Review: The Long Vendetta - Clifton Adams

Buck Coyle is a former race car driver, a World War II vet who was the commander of a tank crew, and the owner of a successful body shop and garage in a small city. He’s a widower, his wife (also a race car driver) having been killed in a crash on the track a year earlier. But he has his successful business and a beautiful new girlfriend he intends to propose to. It’s a pretty good life.

Until somebody hires a hit man to kill Buck.

That’s the setup of THE LONG VENDETTA by Clifton Adams, the second book in the recent double volume from Stark House reprinting two of Adams’ crime novels. From there it’s full-tilt suspense and action as Buck, who is also the narrator of this novel, tries to discover who wants him dead. Sometimes he works with the police lieutenant assigned to the case, but at times, circumstances force Buck to strike out on his own. One thing is pretty sure: the origins of this vendetta go all the way back to the war and a tragedy that occurred during that conflict. Will Buck figure out what’s going on, though, in time to save his life and the life of his girlfriend?

THE LONG VENDETTA was published originally in hardcover by Avalon Books in 1963 under the pseudonym Jonathan Gant. Adams, who is one of my favorite Western authors, wrote only five crime novels, and Stark House has now reprinted all of them. This one is a great yarn with a likable protagonist. It barrels along to a final showdown that features some real white-knuckle writing from Adams. His background serving in the Tank Corps in both North Africa and Europe gives the story a gritty authenticity. For what it's worth, I figured out the big twist before the end, but it took me a while.

This edition features a fine introduction by Eric Compton, as I mentioned when I reviewed the other novel included in it, THE VERY WICKED, and that intro just makes this volume even more worthwhile. It’s available in e-book and paperback editions on Amazon, and I think it’s excellent and well worth reading.

Review: Montana Fury - Al Cody (Archie Joscelyn)

Archie Joscelyn started his pulp career all the way back in 1921 and wrote steadily for them, mostly Westerns, until the late Fifties, after which he devoted his efforts entirely to novels and was still turning them out until the late Seventies. He wrote under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, the most common of which was Al Cody. He probably published more books under the Cody name than any of the others.

MONTANA FURY, as by Al Cody, is from fairly late in Joscelyn's career, published originally in hardcover by library market publisher Avalon Books in 1967 and reprinted in paperback a couple of years later by Macfadden-Bartell, which is the edition I read. That’s my copy in the scan. The protagonist is a young man named Jake Cassius, an orphan who runs away from the family he’s been living with in Kansas and joins a cattle drive headed for Montana. The reason he wants to go to Montana is that he saw a young woman in Kansas and fell in love with her at first sight, and she was on her way to her family’s ranch in Montana.

The first half of the novel follows Jake’s adventures on the cattle drive and forms a well-done coming-of-age yarn. Then there’s an abrupt plot twist and Jake takes the blame for a murder he believes was committed by his best friend. He goes on the run from the law and heads for Montana, winds up pretending to be a U.S. marshal, and finds himself smack-dab in the middle of a range war involving the family of the girl he's in love with.

MONTANA FURY is almost a kitchen-sink book like Louis L’Amour’s TO TAME A LAND (my favorite L’Amour novel), but Joscelyn doesn’t throw quite as many elements into his tale as L’Amour did. And the writing is very different. For most of his career, Joscelyn was a very traditional Western writer, telling his stories in simple prose, but as he got older, his style changed some and this book is a good example. The dialogue has an oddball, mock-Shakespearean tone to it, reminding me of DEADWOOD without all the cussin’. There’s a certain similarity to Frederick Faust’s Max Brand novels, too, although Joscelyn, who grew up on a ranch in Montana, has more realistic settings than Faust.

I’ve read some of Joscelyn’s novels from the Seventies where this tendency is really exaggerated, and they’re not very good. MONTANA FURY is odd and distinctive, but I think it still works overall and I enjoyed it. Anyone who hasn’t read Joscelyn’s work before, though, probably shouldn’t start with this one. Try one of his novels from the Forties or Fifties instead.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I actually bought this book for the Ron Lesser cover featuring model Steve Holland. Lesser did several covers for various Western novels based on reference photographs from the same photo shoot with Holland wearing that long coat. I own several of those books. There’s also a Lesser painting based on that shoot that was never used for a Western novel cover . . . yet. I’ll have more information about that at a later date.