Tad Shay should have died during the late stages of the war. The doctors had given up on him and pushed him aside. But he hung on and spent two years in a hospital recovering. During that time, he read every law book he could find, eventually earning a law license.
He headed west to find a small town where he could practice law. He;d seen enough violence in the war to fill him and he wanted no more.
It wasn’t to be.
Alder City was where he ended up, breaking up a robbery on the stage on the way in. The robbers wanted his three hundred dollars, all he’d saved.
The town was to small for a lawyer to make a living and he did something he never would have believed. After a couple of Texans, who’d bulled their way into a half interest in one of the saloons, killed the Marshal, he took a gun and went into the saloon to arrest them. They weren’t interested and he ended up killing both.
He took the Marshal job to everyone’s delight and began to practice with his gun, getting better and faster.
But, as usually happens, when keeping the peace gets in the way of large profits from the trail herds coming up from Texas, his supporters wanted him to back off. But Tad was bound and determined to uphold the law.
Lucy, the girl who’d come in on the stage with him, had become a successful businesswoman, unknown to her chiefly because of him. She wanted him to stop being a lawman and he was bound and determined to finish the job he’d reluctantly started.
And then he got word that a killer had been hired to come up from Texas and kill him.
I love Frank Gruber’s writing, both westerns and mysteries.
Technically, BAD DAY AT PASCO SPRINGS is not a forgotten book. It’s part of the Western Fictioneers’ program to bring back older westerns in ebook format. James Reasoner speaks of it HERE. He reviews it nicely there.
Ex-lawman Tom Mallory rode to Pasco Springs to check out the ranch he won in a poker game. He didn’t know he was running into a mess.
Even before arriving, he comes upon an ambush, a man wounded and pinned down under his dead horse, two men firing on him. When he takes a hand, they turn on him and he’s in a bad way until a third unknown party helps him out, driving the ambushers off. Then simply disappears. The man under the horse proves to be a lawman and is still alive.
Mallory makes his living these days as a gambler, having left the law business after his wife had been killed in an attempt on his life.
In Pasco Springs, he gets the law to the doctor where he later dies of his wounds. He runs into a mess as, first, he’s accused of shooting the lawman, shots are taken at him, the ranch he won suddenly has an inflated debt, and a powerful rancher wants to buy it off him.
For a supposedly bare bones operation, someone seems awfully anxious to get their hands on the ranch. Mallory soon takes up the Sheriff’s job to find out exactly what’s going on.
A couple of nice twists along the way highlight this excellent western/mystery. It can be found here.
For even more forgotten books, check in on Pattinase, Patti Abbott/s blog.
I don’t remember ever seeing James Cagney in a western before TRIBUTE TO A BAD MAN. I’m sure he made them before though, just never caught one. Based on the short story Hanging’s For The Lucky by Jack Schaefer, author of Shane, Monte Walsh, and many more western tales, it was directed by Robert Wise.
James Cagney is horse ranch owner Jeremy Rodock, a man who extracts a terrible price for anyone caught stealing his horses. He hangs them on the spot.
Steve Miller(Don Dubbins) is a young man come west from Pennsylvania wanting to find work as a cowboy. He rides into a valley. Dubbins does a number of voice over narrations in the film. Here he tells how he never heard it called anything but Jeremy Rodock’s Valley, if it even had another name. He hears gunshots and goes to investigate, finding Rodock pinned down behind his dead horse, two men taking potshots at him. He fires shots with his rifle to drive then off.
Rodock had been shot in the back, though not seriously. Still, if it isn’t taken care of soon, he will likely die. The bullet has to come out. Miller says he can’t do something like that, has never done anything like it. Rodock asks him if he’s ever cored an apple. When answered yes, he replies “Then core the apple!”
Getting back to his ranch to gather men to chase the horse rustlers, Rodock is convinced by Jocasta Constantine(Irene Papas) to get a few days rest anyway. Miller gets his first look at “Jo” and falls instantly in love. Obviously an educated woman, it’s mentioned she speaks several languages, they don’t say much about her past other than that she played piano and sang in a saloon. Other comments later suggest she did maybe more. It’s obvious that Rodock and Jo love each other.
The final main player in the movie is Stephen McNally who is McNulty, head wrangler and a man who wants Jo. He knew her in Cheyenne before Rodock found her and brought her to the ranch.
Rodock thinks he knows the rustlers, his old partner years back(he’s right), and heads there immediately. L. A. Peterson(James Bell) is the ex-partner, Jeanette Nolan plays his wife, and a young Vic Morrow pays his son Lars. In their conversation, we learn Rodock caught him once before and let it slide, taking the story that they just wandered onto Peterson’s land. He has some kind words for the son, Lars, remembering teaching the young boy how to ride. He gives Peterson a warning.
It’s obvious Rodock is a jealous man when it comes to Jo. They have no formal arrangement between them, but he buys her jewelry, couching the price in the terms of the cost of horses. That seems to be his first love, one he has trouble putting aside when it comes to his relationship with Jo.
McNulty keeps trying to make moves on her and is constantly rebuffed. Rodock is not an unobservant man. He notes his foreman coming out of the house one time and following her out of the barn another. It leads to trouble down the road.
Young Miller can’t write and asks Jo to write a letter to his mother for him explaining where he’s at and that he’ll send her money when he can, she being a widow. The letter she writes is a little more personal and mentions ten bucks enclosed. He doesn’t have ten bucks, she says she’ll lend it to him, then tells him she’ll lend him more if he’ll go back east where he belongs. She’s worried he’ll become hard like most of the wranglers, old and worn out before they can start a family. She also has worries about Rodock’s “hanging fever” Rodock gets when he catches up with rustlers and the effect it might have on the boy.
He gets that all to soon when they roust a band of rustler and get into a shootout. All but one is killed and he’s hanged from a big tree, amid Miller’s protests to take him into Cheyenne. And one of the dead is his old ex-partner Peterson. He takes that body back to the family ranch and offers Mrs. Peterson enough money to go back east with Lars. He’s rebuffed by Lars.
Rodock’s jealousy comes to the fore once more when he firs McNulty, beats him unconscious in a fist fight, and even extends a bit to young Miller, who he thinks is Jo’s latest conquest. He doesn’t realize he’s driving the woman he loves away.
Things come to a head when Rodock’s mares and their young are stolen. Most of the hands are off spending their money since the government had just bought a substantial herd. There was only Rodock, Miller, and one more to chase after them. When caught, it’s learned that they cut one of each mare’s hooves to the quick, making it hurtful for them to walk. Rodock explains the idea was to just leave them in this out of the way valley where they’d stay because of the damage and the colts still nursing would be there. Come back next season and you have a small herd of unbranded young horses.
I think the last section of the film may have been Schaefer’s short story, Hanging’s For The Lucky, as Rodock takes the three rustlers’ boots and forces them to walk in socks all the way, intending to take them to Cheyenne.
The ending comes out right all around, more than I’d expected, and i thought it was quite good.
As in most of the westerns of this period, there were those faces and voices one might know without being able to put a name to. Two I did recognize. Lee Van Cleef had a few lines, Royal Dano a few more.
T(heodore) V(ictor) Olsen(1932-1993) was born and lived in Wisconsin for his whole life, venturing into the west for a few trips. He still managed to be one of the best western writers of his day. He actually began his first novel while still in high school, went on to write for the pulps, and finally finished and had that novel, HAVEN OF THE HUNTED, published in 1956.
BLOOD OF THE BREED was published later in his life, 1985. It’s the story of a family and the jealousies and the rage that tore it apart.
The story begins long before that though with three men: Ike Banner, Jack Lynch, and Angus Drew, mountain men all, friends, each eventually going his own way. Banner started a ranch, Swallowtail, it growing to be the largest in the territory. Jack Lynch went completely Navajo, living with and as them, working his way up to elder and leader. Angus Drew at fifteen had stowed away on a ship leaving Scotland for the Americas. Though taking a Navajo woman, Horse Woman, as his wife and raising a son, he never embraced the life as his friend Jack Lynch.
Nathan Drew is the main protagonist of the novel. When his father Angus died, he was only six and his mother and he were taken in by the Banners. His mother died when he was twelve and “Aunt” Dru Banner took up the job of finishing his raising. At the same time she was raising her three sons. After her death, Old Ike lost something. At the time of this book, his aged limbs were arthritic. He had a special saddle built with straps that tied his legs and torso so that he could ride for brief spells.
He was closer to Nathan than his three sons, an odd lot all three. Thorp was the eldest, foreman of Swallowtail, was a cold man. The middle son, Tyrone, never took to ranching. He had talents as an artist. In an attempt to prove himself trying to break a horse, he was thrown wrong and suffered an injury. He know used a crutch and drank most of every day away. Freeman, “Free,” was the youngest, twenty, and fast with a gun. And had no morals at all.
Nathan had grown into the job of horse breaker for Swallowtail, a big moneymaker for the ranch selling to the army.
Old Ike had ceded a northern portion of his land, good grazing land, to Jack Lynch and his people. It had come to be called Lynchtown and other Indian folks had gravitated to live there.It was looked on by most white folks as a shantytown and it especially grated on Thorp Banner.
As mentioned earlier, old Ike had grown closer to Nathan than his sons, there’s a story there for later, and he knew his three couldn’t wait for him to die. Though old and arthritis ridden, he still commanded a certain fear from all. Not a lot, and shrinking, but enough.
Our story opens when Nathan is out hunting and comes upon three men who worked for Thorp, the Purley clan, Snake and his two sons, Claud and Sheb, a motley bunch that were Appalachian trash that had come west when their welcome was worn out. They were rousting a young Navajo, Old Snake using a whip to cut the young man to ribbons, one eye had been plucked out. Nathan rode in and stopped it, Just in time too. he Purleys were about to thrown down on him when they were all suddenly surrounded by Navajo, all with blood in their eyes, some of them Nathan’s family members. That wouldn’t help if things broke down though. As a half breed that has lived most of his life among whites, he was tolerated. The white world didn’t much like him either.
That sets the scene for the rest of the book. Old Ike, when told what happened, demands that Thorp fire that trash. Which infuriates the eldest son. He ran the ranch these days and did what he wanted. He knew his will would dominate his brothers when they got the ranch.
In due course, the old man is murdered and a shocking reveal in his will sets up the ending with Nathan and TY Banner, the same age, on one side and the other brothers on the other.
A solid tale with lots of action and a look at a family going bad.
This week the Forgotten Books are being compiled by Evan Lewis over at his blog, Davy Crockett’s Alamanack.
JUDAS GUN was published in 1964 by Gold Medal. My copy is the 1974 reprint. It was made into a 1968 spaghetti western starring strong man Steve Reeves, A LONG RIDE FROM HELL.
In reading the novel, the film sticks pretty much to the prose story with a few minor changes, mostly names.
Ken Sturgis and his brother Roy, along with friend Bobcat bates, were out tracking horses stolen from their ranch. They’d been counting on the sale for the mortgage payment. Ken had been out scouting and when he gets back to the camp, near a railroad water tower, there’s company, an old friend of ken’s he hadn’t seen in years, Marl Mayner. he eats with them and, as he leaves, he suggests they be away from the area before daylight. The railroad owned the right of way and was nervous about people around because of recent robberies. Mayner was a railroad detective for them.
Later, Ken goes out scouting around again. At midnight, he hears the sound of a train coming through, rides toward the area, only to have his horse slip on some loose rock on the steep trail and fall, breaking it’s neck and trapping his leg under the body. From that position, he witnesses the train stop for water, a group of men pop up. killing everybody and blowing the express coach.
It takes time, but he manages to get from under the bulky body and limps down to see if anyone survives. He’s chilled to find the dead body of his friend, Bobcat, shot in the back. He’s looking for his brother when he collapses and comes to to find himself surrounded by a posse, the sheriff demanding where the rest of them went. $80,000 in newly minted gold five dollar pieces from the Denver mint had been taken. Roy is dragged in, a bullet wound in his head, and savagely beaten. No one believes his story and he quickly learns there is no railroad detective named Marl Mayner
The two brothers get sent to Yuma Prison and Ken just wants to do his time. Roy is out of his head from the head wound and the beatings and a brutal guard takes great delight in tormenting the boy. He wants Ken, but the man remains stoic.
Some of the prisoners are planning an escape. Ken knows the area and knows it’s impossible. Surrounded by deserts and the Colorado river, Indian tribes in the area hate white men and get fifty dollars a head for escaped prisoners no matter the shape. he wants no part of it.
But when Roy dies at the hands of the guard, he starts thinking more on escape. His chance comes while digging graves in the cemetery outside the walls. One con smashes a guard’s face with a shovel and the bunch scatters. Ken takes a different rout, dragging the dead guard into the grave he’d been working on and swiftly switching clothes. In the confusion, he puts the body out of the grave, grabs some dirty potato sacks, and covers himself with them. Daylight is falling fast and he remains undiscovered. After dark, he slips to the nearby river and aboard a steamship unattended, hiding in the paddle wheel well.
Now he has only one thing in mind. Clearing his and his brother’s, and Bobcat’s, names. A little revenge wouldn’t be bad. It had become obvious that the Judas was his old friend Marl. And the sheriff. Both are ultimately responsible for the deaths and two years in prison. Not to mention the brutal guard that was the actual killer.
Richard Prosch is a Nebraskan native and sets his stories in that state, both westerns and those with modern settings. He has a nice style that pulls one into the story.
Here, Deputy Whit Branham goes after a killer and horse thief, Johann Kramer. He knows where Kramer is hiding and goes with his Stevens 10-gauge to get him.
From that simple premise, Richard spins a tale with a twist here and there, a bit of humor, and a satisfying story. It can be ordered HERE.
Richard Prosch brings us his second story of Whit Branham. deputy in Holt County, Nebraska.
Just a year before, Sheriff Kearns had been killed and one of the men involved, Billy Wade who’d grabbed the Sheriff’s gun arm, was inexplicably let go at the trial.
Now Whit is thinking of moving on. The new Sheriff rubs him the wrong way and he’s uncomfortable with everything.
In this tale, he gets his chance to right a wrong when horse thieves strike and murder is committed. Throw in a young woman, a reporter, with just enough education to think she knows everything and naive enough to believe she can go safely where she wants because she thinks so.
Another winning western from Richard, can be ordered HERE, and I look forward to the next Whit tale.
By 1956, Barbara Stanwyck was in her late forties and aging out of the sorts of roles she’d played most of her career(you know movie executive minds). Westerns were her favorite type of film anyway, and it allowed her more time outdoors and riding horses, so she was gravitating more and more toward horse operas. The movie is based on the novel by Zane Grey, which I haven’t read. But by a description I did read, it sounds considerably different from what appeared on screen.
She’s the title character, a maverick queen, with a saloon of the same name. She’s also into cattle rustling and robbery among other things. She owns most of the Wyoming town of Rock Springs. She’s also allied with the Hole-In-The-Wall gang and once had a relationship with the Sundance Kid(Scott Brady), but that was over as far as she was concerned. In her climb to power, Kit Banion was attracted to strong men, but had a habit of using them up. But Sundance didn’t see it that way and his jealousy drives much of the plot of this film. Butch(Howard Petrie) doesn’t like it and tries to keep them apart.
Lucy Lee(Mary Murphy) is a young rancher who’s taking a herd of cattle to market at Rock Springs. Her father had been killed sometime in the past and she was determined to hang onto the ranch.
A man, Jeff Young(Barry Sullivan), hails the camp and asks for food. He’s there when Sundance and the gang approach to rustle the herd. He ducks behind the wagon and, when he emerges guns out, he’s wearing a kerchief covering his face from the nose down, getting the drop on the gang, and relieving them of their guns and forcing them to leave.
In town, he bathes, shaves, and dresses in a suit, heading to the Maverick Queen. There he runs into Lucy Lee who’s sold her head to Kit Banion, much to her consternation as she’d sent the gang to steal the herd. Lucy offers Jeff a job getting rid of Butch and Sundance, though he refuses as he has other plans.
Shortly in a poker game, he gets into an argument with Sundance, the gunman accusing him of cheating. Jeff flips the table over before Sundance can shoot him in the belly. It gets him an in with Kit and he introduces himself as Jeff Younger. When asked if any relation to Cole and Jim, he admits to being a nephew just out of prison(they got twenty-five years, he got three). He takes a job as a faro dealer and when a new “job” comes up, Kit volunteers Jeff to help, much to the jealous Sundance’s displeasure.
She wants her fifty thousand back from Lucy Lee, who’s shipping it by train to a bank in a bigger city, and figures Jeff can help her get it back. She’s also attracted to Jeff and wants more.
Jeff is also not who he appears to be. Kit learns that when the real Jeff Younger shows up and sets out to warn her Jeff.
It sets up a slam bang finish with the Hole-In-The-Wall gang and a posse lead by a Pinkerton.
Enjoyed this look at Butch and Sundance, much less likable than the version I was familiar with, the Newman and Redford portrayals.
I’ll be back next week with another Stanwyck-Sullivan western.
Couldn’t find a trailer, but the movie is on Youtube broken into chunks and I’ve included part 1 to give you flavor:
The man fell into Tom Brodie’s arm, gut shot and on his way to death. He managed to get a few words out before the end. “Eva… Flannery…Salt Crossing!”
Flannery he didn’t know. Salt Crossing was a town in north Texas. He’d never been there. And Eva was his wife!
Brodie had come home from the Civil War minus his left arm to find his wife had sold off everything and left town with a man. Word was they’d thought him dead. He never looked for her, drifting, working whenever he could find it. Here he was a bartender.
A week later he rode into Salt Crossing, having been curious of what Eva had wanted. The first thing he noticed was the name Flannery on almost every business. That cleared up one mystery. Now to find the other.
He found Eva and her man in a saloon, the Deuces High, that she’d won in a card game with Flannery, the big man in town. She’d run a bluff and he didn’t like that she’d legally won the business from her. Mainly that everyone knew a woman had done that to him.
He wanted it back.
Eva was a beautiful redhead used to getting what she wanted from men. That was apparent when she made it clear, without actually saying it, that she wanted Flannery dead. But Brodie was past caring what his wife wanted. Or so he thought. What he didn’t like was being braced by Flannery’s gunmen.
He decided to hang around town for a while.
A Fine western novella by James Reasoner. It can be found HERE
The plot of RIDERS IN THE STORM is not new, though it was considerably newer when this book appeared in 1955. You have a farmer, Ed Cotton, that has legally acquired acreage that cuts a cattle rancher, Big Jim Wilford, off from his favorite grazing and watering.
But author Lee Floren puts in a few twists. Wilford is a decent sort that doesn’t throw his weight around. He just doesn’t like that Cotton has put barbed wire across the driving lanes of the valley. And Cotton likes the big rancher and his daughter, Connie, who responds in kind.
1899 Montana is experiencing a brutal winter. Below zero temperatures, nearly continuous snow.
Ed Cotton is out working his barbed wire when he spots two men riding toward him. One is deputy Sheriff Fred Rome and the other is a local gambler. He thinks nothing of it until Rome announces he’s there to place Ed under arrest for first degree murder
Apparently one of Big Jim Wilford’s punchers had been found shot to death while cutting Ed’s fence. Just a few days before, the two men had gotten into a fight during a poker game when Ed caught the man dealing off the bottom of the deck. They’d ended up swearing to kill each other. Big Jim had been convinced to swear out a warrant.
Ed was willing to ride in with them to straighten things out, but Rome seemed to be pushing things toward a more violent end. All that ends as Big Jim rides up and stops things and agrees to ride in with Ed to jail. He even promises to send someone to his farm to do his chorse, feed all the animals, milk the cows, keep a fire going in the house so the dog doesn’t freeze.
Bail is set at twenty-five thousand dollars “Might as well be twenty-five million,” Ed thinks. Then two odd things happen. First Connie comes in and wants to go his bail if it can be reduced to something more respectable. Then the second richest man in town, Saloon owner Downing, who also owns the bank, is into trapping, wants to go his bail.
Ed refuses both, pride being what it is.
So he breaks jail. With a bit of help. His partner had arrived in town and kept his ears open until he had the lay. Ed and the black man Booger Sam had grown up together, been the best of friends since almost birth. Ed’s mother had died during his birth and Sam’s mother had raised them both. She’d worked for Ed’s father.
They’d even went into the army together and served in the Spanish-American War. As veterans, they gotten the parcel of government land as a reward.
They keep moving in the storms, the bitter cold, determined to find out who killed the puncher and tried to lay the blame on him. One problem Ed had been having was the cutting of his barbed wire.
In the two men’s roamings over the frozen land, they ran across the game warden, Faver, numerous times. Why was he out in this hell so much? He was obviously looking for something. Was it connected?
A nice mystery wrapped up in a western tale.
For more forgotten books, check in with Todd Mason , who’s doing the collecting this week.
A novel of the Indian wars featuring a character named Nevada Jones. He legs it into the town of Red Rock just ahead of a large group of Indians. A small town under siege, with walls built around it, there were two hundred people, including fifty women and children and ninety soldiers.
The Captain is an officious man sure of his troop’s superiority against the “savages.” He would come to learn better in the coming days.
Just as he learned Nevada was more than just a Reb.
The book details the defense of the town against overwhelming forces as they await coming reinforcements. A large command being harassed as they headed toward the town.
Nevada meets an Englishman and shares a brief time in a cell with him as they get pushed in for daring to want a drink during a lull in the battle. There they meet an old man who seems awfully anxious to get out of town, even though it’s surrounded by some two thousand Indians.
They learn the reason and make plans if they survive.
Doesn’t seem likely though.
A nice look at one of the author’s early books, not published until now. I like his style, makes for smooth reading that keeps me flipping those metaphorical pages until I hit the end of this tale.
Tad Shay should have died during the late stages of the war. The doctors had given up on him and pushed him aside. But he hung on and spent two years in a hospital recovering. During that time, he read every law book he could find, eventually earning a law license.
