Here's a summary of three western novels from the sixties I recently read in quick succession. One of the books was a hardback originally, two others were paperbacks. I read the books in Finnish translation, hence the books in the picture are in Finnish.
D. B. Newton: On the Dodge (Berkley 1962): Bannister, wanted by law for killing a man in a fight, finds himself in a town getting tangled up in the fight against the railroad contractor and the landgrabbers. One of the books in Newton's Bannister series. Bannister is a flawed man, but he can take care of himself.
Wayne D. Overholser: The Bitter Night (Macmillan 1961): a fine thriller set almost entirely in a stagecoach station.
Reese Sullivan (Giles A. Lutz): The Demanding Land (Ace Double 1966): a man returns to his hometown after having been suspected of a murder and ends up fighting the father and brother of the dead man. At the same time he sets up his own ranch. Not very tight plotwise, but I liked Lutz's angular style and his eye for peculiar details, such as poisoning wolves with strychnine and selling wild horses to the English for the Boer War.
I thought that Newton's book was the best of the bunch, but I noticed I have a hard time remembering what actually happened in the book. All were quite hardboiled, and with the exception of Overholser, there were no real heroes, and with Overholser the main character is just an ordinary man.
There's one thing about westerns, though: they don't really seem personal to me. In noir and hardboiled, you find more books in which the writers reveal themselves, their fears, desires and dreams, but in westerns this is quite rare. H. A. DeRosso is one exception. I haven't yet read Arnold Hano's Flint, which reportedly has the same plot as one of Jim Thompson's novels (and Hano was his editor in Lion Books). There are more literary westerns, such as the books by Max Evans, which have this personal quality.
