Forgotten Books: The Last Notch - Arnold Hano

Arnold Hano is best known for his sports non-fiction and for being the editor at Lion Books during the Fifties who nurtured the careers of Jim Thompson, Richard Matheson, and many other top-notch noir and crime novelists. But he also wrote a number of dark, suspenseful Western novels under a couple of different pseudonyms. Stark House Press is reprinting one of them, THE LAST NOTCH, originally published as by Matthew Gant, as part of its Black Gat Books line.

THE LAST NOTCH is based on some historical background that occurred in New Mexico Territory during the 1870s, Governor Lew Wallace’s attempt to offer amnesty to Billy the Kid and other gunmen and outlaws in the territory, in order to prevent another outbreak of bloody violence like the one that took place during the Lincoln County War.

Hano fictionalizes this considerably, changing the names while keeping the personalities and events fairly accurate, then dropping his protagonist, Ben Slattery, down in the middle of them. Slattery is a fast gun and a hired killer, but he’s tired of that life and wants the governor’s amnesty. He wants to be able to quit worrying about the Kid, who’s eager to have a showdown with him and find out which one of them is truly faster on the draw. Before Slattery can escape from his past, though, he has to do one last job, make one last kill, for the biggest price he’s ever gotten.

All you have to hear is “one last job”, and you know things aren’t going to go well for Slattery. Sure enough, they don’t, in as neat a twist as you’ll find in a Western novel. How bad things can get, and whether or not Slattery survives, you’ll have to read the book to find out.

THE LAST NOTCH is really a superbly written novel, vivid in its setting and its characters. There’s not a lot of action; guns go off, but this is about as far from a powder-burning shoot-’em-up as you can get. It’s very suspenseful and fast-paced despite that, with some great confrontations between Slattery and the Kid (who’s obviously Billy, although not called that). This novel reminded me of the work of H.A. DeRosso, who Hano edited at Lion Books, and Lewis B. Patten with its bleak outlook on the Old West. Highly recommended.

Forgotten Books: So I'm a Heel - Mike Heller (Arnold Hano)

In a genre known for its often unlikable narrators/protagonists, SO I'M A HEEL fits right in. Ed Hawkins is a heel, all right. He's a World War II vet who got his lower jaw blown off in the South Pacific. It was replaced with a plastic prosthetic, but that still leaves Ed full of resentment over what happened to him. He comes home to a life with his wife and ten-year-old son in a small town in California and ought to be happy, but for one reason or another he can't hold a job, he's mean and sullen, and he blames everybody else for his troubles.

Then one day, the opportunity to blackmail one of the richest men in town practically falls into Ed's lap, and he seizes on it as the way out of all his troubles. But I think we all know things aren't going to work out that easily for Ed . . .

I used to have a copy of the Gold Medal edition of this book, but I never got around to reading it and had no idea who Mike Heller really was. Now I know the author is Arnold Hano, and the book is available again in the Stark House collection 3 STEPS TO HELL. That's good because it's a compelling novel with some really fine writing in it. It's a little offbeat for a Gold Medal because of some of its subject matter – saying any more than that would be too much of a spoiler – and because of its approach, which is decidedly low-key and realistic. There's crime in it – maybe – but it's not really a crime novel, more of an examination of just how low somebody can sink. And of how unsympathetic an author can make his leading character and still have the reader rooting for the guy.

Hano succeeds admirably in this, which makes for a very satisfying ending. SO I'M A HEEL is fast-paced, hardboiled, and paints a vivid picture of small-town life that can be both noble and sordid. Highly recommended.

Forgotten Books: Flint - Gil Dodge (Arnold Hano)

Whenever a book comes out of nowhere for me, when I read a book I'd never even heard of and find that it's spectacularly good, these days that book often comes from Stark House. That's the case with FLINT, a Western originally published in 1957 under the by-line Gil Dodge. The real author behind that name is Arnold Hano, perhaps best known as the editor of the influential paperback house Lion Books but also a fine writer himself. FLINT looks like a typical Fifties Western paperback, doesn't it?

Well, it isn't. Not hardly, to quote John Wayne in BIG JAKE.

The set-up isn't that unusual, though. The narrator, Flint, is a hired killer who has put up his gun and "retired" to a small farm in Arizona. He's living there under an assumed identity because he's wanted in any number of states and territories, and he's also living on borrowed time because he suffered a serious wound during a shootout with a posse several years earlier, and the lingering effects of that injury are sure to kill him at an early age.

Flint just wants to be left alone, but then a representative from a Colorado cattle baron shows up and threatens to expose his real identity to the law unless Flint travels to Colorado and kills a couple of men for the cattle baron. Reluctantly, Flint accepts the job.

That's a fairly standard plot opening, but Hano's fine writing elevates it. Flint is a compelling narrator, a well-read, well-spoken, deeply melancholy man. Despite that, you might think you know where this one is going.

Once Flint reaches Colorado, though, the story begins to take one unexpected turn after another. Not everything is what it appears to be, and after a while you start to wonder if Flint himself is the person he seemed to be at first. Hano peels away the layers of deception slowly and carefully, and FLINT becomes a classic novel of lust, murder, and bleak desperation, as much so as any of the Gold Medals, Dells, etc., from the same era.

This is one of the best Western noir novels I've ever read. In its style, in its characters, in the risks it attempts (and pulls off), FLINT is remarkable. I give it a very high recommendation, and luckily you can read it in the new Stark House volume in which it's included, 3 STEPS TO HELL, which also includes the novels SO I'M A HEEL (originally published under the name Mike Heller) and THE BIG OUT. I'll be getting to them pretty soon, I expect.