Ride Into Yesterday/Ed Gorman

This is one of Ed Gorman’s earlier Westerns, originally published by Walker in 1992 under the pseudonym Christopher Keegan, then reprinted in paperback by Leisure in 1999 under Gorman’s name. But even if I had read the original edition without knowing who the author really was, I think I would have suspected that Ed wrote it. It has all the hallmarks of a Gorman Western: lean prose; characters who are wounded physically, spiritually, or both; a small town that harbors deadly secrets; and an air of grim melancholy that’s relieved somewhat by glimmerings of hope.

Gunfighter Stephen Payne – who never really wanted his reputation as a gunman – arrives in the small town of Favor, where his younger brother committed suicide after robbing a stagecoach. But Payne doesn’t believe that his brother really did either of those things. He thinks that his brother was murdered, and he sets out to discover the truth. It doesn’t take long for his investigation to put him in deadly danger, so he knows his suspicions must be correct. This is a fine book all around, with a particularly satisfying ending.

On a related note, I’ve read several Westerns by Lewis B. Patten lately, and I’ve been struck by the qualities they share with Gorman’s Westerns. Patten wasn’t the writer that Ed is, and his plots are more conventional. He was also inconsistent, producing some pretty bad books at times. But his good ones are well worth reading, and if you’ve read all of Ed Gorman’s Westerns and are looking for something similar, you could do worse than give Patten a try. Some books of his I’ve read recently that I liked quite a bit: PRODIGAL GUNFIGHTER, THE LAW IN COTTONWOOD, and LYNCHING AT BROKEN BUTTE.