There is an entire genre of fiction that I have never read any example from and that is the American Western. Well I’ve recently bought a copy of Valley of Hunted Men so time to find out if I should have explored the category years ago…

First impressions were mixed, right from the first page we have a train robbery, six men holding up the express causing death and destruction before riding out of town with $20,000 in gold coins, a classic trope of the genre. So yes I was intrigued where this was going but I was already caught up in the issues of the language used in the novel, the slang and unusual spelling would be familiar with regular readers of this style but I found it off putting whilst recognising that it was a necessary part of the writing structure. One word in particular struck me as anomalous, which was the constant reference to the stolen loot as specie. Now I know this is the correct word for gold (and sometimes silver) coins rather than paper currency but I’d only ever come across the term in books written or set in Victorian London so it seemed odd to it was being used here, in fact I found it so jarring that it kept pushing me off the narrative and every few pages I’d put the book down and not pick it up again for a couple of days, I just couldn’t get into the story.

The tropes just kept coming though, a wounded mystery man falls off his horse at the feet of the pretty daughter of the man running the valley so she takes him home and nurses him back to health where he gives his name as Kirk Dane but refuses to say anything about how he came to be there. But the pretty daughter falls in love with him anyway. There are outlaws in them thar hills surrounding the ranch, and talking of the ranch there’s a grumpy old roustabout with a heart of gold to almost complete the set and then the biggest stereotype of them all rides into the mix…

“Stranger” muttered Butch to his companion, “Ain’t he a dude though

The man was of medium build with smooth olive skin, dark expressive eyes and perfectly moulded lips shaded by a small waxed black moustache. He was attired in a black frock coat, a white silk shirt and a stetson which must have cost fifty dollars at the least. Under the table Kirk had a glimpse of dark trousers and handmade boots of black Spanish leather.

And then finally I got it, I remembered the Spaghetti Westerns I had seen as a child. The wounded cowboy lounging on the porch smoking as he recuperates, the ultra smart man in black, we have Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef all that was needed was a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone and I was back almost fifty years. I could at last picture what I was reading and the second half was read in one sitting after fighting for two weeks with the first. It’s quite clear that Kirk is after the men who did the train robbery but why? Who else is on the same quest? Which of the various possibilities is the lawman on a mission, Kirk is too obvious and when about fifty pages in some of the outlaws decide he is the marshal after them it’s quite clear that he isn’t going to be. There were lots of characters to keep track of, although that does get easier as the book progresses as they start getting killed off. Of course it has a happy ending, well apart from those that don’t make it to the end anyway, I guess that is normal for the genre.

In the end I quite enjoyed the book but the first half was a real struggle until I finally managed to settle down with the plot flow. Will I read another Western? Probably not, it took me over fifty years to get round to reading this one and if that’s my rate of getting to them then I may not get there. Lehman appears to have been a successful writer in the genre with plenty of books to his name but no I don’t have the need to read another.