Forgotten Books: Burned With the Coyote Brand - Dan Cushman

Dan Cushman is slowly but surely becoming one of my favorite Western pulp writers. After many years of thinking his work was just okay, I’ve developed an appreciation for his pacing, his sometimes over-the-top plots, and his hardboiled tone. BURNED WITH THE COYOTE BRAND reprints three of his novellas from the pulps, and they’re good ones.

“She-Wolf of the Rio Grande” had me at the title and that great LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE cover from March 1949. There’s this beautiful masked Mexican girl called The Angel who leads a gang of bandidos as they wage war against a cattle baron whose ranch is just north of the Rio Grande, and there’s a rival bandit leader, a big hulking brute known as El Gallo, and there’s a stalwart Texas Ranger and a couple of cold-eyed gunfighters and . . . and . . . you get the idea. This is my meat. It’s a great yarn, long enough to have been published as an Ace Double Western novel, and I’m surprised Cushman didn’t try to sell it there, the same way he recycled some of his other pulp stories. Or maybe he did, I don’t know. But I had a wonderful time reading this tale, which I found very well-written except for a couple of action scenes that were a little hard to follow (something that crops up now and then in Cushman’s work).

“Two Queens for Skidway Empire” may have been published in STAR WESTERN (the July 1950 issue), but it’s a Northern all the way, set in the British Columbia timber country in 1908. It’s a logging yarn, in which Buzz Leary returns to the Caribou country to rebuild his family’s failed timber empire. But to do so, he’ll have to throw in with a beautiful, feisty redhead who’s the last member of the family that destroyed Buzz’s family’s business. The other “queen” of the title is a sultry saloon singer, and it’s a toss-up which of the two will betray and/or shoot Buzz first. This is a great yarn with plenty of action. It would have made a top-notch late period Republic Pictures movie with John Wayne as the hero (although I have a little trouble imagining John Wayne playing somebody named “Buzz”).

“Burned With the Coyote Brand” (LARIAT STORY MAGAZINE, July 1947) reminds me of the type of story that Ernest Haycox wrote. It’s a tale of two men clashing over a woman and two half-brothers settling their differences. It’s not as over-the-top as the other two novellas and has a grittier, more realistic tone. There are some good shootouts and fistfights to go with the domestic drama, though, and Cushman does a great job with this slightly more restrained storytelling. The ending is very satisfying.

All three of these novellas are different but they’re also top-notch. Excellent traditional Western tales. And the collection is a late but strong contender for my list of favorite books of the year that’ll be coming up in a few weeks. If you’re a Western fan, BURNED WITH THE COYOTE BRAND gets a very high recommendation from me.