Review: "The Tired Gun" by Lewis B. Patten

 

The Tired Gun by Lewis B. Patten Doubleday, 1973   A recent essay about Lewis B. Patten’s “man alone” western plots—where an individual, usually a lawman or a gunfighter, is forced to fight long odds without help from the townspeople or his friends—by Mike Baker encouraged me to dig out some of Patten’s work. And I’m glad I did because I had forgotten how good Patten was at writing suspenseful, noirish, and violent westerns. His 1973 novel, The Tired Gun, is a gem that plays with the man alone plot in ways that make it surprising more than fifty years after its first publication. Sam Court has spent the last six years moving from ranch to ranch as a hired gun. The jobs never last long—a few weeks, maybe a few months—but they always pay well. And Sam has built a reputation as a fearless gunfighter. A reputation that follows him everywhere, and encourages hardmen to challenge him with hopes of building their own reputations at his expense. While in a Wyoming saloon, Sam is called-out by a local kid with high ambitions. Sam waits until the last moment to draw his Colt, but in the end, the kid is dead on the floor. Sam heads out-of-town, but the kid’s brother, Jess Morgan, follows with a posse of twenty men. Six months later, the posse still on his trail, and Sam out of resources—both money and energy—he decides to return to the only place he has ever thought of as home: the small town of Cottonwood Grove, in Western Kansas. Six years earlier, before Sam’s world crashed down when his wife died in childbirth, Sam had been Cottonwood Grove’s town marshal. A job he had won when he turned away an angry mob of cattlemen bent on burning Cottonwood Grove to the ground. But when Sam arrives back in town, his doubts start—the town has changed, and while his friends are glad to see him, he begins to worry about the trouble he is bringing home with him. Then there is the son he has never seen and the memories of his dead wife. Even worse, the longer he is in Cottonwood Grove, the more the townsfolk begin pulling away from him. The Tired Gun is a razor-sharp Western noir with a jittery atmosphere and an uncertain conclusion. Sam Court’s history with Cottonwood Grove is vividly shown in flashback snapshots throughout the narrative—from the first pages to almost the last. Court’s fatigue, which is manifested, at times, as a desire to give up and let Morgan kill him, and his distress at what he has brought to the town are visceral and emotionally staggering. The prose is uncomplicated but evocative. A handful of action scenes are so vivid the reader can smell the gun powder, hear bootheels clattering against wood planking, and breathe the electric violence. The Tired Gun will appeal to anyone that enjoys the Western genre and others with a fondness for those mid-century crime novels published by the likes of Gold Medal.