A Rough Edges Rerun Review: Outlaw Canyon - Lewis B. Patten

This is another fine early novel by Lewis B. Patten. It opens in the middle of the action, as Matt Springer, the foreman of the vast Fortress Ranch, is about to lead his men into the dreaded Outlaw Canyon in an attempt to recover a herd of rustled cattle. What makes this even more difficult than it would be otherwise is the fact that the rustlers were led by Wes Knudson, the son of Fortress’s elderly owner Chris Knudson – who also happens to be like a father to Matt.

Other than Ed Gorman and H.A. DeRosso, no Western author puts his characters through more emotional torture and turmoil than Lewis B. Patten. In OUTLAW CANYON, after setting the scene Patten launches into a series of flashbacks that establish why Wes Knudson hates his father so much that he’ll lead a gang of outlaws against him. The plot, which involves adultery, murder, and general mayhem, is gritty to say the least, and as is often the case in a Patten novel, there are some sex scenes that are pretty graphic for the era, since OUTLAW CANYON was published in 1961. All of it leads up to the expected big showdown at the end.

Veteran Western readers probably won’t be surprised at any of the plot twists in this book, but odds are they’ll be entertained. Patten’s prose is tough and fast-paced and there’s plenty of action. Despite the fact that his books always have relatively positive endings, his vision of the West is a consistently bleak one, and the characters who manage to achieve happiness usually pay a high price to do so. Most of his books are well worth reading, and OUTLAW CANYON certainly falls into that category.

(This post originally appeared on May 14, 2010. I think that's the first edition in the scan. It's the copy I own. OUTLAW CANYON had several other paperback editions. Scans of them, gathered on-line, are below.)

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Thrilling Western, March 1953

This is a pulp that I own and read recently. That’s my copy in the scan. I’m not sure who did the cover. There’s a signature in the lower left corner that seems to match the signature of an obscure artist named J.G. Hame, whose only credit in the Fictionmags Index is the cover on the November 10, 1950 issue of RANCH ROMANCES. I can’t find anything online about Hame. Maybe some of you know more.

The lead novella in this issue is almost long enough to be considered an actual novel. “Boom-Town Bonanza” (no hyphen on the cover, but it’s there in the TOC and the text) is by Ray Townsend, a dependably entertaining Western pulp author. As you’d expect from the title, it’s a mining yarn. In the early days after the Civil War, ex-Confederate Jim Sheldon comes to Nevada in answer to a summons from his old friend who has found a profitable silver claim. But no sooner does Jim arrive than his friend is gunned down and he finds himself involved in a war between the two big mine owners (one of whom is a beautiful woman) and the owners of the smaller mines (one of whom has a beautiful daughter). It’s basically a range war story, only with mines instead of cattle, and not surprisingly, Townsend does a good job with it. His characters are well-drawn, as is the setting, and the action scenes are excellent. My only complaint is that some aspects of the plot seem to be glossed over rather quickly, as if Townsend had trouble fitting everything into 35,000 words. Townsend’s career was short, only about eight years, but in that time he produced nearly 100 pulp stories and four novels. I plan to read more by him.

I don’t know anything about Don Peterson except that he published two Western stories and had one story in WEIRD TALES, all in the early Fifties. His story in this issue, “Cradled in Hell”, is a really bleak yarn about a stagecoach shotgun guard captured by a gang of Mexican bandits. It’s fairly well-written and it doesn’t end the way I expected it to (always a plus), but it’s so dark I found it more admirable than enjoyable.

“Land of No Surrender” is the only credit for Ray Conley in the Fictionmags Index. I don’t know if that name is a pseudonym or if this is the only story he ever sold. It’s about a crippled Pawnee warrior who seeks redemption and acceptance in a battle against the Sioux. A little on the predictable side, but not a bad story.

Ben Smith’s name is familiar to me mostly from the Western novels he wrote for Ace and Bantam, but he also wrote several dozen stories for the Western pulps in the Forties and Fifties. His novelette in this issue, “Bridge of the Eagle”, is the first thing by him that I’ve read, as far as I remember. In it, drifting cowpoke Johnny Quinn is in Arizona Territory when he gets his horse stolen from him and then a short time later is arrested for holding up a stagecoach and killing the guard. He winds up escaping from jail with a hardened killer who’s on his way to join a gang holed up in an isolated stronghold in the mountains along the border. It’s a colorful, fast-moving yarn, and Smith manages to tie up the various threads of the plot in a way that makes sense. I enjoyed it enough that it made me want to dig out more of Smith’s work. I know I have an Ace Double around here somewhere with half of it by him . . .

“Mama Rides the Norther” is by one of my favorite Western authors, Lewis B. Patten, but it’s not a typical Patten story with noir elements. Instead it’s more of a homespun frontier drama about a married couple and their two young children who leave a life in the city to establish a homestead on the Great Plains. It’s well-written and somewhat suspenseful when a blizzard blows in, but overall a pretty minor entry considering the author.

The issue wraps up with “Turn Home Again”, a short story by J.L. Bouma about a dissatisfied young farm boy who wants to leave home . . . until he has an encounter with an outlaw on the run and a posse. Bouma had a long, prolific career writing for the pulps and as a Western paperbacker, as well as writing other types of novels. I’ve always found his work to be dependably good without being outstanding. That’s the case with this story, which is enjoyable to read and comes to a satisfactory conclusion. I doubt if it’ll be very memorable, though.

Overall, this is about as middle-of-the-road an issue of a Western pulp as you’ll ever find, good but not great stories, but no stinkers, either. It’s worth reading if you have a copy, especially the Townsend and Smith stories.

Flame in the West - Lewis B. Patten

I hadn’t read a Lewis B. Patten Western in a while, and when my buddy Pete Brandvold picked up a copy of this one, which I’d never even heard of, I figured it was a sign I should get my hands on a copy of my own and read it. That turned out to be a good decision.

FLAME IN THE WEST was published as a paperback original by Berkley Medallion in 1962 and reprinted a few years later. I read the second edition, and that’s my copy in the scan. The cover art has a signature, but I can’t make it out. There was also a British paperback from Fontana in 1965, but that appears to be it. Online scans of the original Berkley edition and the Fontana edition are below. I’m surprised there was never a large print edition, given Patten’s consistent popularity as a Western writer in the library market.

With that bibliographic stuff out of the way, how’s the book itself, you ask? Well, pretty darned good. Almost great. We’ll get to why I say “almost”. But it starts out fantastic with a first-person account of Quantrill’s famous raid on Lawrence, Kansas, in 1863. The narrator is Matt Leatherman, an orphan who works for local merchant Eben Sundine. Sundine doesn’t really support the Confederacy, but he is from the South so the local abolitionists hate him and have dubbed him a Copperhead. They’ve even vandalized his store by writing that on the front wall. Quantrill’s raiders see that and don’t destroy Sundine’s store, but in the aftermath of the violence, the local citizens blame Sundine for what has happened, so they burn down his store and house, killing his wife and badly burning his son in the process. An embittered, hate-filled Eben Sundine takes his son and daughter and heads west to Colorado to start a new life. Young Matt Leatherman tags along, since he has nothing keeping him in Lawrence.

Experienced Western readers will have a pretty good idea where the rest of this novel is going. Sundine, with Matt’s help, becomes a successful rancher after the war. His badly scarred son becomes a vicious gunman. His daughter grows up into a beautiful woman and she and Matt fall in love. Sundine battles smaller ranchers who try to encroach on what he considers his domain. Despite the fact that FLAME IN THE WEST is fairly short, maybe 45,000 words, Patten achieves a real epic feel in this novel.

If you’ve read much of Patten’s work, you know it’s well-written, very bleak, and essentially humorless. If not for the fact that he usually came up with semi-happy endings, I’d say his books are even darker than H.A. DeRosso’s. That’s certainly the case in FLAME IN THE WEST, where he piles tragedy after tragedy and bad decision after bad decision on his characters. Because of that, I wouldn’t want a steady diet of Patten’s work, but when I’m in the right mood, it’s very effective.

Where FLAME IN THE WEST is slightly disappointing is in its ending. To be honest, by that point, Patten has written his characters into such a terrible corner that I’m not sure it’s even possible to write a satisfying ending to such a tale. Despite that weakness, this is a very good book and contains some of Patten’s best writing. Matt Leatherman is a fine narrator/protagonist and Patten does a good job of capturing his various moral dilemmas. I raced through this book, reading the whole thing in a day and staying up late to finish it, which is very unusual for me. If you’re a Patten fan or a fan of traditional Westerns with a dark edge, it’s well worth reading.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Short Stories, June 1949

I like the cover on this issue of WESTERN SHORT STORIES, but what's really amazing is the group of authors inside: Walker A. Tompkins, Giles A. Lutz, D.B. Newton, Roe Richmond, Stephen Payne, Joseph Wayne (either Wayne D. Overholser or Overholser in collaboration with Lewis B. Patten), Joseph Payne Brennan, Frank P. Castle, John Callahan, John H. Latham, Clark Gray, house-name Ken Jason, and somebody named Costa Carousso, the only author in the bunch I haven't heard of. There are several of my favorites in there, and several more who were consistently good Western pulpsters.

Forgotten Books: The Odds Against Circle L - Lewis B. Patten

Over the years, Lewis B. Patten has become one of my favorite Western authors. His books always have a dark tone to them, and that’s certainly true of THE ODDS AGAINST CIRCLE L, a paperback original published by Ace in 1966 and later reprinted (the edition I read). In this one, Taggart Landry has returned to his hometown, which sits in the middle of the vast Circle L ranch owned by his father. Tag is the black sheep of the family, having run off a couple of years earlier because he’s jealous of his older brother. After leaving the ranch, he fell in with the proverbial bad company and got mixed up in a bank robbery in which a man was killed. Tag didn’t pull the trigger, but in the eyes of the law, he shares equally in the blame.

Now, after splitting from the gang and drifting for two years, he’s gotten word that his father is very ill and returns home because of that, even though his brother hates him and even threatens to kill him. Then, wouldn’t you know it, his former partners in crime show up and threaten to expose his part in the bank robbery unless he helps them loot the Circle L. What these murderous outlaws really have in mind is taking over the ranch, and Tag doesn’t see any way out of helping them without endangering his still seriously ill father.

Patten was always one to put his characters through hell, and that’s certainly true in THE ODDS AGAINST CIRCLE L. Tag Landry absorbs a considerable amount of punishment, both phyical and mental, as the situation gets worse and worse until he’s finally forced to fight back. Everything comes to a fairly satisfactory conclusion. Despite the darkness of his plots, Patten’s work seldom falls into the category of Western noir, so you can count on endings that aren’t necessarily happy but aren’t tragic, either.

THE ODDS AGAINST CIRCLE L is a little too thin, story-wise, to make it into the top rank of Patten’s novels, but it is a solid traditional Western that provides a couple of hours of good reading. I enjoyed it.

Saturday Morning Western Pulp: Western Short Stories, February 1953

This issue of WESTERN SHORT STORIES starts off with a Norman Saunders cover, and inside are stories by some of the top Western authors ever: Louis L'Amour (writing as Jim Mayo; this is one of the few L'Amour stories I remember seeing outside of a Thrilling Group pulp), Lewis B. Patten, John Jakes, Wayne D. Overholser, Ray Gaulden, Will C. Brown (the other writer from Cross Plains), William R. Cox, Joseph Payne Brennan, H.C. Wire, and more. This is one of the Stadium Publishing pulps, which are not that highly thought of, but it would be hard to beat that lineup for what was regarded as a salvage market.

Forgotten Books: Pursuit - Lewis B. Patten

I like to read a couple of Lewis B. Patten’s Western novels every year. I’m not sure I could stand more than that, because Patten’s West is about as bleak and ugly and dour a place as you can find, although there are usually a few glimmers of hope in his endings.

PURSUIT, originally published by Perma Books in 1957 and reprinted several times since by Signet and Thorndike, is solidly in that mold. As many of Patten’s books are, it’s at least in part a hardboiled crime novel. Four men show up in the small eastern Colorado settlement of Buffalo Wallow, take over the stage station, which is run by a man named Casey Day, and proceed from there to take the whole town hostage. Their plan is to rob a stage scheduled to arrive carrying a lot of cash bound for a bank in Denver.

The first third of the book is a tense, almost minute-by-minute recounting of the lead-up to the robbery, much like something Harry Whittington, Lionel White, or one of the other Gold Medal authors might have done. It’s probably not too much of a spoiler to say that the outlaws get away with the money after killing several people, and Casey Day, who already has a black mark against his name because of a previous robbery that happened on his watch, sets out after them to kill them and recover the money.

The rest of the novel becomes an epic “long chase” yarn that reminded me of some of the Louis L’Amour books I’ve read. Casey Day isn’t a L’Amour type of hero, though. He’s driven more by desperation and hate as he pursues (there’s your title) those outlaws over the next year or so.

PURSUIT is a very readable novel. Patten handles gritty action well, and there’s plenty of it in this book. It’s not without its flaws. There are a couple of continuity glitches early on. Several character descriptions change with no explanation within a matter of a few pages. Somebody should have caught that. This is the sort of continuity problem that plagued Patten all through his career. Characters are blonde and then dark-haired three pages later, fat and then skinny in the next chapter, start riding west and then suddenly they’re riding east with no explanation. Usually the earlier in Patten’s career, the less of a problem it is (I’ve given up on some of his late novels because he couldn’t keep anything straight), but this is from 1957, fairly early on.

Luckily, once you get past that, the book flows very nicely from then on and I wound up liking it quite a bit. Sure, none of the characters are very sympathetic and an air of doom and gloom lingers over the whole book, but I knew to expect that going in. Only a real masochist would want a steady diet of Patten’s work, but now and then they’re like a bucket of cold water in the face and will shake you out of any reading doldrums you might be in.

My Favorite Western Authors

A friend of mine with a growing interest in Westerns who hasn't read much in the genre suggested that I do a blog post about my favorite Western authors. After some thought, I decided that I can do that, with one condition: I have to confine it to authors who are no longer with us. I know almost everyone who's currently writing Westerns, and I don't want any of them coming across this post and wondering why I didn't mention them. It's an unavoidable fact: some writers I love as people but don't care for their books. Others I love their books but don't . . . well, never mind. I'm going to confine the list to ten, with the usual warning that if you ask me again tomorrow, the selections might change. I'm also going to keep it to authors whose work is at least somewhat readily available. I love Harry Olmsted's stories, for example, but none of them have been reprinted and you'd have to buy the original pulps to read them. Some are acquired tastes, too, real love 'em or hate 'em authors, so consider that fair warning.

Enough qualifying. On to the list, which is in alphabetical order.

Walt Coburn – Maybe the most inconsistent Western author ever, capable of sheer, breathtaking excellence as well as utter mediocrity composed in a drunken haze. But Coburn at the top of his game captured the authenticity of the Old West probably better than any other author I've ever read. He also came up with some of the most complicated plots filled with raw emotional angst that you'll ever find in the genre.

H.A. DeRosso – The darkest of all the Western noir authors, the Jim Thompson of the Western. He wrote only a handful of novels, but they're all good. Several of them have been reprinted in the past fifteen years.

T.T. Flynn – Flynn's plots are pretty traditional, but he writes so well it doesn't matter. Also, his novels are often more emotionally complex than they appear at first.

Ben Haas – Writing as John Benteen, Richard Meade, Thorne Douglas, and Ben Elliott, Haas was the best action writer of the Twentieth Century other than Robert E. Howard. I've written plenty on this blog about him. Pick up anything he wrote. I guarantee you're in for a good time.

Elmer Kelton – The man picked by a poll of the Western Writers of America as the best Western author of all time. I have a hard time singling out one author as the best of anything, but Kelton was very, very good for a long time. Nobody was ever better at writing about the contemporary West. And he was one of the nicest people you'd ever want to meet, too.

Lewis B. Patten – Patten's work is similar to DeRosso's, but his novels usually have happy endings that keep them from being quite as bleak. His books became more inconsistent as his career went along, so you're usually better off looking for novels from the Fifties and Sixties, although he was still capable of good work during the Seventies. If you run across a book you don't like, give him another chance.

Leslie Scott – Scott is one of those acquired tastes. He wrote many of the Jim Hatfield novels in the pulp TEXAS RANGERS under the house-name Jackson Cole. You'll be more likely to find some of his long series of paperback novels about Texas Ranger Walt Slade, published under the name Bradford Scott. His plots are repetitious, his prose is really purple at times (especially when he's describing landscapes), but he wrote great, over-the-top action scenes. His stand-alones, often based on historical incidents, are also good. But if you try one of his books and don't like it, there's not much point in trying another, except for the fact that his earlier books generally have better plots.

Gordon D. Shireffs – Almost the equal of Flynn, Haas, and Short when it comes to hardboiled action Westerns, and his depictions of the American Southwest are maybe the best of them all. He was also an excellent plotter.

Luke Short (Frederick D. Glidden) – Not quite noir, but his Westerns are definitely on the hardboiled side and often have some sort of mystery angle. He could write great action scenes as well. His books from the Forties and Fifties are the best as far as I'm concerned, although all his work is worth reading.

W.C. Tuttle – Really the only humorous Western writer I like, and that's probably because the comedy (which borders on slapstick at times) is balanced by plenty of action and complex mystery plots. Tuttle is best known for his stories and novels featuring range detectives Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens, but he also wrote a long series of novellas in the pulp EXCITING WESTERN about a similar pair known as Tombstone and Speedy. He's also famous for a series about a W.C. Fields-like vaudeville performer who winds up the sheriff of an Arizona town. His stand-alones are good, too.

I would have included Robert E. Howard if he had lived to write more Westerns, as according to his letters he planned to do. He actually invented the Western noir in stories such as "The Vultures of Whapeton", "Wild Water", and "Vulture's Sanctuary". If you haven't picked up the collection of his traditional Westerns from the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, I give it a high recommendation. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I wrote the outline for that collection.)

So there are ten Western writers and a sort-of bonus eleventh one you'd be well-advised to seek out if you're looking to broaden your Western reading horizons. You probably won't like all of them, but I think the chances are good you'll discover some new favorite authors among them. If any of you want to throw in recommendations for other authors, feel free to do so in the comments. If there are enough, I'll do a follow-up post based on them.

(The links below are just examples of some of the books by these authors. Many more are available on Amazon and other on-line booksellers and in used bookstores.)

Forgotten Books: Ride a Crooked Trail - Lewis B. Patten

I was in the mood for a Lewis B. Patten novel, not having read one for a while, and picked up a large print edition of this one at the library. It's not one of Patten's claustrophobic, town-set Western noirs, like so many of his books, but rather more of a sprawling, outdoor epic. Set in the days just after the Civil War, the story finds young Jason Willard setting off on the trail of the three discharged Union soldiers who murder his parents and leave him for dead on the family's Illinois farm.

The quest for vengeance is a classic Western plot, and Patten does a good job of it. This is also a rite of passage novel, as Jason, who narrates the story, falls in with a mysterious stranger, meets a pretty girl, learns how to use a gun, and just generally grows up in a hurry. It's also a bit of a kitchen-sink book, since we have outlaws, gunfighters, a trail drive, a buffalo stampede, and several battles with Indians.

The first-person narration and the episodic structure of RIDE A CROOKED TRAIL remind me quite a bit of Louis L'Amour's TO TAME A LAND, probably my favorite among L'Amour's novels. By this late stage of Patten's career his work could be pretty inconsistent, but this is an excellent book and doesn't have any of the continuity gaffes and plot holes that mar some of his other late novels. I really enjoyed it and think most readers of traditional Westerns would as well. (The scan is from the original Signet edition, not the large print hardback I read.)

Forgotten Books: The Tired Gun - Lewis B. Patten

THE TIRED GUN is a very appropriate title for a Lewis B. Patten novel, because there's a distinct strain of world-weariness that runs through most of his work. If not for the happy endings demanded by the Western market during the era Patten was writing, his vision of the frontier probably would be regarded as even bleaker than that of H.A. DeRosso. And those so-called happy endings often wind up with the protagonist irreparably damaged, emotionally, physically, or both. The hero wins, but pays a high price to do so.

This novel, published in hardback by Doubleday in 1973 as part of its Double D line and reprinted in paperback by Signet a year later, is told in first person, something of a rarity for Westerns, although Louis L'Amour did it frequently in his books, notably the Sackett novels. The narrator of THE TIRED GUN is Sam Court, who was once the marshal of the little town of Cottonwood Grove, Kansas. Six years before the novel opens, a personal tragedy drove Court to leave Cottonwood Grove and take up the life of a hired gun. As the book begins, he's on the run, being pursued by a wealthy, vengeful rancher whose brother Court killed in a gunfight. The killing was self-defense, but the rancher doesn't care about that. He's determined to hang Court anyway.

Finding himself near his former hometown, Court makes the fateful decision to return there briefly. Events conspire to keep him there, however, until his pursuers catch up to him, and during that time Patten uses flashbacks to fill the reader in on how Sam Court came to be in this perilous situation.

There's not a lot of action in THE TIRED GUN, but there's a heck of a lot of HIGH NOON style suspense and tension as Court waits for almost certain death to catch up to him. Patten believed in really piling the trouble on his protagonists, so it's not enough that Court has to deal with the danger catching up to him from behind. He finds fresh problems in his old hometown, too. While I was reading this book, I thought that Patten had buried Sam Court in such a deep hole there was no way he'd ever get out of it, but when the action finally does explode at the end, Patten does a great job of resolving everything.

Patten began writing in the early Fifties, and by the Seventies, his work had become pretty inconsistent. He's at the top of his game in THE TIRED GUN, though. If you want to read a hardboiled, noirish traditional Western that packs a lot into 50,000 words, this is about as good as they come. Highly recommended.

Forgotten Books: Outlaw Canyon - Lewis B. Patten

This is another fine early novel by Lewis B. Patten. It opens in the middle of the action, as Matt Springer, the foreman of the vast Fortress Ranch, is about to lead his men into the dreaded Outlaw Canyon in an attempt to recover a herd of rustled cattle. What makes this even more difficult than it would be otherwise is the fact that the rustlers were led by Wes Knudson, the son of Fortress’s elderly owner Chris Knudson – who also happens to be like a father to Matt.

Other than Ed Gorman and H.A. DeRosso, no Western author puts his characters through more emotional torture and turmoil than Lewis B. Patten. In OUTLAW CANYON, after setting the scene Patten launches into a series of flashbacks that establish why Wes Knudson hates his father so much that he’ll lead a gang of outlaws against him. The plot, which involves adultery, murder, and general mayhem, is gritty to say the least, and as is often the case in a Patten novel, there are some sex scenes that are pretty graphic for the era, since OUTLAW CANYON was published in 1961. All of it leads up to the expected big showdown at the end.

Veteran Western readers probably won’t be surprised at any of the plot twists in this book, but odds are they’ll be entertained. Patten’s prose is tough and fast-paced and there’s plenty of action. Despite the fact that his books always have relatively positive endings, his vision of the West is a consistently bleak one, and the characters who manage to achieve happiness usually pay a high price to do so. Most of his books are well worth reading, and OUTLAW CANYON certainly falls into that category.

Forgotten Books: The Hide Hunters - Lewis B. Patten

Unlike most of the Lewis B. Patten novels I’ve read, this one is based on a historical incident, the epic battle between thirty or forty buffalo hunters and hundreds of Comanche, Kiowa, and Southern Cheyenne warriors under the command of Quanah Parker at Adobe Walls in the Texas Panhandle. I think it’s a rule that every Western author has to write an Adobe Walls book sooner or later. I certainly have (STAGECOACH STATION: PANHANDLE, as by Hank Mitchum). It’s such a good, dramatic story, with the buffalo hunters, including Billy Dixon and a young Bat Masterson, standing off what should have been an overwhelming force of Indians.

In this novel, Patten creates a few fictional characters and gives them reasons to be at Adobe Walls when the attack takes place. Would-be buffalo hunter Jess Burdett rescues beautiful Edith Clinger from her abusive husband, who of course follows them to Adobe Walls bent on reclaiming his wife and having his revenge on Burdett. For some reason, a lot of Patten’s heroes wind up in love with other men’s wives, and that’s the case here. He usually has some sort of violent death conveniently befall the husband, freeing the woman to wind up with the hero, but the resolution isn’t quite so neat in this book.

As always with Patten’s work, there’s a good deal of moral ambiguity, plenty of terse prose, and some hard-nosed action scenes in THE HIDE HUNTERS. He gets the history right and does a fine job of portraying the battle itself, so the reader winds up with a very good blend of fact and fiction. I enjoyed this one enough that I’m tempted to read his Custer book, THE RED SABBATH, another historically-based novel.

Forgotten Books: Rope Law - Lewis B. Patten

Over the past few years, Lewis B. Patten has become one of my favorite Western authors. The West he writes about is often a dark and dangerous place, where no one can be trusted completely, not even your best friend or the woman you love, where good men sometimes do bad things and bad men do even worse. His Gold Medal novel ROPE LAW, originally published in 1956, fits right in with that description and is probably the best Patten novel I’ve read so far.

The story begins in the middle of the action, with a posse chasing down a fugitive atop a rugged plateau. When the man they’re after holes up in an old cabin, the posse members surround the place, but then the sheriff throws them a curve by riding up to the cabin and walking in to confront the outlaw . . . who, as it turns out, is the lawman’s adopted son.

From there, as the posse waits for nightfall so they can close in, Patten backtracks to fill in the story of what brought the characters to this point, and it’s a years-long saga of drunkenness, prostitution, robbery, and murder worthy of any of the more contemporary Gold Medals. Sex serves as the motivation for most of this, and while the scenes aren’t graphic, there are quite a few of them for a traditional Western published in 1956. He also puts his heroes through a lot of torment, both emotional and physical, that was unusual for the time period. Patten’s tendency to come up with somewhat happy endings keeps his books from falling completely into the Western noir category, but they come close enough to satisfy most readers of crime fiction, I think. ROPE LAW certainly does.

A couple of words of warning, though: Not all of Patten’s novels are as dark as what I’ve described here. Some of them are very traditional Westerns with nothing really to distinguish them except a competent readability (not something to be taken lightly in its own right, mind you). And he’s also an inconsistent writer, especially in his later books which are carelessly written to the point that I’ve started some of them and not finished them. But pick up ROPE LAW or LYNCHING AT BROKEN BUTTE or THE SCAFFOLD AT HANGMAN’S CREEK (Patten likes hangings as plot instigators, too) or any number of other novels, and I think you’ll be thoroughly entertained.