BOOK REVIEW

Buchanan’s Siege by Jonas Ward (1973) and 

Blade: The Navaho Trail by Matt Chisholm (1981)

Todd Mason has all the links to this Friday’s Forgotten Books at his blog Sweet Freedom.

Last month, I read two entertaining westerns that were similar in many ways.

Both Buchanan’s Siege and Blade: The Navaho Trail were written by prolific and pseudonymous authors.

While Jonas Ward was William Ard, who wrote detective and western novels with equal ease, Matt Chisholm was Peter Watts, a master of western fiction who also wrote as Cy James, Luke Jones, Duncan Mackinlock, and Tom Owen. Both writers have passed away.

Buchanan’s Siege and Blade: The Navaho Trail have not dissimilar heroes.

Tom Buchanan is a tough drifter. He is strong and dangerous and friendly depending on the situation. He calls himself a “peaceable man” and doesn’t like guns because he has had his share of firearms. In this novel, at least, he doesn’t wear a holster in the beginning, preferring to parley with friends and enemies. Buchanan fights for the underdog and once he takes up a cause he won’t leave until he is through with it, one way or the other. He is willing to risk his life for those whose battles he is fighting.

Joe Blade is called the hero of the savage west, and not without reason. Like Buchanan, he is a drifter who takes on dangerous assignments for anyone willing to pay, usually the government. Blade is also a considerate man who doesn’t think twice before sticking his neck to rescue someone from danger, even if it means running into an explosives-ridden school, hauling a wounded man on his shoulders, and running out again. And, like Buchanan, he would rather go about his task peacefully than exchange bullets with the enemy.

Buchanan and Blade, nemesis of evil and all that is unjust on the Frontier, are two good men to have on any side.

A ranch in Laramie, Wyoming. © Library of Congress

While the plot in the novels is different, their theme and setting are quite similar.

In Buchanan’s Siege, the six-foot-four Buchanan is on his way to Buffalo, Wyoming, to help Colonel Brad Bradbury, the owner of the biggest ranch in the country, reach a peaceful settlement with the smaller ranchers and farmers, which actually means forcing them to sell out and walk away. But, Bradbury’s “friends” in the powerful Cattleman’s Association have sinister plans. They want to take over the other ranches and grab their land by brute force, starting with the framing and lynching of farmer Adam Day for rustling. Buchanan hates lynchers and double-crossers and ends up defending Adam Day’s estranged wife, Amanda, and the owners of some of the smaller outfits holed up in the more impregnable stone house belonging to the Kovacs and Raven, the half Crow girl they have adopted. This is where Buchanan’s siege plays out, as the big man and the handful of honest and unthreatening people, including mountain man Dan Badger toting his Sharps rifle, defend the fortress against more than a hundred gunmen of all shades. They have no choice.

The military Sharps rifle, also known as the Berdan Sharps rifle (above),
was used during and after the Civil War. © Wikimedia Commons

In Blade: The Navaho Trail, which takes plays shortly after the Civil War, Joe Blade is on a federal mission to bring back Colonel Warren Haffner for crimes against the Navaho tribe. Haffner, who served under Brigadier General Christopher ‘Kit’ Carson, thinks the legendary frontiersman was too soft on the Indians and hatches a plot to create trouble on the reservation where the Navaho people are living peacefully. Haffner, who lords over his three grown-up sons, kills Juanito, chief of the Navaho, in the hope that it will lead to an uprising in the Navaho Nation, the largest reservation. Armed to the teeth, the insane Haffner and his sons take over the Indian Agency located on the reservation and wait for the Navaho to come to them. With a bloodbath imminent, it is left to Joe Blade and his girl, the vivacious Charity Clayton, to put an end to Haffner’s evil plans and make peace with the Indians.

Navajo chief Manuelito
© Wikimedia Commons

Yet another similarity in both the novels is the important role played by the Indians.

 

While Raven brings her Crow people to help Buchanan and the Kovacs against the Cattleman’s Association in Buchanan’s Siege, it is Indian Police Chief Manuelito who casts his lot with Blade and succeeds in pacifying the Navaho clansmen, thus averting a bloody uprising, in The Navaho Trail. In both the stories, the Native Americans are portrayed as more sensible and restrained compared to the war-hungry whitemen and their divisive and destructive activities.

One of the reasons I enjoy reading westerns immensely is the many fascinating elements in the stories, retold in the backdrop of historical events, places, and characters, with the Frontier always the focal point of the narrative. A recurring theme in these stories is the triumph of good over evil, of right over wrong, of virtue and vice, of the brave and the coward, of honest and hardworking men and women versus greedy men and profiteers, and of the human spirit that never dies.

In Buchanan’s Siege, for instance, the good and brave people, the Kovacs and the Whelans, have seen hard times that would break most others. They would rather face the bullet and go down fighting for the piece of land they worked so hard to build. The Frontier belongs to them as much as it belongs to power-hungry ranchers, cattle thieves, and shady gunmen who lynch innocent men and burn their houses.

As the likeable mountain man Dan Badger tells Buchanan, “Me and them afore me, we didn’t open God’s country for men like these to hog it, to kill other folks. Some of us had a vision, we seen it is the promised land. Everything’s here, all good. Better the Injuns kept it for themselves, so sez I.”

This is the message that Buchanan’s Siege and The Navaho Trail convey to the reader.

At this point I ought to say a few words about the narrative styles of William Ard (Jonas Ward) and Peter Watts (Matt Chisholm) but I seriously cannot because I am not an expert on western fiction and the many excellent writers who occupy the genre. As an outsider, all I can say is that I enjoy reading westerns and I like the way every one of them is written, each absorbing and entertaining in its own way. I might add, though, that I become so engrossed in all the action taking place that I often overlook the style altogether. What I don’t fail to see is the profundity of the narrative and there’s a fair share of it in westerns.

I am looking forward to reading more  books in the Tom Buchanan and Joe Blade series.

References

Cullen Gallagher has reviewed The Name's Buchanan by Jonas Ward (William Ard) at his blog Pulp Serenade.

You can read more about William Ard and his hardboiled detective and western heroes at Dennis Miller's website and about Matt Chisholm — The Man behind McAllister! over at David Whitehead’s website.

Vultures in the Sun by Brian Garfield (1987)

A replica of my copy of the book

They hired a town tamer named Ethan Scott, a coldly efficient gunfighter with a dark reputation. Everyone knew that some blood would be shed before there could be peace. The only question was, whose blood would it be?

Any writer who has authored more than seventy books including nonfiction requires no introduction. Like Brian Garfield (74) who has not only been a prolific writer but has also redefined the way fiction is written. He has brought a refreshing style to many popular fiction like western, thriller, espionage, and mystery. There is a perfect balance between his stories and characters. If you haven’t read his books yet then I suggest you should. Garfield is a very good writer.

Most readers identify the American novelist and screenwriter with the Death Wish series, his most prominent work, and Hopscotch, the Edgar Award winning spy thriller. There is nothing wrong with this. Every author is known for one or two major works. For instance, think Frederick Forsyth and you’re thinking The Day of the Jackal; think Kurt Vonnegut and you promptly mention Slaughterhouse Five; think John Irving and you tick off The World According to Garp; think Joseph Heller and you’re picturing Catch-22; think John le Carré and you remember The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; think Robert Ludlum and you point to the Bourne trilogy, and so on and so forth.

I consider Brian Garfield to be one of the finest writers of frontier fiction, for his westerns like Tripwire (1973) and Apache Canyon (1986), and Buchanan’s Gun (1968), his single contribution to the Tom Buchanan series created by William Ard, all of them under the pseudonym Jonas Ward. Lesser-known books usually draw my attention to an author’s work. While I haven’t read every book by Garfield, I can single out the Russia-centric suspense novels Kolchak’s Gold and The Romanov Succession (both 1974), which I have read, and The Paladin (1980), a WWII novel in my possession and waiting to be read. A lot of good things have been said about this novel.

Vultures in the Sun is one of Garfield’s latter-day westerns. At 149 pages, it tells the story of dreaded Arizona gunfighter Ethan Scott who is hired by the wealthy mine owners of Lodestar to eliminate a gang of outlaws led by Henry Dierkes who have been hijacking their monthly payrolls and ore shipments.

Guy Murvain and Tom Larabee, the two largest mine and land owners, stand to lose the most in the large town divided, down its middle, by the respectable and the seedy. While they hire Ethan Scott, they don’t bargain for his ways: the gunfighter, sporting a black moustache, deep-set eyes and two guns, stares at his opponents till they’re provoked into drawing first and dropping dead in the ensuing gunfight. The bodies soon pile up. Dierkes loses men but not the will to confront his old enemy.

Matters come to a head when Ethan Scott fires at Tom Larabee and breaks his gun arm in defence of his “friend” Krayle MacIver, owner of the largest saloon in Lodestar. Guy Murvain realises he might have bitten more than he can chew. He tries to tame the town tamer by demanding the gunman’s loyalty towards the mine owners, but in vain.

“No man can hire my loyalty. My loyalty is to myself alone. What you've paid for is not loyalty but the performance of a job—and I’m performing that job. Mr. Murvain, when I took the job it was with the understanding that I would clean up the district—my way.”

Ethan Scott cleans up Lodestar his way, in a style reminiscent of Tombstone, except he does it alone with both his guns blazing.

Most westerns have a predictable storyline; the difference lies in the way they’re told. Garfield is a past master at this. He weaves the all-too familiar plot into a tight narrative with an equal share of clean prose and dialogue that keeps the reader engaged from beginning to end. The description of the town of Lodestar and the hostile terrain of Peacock Gorge, the hideout of the toughs, an essential part of every western, is kept to a bare minimum.

The dialogue between the lead characters is straightforward. The characters, apart from Ethan Scott and the others, include Krayle MacIver, an old acquaintance who endears himself to the gunman; the beautiful Marla Searles, a partner in MacIver’s saloon and Scott’s former girl; Nita Matlock, who runs a café and MacIver’s love interest; and Sheriff Eugenio Castillo, who casts his lot with Henry Dierkes before fleeing the town. There is a quiet vulnerability about each of the unique characters, particularly Scott who much as he'd like to refuses to change his hard and impersonal existence, because the gun has made him what he is.

“I didn’t make the rules, Marla. But I've had to learn them.”

One of the milder westerns I've read in recent times, Vultures in the Sun is nonetheless a stark portrayal of hardened men in an unforgiving land called the frontier.

A book pilgrim’s journey to Books by Weight

I was a model of restraint during my biannual pilgrimage to the Books by Weight exhibition at Churchgate in South Mumbai, last week. I picked up only four used paperbacks in mint condition. The books had a familiar musty smell, as if I’d pulled them out of a rusty trunk in the attic. I like the way old books smell. Some people religiously sniff pages of novels and newspapers before reading them. It’s supposed to bring good luck. A quaint habit and one I indulge in occasionally.

 

The four titles I picked up, out of a million-odd books, were Guzman Go Home by Alan Sillitoe, another of my favourite authors; The October Country by Ray Bradbury, whose paperbacks have some of the best illustrated covers; And So To Bed by William Ard, whose western novels I’ve read as Jonas Ward; and Lie Down Killer by Richard S. Prather, whose crime and mystery have been on my wish-list for a long time. See the topmost picture.

I found these in one of a dozen open boxes strewn across the floor in the large and roomy auditorium at Sunderbai Hall. There were at least two cartons filled with mid- to late 20th century fantasy, sf and horror novels mostly by authors I’d never heard of. I can’t imagine what I missed, especially since I was the only one pouring over this section. Most people were picking up popular and contemporary authors, such as, Stephen King, James Patterson, Michael Connelly, Danielle Steel (still widely read in India), Jonathan Kellerman, Elizabeth Gilbert, Peter James, Mary Higgins Clark, Ian Rankin, Joanna Trollope, Ellis Peters, and J.K. Rowling, to name a handful.

Apart from the boxes, there were eight rows, each the length of a bowling alley, stacked with hundreds and thousands of paperbacks and hardbacks across several categories. The books were pressed so tightly against one another, their spines facing upward, I was afraid they’d suffocate to death. Books have life, after all.

The one carton I eyed with unconcealed glee at Books by Weight was the one that contained my most favourite writer—Jack Higgins (Harry Patterson). I pulled out many of his Book Club hardbacks only to drop them back into the box. I’d enough of his novels at home. And yet, when it comes to books, there’s never too much of a good thing.

© Photographs by Prashant C. Trikannad