Three westerns from the sixties

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.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Bill Crider: Outrage at Blanco

The Brash Books reprint.
Don't think 
they have sunglasses in the book...

I've known Texan author Bill Crider for twenty years. I joined the Rara-Avis e-mail list I think in 1997 (not 100% certain about this, it could be 1998 as well) and found Bill's postings to be knowledgeable, funny and not besserwisserish. (Is that a word?) We have swapped e-mails on and off about all things hardboiled and noir, and we've commented each other's blogs for years now. I think Bill is one of my most permanent readers.

So I was actually quite sorrow-struck to learn that Bill is in hospice care. I'd known that he has cancer (he writes about it openly), but still this made me sad. I'm glad to be able to participate in this Friday's Bill Crider commemoration.

With the help of Evan Lewis, I got my hands on Bill's 1999 western novel Outrage at Blanco. It suited me just fine, since I'd been thinking I'd like to read me a good solid western story, and I knew Bill would deliver it. And yes, he does. Outrage at Blanco is a fast-moving tale with multiple point-of-view characters, and each and every one seems like a whole human being, though some of them are merciless bastards with no meaning in life. There are two bank robbers and rapists, there is an old patriarch on the brink of his own death and his cowardly son who's after his father's money, there is a frontier woman whom the bank robbers rape in the beginning of the novel (Bill handles the scene with compassion, I don't anyone could accuse him of using rape as a titillation), there is the woman's husband, an ordinary man who suddenly feels a burst of rage when he hears about what happened to his wife. Some of the folks in the book die suddenly, which keeps the reader guessing who will come out alive.

This was the first Bill Crider's westerns I've read, but I certainly would like to read more. He writes very fluently and effortlessly, like the best of them, and the story keeps moving without a pause, yet there's enough room for building a tension or characters or their backstories. Nothing ever gets in the way of the story. Here's Bill talking about the book.

I've read some of Bill's crime and horror novels earlier, here's my review of Blood Marks, and here's Goodnight Moom. In my book Pulpografia (in Finnish only) I have a reviews of Bill's Nick Carter novel (his first book!) and another horror novel as by Jack MacLane. (There's a side character called Jack MacLane in Outrage at Blanco.) Mind you, I've also published a short story by Bill, namely "Evening Out with Carl", in the anthology Kaikki valehtelevat/Everybody Lies.

By the way, here's a little something most people have probably forgotten: Bill's short story in the form of a blog.

More posts about Bill Crider and his books coming your way on Patti Abbott's blog here.

Stark House Western Classics

There's been some talk about the idea of reprinting classic hardboiled and noirish westerns of the fifties and sixties. I compiled such a list earlier on my blog here (I called the list, jokingly, Hard Case Western) and the Spinetingler Mag maven Brian Lindenmuth has been talking about the same kind of westerns on his Facebook site.

Only now I noticed that Stark House Press has started doing this. Earlier they reprinted three of Harry Whittington's noir westerns, and they reprinted one by Arnold Hano, the Lion Books editor, and now they've done a two-fer by Clifton Adams. This is incredible! I only hope I'd have more time on my hands.

If anyone wants to work along these lines, the list I compiled can be used. I only wish my name would be mentioned somewhere.