STEVE CARROLL WRITES

Mad River  (1956/1967)   by Donald Hamilton Before he solidified his reputation as the author of the Matt Helm   espionage series, Donald Hamilton wrote several westerns, some of which   started   life as serialized stories for Collier Magazine . Such is the case with  Mad Rive r originally printed by Collier   in 1956 and then lengthened   into a novel and republished by Gold Medal in 1967.   While Mad River is well-written (I’ve yet to read anything by Hamilton that   wasn’t) and   features a few standout action sequences, it bears the tell-tale   signs of a shorter work that was padded to hit a required word count rather   than a   justifiable plot expansion.  Boyd Cohoon is released from Yuma prison   following a 5-year stint for a crime he didn’t commit; he agreed to serve in   order to protect the brother of the woman he loves, who has pledged to wait for   him.  However, nothing goes as planned once Cohoon returns to   his hometown and a   rather convoluted and sometimes conf

Mac Wingate #2 -   Mission Code: King’s Pawn  (1981) by Bryan Swift (Bill C. Knott) Although three writers took on the name of Bryan Swift to pen the Mac Wingate series of World War II adventures, I started with the second one, credited to Bill C. Knott.  Mission Code: King’s Pawn  finds our hero, special agent and demolition expert Mac Wingate, tasked with putting together a small munitions team to parachute into Albania for the purpose of arming, training, and assisting Islamic anti-Communist guerrillas in their efforts to blow up a German gasoline and munitions dump. The plan hinges on Mac’s ability to successfully unite the disparate factions of the rebels under the leadership the Albanian king’s cousin.  The plot hops effectively from Cairo to Malta to the mountains of Albania. Clearly films such as  The Guns of Navarone ,  The Dirty Dozen , and  Where Eagles Dare  had their influence on Knott as there is very much a big Hollywood cinematic feel to most all of the frequent action

Bitter   Sage  (1954) by Frank Gruber Frank Gruber was a highly prolific writer of pulps and various novels, including many westerns. 25 of his books were made into movies and he created 3 different western TV shows, in addition to writing 65 screenplays and 100 television episodes. I note all of this because reading  Bitter Sage  is like watching a classic Hollywood western movie from the heyday of the 50s.  Wes Tancred is one of the best gunslingers in the old west, but he’s running from a violent past and a lie about who he is and what he’s done that has taken on mythic proportions. Following a fateful intervention that sees him gun down 3 would-be thieves, Tancred ends up in Sage City, Kansas, a cattle town owned and lorded over by the crooked mayor, Jacob Fugger.  Taking a job as a printer at the local newspaper, Tancred is inevitably pulled into a growing war between the upright citizens of Sage City and the forces of Fugger, who starts calling in hired guns to kill anyone who op

Lassiter: Funeral   Bend  (1970) by Jack Slade (Peter McCurtin) The Lassiter series, credited to house name Jack Slade, was written by a variety of authors over the course of numerous books with multiple publishers in the US and across Europe, although deciphering information on actual authors and correctly numbered editions is a bit daunting. Most consensus seems to land on  Funeral Bend  being the work of action/adventure stalwart, Peter McCurtin.  We are introduced to our anti-hero, Lassiter, as he arrives in the town of El Dorado, formerly known as Funeral Bend. It’s a violent mining town with no law to speak of and plenty of intermingling immigrants (Welsh, Irish, and Chinese). Lassiter takes out 3 troublemakers in one of the town’s saloons early in the book and is offered a job as marshal, which he takes. However, we soon learn that Lassiter has a plan to steal the town’s gold reserves through information he gains as the local peacekeeper. He ends up angering the Irish and Welsh