The Nightmare Riders - Lynn Westland (Archie Joscelyn)

The very prolific Archie Joscelyn’s best-known pseudonym was Al Cody, but he wrote quite a few Western novels under the name Lynn Westland, too. THE NIGHTMARE RIDERS is an early Westland novel, published by lending library publisher Phoenix Press in 1940. My copy doesn't have a dust jacket, but I found the above image on-line.

This novel makes use of the old amnesia plot. I used it myself in one of my Longarms, I recall. In THE NIGHTMARE RIDERS, a drifting cowpoke who can’t remember who he is comes across a bushwhacked old-timer who recognizes him and calls him by the name Jody Johnson. But who is Jody Johnson? The old-timer dies before he can reveal that. Jody decides he might as well use that name, even though it means nothing to him, and soon discovers that the murdered man owned a ranch and had a beautiful granddaughter. The local saloon owner/cattle baron has his eyes on the ranch and also on a gold mine located on the spread, even though the diggings have never paid off. Jody hangs around to help the granddaughter, of course, and maybe find out more about who he really is.

That doesn’t take long, because he soon sees the deputy in town tacking up a reward poster stating that Jody Johnson is wanted for murder.

Well, we’re off on a whirlwind of action after that, as Jody foils the villain’s schemes and gradually uncovers the truth of his own identity. Joscelyn’s prose, especially at this stage of his career, runs toward the melodramatic, but a little purple prose never bothered me much. There are some excellent, highly suspenseful scenes late in the book that take place in the mine’s underground tunnels. I’m a little claustrophobic to start with, and this section was genuinely creepy to me. The ending’s not quite as dramatic as it could have been, but it still worked okay.

THE NIGHTMARE RIDERS reminded me of a 1930s B-Western movie, maybe not top tier Republic Pictures stuff, but better than, say, Monogram or PRC. It’s not one of Archie Joscelyn’s best novels but I still had a fine time reading it.