Flame in the West - Lewis B. Patten

I hadn’t read a Lewis B. Patten Western in a while, and when my buddy Pete Brandvold picked up a copy of this one, which I’d never even heard of, I figured it was a sign I should get my hands on a copy of my own and read it. That turned out to be a good decision.

FLAME IN THE WEST was published as a paperback original by Berkley Medallion in 1962 and reprinted a few years later. I read the second edition, and that’s my copy in the scan. The cover art has a signature, but I can’t make it out. There was also a British paperback from Fontana in 1965, but that appears to be it. Online scans of the original Berkley edition and the Fontana edition are below. I’m surprised there was never a large print edition, given Patten’s consistent popularity as a Western writer in the library market.

With that bibliographic stuff out of the way, how’s the book itself, you ask? Well, pretty darned good. Almost great. We’ll get to why I say “almost”. But it starts out fantastic with a first-person account of Quantrill’s famous raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863. The narrator is Matt Leatherman, an orphan who works for local merchant Eben Sundine. Sundine doesn’t really support the Confederacy, but he is from the South so the local abolitionists hate him and have dubbed him a Copperhead. They’ve even vandalized his store by writing that on the front wall. Quantrill’s raiders see that and don’t destroy Sundine’s store, but in the aftermath of the violence, the local citizens blame Sundine for what has happened, so they burn down his store and house, killing his wife and badly burning his son in the process. An embittered, hate-filled Eben Sundine takes his son and daughter and heads west to Colorado to start a new life. Young Matt Leatherman tags along, since he has nothing keeping him in Lawrence.

Experienced Western readers will have a pretty good idea where the rest of this novel is going. Sundine, with Matt’s help, becomes a successful rancher after the war. His badly scarred son becomes a vicious gunman. His daughter grows up into a beautiful woman and she and Matt fall in love. Sundine battles smaller ranchers who try to encroach on what he considers his domain. Despite the fact that FLAME IN THE WEST is fairly short, maybe 45,000 words, Patten achieves a real epic feel in this novel.

If you’ve read much of Patten’s work, you know it’s well-written, very bleak, and essentially humorless. If not for the fact that he usually came up with semi-happy endings, I’d say his books are even darker than H.A. DeRosso’s. That’s certainly the case in FLAME IN THE WEST, where he piles tragedy after tragedy and bad decision after bad decision on his characters. Because of that, I wouldn’t want a steady diet of Patten’s work, but when I’m in the right mood, it’s very effective.

Where FLAME IN THE WEST is slightly disappointing is in its ending. To be honest, by that point, Patten has written his characters into such a terrible corner that I’m not sure it’s even possible to write a satisfying ending to such a tale. Despite that weakness, this is a very good book and contains some of Patten’s best writing. Matt Leatherman is a fine narrator/protagonist and Patten does a good job of capturing his various moral dilemmas. I raced through this book, reading the whole thing in a day and staying up late to finish it, which is very unusual for me. If you’re a Patten fan or a fan of traditional Westerns with a dark edge, it’s well worth reading.