The dependably entertaining author Edward A. Grainger (aka the astute editor and publisher David Cranmer) returns with HELL TOWN SHOOTOUT, a new tale featuring Deputy U.S. Marshal Gideon Miles. Grainger plunges right into the action with this one, which finds Miles in the appropriately named settlement of Hell Town, Wyoming, to take a gang of bank robbers into custody. He finds himself ambushed instead and is forced to hole up in the local hotel with a dwindling supply of ammunition as the gang lays siege to the place. But even though he's outnumbered, outgunned, and faced with treachery within as well as a savage assault from outside, it never pays to underestimate Gideon Miles...
Grainger does a great job with the almost non-stop action of this tale, told in appropriately terse and tough prose, then elevates it to an even higher level with a lengthy epilogue that delves deeper into the character of Gideon Miles. Over the past few years, the Cash Laramie/Gideon Miles series by Grainger and several other authors has produced some of the best hardboiled Westerns being written today. HELL TOWN SHOOTOUT is a fine addition to the series. If you've read the others, you'll want to read this one, too, and if you haven't, HELL TOWN SHOOTOUT would serve as an excellent introduction. Highly recommended.
For a while now, David Cranmer has been writing stories under the name Edward A. Grainger about Deputy U.S. Marshal Cash Laramie (sometimes known as The Outlaw Marshal because of his tendency to break the rules to accomplish justice) and his fellow deputy and sometimes partner Gideon Miles. Cash was raised by Indians and Gideon is black, so both of them are to a certain extent outsiders in frontier society, but that doesn’t prevent them from doing their jobs.
ADVENTURES OF CASH LARAMIE AND GIDEON MILES is a new e-book collecting seven of the stories about these characters, five of them reprints from various venues and two appearing here for the first time. They’re all tightly-plotted, well-written yarns, traditional Westerns for the most part but with some extra grit and edgy plots. One of them, “The Bone Orchard Mystery” (a story new to this volume), is just what it sounds like, a fine mystery story centered around a graveyard, and it’s probably my favorite entry in the book.
But all the stories are well worth reading. If you’re a Western fan and haven’t yet made the acquaintance of Cash and Gideon, you definitely should, and this volume is a perfect introduction.
By the way, there’ll be a new Gideon Miles story in the Western Fictioneers anthology to be published later this summer. One more good reason to keep an eye out for that one!
