Last week I reran a review of a Ben Haas novel from some years back, and that put me in the mood to read another Western by him. For decades, I’ve been meaning to read his Rancho Bravo novels, a five-book series published by Fawcett in the Seventies under the pseudonym Thorne Douglas. I know an omen when I see one, so I dug out my copy of CALHOON, the first book in the series.
Lucius Calhoon comes to Texas right after the Civil War. A former Confederate
cavalry captain, he’s lost the plantation he owned in South Carolina and also
lost his right hand to torture he was subjected to in a Yankee prison camp. The
man responsible for that torture was a young Union officer named Gordon
Weymouth. Weymouth is supposed to be in Texas, at a town in the South Texas
brush country along the Nueces River. Unlike many former Confederates, Calhoon
doesn’t head for Texas to make a fresh start. He’s there for one reason and one
reason only: to kill Gordon Weymouth.
And of course, things don’t work out that way. Calhoon rescues a former slave
from a lynching attempt and befriends a flat broke rancher who has a big spread
of chapparal and thousands of mostly wild longhorns. The rancher, Henry Gannon,
is going to lose the ranch to the corrupt Reconstruction judge the Yankees have
put in charge of the area, who just happens to be Gordon Weymouth’s father.
Calhoon throws in with Gannon and the former slave, Elias Whitton, and decides
to help them achieve their dream of driving Gannon’s cattle to West Texas and
establishing a ranch there, in the middle of Comanche country, to be called
Rancho Bravo. The local commander of the Yankee occupation forces, Captain
Philip Killraine, is sympathetic to their cause, as is his beautiful sister
Evelyn.
Unfortunately, that may not be enough to allow the partners to stand up to the
political corruption and greed of the Weymouths, father and son, and the
violence of the brutal Regulators who work for them.
CALHOON is a flat-out superb Western novel. Haas manipulates his plot
skillfully, piling up trouble and more trouble on his heroes. Lucius Calhoon,
as the protagonist of this book, comes in for the most character development,
and he’s a fascinating individual, very demon-haunted and not even all that
likable at times, but always sympathetic to the reader. The other characters
are interesting, as well, including the villainous Weymouths. And of course,
there’s plenty of the great action you’d expect in a Ben Haas novel. He was one
of the best there ever was at writing both close combat (fistfights and knife
fights) and epic, large-scale battles.
I galloped through this book and enjoyed every page of it. I think it’s
one of the best Ben Haas novels I’ve ever read. And it’s really just the
opening chapter in a much bigger tale. I suspect I’ll be reading the second
book in the Rancho Bravo series very soon. CALHOON is available in an e-book edition from the fine folks at Piccadilly Publishing, and so are the rest of the books in the series.
