Blood Brand - Larry Lawson

Every so often I run across writers I’ve never even heard of, let alone read. One such is Larry Lawson, who wrote a few Western novels in the late Fifties and early Sixties. A friend of mine asked me about Lawson, and I had to admit to not knowing anything. But of course, that intrigued me, so I had to look up his books. They appeared to be fairly interesting, so I ordered three of them.

The first one I’ve read is BLOOD BRAND, a 1957 Pyramid Books paperback that’s actually a reprint of a novel called PRAIRIE GUNS, published in hardcover by Arcadia House a year earlier in 1956. As far as I can tell, this is Lawson’s first novel. The protagonist is Clabe Burdett, a convict who has spent fifteen years in prison for robbing a bank and wounding a man in his attempted getaway. He also killed three men in a gunfight before that. He’s getting a second chance, because the prison allows him out on what would now be called a work release program. Burdett becomes a hired man to farmer Mark Eccles, who’s in something of a bind because his crops have been bad and his former friend, the local cattle baron, has his eye on Eccles’ land. The rancher, whose name is Riker, has already gobbled up several smaller farms and ranches in the area.

By the way, Eccles also has a pretty wife and a young son. With that domestic set-up, a looming range war, and a bad guy named Riker, I think there’s a distinct possibility that Lawson read or watched SHANE at some point in his life.

However, before you start thinking that BLOOD BRAND is just a rip-off of a much more famous book and movie, you should know that while Lawson’s starting point does seem to be a little suspicious, he spins his yarn off into unexpected directions and develops his characters with admirable moral complexity. Clabe Burdett, while sympathetic, is never really a very likable protagonist, and you get that same mix of good and bad in just about everybody in this novel except the kid, who still has his youthful innocence. The action scenes, while a little sparse, are brutally effective. BLOOD BRAND isn’t a lost masterpiece, by any means, but it is a slightly above average traditional Western and I enjoyed reading it.

So who was Larry Lawson? According to copyright records, his real name was Clarence O. Lawson . . . unless it was Clarence V. Lawson, as the copyright records say in another place. When the original edition of this book came out in 1956 under the title PRAIRIE GUNS, a short, favorable review of it appeared in THE OAKLAND TRIBUNE and referred to Lawson as a Berkeley author, so I guess it’s safe to assume that he lived there then. The Fictionmags Index lists Larry Lawson as the author of one story in the pulp LOVE STORY in 1940, so I suppose it’s possible that’s the same guy. There are no listings for Clarence Lawson, C.V. Lawson, or C.O. Lawson. That’s all I know about him at this point. You can’t ever tell, maybe one of his relatives will see this post and give us more information about this forgotten Western writer. Stranger things have happened.