The Prisoner of Gun Hill - Owen G. Irons (Paul Lederer)

The plot where the protagonist is captured by bad guys and forced to work in their gold/silver mine is a common one in Western novels. I've used it myself. Paul Lederer, a prolific and top-notch author of Westerns, takes a crack at it in THE PRISONER OF GUN HILL, and it makes for a fine yarn with some unexpected twists in the plot.

Luke Walsh is on the run through the Arizona desert after unintentionally shooting a lawman in Tucson (he was tricked into it by a femme fatale). On the verge of death from thirst and heat, he's "rescued" by a couple of men on their way to a gold mine at Gun Hill. They take Luke with them, and as soon as he recovers a little from his ordeal he's forced to go to work digging a mine shaft in the side of the hill. As if that's not bad enough, it turns out that Gun Hill is where a vicious outlaw gang is getting back together to pull a new job. This threatens not only Luke but also a young woman who's being held captive at the mine. Then the soiled dove who got him in this mess in the first place shows up, along with her murderous outlaw lover.

None of that is particularly surprising, but from there things don't turn out exactly as you'd expect. Lederer has a sure hand with his plot and characters, and his action scenes are well-done, too. He was all over the publishing world in the Seventies and Eighties, writing dozens of house-name Westerns as well as series he created (he wrote most of the Shelter books as Paul Ledd and all of the great Spectros series as Logan Winters), as well as several historical novels under his own name. Then he was out of the business for a while but in recent years has made a strong comeback with stand-alone traditional Western novels, many of them under the pseudonym Owen G. Irons. THE PRISONER OF GUN HILL was published last year under that name by Robert Hale as part of the Black Horse Western series, but an e-book edition under Lederer's own name is available from Open Road Media. It's a very entertaining book, and if you're a Western fan you should check it out, along with Lederer's other novels.

Forgotten Books: Ute Revenge - Paul Ledd (Paul Joseph Lederer)

Paul Ledd (real name Paul Joseph Lederer) was a very prolific author of series Westerns during the Eighties, working on, among others, Shelter, Ruff Justice, Easy Company, and Lone Star. As Logan Winters, he wrote the cult favorite supernatural Western series SPECTROS. UTE REVENGE, however, is a stand-alone novel, and a good one.

The story begins in 1850 with the arrival in the Colorado Rockies of Georges Lacroix, a French fur trapper. After a clash with Ute Indians, they burn down the cabin Lacroix has built, so to even the score with them, he kidnaps a woman of their tribe and takes her as his wife. When she gives birth to a son, the Utes regard this as a stain on their honor and set out to kill Lacroix, the woman Morning Light, and their son Mantaka. The Utes have their revenge on Lacroix and Morning Light, but Mantaka escapes and grows up pretty much on his own, able to speak Ute and French, but no English. He is befriended by some prospectors and helps them find gold, which brings even more people into the mountains. Years pass as Mantaka grows into a massive man and a great hunter. When a town is founded and Mantaka runs afoul of the criminals who are trying to take over, he is framed for a murder and has to take to the high country again. And all the time, the Utes are still after him. On the run from all his enemies, he becomes known as The Savage, because he still can't speak English and communicate with people.

It seems to me that Lederer is trying to write a Western version of Tarzan, at least in some respects. I'm not sure he manages to pull that off, but UTE REVENGE is still an entertaining, fast-moving story. Lederer writes in a very readable style, with plenty of action and some nice descriptive passages. I think he intended this to be a more serious novel than his series work (which makes me wonder if the generic UTE REVENGE was an editor's retitling of the book). For the most part, he succeeds.

Lederer stopped writing for a while after the late Eighties/early Nineties, but he's returned to the Western field in recent years, publishing a number of Black Horse Westerns under his old pseudonyms Logan Winters and Owen G. Irons. It's a welcome return as far as I'm concerned.