Recently I read some pulp stories by J.E. Grinstead that I enjoyed, so I decided to pick up a novel by him and give it a try. HELL RANGE IN TEXAS is a 1958 paperback from Avon that was published originally under the title LAW OF THE TRAIL as a 1940 hardback by Dodge Publishing, one of the lending library publishers. This is probably an expansion of Grinstead’s novella “The Law of the Trail Herd”, which appeared in the September 1926 issue of the pulp THE FRONTIER. The Avon paperback I read (that’s my copy in the scan) says that it’s revised, but I don’t know what that revision consisted of. It’s possible Grinstead just went back to the pulp version after adding material to make it longer for the hardback edition. That’s pure speculation on my part, however, just the sort of thing that makes sense to me.
This story takes place in Texas (of course) in the days following the Civil War when the cattle industry is just getting started in the state and herds have started being driven up the trails through Indian Territory to the railhead in Kansas. The setting is a little unusual, though, in that the action takes place along the Little River in central Texas, rather than in West or South Texas like most Westerns. I’ve driven across the bridge over the Little River just south of Cameron, Texas, many times, and I’ve always thought it was a scenic stream and would make a good setting for a Western. That’s what Grinstead has done.
Most trail bosses in Western fiction are the protagonists, or at least sympathetic characters, but not Shag Sanders in this novel. He’s the bad guy in the first half of the book, stealing cattle from local ranchers as he heads north and buying rustled stock cheaply from outlaws. Old cattleman Montgomery Jackson (who, just as you suspect, has a beautiful daughter) is determined to put a stop to this, leading to a gun battle with Sanders and his crew shooting it out with the cowboys from Jackson’s spread.
However, one of Sanders’ men, young and gun-handy Frank Carleton, goes over to the other side and throws in with Jackson and his bunch, becoming a staunch ally in Jackson’s clash with a rival rancher who works with the crooked trail drivers. Matters are complicated by the fact that Jackson’s beautiful daughter is supposed to marry the rival rancher’s son.
You might also suspect that all this is going to lead up to a big showdown, and you’d be right. Along the way, Grinstead gives us plenty of colorful characters and Old West dialogue without getting too heavy-handed about it.
I’ve mentioned in previous posts that Grinstead was an actual cowboy at one time in his life, but my memory was playing tricks on me and I was absolutely wrong about that. However, he was a newspaperman in Texas in the early 20th Century, owning and publishing the newspaper in Kerrville, Texas, a hundred miles or so southwest of where this novel is set, and he was also involved in politics. No doubt he knew quite a few old cattlemen who had been around during the era about which he wrote in his fiction. Because of that, there’s an undeniable air of authenticity about Grinstead’s work that I enjoy.
However, based on this novel, he may be one of those writers who’s better at shorter lengths. HELL RANGE IN TEXAS is pretty slowly paced, and there’s not as much action as there might have been. The action that’s there is sometimes not very well-written, either. Late in the book, there’s a long chase scene/gun battle that really drags and is hard to follow. Or maybe it’s just me. That’s always a possibility.
I give this novel thumbs-up on the setting, characters, and dialogue but found it disappointing because it didn’t capture my interest and drag me along in the story the way I like for fiction to do. I’ll certainly continue to read Grinstead’s stories when I come across one in a Western pulp, and I’ll probably enjoy them. I’ll even check my paperback shelves sometime and see if I have any more of his novels. But I don’t think I’ll be doing that any time soon.
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