Jim Bannister rides into the town of Antelope, Colorado, on the morning of the Fourth of July, but he’s not there to celebrate. Bannister is a fugitive from the law, the victim of an unjust murder conviction and a death sentence. But he escaped from jail and is now on a quest to clear his name, and there’s a chance that a man he hopes to find in Antelope can help with that goal.
Unfortunately, there’s a range war brewing in the area, and even though the town is full of Independence Day festivities, trouble is lurking right under the surface and quickly crops up, catching Bannister right in the middle of it.
I’ve been a fan of D.B. Newton’s Western novels for more than forty years. I first discovered them in the late Seventies when he was writing hardback Westerns for Doubleday’s Double D line under the pseudonym Dwight Bennett (his first and middle names, of course). It wasn’t long before I found out that he was also a prolific contributor to the Western pulps and even wrote a few of the Jim Hatfield novels in TEXAS RANGERS under the house-name Jackson Cole.
Eventually, when I became a writer myself, my first Westerns were entries in the Stagecoach Station series, which was created by D.B. Newton, who also wrote a number of them. I’ve always liked the fact that I shared a house-name with someone who wrote Jim Hatfield novels.
In the Sixties, Newton wrote an eight-book series for Berkley featuring a hero named Jim Bannister who was a fugitive from the law but not really an outlaw. ON THE DODGE is the first of those novels, all of which are in the process of being reprinted by Piccadilly Publishing. I just read it and thoroughly enjoyed it. Newton drops the reader down at a point where all hell’s fixin’ to bust loose, and I always appreciate an author who doesn’t waste any time getting the story going. Newton is from the same school of Western writing as L.P. Holmes and T.T. Flynn. He uses traditional plots but elevates them to a higher level with fine writing, well-developed characters, and moral and emotional complexity. ON THE DODGE has a real air of Greek tragedy about it, along with plenty of action and a very human and likable protagonist.
I had a paperback copy of the Berkley edition of ON THE DODGE for many years but never got around to reading it. That’s a good thing in a way because now I can read the new editions as they come out from Piccadilly. This one is a superb hardboiled Western that’s available in e-book and paperback editions. It gets a high recommendation from me.
7 comments:
Thanks for the review, James. I was an avid reader of Double D westerns and a fan of Michael Bennett. I "discovered" D. B. Newton in used bookstores. I never made the connection between Bennett and Newton. Once again, the Brits are giving us a second chance at some great reading.
Jim Meals
Those Double D Westerns were great. I read a ton of them from the library. Ray Hogan, Lewis B. Patten, Giles Lutz, Cliff Farrell, so many others. I'm sure a lot of what I know about Western writing rubbed off from them.
The book sounds interesting on the premise alone (I wish I knew of it earlier to read it around 4th), but I can't get myself to support a publisher who's using AI not only for covers, but also their blurbs on amazon.
I guess I'll be tracking down the old paperback instead.
Von Bednar needs to understand that, as much as they'd like to, small-press publishers can't afford to employ artists, and AI provides a cost-effective alternative. Generating an AI cover is easy - generating a very good AI cover isn't. There are all kinds of complexities to it that the layman never even dreams of. Regarding the blurb - I see no evidence that this was generated by AI.
Check out www.Piccadillypublishing.org - you may be pleasantly surprised what is on offer.
Small-press publishers have alternatives to using AI. There's plenty of suitable public domain art that can be used for cover art, there's ways to design covers with typography alone (doubly so for westerns, that era was ripe with weird typographic exploration), or even teaming up with small, local artists. Options exist, but they require effort.
...and that's what it boils down to: effort.
In my eyes, using AI makes me feel that the publisher is both lazy and cheap. It makes me worry what other shortcuts they made (i.e. not proofreading an OCRd text themselves, but giving it to AI for example, not licensing a book, just assuming it's in public domain because AI told them). This is on top of my personal detest of AI on ethical grounds and simply thinking that AI art looks like shit (why is the horse covered in bumps‽)
As for the blurb - the m-dashes and short, overly punchy paragraphs with excessive detail are strong indicators that it was written by AI.
No one who uses m-dashes nowadays would use it without spaces around them. This is an old way of laying out text, like metal type, XIX century old. The text itself doesn't lean into a XIX century pastiche, so it's not really a stylistic choice either.
The paragraphs don't flow in a way an actual writer would write it (last two paragraphs should be combined, but AI decided that 4 lines of text is too many) and inclusion of the full names of secondary characters is an indicator of "information mining" that AI does with text - a blurb writer wouldn't barrage you with proper nouns to try to hook you in, unless they are known characters.
...but, in the end people will support who they want to support, and I don't want to support publishers using AI.
I agree completely that readers should support whoever they want to, but based on sales numbers, most readers simply don't care if a book has an AI cover. I'd go so far as to say that many readers prefer the AI covers, otherwise publishers wouldn't be taking down books with non-AI covers and replacing those covers with AI-generated ones. I know that's not at all uncommon in the business. Some people don't like the concept of house-names, or when a popular author becomes a franchise and other writers carry on with those series. But more readers (by several orders of magnitude, I'd guess) don't mind. They just want to be entertained and don't want to know how the sausage is made.
As for the blurb on this particular book, it honestly doesn't sound like AI to me, either. I've used em-dashes without spaces around them my entire career and have only recently shied away from them because people think they're an indicator of AI. But I've been using them for decades and must have written thousands of them. Using the full names of characters the first time they're mentioned just seems logical to me. Boyd Selden and Kelsey Harbord are each mentioned only once in this blurb. In the second mention of Jim Bannister, he's just "Jim". I wouldn't have combined the last two paragraphs into one, either, since Amazon sales copy tends to have short, punchy paragraphs.
As always, it comes down to personal taste, of course. There's a certain small press Western publisher (not Wolfpack or Dusty Saddle) that I'm convinced is completely AI, not only the covers but also the books themselves and even the "author" photos, and they sell extremely well. As a writer, that bothers me. How do you compete against that? But in the end, the readers decide, and I'll just keep doing what I'm doing and hope enough of them enjoy my efforts.
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