Although he was a prolific author, Davis Dresser wrote only a few books under his own name, and I believe all of them were Westerns. Best known as Brett Halliday, the creator and principal author of the Mike Shayne series, Dresser wrote quite a few Westerns as well, some under the house-name Peter Field (the Powder Valley series), some as Don Davis (the Rio Kid books, reprinted by Pocket Books in the Sixties – but these are not about the pulp character known as the Rio Kid, whose adventures were chronicled by Tom Curry, Walker Tompkins, and others), and three under his own name, two of which feature good-natured cowboy/detectives Twister Malone and Chuckaluck Thompson. [I was wrong; there are four books in the series.]
THE HANGMEN OF SLEEPY VALLEY opens with Twister and Chuckaluck on their way to Mexico, but in West Texas they run across a bizarre scene: a man being hanged by a group of four masked vigilantes . . . and the hoods worn by the vigilantes have only one eye hole each. Twister and Chuckaluck exchange shots with the hangmen and then discover that the hanged man is still alive. They cut him down, take care of him, and find out that the gang of lynchers has been terrorizing Sleepy Valley for months, singling out ranchers and then hanging them if they refuse to heed the gang’s warnings to leave the valley.
Of course, being the heroes that they are, Twister and Chuckaluck aren’t going to stand for that and decide to hide out the man they rescued so the hangmen won’t realize that he’s still alive. They take over the fellow’s ranch and proceed to go after the gang, leading to plenty of ridin’ and shootin’ before the identities of the masked hangmen are uncovered.
While that basic plot is pretty standard, Dresser throws in some nice twists along the way. Nothing on the level of complexity to be found in his Mike Shayne novels, to be sure, but still, I didn’t see all of them coming. What I really liked about the novel are the bizarre little touches like the one-eyed masks worn by the hangmen (Dresser had only one eye, by the way, and his author photos always show him wearing a black eye patch and looking rakish) and the way that he plays against reader expectations with some of the characters. There’s more to Twister and Chuckaluck than you’d think at first, and that’s true of some of the other characters, too.
One word of warning: nearly everybody in this book speaks in heavy “pulp Western” dialect, what I sometimes call “yuh mangy polecat!” dialogue. That was the fashion of the times (the book was originally published by William Morrow in 1940 and reprinted by Pocket Books in 1952 – with an introduction by Erle Stanley Gardner), although some authors were more inclined to it than others. Dresser sort of overdoes it, but I got used to it. Some readers might not.
THE HANGMEN OF SLEEPY VALLEY is a solidly entertaining Western of its era, unreprinted since 1952 and surely forgotten by most. But as a friend of mine who also read the book recently told me, “You can’t go wrong with masked hangmen.” I agree. [The friend of mine who said that to me was, as some of you may have guessed, Bill Crider. Also, all four of the Twister and Chuckaluck novels are now available as e-books, which you can find here: THE HANGMEN OF SLEEPY VALLEY, DEATH RIDES THE PECOS, LYNCH-ROPE LAW, and MURDER ON THE MESA.]
(This post appeared in a somewhat different form on July 18, 2008.)
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