The Fourth Gunman

Remember the Ace Doubles? They easily rank among Mankind's greatest achievements. I'm pretty sure they fall between the pyramids and the Great Wall of China on any legitimate list.

Ace began publishing them in 1952 and the line didn't peter out until the late 1970s. They were... well, they were wonderful. Each paperback was two novels in one, printed back-to-back with each novel oriented upside down in relation to the other. So you read one novel, flipped the book upside down and then read the other. Genres published by Ace as Doubles included science fiction & fantasy, detective fiction and Westerns. Aside from the great storytelling featured within each Double, they usually had magnificent cover illustrations.

I've never made a point of collecting the Doubles, but if I have a chance to get my hands on one, I inevitably will do so. So when I recently had a chance to acquire the 1958 Double featuring two Westerns, I did so.

As of my writing this post, I haven't yet read Slick on the Draw, by Tom West, but I have read The Fourth Gunman, by Merle Constiner.

I was not familiar with Constiner (1902-1979), who has 25 separate novels (mostly Westerns) listed under his name on Goodreads. But--even though I'm supposed to be something of a scholar about such things, I don't feel too bad about that. There were so many Westerns being churned out in the 1940s and 1950s, it's pretty much impossible to be familiar with them all.

Costiner, it turns out, was good at Westerns. The protagonist of The Fourth Gunman is George Netfield, who owns a saloon in the town of Kirksville. When the novel opens, Netfield is already hip-deep in trouble. He's become aware that a local ranch owner is looking to gain control of both a second ranch and the feeding station in town. (The area where cattle are held before being loaded onto trains.) The rancher would then use these resources to move stolen cattle through the town and make a lot of money. The local sheriff is corrupt and on the rancher's payroll, so there's no point in looking to the law for help.

Netfield does not want this to happen. He is, essentially, a very moral man who likes his town and doesn't want to see it corrupted. But this attitude gets him on a hit list. And, as the novel opens, his barkeeper, who is also his best friend, is murdered.

Netfield learns that there are four gunman in town and that one of them--named Kruger--is particularly dangerous. But Netfield is not a man to back down. He's also pretty good with a six gun himself, as he demonstrates when he kills one of the men who killed his friend.

The story spreads out from here. There's plenty of action and Costiner definitely knows how to effectively describe a gun battle. A particularly interesting one takes place early in the novel, when Netfield and another ally are being stalked through a lumberyard, with stacks of wood forming a maze around them.

Costiner also introduces several fun supporting characters: A young man named Wingate who was cheated out of his small farm, but proves very skilled with a rifle; and an aging gunfighter who should probably have outgrown his nickname, the "Turtle Creek Kid," but never did. Both these guys affect the story in surprising ways.

I also really enjoy how Costiner uses the gunman Kruger as the scariest villain. He's very much an unseen threat. Neither we nor Netfield meets him in person until the climatic gunfight. But Kruger is effectively built up as a serious threat throughout the novel, so we feel us presence hanging over all other events even before he finally shows himself.

That climatic battle, by the way, is exciting and satisfying as well as ironic in how it plays out.

So I've run across yet another writer whose works I want to read more of. For years, I've had a plan to meet and marry a wealthy heiress so that I can spend my life reading everything I want to read. I really need to get that plan rolling.