Riker's Gold by Skeeter Dodds

I picked up this novel wondering what kind of western writer someone named Skeeter might be. Checking the copyright page, he's apparently actually James O'Brien. I gargled the Internet and came up with nothing about this particular writer.

Riker's Gold was originally published as a Black Horse Wester in 2001. I read the large print edition published in the Dales Western Library.

I thought I would be in for a long, slow read when the novel opened with Jack Riker bemoaning the bad times: his once-fruitful farm has hit bad times, as the past few years have brought drought and a failing future to Riker and his wife, who has turned rather bitterly against him as well.

Then a soldier comes by and leaves behind saddle bags full of Army gold for Riker's safekeeping. The soldier is sick with a fever that has wiped out the rest of his company. He wants Riker to hold onto the gold until the Army sends someone looking for the lost troop. Then the soldier rides into the snow-covered mountains to die.

A band of thieves come across the soldier's trail and follow him into the mountains. They see him scribble a note, then fall over dead. Overcoming their fear of the illness that's claimed all the dead soldiers lying about, they take possession of the note and read about the gold and its whereabouts.

Meanwhile, Jack has ridden into town to lock the saddlebags in the safe within the sheriff's office. Jack is part-time lawman for the town. After a rattling argument with his wife, who wants him to simply take the gold and start a new life, Riker thinks the gold will be safer hidden in town until the Army shows up. But a nosey townsman peeps through the office window and sees Riker locking away the saddlebags, which raises his curiosity. The fellow is a known lush, and the wily bar owner can tell something is on the man's mind. Lubricating the gent with free drinks, he learns about the hidden saddlebags and wonders why Riker would make the effort to secure them.

The barowner has kept a long-simmering feud going with Riker, because he hankers for Riker's wife. When he learns the sheriff's safe holds gold, he stirs up the townspeople – who, like Riker, are beaten down by bad times – in a scheme to get the gold and Riker's wife, too. The conflict boils over when the deadly gang of thieves arrive in town, and the shooting begins.

Dodds uses the love triangle effectively in this story, building a range of conflicts from that emotional dynamic coupled with Riker's ethical dilemma about how to handle the gold placed in his care. Although there are plenty of characters willing to fire guns in this tale, Dodds plays a wary game with his primary character, Riker, by having the sheriff keep gunplay at bay until the final town-sized shootout that brings the story to a climax. Dodds handles this nicely.

I was intrigued enough by Riker's Gold to wonder how the author might handle another plot. I'll have to find out.

Railroaded! By Mark Bannerman

Mark Bannerman is the pseudonym of Robert Hales writer Tony Lewing, whose first Black Horse Western was Grand Valley Feud, published in 1995. Steve Myall has a very nice interview with him from 2009 on the Western Fiction Review blog. You'll find it here.

Railroaded! was published as a BHW in 2001. I read the large print edition published in the Linford Western Library in 2003.

Here's the cover blurb:

After the Civil War, Kansas was a wild territory ripe for exploitation German immigrant Helmut Rapp and his wife come west, claiming land under the Homestead Act. With the new railroad thrusting towards his land, Helmut strives to preserve the life and obscurity he has worked hard to achieve.

Mark notes in his interview that he's a fan of Ernest Haycox. His well-crafted sentences, the details he uses to build his characters, and the descriptions of events all provide proof that he's studied Haycox's finer works. There is a pulse and rhythm to Bannerman's narrative that demonstrates his attention to his storytelling craft.

His structuring of the novel provides a nice example. Most BHWs I've read offer a linear narrative, building from a traditional exposition of place and setting, introducing characters, and then adding the points of conflict from A to B to C.

In Railroaded!, Bannerman opens with a dramatic scene spotlighting the primary character in mortal danger, then moves to a deep flashback, so that the narrative keeps moving forward to the point at which the novel opened—not the climax, but quite near it. Building his novel with this structure displays Bannerman's confidence in his skills and his awareness of how to place the load-bearing structures in a plot.

This story is an emigrant tale: Helmut Rapp's story begins in Bavaria, where – as a starstruck and somewhat naïve youth -- he marries stage star Ingrid. Ingrid continues to bed other men, and when Helmut discovers her continual infidelity and lack of remorse, he takes his savings and goes to America. He meets a resourceful Irish girl and marries her, sure that his past will not catch up to him.

Of course, how wrong he turns out to be introduces all kinds of conflict into the plot.

After he successfully builds a ranch in the west, Ingrid tracks him down and extorts him into signing over ownership of the farm to her. In return, she won't reveal that Helmut is a bigamist. She opens a brothel in town and lives the high life of a wild west entrepreneurial bordello queen.

Helmut's troubles grow exponentially when the railroad arrives and wants to buy his valley to make its way to the nearby town. The townspeople want Helmut to sell, because the railroad will bring money to the town's businesses. Helmut could be rich. But Ingrid holds the paper on his property, so he stands his ground and refuses to sell – even though the ground he stands on doesn't legally belong to him.

Conflict escalates until the reader returns to the first scene, where Helmut is on the run from the local marshal, a bloodthirsty gunman named Keno who doesn't mind if the line of the law wobbles a bit in favor of the railroad.

In terms of storytelling finesse, this is one of the best BHWs I've read. Bannerman demonstrates an expert hand at pacing and storytelling. Recommended.

LINKS:
Railroaded! is available from Amazon. Click here for a large print edition. Click here for the Kindle edition..

Dead's Man Ranch

A Ralph Compton novel by Matthew P. Mayo. Published by Signet Books, 2012.

I'm not usually a fan of the plot that features a dude or greenhorn heading west and colliding with the earthy western customs, only to end up won over by the locals and having the “veneer of civilization” (in the words of Edgar Rice Burroughs) stripped away to leave something more straightforward and honest. But Matthew P. Mayo's considerable storytelling skills excellently overcome the obstacles inherent in this vintage plot, and he delivers a well-told, nicely paced, exciting novel that any western reader will find very satisfying. In Dead Man's Ranch, a stranger — Bryan — comes to town, but everyone recognizes him as the spitting image of his father, who died recently and left one of the finest ranches in the territory to this son, who was sent East to be raised by his mother's parents after she died. There are complications to Bryan's taking over the ranch, of course: he's an Eastern dandy and doesn't have a clue to his family's story (his grandfather, who raised the boy, had disinherited Bryan's mother when she married the rough-and-tumble western rancher, and subsequently kept Bryan in the dark about his beginnings as he raised the boy, even returning unopened any letters and gifts from Bryan's father when they came to the house); his dead father left behind the kindly Esperanza, unmarried, but with a grown bastard son, good-hearted Brandon, who has spent most of his time in a bottle since his father's death. There's also the owner of the neighboring ranch—also a widower—who wants Bryan's new property; his reckless, hot-headed, and frequently drunken son, who will perform any violent act necessary to get hold of the dead man's ranch to gain favor from his hard-nosed father; and the rancher's daughter, who frequently mediates between the two hot-headed men of her family. Throw in a psychopathic serial killer who has heard about the complicated mess about settling the dead man's property from a lawyer who was in his cups at a poker table (and who later ends up dead in an alley—guess who does him in?), and you've got all the ingredients for a western stew that is muy caliente.

Mayo weaves together all the tangled strands and pulls it off in fine fashion. He is a veteran western writer and historian of the West who has penned novels for Robert Hale's Black Horse Western imprint. (You can learn more about Black Horse Westerns at The Black Horse Extra blog.) It's a pleasure to see his work now made available to a wider mass-market audience. Mayo has recently released the first novel about his series character, Roamer, titled Wrong Town. It is available as a paperbound book or as an ebook for the Kindle. Readers who try Dead Man's Ranch will soon find themselves searching for his other books.

A Fistful of Legends

Pal and writer of westerns Ian Parnham has posted some info at this blog, "The Culbin Trail," about a new anthology of western stories, A Fistful of Legends. It sports a cover painting that's nicely reminiscent of the cover paintings one used to see on the novels by the Piccadilly Cowboys -- the Edge series, the Steele series, the Undertaker series, Jubal Cade, and many others.

This anthology is the second released by the group of western writers who work together under a sort of umbrella imprint, Express Westerns. Many of these folks write western novels published by the British publisher Robert Hale Books under its Black Horse Western imprint.

I had a story in the first Express Westerns anthology, Where Legends Ride, and enjoyed the experience immensely. That first collection still is available at this URL:
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Legends-Ride-Matthew-Mayo/dp/0615175813/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1260735179&sr=1-1/thepulprack-20

Meanwhile, check out Ian's nice preview of A Fistful of Legends at this URL:

http://ijparnham.blogspot.com/2009/12/fistful-of-legends.html