Reading Forgotten Books: The Hangmen of Sleepy Valley – Davis Dresser

The Hangmen of Sleepy Valley was a Forgotten Friday book recommendation by James Reasoner a while back. I’ve had it laying around for a bit and I decided to give it a go. Should have listened to James sooner.

Davis Dresser is well known as the creator and early chronicler of private eye Mike Shayne, whose prolific number of tales have been told by a number of different writers(James and his wife, Livia, being two of them) in novels and the digest magazine that carried his name.

It was the late sixties when I started buying MSMM and the individual novels featuring the red-headed PI, long after Dresser had retired from the series. Of course back then, I didn’t know the Dresser name or that other writers were using the Halliday pseudonym.

Recently, I read the first Shayne novel, Dividend On Death, first published in 1939. Even though I hadn’t read a Shayne in years, I could tell the difference in this one as compared to those others.

Let’s get back to the book of this post.

Twister Malone and Chuckaluck Thompson(love those names) were minding their own business in West Texas when they interrupted a hanging by four masked men, hoods with only one eye hole. A bit of gunplay and the quartet disappear, one wounded, leaving the two friends with a hanging man.

The young man, rancher Frank Barnes, wasn’t dead yet and they cut him down, hearing an odd tale when he’s able to talk. In the last few months, two other men had received a notice to not let midnight catch them in Sleepy Valley and it was signed simply with a one-eyed skull. The first had been hanged from the very same tree as Barnes, the second left before midnight.

The three men quickly concoct a plan to flush out the Hangmen, with Barnes staying out of sight, dead of course, and Twister with a letter in Barnes’ handwriting begging his brother, Twister, to come help him with his troubles.

Twister assumes ownership of the ranch and the two partners begin to stir up trouble, trying to bring the Hangmen out into the open. There are plenty of suspects: a one-eyed rancher whose lovely daughter had been courted by all three victims, a gambler who wanted to marry said daughter, and had the father’s blessing, the foreman of one of the ranches involved.

The Hangmen of Sleepy Valley was first published in 1940 and was apparently part of a program selecting books for paperback release in 1952. It had a triple A seal on the cover and an introduction by Erle Stanley Gardner, a triple A western classic.

I like this book and will look for other westerns by Dresser, as well as more of those early Shaynes, if I can only find the time.(sigh)

~ by randy Johnson on Saturday, July 18. 09.