Forgotten Books: The Return of the Kid - Joseph Wayne (Wayne D. Overholser)

Wayne D. Overholser is one of those writers whose books have been around on library and used bookstore shelves as far back as I can remember. For some reason, though, I’ve never read much by him. A few novellas and short stories originally published in the Western pulps, but no novels that I can recall.

However, I recently came across a large print hardback of his 1955 novel THE RETURN OF THE KID and decided to give it a try. This novel was published in hardback by Dutton under the name Joseph Wayne, a pseudonym shared by Overholser and Lewis B. Patten. Evidently, some of the Joseph Wayne books are by Overholser, some by Patten, and some are collaborations between the two men. But since the copyright on this book was renewed by Overholser and it’s been reprinted more than once under his name, I assume it’s one he wrote without Patten.

As you might guess from the title, THE RETURN OF THE KID is a prodigal son yarn. (One minor problem is that nowhere in the book does anybody refer to the protagonist as “the Kid”. But I digress . . .) Jim Dunn returns to his hometown in Colorado after three years as a drifter. He’s the son of the biggest rancher in the area, who has died under mysterious circumstances several months earlier, after marrying a beautiful, much younger woman. It was this marriage, in fact, that caused the trouble between Jim and his father and led to his leaving home. Now his father is dead and the widow and the sinister foreman she’s hired are poised to take over and cut Jim out of his inheritance. He doesn’t intend to let that happen.

But then not everything turns out to be exactly the way Jim believes it to be, and more than one person surprises him. One thing that’s not a surprise, though, is that somebody keeps trying to kill him, and lots of bullets will fly before he sorts everything out.

As you can tell from that set-up, there’s not much in this book that you haven’t seen many times before. In that way, THE RETURN OF THE KID reminds me of the work of L.P. Holmes, who also used standard plots in his novels but wrote them extremely well. Overholser wasn’t the writer that Holmes was, though, at least not in this book, so I had a little trouble with the predictability of the plot and the deliberate pace early in the book. The story never does work its way up to much of a gallop.

However, Overholser has a deft touch with his characters, and the action scenes are good and tough. There are just enough plot twists to keep things interesting. I can see why Overholser had a long, successful career as an author of traditional Westerns, even though I didn’t think THE RETURN OF THE KID was anything special. I enjoyed it enough that I’ll read more by Overholser, but it’ll probably be a while before I get around to it.