Last month, I reviewed 'The Incredible Adventures of Dennis Dorgan', a 1974 hardback reprint of a collection of mostly unpublished stories by pulp legend Robert E. Howard that didn't unfold in the sort of setting we tend to expect from him, given that he's best known nowadays for his stories of Conan the Barbarian and maybe Kull the Conqueror or Solomon Kane. Dennis Dorgan was a sailor who liked to brawl and Howard's vivid action-filled prose met that challenge perfectly. Here's the other anomalous ‘70s Howard hardback reprint that I picked up at the same time, this one a pair of westerns brought back from obscurity by Fictioneer Books.

They're identified as novelets here, but I'd call the primary one a novella. That's 'The Vultures', an accomplished western that first saw print in 'Smashing Novels Magazine' in December 1936 under a slightly different title, 'Vultures of Whapeton'. The supporting piece, titled 'Showdown at Hell's Canyon' was never published back in the pulp era and saw print for the first time here in this book in 1973. It's far less substantial, running about fifty pages instead of a hundred and twenty, but it's just as vibrant and engaging. As much as I enjoy Conan, Kull and Kane, dipping into a Howard of an entirely different genre felt good once more and this underlined how his writing of action scenes was rarely matched, regardless of genre.

I liked 'The Vultures' a great deal, because it stars a one-off character who's not easily categorised and spends the entire novella figuring out which side of the law he wants to be on. He's nobody as the story begins, at least to the other characters in it, who reside in Whapeton Gulch, a small town I think must be in California. However, we're quickly given the impression that he's not a nobody in Texas, where he's from, and probably not in a bunch of other places too, but we're never told why.

Billy Glanton knows who he is, even under a fake name, but he loses his shootout with him quickly after we meet them both.

It turns out that the sheriff of Whapeton Gulch, John Middleton, sees this gun battle because he was riding out to hire Glanton as his deputy. Instead, he hires Corcoran in order to use his obvious skill with guns, and less obvious but just as important skill in reading other people, to help keep a semblance of peace in a town ravaged by a vicious gang, the Vultures of the title. He accomplishes that by seeing through the trap that caused the death of the previous deputy, Jim Grimes, in the Golden Eagle Saloon.

We experienced that in the first chapter, which is a dynamic way to kick off a story. One of the gang empties his gun into the ceiling, so prompting the deputy to rush in and arrest him, at which point other members of the gang shoot out the light and open fire on the lawman in the dark. It couldn't have been the first guy who murdered him, because his gun was empty, and who knows who else it was because it was dark when the gunshots rang out. Corcoran doesn't fall for it and takes down a few members of the Vultures, winning the immediate trust and support of the townsfolk.

That's neat but it's nothing particularly special. What makes this work so well is that we simply do not know if that trust and support is warranted. Is Corcoran a good guy, as he seems to be, keeping law and order in Whapeton Gulch and warring against the Vultures? Or is he a bad guy, even if he's clearly not a Vulture, who's just biding his time until he can get something out of the town to help his way back home to Texas? As certain revelations are made, such as the identity of the leader of the Vultures, he's constantly tasked with figuring out who he wants to be and what side of the line he wants to be on.

I'm not a particular aficionado of westerns in print, though I've become more partial to them after moving to Arizona. Somehow living in a desert with blazing sun and saguaro cacti all around makes it seem like the Wild West wasn't long ago, which it quite frankly wasn't, and maybe it's still there, all around us. After all, every year that passes underlines to me how the city of Phoenix is really a testament to man's battle with nature and, should we drop the ball, it'll take this land back from us in a heartbeat.

However, Howard's approach to westerns is a powerful one. He knows exactly how to craft the sort of tough guys that made things happen in the Wild West and Corcoran is a pristine example. He's as quick with his wits as he is with his guns and, while he's perfectly suited to his setting, he would be completely out of place in our world. Other characters bolster the story, not least the sheriff he works for but including a number of others, some of whom we discover are Vultures and some of whom are not. It's a strong novella.

'Showdown at Hell's Canyon' isn't as strong, not only because it's shorter but because it's more of a formula piece, the sort of thing that Howard could knock out without thinking much about what he was doing. It's highly readable, because Howard was just that good, but it's not as essential to us today because it doesn't do anything that he didn't do in other stories too. It has value more as part of a set of stories than on its own.

The lead this time is Stan Brannigan "who's been punchin' cows across the line in Arizona" but who finds himself in Old Mexico when another man is shot dead in another saloon, this one in the town of Sangre del Diablo, the blood of the devil. He leaps to his aid, an effort doomed to failure but an effort that allows him to hear the man's final words, a cryptic message about the left barrel of his gun. It's only when an old timer explains to him that the dead man was Sour Sanson, a prospector who claims to have found Pancho Villa's stash of gold but won't reveal a location.

And so the hunt is on, courtesy of a map that they find concealed in the left barrel of the antique muzzleloader back at Sanson's place. Into the mountains they go to track down the gold in Canon los Infernos, or Hell's Canyon. I love these overblown names, which are thoroughly exploitation in nature. I enjoyed the story too, which trawls in a treasure hunt, a chase and a girl and, eventually, of course, some treasure, but it's forgettable when compared with 'The Vultures'.

One bonus in this hardback edition is the art, which is dynamic black and white illustration by Stephen E. Fabian, a young man in 1973 working on what I believe to be his first professional job, certainly his first hardback. He's still a working artist today, continuing to employ the styles of Hannes Bok and Virgil Finlay, two legends of the pulp era, in many editions of Howard's work and that of others. He won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 2006. ~~ Hal C F Astell

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