Wayne Dundee has become a reliably entertaining western writer, and I recently read The Lawyer: The Retributioners. Sounds kind of like a title in the Matt Helm series, right? But it’s a western, for sure. The titular lawyer is J. D. Miller, a respectable and respected man until some outlaws kill his wife and daughter. Now he’s tracking the baddies down and getting his revenge. I haven’t read any of the other novellas (not novels) in this series produced by David Cranmer at Beat to a Pulp press, but I know that not all of them are written by Dundee, not that it matters. In this one The Lawyer finds himself in a small town just as a jailbreak occurs. The sheriff is killed, but The Lawyer kills one of the baddies, which causes to the town’s civic leaders to ask him to be the new sheriff. He’s not interested because one member of the gang the broke their compadre out of the jail is a guy The Lawyer is looking for.
Besides, he doesn’t like the leaders because they won’t promote one of the deputies, a black man named Ernest Tell, to the sheriff’s position. The Lawyer goes after the gang after refusing Tell’s offer to accompany him. However, he and Tell eventually join forces for the big shootout. Dundee has a clean hardboiled style, and he knows how to keep things moving. Good stuff for us western fans.
1 comment:
Read them all and have enjoyed them quite a lot.
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