STEVE CARROLL WRITES

The following column was originally printed in Justin Marriott's  Paperback Fanatic 46 , which was published in January of 2023. You can buy a copy of it  here . While   the martial arts have been a deeply ingrained part of various Asian cultures   and their literature for centuries, their influence in western culture was   a   direct result of military exposure to Eastern fighting forms during World War   II in both China and Japan and later during the Korean War. Servicemen   brought   an interest in these esoteric fighting styles back home with them and soon   their influence found its way into the collective psyche. Shortly   thereafter,   the Hong Kong movie scene exploded in the late 60s and spilled over into the   rest of the world in the early 70s. Suddenly Kung Fu was   everywhere from the suburban   neighborhood cinema to TV screens, comic books, and even Top 40 commercial pop   radio ( Everybody w...

Under a variety of house names, Laurence James was a mainstay of the UK-based Piccadilly Cowboy stable of writers and penned the  Crow  series, as well as  The Apache ,  Gunslingers , and the  Caleb Thorn  series.   Following a short prelude,  Worse than Death  introduces readers to a wagon train made up of Cavalry officer wives and a small detachment of soldiers escorting them through the blizzard-ridden Dakota Territories and into the sights of renegade Shoshone chief, Many Knives, who is on the warpath against whites. After an initial attack on the wagon train decimates the ranks and leaves the travelers stranded, our anti-hero, Crow, enters the scene and assists what’s left of the soldiers and the women.  Lest this sound like an altruistic bit of heroism, it’s made clear that Crow is only looking out for Crow and how he can best survive the situation. Much mayhem e...

Six Gun   Samurai  (1981) by Patrick Lee (Mark Roberts) As was the case with many men’s adventure series,  Six Gun Samurai  was actually authored by 3 different writers all working under the house name of Patrick Lee; this first book’s copyright is attributed to Mark Roberts, who also wrote the odd-numbered books in  The Penetrator  series. Despite the fact that I have always had a strong affinity for martial arts-related adventure fiction, I did not enjoy this book and had to repeatedly force myself to keep slogging through to finish it.  The first book in this short-lived 8-book series introduces us to Tommy Fletcher, son of American missionaries to Japan in the mid-1800s. After a massacre leaves him orphaned, Fletcher is taken in by a samurai and trained in the art of Bushido, learning not only karate, but many different weapons forms, including, of course...

Honeymaker’s Son   (1975) by Ray Hogan Universally feared yet despised land baron Burl Honeymaker has been bushwhacked, shot in the back by an unknown assassin. Now it’s up to his young estranged son, Tom, to find the killer even as he assumes responsibility of the family ranch and with it, inherits an escalating land war with three other powerful landowners who all want his vast acreage. The question for Tom to answer is, which one of them is willing to kill to get it?  Overall Honeymaker's Son is a pretty straightforward western. There’s plenty of gunplay and dastardly potential villains with their personal armies, all ready and willing to take the Honeymaker property by force. Complicating things is an unexpected romance that develops between Tom and the daughter of one of the scheming landowners.  Ray Hogan wrote well over 100 books in his career, mostly standalone westerns, though he did pen a couple of wes...

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...

The Laramie River   Crossing  (1973) by Jack Ehrlich After a career as a lawyer, a district attorney, and a reporter for Newsday, Jack Ehrlich started writing fiction late in life. Thank God, because  The Laramie River Crossing  is stunning—a lean, mean, hard-edged adult-oriented western that left me hungry to read everything by the author.  This is a genuinely literary novel that takes the time to craft characters of real depth with myriad shades of gray. Smith (no first name given), and Preacher are bad men with a history of violence and crime. The first half of the book has a classic “men on a mission” set-up as Preacher goes about putting their previous crime ring back together at the behest of The Limey, their old handler and heist mastermind.  Preacher is not above bushwhacking his former colleagues or breaking them out of jail to force their involvement. The plot itself is deceptively simple...

Rio Desperado  (1962)   by Gordon Shirreffs As  Rio Desperado  opens, gunslinger Burke Dane cuts down the lynched body of his half-brother on the outskirts of a town where the young family man had gone to buy cattle. Dane’s only clue is the unique style of braided rawhide  reata  that was used to hang his brother.  Armed with basic knowledge of the town and the power-hungry cattle baron who runs it, Dane sets out to find those responsible and exact justice. He also intends to retrieve the $5,000 in poker winnings that was stolen from his brother’s corpse so he can give it to his brother’s widow and children.  This basic set-up is all that is necessary in the hands of a pro like Shirreffs, who wrote over 70 novels in his day. There is a depth of character and a literary flair to this book that belies its pulp roots. Dane saves the life of Jesse, a hot-headed young hired gun worki...