Brand Rider - Ed La Vanway

Ed La Vanway’s name was only vaguely familiar to me, but I came across this Dell paperback by him, with a nice cover by John Leone, and was intrigued enough to pick it up and read it. Further investigation into the author reveals that he published a couple of dozen stories in the Western pulps from the late Forties to the late Fifties, when that market was drying up, and also wrote five or six Western novels, most of them from library publisher Avalon Books.

BRAND RIDER appears to have been La Vanway’s first novel, published by Dodd, Mead in 1958 and reprinted by Dell in 1961. It’s a save-the-ranch yarn, and also a cattlemen-versus-sodbusters yarn, as gunman John Lane is hired by a cattle baron to take over a ranch in which the cattle baron has a financial interest. The ranch actually belongs to a beautiful young woman, the daughter of the cattle baron’s recently deceased partner. In a nice twist, she’s the one who wants to go after the sodbusters and run them out by force if necessary, and the gunman/protagonist who’s reluctant to do so, because in this case he believes the farmers may be within their rights.

In addition to this, there’s a banker who may or may not be crooked, a deputy sheriff who’s definitely crooked (he’s an old enemy of the protagonist), a couple of different romantic triangles, a murder for which our hero is framed, and a stampede. Plenty of elements for a solid traditional Western.

Is that what La Vanway delivers? Well . . . sort of. The plot is good, the characters are interesting, and La Vanway does a fine job with the Texas setting, which makes me think he probably was a Texan. I couldn’t find any biographical info about him on-line. The action scenes, when they eventually break out, are handled well. But the book is very slow-paced and John Lane spends a lot more time thinking and brooding than he does riding and shooting. Call me shallow, but I like plenty of powder-burning in my Westerns.

Overall, I’d say BRAND RIDER is a slightly below average traditional Western, but there was enough I liked that I don’t consider the time spent reading it wasted. And La Vanway’s Texas feels authentic enough that I’m tempted to read something else by him, although I won’t rush right out to do so. If any of you have read his work and have any recommendations, I’d be glad to hear them.