Law Rides the Range by Walt Coburn (1935)

A pretty run of the mill novel, but with some nice twists and turns and a couple of interesting characters.

Law Rides the Range is the story of Joe Morgan, the man who grew up with a reputation for being the son of an outlaw; his father, Wade, killed the town boss, Shotgun Riley and went off to join the Hole in the Wall Gang, the Wild Bunch.
As a child, Joe shot Riley's comrade, Bull Mitchell the saloon owner, but as he grows up he's taught not to become an outlaw like his father, but to become a lawyer instead. A lawman, anyway.

Now he's decided to bring Mitchell and the Clantons to justice, and finds himself in a love triangle between his childhood friend Amy Steele, and the new girl in town, Kit Kavanaugh.

I was pleasantly surprised by Kit because she defied all my expectations of what I've seen from female characters like her in Hollywood Westerns. She's much too complicated to be a "bad girl", which she would have been in any other story. Not only did she have the conscience to go out and rescue her romantic rival Amy from the Clanton brothers, she also manages to avoid getting captured herself, even chasing them out with a few threats.
I thought she was going to get killed so she can be out of the way for Joe and Amy to get married. No way. She personally encourages them to marry, and goes off and marries Pete Smyth instead.
At times she was the hero of the story, not Joe.
Sure, she's told not to fight by Wade Morgan during his final standoff, but other than that, she's a badass all the same.

Coburn gives a very good sense of time, place and even community, allowing us to get to know some of the townspeople of Pay Dirt.

The story isn't all that memorable and the characters are mostly archetypes. I'm getting shades of Morgan Park from Silver Canyon reflected in Bull Mitchell. They both even get in fistfights with the respective heroes.
We know that Amy Steele is the civilized girl, the good one, that the hero is fated to marry. But at least unlike in Silver Canyon the hero knows the girl for a long time, as opposed to deciding to marry her at first sight and refusing to take no for an answer.

The action and suspense is good in this one. There's even one moment that really shocked me.

In the end, everything is set right and Joe and his father's partner Bob Burch hang up their guns, with amazing ease. Everything is tied up satisfactorily, even though lives have been lost in the process.

Law Rides the Range was an engaging read that I got through quickly.

Not much to say about it, but Kit was really cool.

Argosy, June 23 1934

I bought this one because the cover illustration made me curious.

This is one of those all-purpose men's magazines. There's only a couple of Western stories in here so I'm reviewing just those.

The Trail of Danger, Part 1 by William MacLeod Raine

California, 1849. A young sailor, Dennis Gifford's ship is shanghaied by pirates, but he makes a daring escape into Monterey. There he is attacked by a couple of thugs, but he begins to realize that one of them is a powerful criminal who is courting a pretty girl, Rosita Martinez, whose garden our hero tries to escape into.

The criminal calls himself "Juan Bandini", but at one point he very nearly gives away his real name- Juan Castro.
Really, dude? If you're the greatest bandit in California, you can't make a dumb mistake like that. Luckily for him Dennis and Rosita don't notice him second guessing his own name and go about the conversation like it was nothing.

Gifford is taken in by Rosita's family, without telling them that the two had met a little beforehand, lives in comfort and is offered land (lucky kid), but he has to stay at the place anyway because he eventually convinces them that this "Bandini" guy whom the family knew is, of course, Juan Castro, who is hunting him, because he hates Americans. 

Rosita's father Ramon was a little suspicious of him anyway. 

So Gifford goes with one of Rosita's brothers to investigate and runs into Juan's lieutenant, Felipe, who is essentially described to have teeth just as nice and white as his leader's. They also meet the obligatory muscle of the gang, Pedro, who isn't too different from Lupo in A Coffin Full of Dollars, or Gualtero in South of Rio Grande. The two young men eventually arrive at the hills, meet a bunch of soldiers and together they try to take on the gang. 

Back at the Martinez place he receives a letter from Juan asking for Rosita's hand in marriage and threatening to kill Gifford. Dude, just write about the marriage part if you want Rosita's father on your side. You don't need to put him off by threatening Gifford as well.

"He is full of flourishes and courtesy, but every few words the threats break through." You think?

The pacing of this story goes along at breakneck speed. I'm almost considering having the full novel.

Very engaging and fun to read, even if it doesn't break any new ground. You've still got the hero, the girl, the villain and his musclebound henchman... it's all very formulaic.

Picture Rock, Part 3 by Frank Richardson Pierce

And speaking of formulaic...

So this guy named Jerry McGrath is out to kill a man named Spider Darby who is determined to get control of McGrath's father's mine.
However, when Darby's daughter Lois starts flirting with him as part of a scheme, she begins to fall in love with him for real. 

It's not very memorable but it kept me reading anyway.

South of Rio Grande by Max Brand (1936)

Cover illustration by Jack Thornton. Spoiler warning: the man on the cover is not a character in this novel.

I enjoyed this one a lot and I highly recommend it.

Joe Warder, the gunman and jailbird, is hired to go down to Mexico to bring back the bandit chief El Tigre. Seems simple enough. However, a young Irish man named Dennis MacMore is tagging along for the ride, looking for his brother Patrick, whom he praises and admires, and who is in the very same town that El Tigre is operating in, the town of San Clemente.

It seems that young Denny is way in over his head. He's unskilled, inexperienced and generally a burden on the mission. He reads and sings, but that amounts to too little. Joe is already too far ahead to send the boy back; he'd already saved him from a mugger named Pedro Oñate (Cool name!) and wasn't going to risk leaving him alone again.

Fortunately, where Dennis lacks in survival skills he makes up for in gumption. After Joe is pursued by a gang of horsemen, Dennis, who is behind them and who is a lousy shot on an emaciated horse, goes charging after them, firing a rifle wildly, and saves Joe's life, therefore earning his right to accompany Joe on the search for El Tigre, and also for Patrick MacMore. It won't be easy, but together the two just might be able to make it.

This book had me hooked right from the start. Sometimes you can easily guess what's going to happen, sometimes not. There's one character in the novel whom you can't even tell is good or not, all you know is that he's really cool, and very memorable.

Our narrator, Joe Warder, is strong and heroic, but very human and sympathetic. He's terrified of hunting for El Tigre and is constantly wary of the perilous journey he is embarking on. I like his self-deprecation, that's a nice touch. More than once he mentions his broken nose and smashed up face. And I love the way he regards everything with a degree of disbelief. Often throughout he essentially says, "I can't believe I'm writing this, but it actually happened."

But the story belongs to Dennis MacMore, a truly unique character in a work of Western literature. He's plucky, although inexperienced. He's impulsive and a hopeless romantic, but resourceful and intelligent. He is the heart and soul of South of Rio Grande. Brand has created a truly well rounded character here.

Even his love interest, La Carmelita, doesn't shy away from the action. Though she is young, she carries herself like a queen. She may be in distress, but she's not weak. And though she is even more experienced than Dennis, she is a brave fighter. I was pleasantly surprised by her and her development as a whole. She beats down a guy with a broken oar in one scene!
She has a reputation for being the most beautiful woman in San Clemente, and I can only picture a sweeter, Mexican Crimson O'Hairoil in my imagination.

Joe himself seems to be attracted to strong young women. After hearing about General Pinzon's daughter and how helpful she was to Dennis, Joe decides that although he's forty two and has a broken nose, and she's reportedly not attractive, he'd totally do her. That's what he essentially said. He also appears to have the hots for La Carmelita as well, even though she's also young enough to be his daughter. Moving along.

The action itself is taut and tightly paced. The whole thing kept me guessing. I found it that difficult to put it down.

The descriptions of the setting are lush and vivid, from the desert, to the streets of San Clemente, to the moonlit river and Alvarado gardens.

One or two problems with it, though. First of all, this is not recommended for any Asian readers. One small scene with "the Chink waiter" is enough to put anyone off even a bit.

Any Mexican readers might be offended as well, especially when reading about ones like the Guadalupe family, but Joe tries to explain that he doesn't think they're all a bad lot. "When they're bad, they're poison. When they're good, they furnish you with a finer type of gentlemen than any I've ever seen from Texas to Montana". And indeed San Clemente is full of a diverse range of characters. For every Pedro Oñate and Jose Guadalupe, there are noble, helpful and decent characters such as Orthez, the Pinzon family and, again, La Carmelita, who is rumoured to be a maneater but who is good as gold.

The second problem is that the ending has a twist in it which doesn't make any sense and very nearly ruined such an enjoyable piece of work for me. It's not only disappointing, it's improbable as well.

Anyway, it's an exciting adventure with vivid imagery, colourful characters and one twist after another. I don't want to spoil too much because for most part, it's that good of a ride, that good of a journey into a new and exciting world.