New on My Shelves

You've got to love used book stores and all the treasures they offer.

And a happy Ides of March, everyone.

Trapp's Mountain by Robert J. Randisi (western)

In 1846, mountain man John Henry Trapp's wife and home were deliberately destroyed by fire. Trapp searched high and low and killed the men responsible. But one of the men was the son of a powerful man, and he made sure Trapp served the top sentence of 25 years in prison for his revenge. Finally free again, all Trapp wants is to get back to his mountain.

Now Trapp has to feel his way around the 1871 West as a 64-year-old man who still feels 39 (age doesn't matter in prison) but whom others now derisively call "Grandpa." And he's got only his talent for poker, his skill with his trusty Sharps buffalo rifle, and his new friend Fry to help him along.

As if that weren't enough, there's someone who thinks that prison was not enough punishment for Trapp and wants him dead. But getting between Trapp and his mountain is a dangerous proposition.

Robert J. Randisi is one of my favorite Western writers. In addition to his work on The Gunsmith (probably my favorite of the monthly Western series), he also manages to write some of the more interesting nonseries Westerns due to his modern approach to character and his liberal use of humor along with the expected traditional genre tropes.

In Trapp's Mountain (originally published as Mountain Man's Vengeance under the pseudonym "Robert Lake"), Randisi shows the other side of revenge. Many Western authors would have focused on Trapp's seeking of retribution and called it a day. Randisi does give that part its due through a strategic use of flashback, but he is more interested in how that action colors the rest of Trapp's life.

Trapp just wants to get back to the life he had before, but first he's got to actually make it back to the mountain, and Randisi puts a lot of exciting obstacles in his way. Trapp's Mountain makes great use of Randisi's unadorned prose style. It reads quickly and moves like the best pulp fiction. The only downside is that it ends at the point where a sequel would begin, and there doesn't seem to be one. But Trapp's journey is interesting enough to stand alone.

The Scarlet Gun (Gunsmith #44) by Robert J. Randisi writing as J.R. Roberts (Western series)

Clint Adams's stopover in Hedgemont with Sheena O'Shay had an unexpected effect. Learning that Adams was the famous Gunsmith led her 20-year-old brother Danny to be a gunfighter. Now Danny has run off, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake, and Sheena wants Clint to stop him before someone else does, with a bullet.

Meanwhile, another beautiful Irish redhead known only as Scarlet is out for the blood of the five men who "destroyed her family and snatched her innocence." She's already killed two, and the next one on her list is John Titus, who has just hired Danny as a bodyguard of sorts. Leave it to Clint to satisfy the needs of both women in The Scarlet Gun — the forty-fourth in the long-running Gunsmith series — and in more than one way (including one sequence that spans ten pages).

It's always a pleasure to settle in with one of the Gunsmith novels written by author Robert J. Randisi, who is also a writer of terrific private-eye fiction. (The series has been published under the name "J.R. Roberts," a pseudonym of Randisi's and not a house name like other monthly Western series such as The Trailsman or Slocum, since its inception in 1982.) He has a very fast-paced and visual style that makes each novel a flawlessly easy read. Randisi has written over 300 of these books now, and I'm consistently amazed at how he continues to innovate, even in more recent ones like East of the River.

But I think these earlier Gunsmith entries like The Scarlet Gun are my favorites. I especially like how he gives Clint Adams a trackable memory in them. When there were still fewer than a hundred, and no so many plot to keep track of, Randisi would have the current story reference past novels — a very clever marketing tactic. In this one, Adams remembers or discusses events or characters from no less than seven other Gunsmith books: Dead Man's Hand (#14), Killer Grizzly (#24), North of the Border (#25), Trouble Rides a Fast Horse (#31), The Bounty Women (#35), The El Paso Salt War (#39), and Hell with a Pistol (#41). This adds to the fun and, of course, makes me eager to try out the other books.

East of the River (The Gunsmith #328) by Robert J. Randisi writing as J.R. Roberts (Western series)

Clint Adams, better known as the Gunsmith, knows he's in for trouble whenever he goes east of the Mississippi, but a high-stakes poker game in Ajax, Indiana, is too good to pass up. When he finds it's been called off, he's irked, but you can't reasonably expect to receive a telegram when you're constantly on the move. His ersatz host recommends the nearby town of Dexter, where Clint gets himself embroiled in a Deputy U.S. Marshal's search for evidence against some local bank robbers.

I don't know what money Clint lives on; he doesn't seem to be selling guns like he did in the earlier books in the series. [Update: see author comment.] But he helps out at least 3 people in this story and sees not a cent from any of them, apart from the occasional free beer or roll in the hay. But suspension of disbelief notwithstanding, author J.R. Roberts (in reality Robert J. Randisi) has produced yet another entertaining page-turner with East of the River.

Roberts/Randisi has a very visual style that could easily translate to the screen. The author even changes perspective often during action scenes — as if he were editing the program "in the camera," so to speak — which keeps the mind alert. In general, he doesn't linger on a scene; he has his characters tell us what we need to know, and he moves on. I read the whole of East of the River in about ninety minutes.

Which brings me to my only complaint regarding this book: it's just too short. The story is thin and wouldn't stand for much expansion, but calling East of the River a novel is a stretch, even compared to other entries in the series. The large type, wide margins, and the fact that all the chapters begin on the right-hand page (very often leaving a blank facing page) all suggest that even the publisher had a hard time getting it to look like a book worth paying six dollars for. And there may lie the issue in a nutshell: I don't usually pay full price for books, but when I do, I want to feel I got my money's worth.

Luckily, Randisi is an always entertaining and sometimes even innovative writer. Possibly in response to those readers of series Westerns who complain that the obligatory sex scenes get in the way of the story (or even stop it cold), in East of the River he has cross-cut a scene of one kind of action with a scene of another kind, folding them together like the cards in a shuffling deck. Just one more reason that The Gunsmith is my favorite Western series.

Killer Grizzly (The Gunsmith #24) by Robert J. Randisi writing as J.R. Roberts (Western series)

When a wheel on his rig breaks, Clint Adams — a.k.a. The Gunsmith, an ex-lawman with a well-known reputation — is stranded in the town of Bear Pass, Wyoming, while it is fixed. Adams laments being stuck, but before long a Killer Grizzly known as "Ol' Three-Paw" appears and destroys his horse team, making things immediately more interesting.

A reward is soon offered by Calvin Lockman, the local bigwig, for the death (with proof) of the giant grizzly bear — Ol' Three-Paw seems to like eating Lockman's cows. So the Gunsmith is on the hunt — despite the protestations of hotel mistress Dorian Ward, who says Ol' Three-Paw killed her husband and followed her here from Montana. Though it is thought that the money will bring all the amateurs out of the woodwork, Adams's only competition is Lacy Blake, a beautiful bounty hunter who heard about the reward. Will they compete against each other or decide to join forces?

One trait about the Gunsmith series that invariably brings a smile is how the author's business sense comes out. After referring to characters or events in past storylines, Randisi includes a footnote naming the other volume in which it appeared. For example, in Killer Grizzly, Adams thinks the Parker-Hale game rifle would be best to use on Ol' Three-Paw since it was so effective in taking down Big Foot (in book #21, Sasquatch Hunt). (A poker game also reminds him of the events in book #13, Draw to an Inside Death. I think you get the idea.) This is probably the best way I've seen yet to get a reader to buy other books in a series.

Killer Grizzly and its brethren are perfect back-pocket reads. The stories are fast-paced and told simply, and the short chapters make them easy to dip into at any free moment. Most appealing, however, is how Roberts / Randisi offers a heavy dose of tongue-in-cheek humor along with the sex and violence expected in "The All-Action Western Series." He doesn't take himself too seriously (he had his hero hunting down Big Foot, for Pete's sake!), making for an all-around pleasurable reading experience.

The Trailsman by authors writing as Jon Sharpe (Western series novels ghostwritten by Jon Messmann, David Robbins, James Reasoner, Robert J. Randisi, Ellen Recknor, Robert Vardeman and others)

Series titles reviewed:
Trailsman #271: St. Louis Sinners by Ellen Recknor
Trailsman #209: Timber Terror by [unknown to me]
Trailsman #3: Mountain Man Kill by Jon Messmann
Trailsman #309: California Carnage by James Reasoner
Trailsman #317: Mountain Mystery by David Robbins
Trailsman #210: The Bush League by Robert J. Randisi
Trailsman #234: Apache Duel by Robert Vardeman
Giant Trailsman #5: Idaho Blood Spoor by David Robbins

The Trailsman is one of the longest-running series of Western novels, having begun in 1980. Created by author Jon Messmann and published under the pseudonym Jon Sharpe, Messmann wrote most of the first books before his death in 2004. With a stable of experienced Western writers fulfilling the duties these days (though the name on the cover is still "Jon Sharpe"), the series is well past its 300th entry at this writing and is still going strong.

The series follows loner Skye Fargo, who, since he was eighteen, and after tracking down the people who killed his parents, has built a reputation as a trailer and tracker, hiring himself out as a combination protector/detective along the way to help people get out of difficult situations.

Since The Trailsman is an "adult" Western series, these jobs usually involve a comely female who is invariably willing to pay Fargo fringe benefits before he rides off again. Generally, there are between two and six sex scenes in among the fighting and shooting (these are traditional Westerns in every other sense), leading some of the more self-important Western readers to call them "Western porn."

But I think this just adds to the rough and tumble nature of the series and its protagonist, and there's nothing wrong with any Western that couldn't be helped by a few rolls in the hay. Readers respond positively to this, a fact supported by the series' success and longevity. (Some have even said that the success of series Westerns like The Trailsman keeps the door open for the publication of newer original Westerns.)

In any case, I enjoy them a great deal, though I wasn't sure I was going to when I read my first, #271 in the series, St. Louis Sinners, published in 2004. Though it had an interesting enough story (with enough of Oliver Twist included to make the connection unavoidable), I didn't get into the character or his predicament, and it just wasn't exactly what I was looking for.

Timber Terror by Ellen Recknor

I have since learned from more experienced readers of the series (like Western Fiction Review) that St. Louis Sinners is one of the lesser entries in the series, and author Ellen Recknor actually gets a few obvious things wrong about the character. Luckily, I was intrigued enough by Recknor's planting of Dickens into the Old West to try another, #209, Timber Terror from 1999.

Timber Terror wasn't a great improvement, but was a much quicker read. In it, Fargo gets involved with rival logging companies, and the book includes some suspenseful scenes involving Fargo in a log flume with giant tree trunks racing down toward him and the sides almost too slippery for purchase. (When a writer can make you fear for the safety of a series character who appears in more than 300 books, that's skill.)

Mountain Man Kill by Jon Messmann

Chance brought me into contact with a very early entry in the series, the third in fact, Mountain Man Kill from 1980. In it, Fargo is hired to find out who is stealing from the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, so he sets himself up as a trapper in the mountains and settles in to wait.

I thought I was in for an interesting look at a sort of trapper detective — not to mention expecting this to be a more fully thought-out representation of the character, since the author could not have possibly been out of ideas by this time — but Messmann is much too focused on chronicling Fargo's time playing house (or tepee, as the case may be) with Suni, an Indian maiden given to him for saving a brave's life, to ever make the mystery, such as it is, more than of passable interest.

Now don't get me wrong: the sex is part of what I come to these books for, too, but by the sixth or seventh time reading about Suni's "copper-cream breasts," the idea begins to take hold that perhaps the author is just filling up pages to meet contract stipulations. (The publisher reportedly changed the direction of this part of the series in later years.) This one was the greatest disappointment, but only due to my higher expectations: Mountain Man Kill is otherwise surprisingly indistinguishable in style and content from the books written 20 years later.

California Carnage by James Reasoner 

Luckily, the next one I tried, immediately after and bought in the same batch from my local used book store, was a great improvement — one might even say its diametric opposite. In any case, California Carnage (#309, from 2007) was the book that has cemented my faith in the series, or at least in the current crop of entries.

Not surprisingly, it was written by prolific genre-spanning author James Reasoner, and it is undoubtedly the best Trailsman I've read yet. In fact, California Carnage is so good as to seem as if it could be enjoyed even by people who normally scoff at these books; it feels just like a traditional Western that has been crafted to fit around the character.

In California Carnage, Fargo heads to the Golden State to meet up with Hiram Stoddard, one of two men who want to build the first stagecoach line along the Old Mission Trail. But when Stoddard's men make an attempt on the life of Belinda, the daughter of Stoddard's rival Arthur Grayson, Fargo decides to ride with Grayson's team instead (I'm sure it doesn't hurt that she's the only mature female character in the book). Soon it's a race, with Fargo acting as bodyguard as Grayson's stagecoach makes its way up the Trail, with Stoddard, who is willing to do anything to win, close behind.

Along the way, the crew meet up with a salty coach driver, a ghost who's searching for lost treasure, a girl who needs saving, and a boy who's rather taken with her. Reasoner makes the interesting choice of focusing on the emotional aspect in the few of Fargo's sex scenes, using the kind of "two into one" language more suited to the historical romances on Reasoner's bibliography.

My only problem with this is that it sets Fargo up to actually fall in love, but then the anthologic nature of the series forces him to be eager to get back on his own at the end. Still, that's a minor quibble in what was a really terrific read. I mean, stagecoaches, a ghost, and young love — California Carnage has something for everyone.

Mountain Mystery by David Robbins

In #317, 2008's Mountain Mystery, Fargo is found by Mabel Landry, who wants the famous Trailsman to locale her missing brother, Chester. He agrees, until Mabel says she must go along. The stubborn Mabel won't take no for an answer but proves to be little more than trouble for Skye, who has to rescue her from the Untilla Indians at least twice.

Fargo also has a run-in with Malachi Skagg — with whom he has a history that is described (though I don't know if this history actually took place in an earlier book in the series, or in the "inbetweens") — and from whose settlement Chester last wrote to Mabel. Eventually, Fargo is involved in a multilayered search and rescue, and author David Robbins (Rio Largo) keeps the pages flying by. He skimps on the sex scenes, though, and in fact the action stops entirely once he attempts to insert an instruction manual on sensitivity in the midst of one:

When Fargo had slept with his first dove, he learned an important lesson. She told him that most men [ignored] the woman's needs.... She explained to him that foreplay meant a lot ... that touching and kissing helped bring a woman to the brink so that her release was as powerful as the man's.... If touching and kissing helped things along, then by God he would touch and kiss until he straddled a volcano. [p.76]

Mountain Mystery starts out great, but in the end it only hints at the interesting aspects of a couple of characters that seem intriguing at first but then devolve into the usual ciphers necessary to push the hero's plot along. Robbins, however, is known for his innovation in the genre, and so manages to incorporate a substance that is common today, but that is rarely mentioned in Western novels.

He also utilizes the kind of action currently popular in extreme crime novels — a kind of Biblical torture like that which made Allan Guthrie's novel Hard Man so controversial upon its release.

This combination of traditional Western action with modern tropes is what makes Robbins one of the more interesting Western authors working today. Unfortunately, with series novels being what they are, his attempt at getting the reader emotionally involved with the characters' relationships falls flat (and in fact feels like an insult) when Robbins is required to end Mountain Mystery in the expected way.

The Bush League by Robert J. Randisi

Author Robert J. Randisi is one of my favorite Western writers, and his The Gunsmith is certainly my favorite series, so when I learned he had written 1999's The Bush League (#210), I had to try it out. In it, the owner of a team playing the new sport of baseball hires Fargo to lead them across the Wild West to San Francisco, playing a few exhibition games along the way.

Imagine my disappointment when not only was The Bush League only 150 pages, stopping abruptly before any closure was allowed — I was misled by the 16-page preview of Badlands Bloodbath in the back into thinking that it was at least a little longer — but it also was short on sexiness (the scenes there were, were few and dull). The author also makes Fargo look dumb by having him not know anything about baseball, and yet (contractually, I have to assume) gives him the physical prowess to hit five home runs in a row.

Apache Duel by Robert Vardeman

My next was a disappointment as well, #234: Apache Duel from 2001, in which Skye Fargo finds himself up against two formidable foes: the Apache Sharp Knife and gunrunner Big Red Frederickson. The author of this one is Robert Vardeman, who writes his own Westerns as Karl Lassiter and has written scores of novels in the Slocum series by "Jake Logan."

Vardeman's prose is serviceable and workmanlike, showing little flair or personality. This makes the action fast, and the beginning of Apache Duel was especially exciting, but everything else is dull in comparison to the work of other authors. I encountered these same traits in one of his Slocum titles, Slocum and the Pomo Chief, and I may simply need to avoid his work in the future.

For vacation reading, I decided to seek out the work of an author I'd been impressed with in the past, and so chose the fifth of the Giant Trailsman novels (these are 100 or so pages longer than the norm). David Robbins's Idaho Blood Spoor has a lot going for it: fast action, smooth-flowing prose, and because of the added length, deeper characterization.

Idaho Blood Spoor by David Robbins

In Idaho Blood Spoor, a rich man's son disappears (along with the son's wife and friend), and the tycoon hires the best trackers he can find to locate the boy. (He seems to not care whether the other two are found.) This group includes, of course, the famous Trailsman, a brother-sister duo, and two old friends of Fargo's. This Magnificent Five head out (separately) in search of the young man and a hefty reward.

Robbins does an excellent job of making the quintet of trackers into distinctive individuals. Their competition and mutual respect, along with their heated pursuit of $20,000 for the one to find the man's son, make Idaho Blood Spoor a suspenseful read full of human greed and machinations. Robbins is one of the Western genres most prolific and accomplished authors, and his Trailsman novels are always some of the best ones available.

In conclusion, the quality of the books in The Trailsman series (and sometimes within a single book) is very uneven, but gems are hidden throughout, and these fast-paced, sexy reads are always worth the small cover price. For a while, however, I may limit my own purchases to those written by James Reasoner — or perhaps David Robbins, who is an experienced Western series writer in his own right (penning the Wilderness series as "David Thompson") and writes the vast majority of the Trailsman titles published in the series these days.

The Trailsman series, along with the other Action Westerns once published monthly by Penguin, has ended, but they are still available used and in e-book formats.