It
has been a summer of great older stuff at my house, and one of the fascinations
I developed is the work of Brian Garfield. I read a handful of his novels and
reviewed two—Necessity and Fear
in a Handful of Dust.
My latest Garfield experience is a Western he wrote for the ACE Double line
titled Call Me Hazard. It was published as by Frank Wynne in 1966
(M-138 with The Rincon Trap by Dean Owen), and while it isn’t the
top of his work it is pretty damn good.
Jason Hazard is a hard
case. He isn’t a bad man, nor is he the type who looks for trouble, but
nonetheless he is hard, silent, and (when he needs to be) violent. He is also a
mystery—the people around him respect and admire him, but Hazard always holds
back. When he left his successful mine, and the town of Stinking Springs,
Arizona, he didn’t tell many why. He just left and there were a few who took
exception to his absence.
Hazard is back in
Stinking Springs, but he doesn’t find a warm welcome. There is a new mine owner
in town. A man named Vic Olsen who has a long history with Jason—it goes back
to their teenage years—and his major ambition in life is ruining Jason’s. The
other major mine owners in town are all having trouble too. The place seems
jinxed. There have been an abundance of cave-ins and payroll robberies, and
most of the owners are contemplating selling out and moving on.
The foreman of the
largest operation has gone missing and the local law—a tiny man named Owney
Nash, who is owned by the new player—thinks Hazard did it. Hazard hasn’t seen
the foreman since he left years earlier, but as he walks into Stinking Springs
all hell breaks loose and he will need the few friends he has left in town to
survive.
Call Me Hazard is an early example of Garfield’s work. His
trademarks are all there—the tight and controlled suspense, the crisp dialogue
and competent and literate writing—but it isn’t as sharp or developed as his
later work. The story is larger than the space allowed. The plot is tricky and
Garfield does well at packing it in to 126 pages, but it would have worked
better with more room and run time.
With that said, Call
Me Hazard is really entertaining. It is a traditional Western with
everything from hired guns, to nefariously beautiful women, and cold-blooded
murder. It even has a few humorous names, of which Hazard and Stinking Springs
are only two. The lead is a stolid and quiet man who isn’t a hired gun or even
a loner. He left Stinking Springs for a reason and everyone who knows why he
left is more than glad to see him back.
There is one
particular scene—the first major showdown between the protagonist and the
villain—that is as suspenseful as any scene in a successful suspense novel,
which is Brian Garfield’s calling card. His work, no matter the genre, is
plotted to ratchet the suspense from scene-to-scene and Call Me Hazard is
no different. It is early and a little too short, but it is all entertainment
and a fine example of how good—even at the age of 27—Brian Garfield is.
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ReplyDeleteBen, Garfield is one of my favourite writers partly because of the reasons you give, "tight and controlled suspense" and "crisp dialogue" and partly because of the stories he writes. I haven't read his westerns assuming he wrote more than this one with the nice title.
ReplyDeletePrashant. I also really like Garfield's writing. I often contemplate the unfairness of his abandonment of fiction in the late 1980s. Garfield actually wrote a bunch of westerns; several for Ace in the 1960s including six or seven featuring serial character Jeremy Six.
ReplyDeleteHis best westerns, in my mind anyway, were written in the 1970s; specifically SLIPHAMMER, GUNDOWN and TRIPWIRE. But all are pretty good.
Ben