Review: Rancho Bravo #1: Calhoon - Thorne Douglas (Ben Haas)

Last week I reran a review of a Ben Haas novel from some years back, and that put me in the mood to read another Western by him. For decades, I’ve been meaning to read his Rancho Bravo novels, a five-book series published by Fawcett in the Seventies under the pseudonym Thorne Douglas. I know an omen when I see one, so I dug out my copy of CALHOON, the first book in the series.

Lucius Calhoon comes to Texas right after the Civil War. A former Confederate cavalry captain, he’s lost the plantation he owned in South Carolina and also lost his right hand to torture he was subjected to in a Yankee prison camp. The man responsible for that torture was a young Union officer named Gordon Weymouth. Weymouth is supposed to be in Texas, at a town in the South Texas brush country along the Nueces River. Unlike many former Confederates, Calhoon doesn’t head for Texas to make a fresh start. He’s there for one reason and one reason only: to kill Gordon Weymouth.

And of course, things don’t work out that way. Calhoon rescues a former slave from a lynching attempt and befriends a flat broke rancher who has a big spread of chapparal and thousands of mostly wild longhorns. The rancher, Henry Gannon, is going to lose the ranch to the corrupt Reconstruction judge the Yankees have put in charge of the area, who just happens to be Gordon Weymouth’s father. Calhoon throws in with Gannon and the former slave, Elias Whitton, and decides to help them achieve their dream of driving Gannon’s cattle to West Texas and establishing a ranch there, in the middle of Comanche country, to be called Rancho Bravo. The local commander of the Yankee occupation forces, Captain Philip Killraine, is sympathetic to their cause, as is his beautiful sister Evelyn.

Unfortunately, that may not be enough to allow the partners to stand up to the political corruption and greed of the Weymouths, father and son, and the violence of the brutal Regulators who work for them.

CALHOON is a flat-out superb Western novel. Haas manipulates his plot skillfully, piling up trouble and more trouble on his heroes. Lucius Calhoon, as the protagonist of this book, comes in for the most character development, and he’s a fascinating individual, very demon-haunted and not even all that likable at times, but always sympathetic to the reader. The other characters are interesting, as well, including the villainous Weymouths. And of course, there’s plenty of the great action you’d expect in a Ben Haas novel. He was one of the best there ever was at writing both close combat (fistfights and knife fights) and epic, large-scale battles.

I galloped through this book and enjoyed every page of it. I think it’s one of the best Ben Haas novels I’ve ever read. And it’s really just the opening chapter in a much bigger tale. I suspect I’ll be reading the second book in the Rancho Bravo series very soon. CALHOON is available in an e-book edition from the fine folks at Piccadilly Publishing, and so are the rest of the books in the series.