Forgotten Books: High Lonesome - Jack Slade (Peter McCurtin)

My copy, complete with price sticker from the Used Book Warehouse in Rockport, Texas.

LASSITER by “Jack Slade” is the first true Adult Western series in the sense that we use the term now, meaning a Western with sex scenes in it. HIGH LONESOME is an early entry in that series, the sixth, and is also the first to be written by the man who was also editing it, Peter McCurtin. McCurtin is one of those writers whose prose is almost unmistakable. He has a distinctive style that is crude, profane, and violent, but it’s also very effective in moving the story along. There are few, if any, wasted words in a Peter McCurtin novel.

Lassiter (we’re never told his first name, as I recall) is very much an anti-hero, sometimes a bank or train robber, sometimes a hired killer, but a man who does operate according to his own standards and code. In HIGH LONESOME, he’s hired to kill a man. Simple enough, but by the time Lassiter tracks his quarry to the town of Socorro, New Mexico Territory, the gent is already dead. Since he can’t complete that job, Lassiter looks around for another way to make some money. He doesn’t have to look far. There’s a war going on around Socorro between a greedy rancher who wants to own everything in sight and a crooked businessman in town who has the same goal. Both sides are hiring gunmen. It seems simple enough for Lassiter to play them against each other and clean up . . .

As usual in these books, not everything goes according to Lassiter’s plan. He gets double-crossed more than once, and most of the book is a long, bloody series of shootouts, bushwhackings, and betrayals. The plot isn’t complex, but McCurtin isn’t trying to make the reader think. He’s more interested in achieving a visceral reaction, and he succeeds admirably in that. Lassiter is almost a force of nature, and in the midst of all the carnage, you can’t help but root for him, even though he’s not exactly likable.

As I mentioned above, HIGH LONESOME is McCurtin’s first Lassiter novel, and I think some of his later entries have better, more fully developed plots. But for hardboiled, amoral Western action, it’s hard to beat his work, and I enjoyed this novel. For fans of grittier Westerns, it’s well worth reading.

Forgotten Books: Sidewinder (Lassiter #7) - Jack Slade (Frank Castle)

Many people consider the Slocum series, published originally by Playboy Press under the house-name Jake Logan, to be the first Adult Western series, but I believe that’s incorrect. The Lassiter series, published under various imprints by Belmont/Tower/Leisure under the house-name Jack Slade, started in 1968, eight years before Slocum and included all the elements of an Adult Western: sex, a gritty, violent tone, and a somewhat amoral protagonist. True, the sex scenes usually aren’t as graphic as the ones to be found later in Slocum and other Adult Western series, but they’re definitely there, and the violence and shades-of-gray characterizations are in full force.

A lot of this goes back to the pulp SPICY WESTERN. As far as I know, W.T. Ballard, who created the Lassiter series and wrote the first four books, didn’t write for SPICY WESTERN, but his good friend and occasional writing partner Robert Leslie Bellem did, and as a prolific professional pulpster, Ballard certainly would have been aware of the magazine even without the Bellem connection. So my contention is that the whole Adult Western paperback sub-genre can be traced back to the pulps and is largely the creation of one man, W.T. Ballard. (I expound more on this in my introduction to LUST OF THE LAWLESS, a fine collection of the stories Robert Leslie Bellem wrote for SPICY WESTERN.)

The Lassiter series ran until 1981 with several different writers authoring the novels as Jack Slade. The most idiosyncratic of them, at least as far as his writing style goes, was probably Frank Castle, who turned out the Lassiter novels SIDEWINDER and THE BADLANDERS. Castle wrote for the pulps and also wrote several Westerns and crime novels for Gold Medal during the Fifties. (I think the Gold Medal hardboiled Westerns also had an influence on the Adult Westerns.) I read THE BADLANDERS a number of years ago, and I have to confess that I misattributed it to Tom Curry, another veteran pulp Western author who wrote a couple of the Sundance novels under the Jack Slade name. It’s clearly Castle’s work, though, as proven by Lynn Munroe.

Which brings us, at last, to SIDEWINDER, which I read not long ago. Lassiter is a drifting gun-for-hire and sometimes outlaw, and as this book opens, he’s south of the border in Mexico, being forced to dig his own grave by the firing squad that’s soon going to execute him. It’s a great opening, and Castle never slows down the action and suspense as he gives us the back-story while we go along. It seems that Lassiter was hired by Homer Brill, an American mining tycoon in Arizona, to travel into Mexico and collect on an I.O.U. that’s owed to Brill by General Juan Peralta, a local strongman who also owns a gold mine. Instead of paying the debt, Peralta loses his temper and orders Lassiter shot.

Of course, Lassiter escapes and quickly discovers that all is not as it appears to be at first. Conspiracies and double-crosses abound. Everybody’s after a fortune in gold and nobody can be trusted. As you’d expect from a novel set in Mexico during the late 19^th Century, political intrigue and revolution play large parts in the plot as well. And of course there are a couple of beautiful women involved, and Lassiter beds both of them when he’s not busy running around shooting and getting shot—and knifed—and blowing stuff up real good. Lassiter wants to get his hands on some of that gold, but it’s even more important to him that he settle some scores with men who crossed him.

Castle has an odd, choppy, comma-heavy, and sentence-fragmented style that takes some getting used to. Once you do, however, it works pretty well and produces some vivid scenes. He also has a good grasp on Lassiter’s character. Lassiter isn’t a typical Western hero, but he has a number of opportunities to be even less sympathetic but winds up doing the right thing instead. He’s not necessarily a guy you’d want as a friend, but you certainly don’t want him as an enemy, because he finds a way to just keep fighting until he wins.

I’d say SIDEWINDER is about in the middle when it comes to the Lassiter series. I’ve read much better books in the series, but I’ve read worse, too. That may seem like I’m damning with faint praise, but that’s not my intention. I enjoyed reading SIDEWINDER, and I think most Adult Western fans would, too. Just be aware that Castle’s prose is definitely off-trail.

(The image above is my copy, the one I read. There's an earlier edition from 1969, but I don't own that one and wasn't able to find an image on-line.)

UPDATE: Here's the cover of that first edition, provided by my friend Kurt Middleman.

Peter McCurtin Catalog/Checklist from Lynn Munroe

Anybody who has seen one of Lynn Munroe's on-line book catalogs knows that's not your typical book catalog. His latest features the work of the legendary Peter McCurtin, and as usual it's a treasure trove of information (including previously unknown pseudonyms) and great cover scans. If you have any interest at all in paperback Westerns and men's adventure novels from the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties, you really do have to check this out.

On a personal note, I recall buying a copy of the Lassiter novel THE MAN FROM DEL RIO at Lester's Pharmacy, in the edition shown above, and realizing as I was reading it that this wasn't really the same sort of thing as Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Clarence E. Mulford (my main Western reading up to that point). Nice to know it was actually written by Peter McCurtin, possibly in collaboration with George Harmon Smith. If I ever come across a copy of that edition again, I'll probably buy it just for old times' sake.

Forgotten Books: The Man from Lordsburg -- Jack Slade (Peter Germano)

Since I had this book out for the post I wrote the other day about the Lassiter series, I decided to go ahead and read it as this week’s Forgotten Book. In his comment on the previous post, John Hocking mentions that in some of the books, Lassiter shows certain similarities to Parker, the late Donald E. Westlake’s professional thief character. That’s certainly true in THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG. (By the way, Lassiter is in Lordsburg when he gets the telegram that opens the book. Other than that, the entire novel takes place in and around Abilene, Kansas.)

Lassiter is summoned to Abilene by an old girlfriend who has a plan to steal a small fortune being brought in by a cattle buyer to pay for the largest herd to ever come up the trail from Texas. In order to carry out this robbery, Lassiter brings in a handful of other hardcases and outlaws, and the first half of the book is concerned with the planning and preparations for the robbery, which involves stampeding six thousand longhorns right into the middle of Abilene. The robbery takes place in the middle of the book, then the rest of THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG is about the aftermath and the inevitable violent complications.

Lassiter certainly isn’t a heroic character in this one (check out that front cover copy), although he’s slightly more honorable than most of the other characters. He has a code, too, which consists mostly of going after anybody who’s dumb enough to doublecross him. He really does remind me a lot of Parker, although the writing isn’t as good as you’ll find in a Westlake book.

Speaking of the writing, THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG is supposed to be one of the novels written by Peter Germano under the Jack Slade house-name. I’ve read quite a few of Germano’s books, both his traditional Westerns as Barry Cord and his Jim Hatfield novels published in the TEXAS RANGERS pulp as by Jackson Cole. His style was always rather hardboiled, and it’s even more so in this Lassiter novel. The pace is fast, the action scenes are well-written, and there’s a toughness about both the character and the writing that works very well. I think most readers of hardboiled crime fiction would enjoy THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG.

The Lassiter Series by Jack Slade

In the comments a couple of posts back, John Hocking mentions the Lassiter novel A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE, which was published in at least a couple of different editions under the Jack Slade house-name. Years ago someone – and at this late date I don’t recall who it was – told me that Ben Haas had written this early entry in the Lassiter series. I read it and thought it was possible, but at that time I hadn’t read as many of Haas’s novels as I have now.

Then there was some discussion on the WesternPulps group about the series, and someone pointed out a website put up by relatives of the late Peter Germano (better known under his pseudonym Barry Cord) that included A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE in a list of Lassiters written by Germano. I had forgotten about that until John’s comment, so I checked my shelves and found that I have a copy of A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE, as well as THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG, another Lassiter written by Germano, according to the website. I skimmed through them, and they certainly appear to be by the same author. The styles are very similar. So I’m thinking that maybe I made a mistake attributing A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE to Ben Haas.

That’s not the end of the story, though. This German website has a list of the Lassiter novels, and it attributes a different book to Haas. Here’s the list of the Lassiter series from that website, along with the best guesses for the actual authors:

LASSITER, W.T. Ballard
BANDIDO, W.T. Ballard
THE MAN FROM YUMA, Peter Germano
THE MAN FROM CHEYENNE, W.T. Ballard
A HELL OF A WAY TO DIE, Peter Germano
HIGH LONESOME, Ben Haas
SIDEWINDER, Peter Germano
THE MAN FROM DEL RIO, Unknown
THE MAN FROM LORDSBURG, Peter Germano
GUNFIGHT AT RINGO JUNCTION, Peter Germano
FUNERAL BEND, Peter Germano
THE MAN FROM TOMBSTONE, Peter Germano
GUERRILLA, Unknown
THE BADLANDERS, Tom Curry
GUTSHOOTER, Unknown
HELL AT YUMA, Unknown
RIDE INTO HELL, Unknown
BLOOD RIVER, Unknown
RIMFIRE, W.T. Ballard
APACHE JUNCTION, Unknown
DURANGO KILL, Unknown
THE MAN FROM PAPAGO WELLS, Unknown
LUST FOR GOLD, John M. Flynn
HANGMAN, John M. Flynn
CATTLE BARON, John M. Flynn
WOLVERINE, John M. Flynn
FIVE GRAVES FOR LASSITER, Peter Germano
BIG FOOT’S RANGE, Unknown
BROTHER GUN, Unknown
REDGATE GOLD, Unknown

W.T. Ballard has generally been credited as the creator of the series and the author of the first four novels, but this list attributes the third book to Germano, based on his records, so that’s probably accurate. I wonder if RIMFIRE, coming quite a few years after Ballard’s other books in the series, might be a retitled reprint of one of the early books. As for THE BADLANDERS, I’ve read it and I’m convinced it actually is by Tom Curry. I was reading a lot of Curry’s pulp work at the time, and a lot of his style tags show up in the Lassiter novel as well. Curry wrote two books in the Sundance series at about this same time, also under the Jack Slade house-name, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if some of the other Lassiters where the author hasn’t been identified were his as well. John M. Flynn, author of four books in the series, was better known as mystery writer Jay Flynn. I believe Bill Pronzini knew Flynn and has written about him in MYSTERY SCENE. Of course, I’m most interested in reading HIGH LONESOME to see if I think it was written by Ben Haas. I don’t believe I have a copy of that one right now, but I’ll be keeping an eye out for it. The Lassiter novels still show up fairly regularly in used bookstores.

By the way, some of these books were reprinted with “Zane Grey’s Lassiter” on the cover, which I think was just a marketing ploy on the part of the publisher. This Lassiter is not the same character as the hero of RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE . . . although there was a series of novels featuring that character ghosted by Dean Owen and perhaps others under the name Loren Zane Grey.

Now, at this point the real question is: who cares about any of this stuff? Well, me, for one, and I hope at least a few of you reading this. But I still have vivid memories of buying my first Lassiter novel, THE MAN FROM DEL RIO, brand-new off the spinner rack at Lester’s Pharmacy and reading it one summer day in 1969. I’d been reading Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Clarence E. Mulford, so that Lassiter novel, with its grittier violence and slightly graphic sex, was a big change for me. The Lassiter books, not the Jake Logan series, are the first true “Adult Westerns”, as the genre came to be known, and as such, they have some historical importance in the Western field. Over and above that, though, some of them are pretty darned good books and worth checking out if you happen to run across any of them. (Fair warning, though: some of them are pretty bad, too.)