There’s a chance I read this book when I was a kid, although
I don’t remember it at all, because I read a lot of the juvenile novels
published by the Whitman Publishing Company of Racine, Wisconsin. This one was
published in 1944, but that doesn’t matter because they stayed on the kids’
section shelves of public libraries for years. Whitman published hundreds of
them, I’d say, some featuring original characters created for the line, but
many of them starred popular characters from movies, radio, TV, and comic
strips.
GENE AUTRY AND THE THIEF RIVER OUTLAWS is very much like one of the B-Westerns Autry made for Republic Pictures, although toned down somewhat for kids. Gene, a roving troubleshooter, is asked by a friend of a friend to investigate some sabotage plaguing the construction of a railroad bridge over Thief River Canyon. It’s the usual bit where the old-timer who owns the construction company has to complete the bridge by a certain date or else lose the lucrative contract. Gene’s investigation quickly turns up a suspect, but he has a hunch something else is going on, so he continues to dig around and winds up in danger a couple of times before everything is straightened out satisfactorily.
Overall, this is a fairly mild book, as I mentioned above. There’s one murder, but it takes place off-screen. Not much gunplay and only a couple of fistfights. But the pace moves along fairly quickly and the author at least makes an attempt to throw a few twists into the plot. He also does a good job with the colorful sidekick character, a Gabby-like old codger called Tennessee.
GENE AUTRY AND THE THIEF RIVER OUTLAWS was written by Bob Hamilton, whoever
that was. He wrote a couple of other Gene Autry novels for Whitman, or at least
they were published under that name, but that’s all I know about him. It could
well be a pseudonym or house-name. But this one is competently written and
entertaining in a nostalgic way. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to anybody who
didn’t read these books as a kid, but if you’re an old codger like me, there’s
a good chance you’d enjoy it, too.
GENE AUTRY AND THE THIEF RIVER OUTLAWS is very much like one of the B-Westerns Autry made for Republic Pictures, although toned down somewhat for kids. Gene, a roving troubleshooter, is asked by a friend of a friend to investigate some sabotage plaguing the construction of a railroad bridge over Thief River Canyon. It’s the usual bit where the old-timer who owns the construction company has to complete the bridge by a certain date or else lose the lucrative contract. Gene’s investigation quickly turns up a suspect, but he has a hunch something else is going on, so he continues to dig around and winds up in danger a couple of times before everything is straightened out satisfactorily.
Overall, this is a fairly mild book, as I mentioned above. There’s one murder, but it takes place off-screen. Not much gunplay and only a couple of fistfights. But the pace moves along fairly quickly and the author at least makes an attempt to throw a few twists into the plot. He also does a good job with the colorful sidekick character, a Gabby-like old codger called Tennessee.
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