certain resemblance to Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane), while Amram is a massive Abyssinian who wields a Viking axe. They find themselves in the Caucasus Mountains near the Caspian Sea, in what would be modern-day Azerbaijan, helping a young nobleman who’s a fugitive from the usurper who murdered the rest of the young man’s family. But of course, not all is as it seems to be, and after a series of picaresque adventures, several massacres, an attempted coup, and encounters with assorted elephants, Zelikmann and Amram finally get everything straightened out satisfactorily.

While I thought this novel was a lot of fun, a couple of things about it bothered me. Chabon’s colorful but long-winded style worked pretty well for the first seventy or eighty pages but began to get a little tiresome after that. If he had cut back on it and picked up the pace just a little, I think I would have enjoyed the book even more. The other thing is a curious lack of action. There are several big battles, but they occur off-screen with Zelikmann and Amram showing up after all the fighting is over. The few action scenes that actually take place are described in such a restrained manner that it’s hard to get excited about them. Maybe reading and rereading Howard for forty years has spoiled me, but in a story like this I want swords to flash, heads to roll, and blood to flow in rivers. But that’s just me, I suppose.

Overall, GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD is pretty entertaining, and if Chabon decides to write another novel with these characters, I wouldn’t hesitate to read it.

(In the 17+ years since this post originally appeared on April 13, 2008, I haven't read anything else by Michael Chabon, and as far as I know, he hasn't written anything else about these characters. I haven't really looked into it, though, so I could be wrong about that. This is one still available in e-book and paperback editions.)

Review: Dream Town - David Baldacci

DREAM TOWN is the third and for the moment final book in David Baldacci’s series about Aloysius Archer, ex-GI, ex-con, and as this book opens on New Year’s Eve 1952, a private detective working for an agency in Bay Town, California, up the coast from Los Angeles. But Archer is in L.A. to celebrate the new year with his friend, actress Liberty Callahan. While they’re having dinner at Chasen’s, a female screenwriter who knows Liberty joins the pair briefly and, finding out that Archer is a private eye, hires him to find out who’s responsible for some vaguely threatening things that have happened to her lately.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, before 1953 has hardly gotten started, there’s been a murder and Archer has literally tripped over the body, just before (of course) he gets hit on the head and knocked out. That’s just the beginning of an extremely complex plot featuring, as they say, a cast of thousands. Well, not quite, but sometimes it almost feels that way. There are a lot of characters to keep up with in this book as Archer’s investigation takes him from the highest planes of Hollywood royalty to a bunch of down-and-dirty, very dangerous characters—and sometimes those are one and the same.

Okay, obligatory complaint about how the book is too long. It is, but the plot almost justifies the length in this one. For the first half of the book, things seem relatively simple, but then Baldacci throws in twist after twist, to the point that I almost felt like I was reading an Erle Stanley Gardner book. I had a really strong hunch that the whole thing was going to go off the rails sooner or later, too, but Baldacci makes it all make sense.

With that plot, setting, and time period, you know I’m the target audience for this book. All three of the Archer books seem heavily influenced by Raymond Chandler, and that influence is really strong in this one. Archer is an excellent protagonist, smart enough and tough enough to survive but not a superhero by any means. He’s pretty good with the banter, too. Baldacci does a good job capturing the early Fifties, other than one anachronism.

The first two books in this series are ONE GOOD DEED and A GAMBLING MAN, and I enjoyed both of them. DREAM TOWN is even better and ends on a great note for sequels. Baldacci has said he’s going to write more about the character. I really hope he does. You can get this one in e-book, audiobook, hardcover, or paperback, and if you’re a fan of private eye fiction in the classic style (even if it’s not old enough to actually be called a classic yet), I give it a high recommendation.

Review: The Red Tassel - David Dodge

THE RED TASSEL is the third and final novel by David Dodge to feature Al Colby, a private detective/troubleshooter who works primarily for U.S. business interests in South America. It was published in hardcover by Random House in 1950 and reprinted in paperback by Dell in 1952 with a cover by Robert Stanley. The same Stanley cover art graces the recent reprint from the fine folks at Black Gat Books, which is available in paperback from Amazon and also includes an excellent introduction by Randal S. Brandt.

In this novel, Al Colby, who is a very likable narrator/protagonist, is hired by beautiful redhead Pancha Porter, who inherited a lead and silver mine in the mountains of Bolivia from her father. The mine’s production has dropped dramatically, and Pancha wants Al to find out why and put a stop to it. The situation is complicated, as far as Al is concerned, by Pancha’s insistence on traveling to the mine with him. And since she’s footing the bill, he can’t really say no.

They run into trouble before they even arrive and meet all the colorful characters at the mine and the nearby village of Indian workers. Those colorful characters include a witch doctor who holds a grudge against Pancha’s late father, a neurotic young man and his overprotective mother, assorted surly servants and employees, and an old woman who wanders around acting like a lunatic . It’ll come as no surprise to most readers that a murder takes place sooner rather than later, and Al find himself in deadly danger more than once.

Dodge and his family lived in South America and the setting for this novel is based on a real place. You can tell that from the excellent descriptive writing. THE RED TASSEL is well-plotted, too, not extraordinarily complex but always solid and intriguing. I figured out the killer’s identity and most of what was going on, but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this book even a little bit. That’s how good the characters and the writing are.

Dodge is best remembered for his novel TO CATCH A THIEF, which served as the basis for the famous Alfred Hitchcock movie with Cary Grant and Grace Kelly. I haven’t read that one, but I have read the second Al Colby novel, PLUNDER OF THE SUN (also a movie) and the posthumously published THE LAST MATCH. I really liked both of those books, too. I need to read more by David Dodge. I thoroughly enjoyed THE RED TASSEL and give it a high recommendation. It’s a smoothly told, very entertaining tale.

Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp: Detective Fiction Weekly, March 28, 1931

This isn't a particularly dramatic Mountie cover on this issue of DETECTIVE FICTION WEEKLY, but I don't recall coming across a Mountie on a DFW cover before, so I find it interesting. I don't know who painted it. There's certainly a decent group of authors in this issue, including Hulbert Footner, Fred MacIsaac, J. Allan Dunn, J. Lane Linklater, and Edward Parrish Ware. Those are all prolific, well-respected pulpsters. I don't own this issue, but I think it would be worth reading if I did. 

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Double Action Western, January 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I don’t know who painted the cover. It’s not a great cover, in my opinion, but it’s not really a bad cover, either. And the map of Texas has El Paso not quite in the right place. They didn’t think they could slip that past a born-bred-and-forever Texan like me, did they? But on to the stories.

Seven Anderton is an unjustly forgotten writer who had a decent career in the Western, detective, and sports pulps from the late Twenties to the late Fifties, producing around a hundred stories during that run, many of them novellas or novelettes. But he never wrote an actual novel as far as I know, which is probably one reason he’s forgotten. His novella “Her Name is Battle” leads off this issue, and the title is literal: the heroine is named Esther Battle. She’s a Western girl born and raised who has been at an Eastern school the past few years, but as the story opens, she’s returning to claim the ranch she’s inherited from her uncle. During the trip, she makes some allies: a giant Swede who wants to become a cowboy, and an actual down-on-his-luck cowboy who winds up being hired as Esther’s foreman. Naturally, there’s an evil banker who wants to take over the ranch, even if it means kidnapping or killing Esther before she arrives.

As far as the set-up goes, there’s nothing in this story we haven’t read many times before, but Anderton populates his yarn with distinctive, well-developed, and even colorful characters. His writing is smooth and funny at times, tough and gritty at others. “Her Name is Battle” is just a well-written, very entertaining story with a few welcome twists. Unfortunately, it kind of limps to an ending that’s not as satisfying as it could have been, which is something I’ve noticed in other stories by Anderton. It’s like he pulls back rather than going for a big finish. However, that didn’t stop me from enjoying this story, and I won’t hesitate to read more by him.

During the Thirties, Cliff Campbell was a personal pseudonym for writer and editor Abner J. Sundell. In the Forties, it became a Columbia Publications house-name used by numerous authors on Western, detective, and sports stories. The actual author of “Killer From Texas”, a novella in this issue by-lined Cliff Campbell, hasn’t been determined as far as I know, but whoever it was did a pretty good job. Drifting cowpoke Homer Kale rides into a Wyoming settlement figuring on having a quiet drink, but before you know it, he’s been accused by a beautiful girl of murdering an old prospector, and he’s locked up in jail before being taken out by a lynch mob. Homer barely escapes that necktie party and goes on the run from the law, knowing that the only way he can save his life is by finding the real killer. It’s a time-worn plot, to be sure, but “Campbell” spins his yarn with skill and enthusiasm, combining some surprisingly lighthearted scenes with a grotesque and suitably evil villain, some other colorful characters, and enough gritty action to keep things interesting. I couldn’t even make a guess who actually wrote this one, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I’d read a couple of stories by W. Edmunds Claussen before and had a mixed reaction to them. One I thought was kind of okay, the other I didn’t like. His novelette in this issue, “Gun-Smuggler Trail”, falls into the kind of okay category. It has a pretty good plot: fiddlefooted adventurer Burt Moffat returns to his family’s ranch in New Mexico to find that his father and his brother (a U.S. marshal) have both been murdered, and outlaws are using the ranch to smuggle guns across the border to Pancho Villa in Mexico. The smuggling gang uses an old ghost town as its headquarters. The story is atmospheric and violent, but Claussen’s convoluted style can be hard to read and follow. So this is sort of a miss, but an interesting one that might have been a really good story in different hands.

“Gunslick Trio From Hell” is by Charles D. Richardson Jr., another author whose work I’ve found to be okay at best. In this story, a reformed outlaw who has become the respected mayor of a frontier settlement has his past crop up to haunt him in the form of three members of his old gang. Things play out about like you’d expect them to, but in rather bland fashion and nobody in the story is really all that likable. And overall, I didn’t like the story much.

Lee Floren’s work is hit-and-miss with me, but mostly I like his stories. “Triggers for a Texan” in this issue is another interesting yarn that’s not particularly well-written, but I liked it considerably better than Claussen’s novelette. It’s about a Texan who has sworn off using a gun because of violence in his past, but when he gets involved in a Wyoming range war, he has to choose whether to pick up a Colt again. We’ve all read this plot many times before, but Floren does a decent job with it, attempting a few stylistic tricks that don’t quite come off but don’t keep it from being an entertaining yarn.

Chuck Martin, who often wrote as Charles M. Martin as well, is another dependably entertaining Western pulpster. His story “Gun or Gallows” in this issue is about a young marshal working for Judge Isaac Parker, the famous Hanging Judge. He has to arrest an old friend of his for murder, but he doesn’t believe the man is guilty, so the two of them set out together to find the real killer. I didn’t like this one as much as the other stories I’ve read by Martin, but it’s not bad. The ending is a considerable stretch, though.

Lon Williams is a pretty well-regarded author because of his series of Weird Western stories about Deputy Sheriff Lee Winters. I’ve read a few of those, though, and I’m not really a fan. His contribution to this issue is a short stand-alone story called “Stolen Waters” about a crooked lawyer and forger getting his comeuppance. It’s a very minor story but reasonably well-written.

Overall, this issue of DOUBLE ACTION WESTERN is probably a below average Western pulp, with the best story being the “Cliff Campbell” house-name yarn, and the Seven Anderton story is good, too. None of the others are terrible, but they’re not very memorable, either. Don’t rush to your shelves to see if you have this issue. If you do read it, go in with low expectations and it’ll probably provide at least some entertainment.

A Rough Edges Rerun Review: The Ship of Shadows - H. Bedford-Jones

THE SHIP OF SHADOWS is a Black Dog Books chapbook reprint of a vintage pulp adventure yarn by H. Bedford-Jones. This one was originally published as a complete novel in the February 1920 issue of BLUE BOOK, one of the classiest of the pulps.

Eric Venable is a minister who finds himself beset by tragedy and winds up a drug addict. That’s not a spoiler, because it’s the situation as the story opens. Venable loses his church and sinks far into the depths of degradation, only to wind up being shanghaied onto a tramp steamer bound for China. That proves to be his salvation, of course, because he’s forced to get over his opium habit and the hard work as part of the ship’s black gang builds up his body and returns his strength to him.

That’s still just prologue to the main story, which finds Venable and the ship’s engineer who has befriended him signing on as part of the crew on a mysterious ship sailing from China back to America. What Venable and his friend Garrity don’t know until it’s too late is that the ship’s passengers are all Russians, a volatile mixture of aristocrats and Bolsheviks. Each group wants to kill the other and wind up with their hands on a fortune in gems and religious artifacts which were smuggled out of Russia by a group of nobles on the run from the Reds. And there’s intrigue going on among the groups, too, as double-crosses abound.

Throw in storms at sea, a few gun battles, knife-wielding Chinamen, some far-fetched coincidences, and a little romance and you’ve got a fine example of a blood-and-thunder adventure yarn. Being decidedly old-fashioned (it was written nearly ninety years ago) [105 years ago now] and somewhat politically incorrect, it won’t be to everyone’s taste these days, of course, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

(This post originally appeared in a somewhat different form on April 3, 2008. I love those Black Dog Books chapbooks Tom Roberts published, own most of them, and have read many of them. Great stuff all around. I don't believe this one is available directly from the publisher anymore, but affordable used copies can be found on-line. I still highly recommend it for any fans of pulp adventure yarns.)