Review: Arizona Outlaw - Bayne Hobart

The last thing drifting young cowboy Lance Harvey wants is trouble with the law, but when he rides into the town of Elkhorn, Arizona, he finds him unwillingly mixed up in a bank robbery and then on the run from the law.  Fleeing from this injustice, he winds up in the settlement of Black Rock, where he’s promptly accused of being a mysterious murderer who dubs himself The Avenger. Several prominent citizens have been killed, and the town is gripped by fear and eager to blame the first possible suspect who comes along, namely Lance. He just can’t seem to win for losing.

But since he’s the protagonist of ARIZONA OUTLAW, a novel by Donald Bayne Hobart published by Arcadia House in 1961, you know he’ll untangle all the strands of this dangerous mess eventually and discover not only the true Identity of The Avenger but also the bad guy behind a seemingly unconnected stagecoach robbery and murder. He might even find the bank robbers who got him in trouble with the law in the first place!

After the end of the pulp era during which he wrote dozens of novels and hundreds of shorter pieces of fiction, mostly Westerns but quite a few detective and sports yarns, too, Donald Bayne Hobart continued writing for digest magazines and for library-market publishers such as Arcadia House. On the cover of ARIZONA OUTLAW, he’s by-lined only as Hobart; on the title page and the inside flap of the dust jacket, he’s Bayne Hobart. But we know this is really the prolific pulpster Donald Bayne Hobart. His style had changed slightly from the days he was writing more Masked Rider novels than anyone else, but the later novel is still recognizably his work. It’s a little milder, with more talk and not as much action as in his pulp efforts, but that’s common for an aging author. I see it in my own work. What hasn’t changed is Hobart’s ability to create a likable protagonist and move a story along at a fairly brisk pace. And the action scenes are still well done, if not as prevalent.

I enjoyed ARIZONA OUTLAW and I’m glad I have several more of Hobart’s late-career Western novels from Arcadia House on hand to read. It’s not a great Western, but I had a good time reading it and if you’re a fan of traditional Westerns, you certainly might, as well.

Review: Silver River Ranch - Leslie Scott

In addition to several hundred novels featuring Texas Rangers Jim Hatfield and Walt Slade, A. Leslie Scott wrote dozens of stand-alone novels, although some of these were rewritten and expanded from either Hatfield or Slade novels with the protagonist changed. But quite a few of them appear to be original stories not based on any of Scott’s pulp work. One such novel is SILVER RIVER RANCH, published by Arcadia House under the name Leslie Scott in 1961 and reprinted a couple of times in large print editions since then. I read the original Arcadia House edition. That’s my copy in the scan.

This novel opens with a vicious and bloody knife fight between the protagonist, stalwart young rancher Val Dixon, and brutal Blount Roberts, part of a trouble-making family that owns a rival ranch. Neither man dies in this encounter, but the fight solidifies the position that Dixon and the Roberts family are bitter enemies.

Except for Rosalee Roberts, a beautiful redheaded cousin of Blount and his brothers. Dixon is in love with her and hopes that someday she may return that feeling, but it seems unlikely given the rivalry between the ranches.

Complicating things is that everybody in the West Texas valley where this novel takes place has been losing stock to rustlers. Dixon hires a gunslinging young cowboy named Billy Flint, who may or may not actually be Billy the Kid, rumored to have survived his shooting by Pat Garrett over in New Mexico a while earlier. Together, Dixon and Flint set out to track down the rustlers, who they figure will turn out to be the Blount brothers.

SILVER RIVER RANCH will seem very familiar to anyone who’s read very many novels by Leslie Scott. There’s plenty of action with assorted bushwhackings and clashes with the rustlers, plus some tentative romance between Val Dixon and Rosalee Roberts and a lot of riding back and forth, sleeping, and eating. However, there’s nothing about mining or railroading, two of Scott’s favorite themes, and the descriptions of the landscape are a lot less detailed. This is Scott in pared-down mode, which makes for a very fast-moving book. The action scenes are consistently good, although the great knife fight that opens the book is the high point in that respect.

If you’re already a fan of Leslie Scott’s work, you’ll certainly enjoy this novel. It’s not fully representative of his usual yarn-spinning but close enough that if you’ve never sampled any of his stories before, you could start with this one just fine. I’ve enjoyed every one of Scott’s stand-alone novels I’ve read over the years, and this one is no exception.