The Ranch Cat (Straight from Boothill) - William Hopson

I’ll admit, I bought this book partially because of the great Mitchell Hooks wrap-around cover, which you can see below in an image found on the Internet. The scan at the top of this post is of my copy. I also bought it partially because I’ve found William Hopson to be a good to very good and occasionally excellent Western author, and because it’s a Lion Book, a short-lived but influential paperback house that published a lot of great authors in the early Fifties. I’m always glad to add another Lion Book to my collection.

THE RANCH CAT was published originally in hardback under the title STRAIGHT FROM BOOTHILL by lending library publisher Phoenix Press in 1947. This retitled reprint from Lion Books came out in 1951. Later, the novel was reprinted in paperback under its original title by Avon (with Steve Holland on the cover!), Macfadden-Bartell, and Leisure Books, at least. There was also a large print edition from Chivers Press. There may be other paperback editions I’m not aware of. But with those bibliographic details out of the way, you may be asking, is it any good?

Oh, yes. This is the best book by William Hopson that I’ve read so far, and one of the best books I’ve read this year, to boot.

Rather than the lurid tale promised by the Hooks cover, the title, and the copy on THE RANCH CAT, or the traditional shoot-em-up indicated by the original title and the other reprint covers, this novel is a low-key, somewhat realistic portrait of ranch life in Montana in the 1890s. It covers several years in time (not counting a modern-day framing sequence) and is narrated by Jim Devers, the son of the ranch owner who, in the course of the book, goes from a gangling teenage boy to a grown man who runs the spread. His sister is the title character in the Lion reprint, a flirtatious beauty who stirs up a great deal of trouble among the crew.

There are some fistfights and a couple of shootings in this book, along with a crooked gambler and a hanging, but none of it is presented in any sort of melodramatic fashion. When violence does break out, it’s sudden and shocking and tragic. A lot of the book is a slow, deliberate ratcheting up of tension among the characters.

And then there’s Quong, a mysterious Chinese cowboy with some secrets in his past. He’s a great character who has a big part to play in the unfolding of life on the Devers ranch. It takes a skilled author to pull off such an oddball plot element without it seeming goofy, and Hopson does a great job of it.

THE RANCH CAT/STRAIGHT FROM BOOTHILL is a hard book to describe but a joy to read. Fairly inexpensive copies of the various editions under the original title are available on Amazon. If you want the Lion edition, it’ll cost you a little more, but still not all that much for a great, forgotten Western novel. I think I’ll remember this one for a long time.

William Hopson