Gunsmoke Reckoning - Joseph Chadwick

Texas rancher Cole Mowbrey arrives in Montana on the trail of Matt Kerrigan, who ran off with Cole's sister and then abandoned her to die in a mining camp. He finds that his quarry has a stake in a big ranch, and Kerrigan and his partner are trying to run off all the smaller ranchers and homesteaders in the basin. So Joseph Chadwick’s novel GUNSMOKE RECKONING, published in 1951 by Gold Medal, is both a vengeance quest story and a range war story.

Those are, of course, very traditional plot elements for a Western, and we’ve probably all read books like this dozens, if not hundreds, of times. The appeal of a book like this is in the execution, and Chadwick does a fine job of that in this book, manipulating his plot with great skill and achieving a headlong pace that kept me turning the pages past my usual bedtime, which, let me tell you, at my age is quite a feat of storytelling. He also handles the characterization with a sure hand, so that not everyone in this novel turns out exactly like you might think they would. There’s a romantic rectangle, as well, that’s done about as well as you can do that sort of thing.

Not long ago, I had some pretty harsh things to say about Chadwick’s contributions to the Jim Hatfield series in the pulp TEXAS RANGERS, but as unsuited as I think he was to that series, he’s a great Western writer in his stand-alone novels. GUNSMOKE RECKONING is the best of those I’ve read so far and one of the best traditional Westerns I’ve read in a long time. If you’re a Western fan, I give it a very strong recommendation. As far as I know, it was never reprinted after this 1951 edition with its great A. Leslie Ross cover. That’s my copy in the scan, by the way.