Bolt #1: First Blood - Cort Martin (Jory Sherman)

It had been quite a while since I read an Adult Western. Finding myself in the mood for one, I picked up BOLT #1: FIRST BLOOD by Cort Martin. The Eighties were really the heyday of the Adult Western with dozens of different series on the paperback racks, including this one that ran for 26 books, all published by Zebra, from 1981 to 1988.

Jared Bolt is the protagonist of this series, and as the first book opens in 1870 he’s only eighteen years old. But he’s already involved with an older girl (22), meeting her regularly for romps in the hayloft, and when she turns up pregnant, she wants him to marry her. Bolt, who isn’t a very sympathetic protagonist, wants nothing to do with that, so he runs away from home (which is Ellsworth, Kansas), earning the enmity of the girl, her father, his own preacher father, and his strait-laced older brother.

When we meet Bolt again, five years have passed. He’s become a cowboy and picked up some skills at gun handling, and he still beds every woman who’ll give him the time of day, married or single. He and a friend are driving a small herd of cattle north from Texas, intending to sell them in Kansas. Bolt gets involved with a married woman along the way and kills her husband in self-defense when the man comes after him. The guy abuses his wife, so Bolt doesn’t come off as a total jerk in this situation. The dead man also has a father who’s a judge and a brother who’s a marshal, so Bolt is in for more trouble from them. His older brother is still on his trail, too.

That’s pretty much all the plot we get in this book, various people chasing Bolt and him trying to survive, but since Cort Martin was really Jory Sherman, FIRST BLOOD is well-written and most of the characters have at least some complexity and depth. Jared Bolt, despite his moral failings, still manages to be likable somehow. The numerous action scenes are excellent.

I recall Jory saying that while he wrote this book and the contracts for all the others were in his name, his wife Charlotte actually ghosted the rest of the series. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I enjoyed FIRST BLOOD enough that I intend to read at least the second one and see if I can tell any difference in the writing. I used to have the entire series in paperback, but those copies were lost in the Fire of ’08. Luckily, e-book editions of this and all the others are available on Amazon. If you’re an Adult Western fan, I think the Bolt series is worth checking out.