Wyoming Way - Roe Richmond

Young Dan Ruylander is the son of a wealthy rancher in Wyoming and is given the job of going to Oregon, buying a herd of cattle there, and driving them back to Wyoming. Several members of his father’s crew accompany him on this journey.

All is not as straightforward as it seems, however. The ranch in Oregon where Dan is going to get the cattle belongs to the son and daughter of Dan’s father’s old partner, who double-crossed him and stole the woman he loved thirty years earlier. Dan’s father has hatched an elaborate scheme to get revenge, even though his former partner is dead and the plot targets the man’s grown children. Dan doesn’t like the idea, and he likes it even less when he gets to Oregon and falls in love with the daughter of his father’s old enemy, but he feels like he has to go through with it out of loyalty to his father. Throw in a romantic triangle involving a beautiful redheaded saloon girl, a gambler/gunman with a grudge against Dan, and two crews of cowboys that hate each other, and the long drive back to Wyoming seems likely to be filled with danger.

That’s the plot, and a semi-complicated one it is, of WYOMING WAY, a 1958 novel by Roe Richmond published by Avalon Books and reprinted a couple of times in large print later on. I read the original Avalon edition.

I’ll be honest: I’ve never been much of a Roe Richmond fan, even though in a convoluted way he unknowingly helped my career (you can find that story here). But I haven’t read much by him, either, mostly some of the Jim Hatfield novels he wrote for the pulp TEXAS RANGERS under the house-name Jackson Cole. My complaint about his Hatfield novels is that he just didn’t “get” the character. You don’t take a stalwart protagonist known as the Lone Wolf and surround him with a gaggle of lame sidekicks, but that’s exactly what Richmond did in his Hatfields. The novels worked somewhat better when Richmond rewrote them into a series of paperback original novels, with Hatfield replaced by Lash Lashtrow, but I still didn’t care much for the two or three of those I read.

However, Richmond wrote quite a few other stories for the Western pulps and a number of Western novels, including a tie-in novel based on the TV show THE DEPUTY, starring Henry Fonda, that was later republished under the title THE SAGA OF SIMON FRY. His work seems to be fairly well-regarded by those who remember him, so I figured it might be worthwhile to give one of those stand-alone novels a try.

WYOMING WAY is pretty good, well-written in a nice hardboiled style, with good descriptions of the settings, some emotional depth to the characters, and a number of excellent action scenes. The big gun battle at the end is top-notch. The book didn’t turn me into a Roe Richmond fan, but it’s certainly entertaining enough that I would read more by him.

Also, the saga of the Beemer Public Library continues. Like Curtis Bishop’s RIO GRANDE, which I reviewed a few weeks ago, my copy’s original owner was the library in Beemer, Nebraska, where it entered the collection as book #2974 on November 1, 1958. It was a little more popular than RIO GRANDE, having been checked out 27 times. RIO GRANDE had 19 check-outs. Comparing the book cards, I see that many of the same people read both books. Unfortunately, I think these are the only two Beemer Public Library books that I have.

Also as with RIO GRANDE, my copy of WYOMING WAY has no dust jacket and there’s no image of one on-line, so I’ve used a stock photo of one of the large print editions instead.