Review by C.J. Bunce
There are Westerns, and there are great Westerns. Unforgiven isn’t a great Western, it’s a modern Western, and modern Westerns tend to try too hard–try to be too gritty, and in so doing they lose the mythic nature of the Western. Want to see some great Westerns? Open a Louis L’Amour book or check out this list of movies. You can identify a great Western with respect to John Wayne movies by searching early in his career. As the genre goes, early black and white John Wayne movies have all the elements of a great Western–many are referred to as B movies. But make no mistake, that’s where you’ll find the A stories of the genre.
Years ago Mickey Spillane (check out some of the noir books we’ve reviewed here) wrote a screenplay for a Western to star John Wayne, starring a sheriff named Caleb York. Spillane left his books and legacy to writing pal Max Allan Collins, and the result is dozens of posthumous stories begun by Spillane and fleshed out and often significantly (if near entirely) written by Collins. The first Caleb York book was The Legend of Caleb York in 2015. The sixth and latest, Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek, is the kind of treat that will have John Wayne fans believing there are more John Wayne films out there, somewhere–it’s a throwback to his roles around Angel and the Badman, and a great Western read, available here at Amazon.
Mickey Spillane and John Wayne in the 2020s? Why not? Maybe someone will make the movie one day with the latest AI technology. It’s unlikely the experience would be better than reading Collins and Spillane’s story. Spillane begins right with that name–Caleb York–recall one of Wayne’s best roles was as Lieutenant Colonel Kirby Yorke in Rio Grande. Clearly Collins made sure every line of dialogue would be something the reader could hear in Wayne’s slow drawl. Most of the scenes don’t go much beyond what Wayne did on film, plus a few brief love scenes that seem more of the Spillane-Collins noir slipping in where the old Western movies would have stopped short.
The plot begins like Unforgiven–a prostitute is attacked and beaten to near death–then developments interwoven from Silverado and characters from Angel and the Badman come together with a twist on The Magnificent Seven. Caleb York is a former gunfighter at the dawn of a changing world. He’s getting his hands into business and investment interests when the ranch owned by best gal Willa Cullen is nearly devastated by a (real-world) blizzard that spells doom for getting water to her cattle. Enter a new owner at the nearby ranch that controls the water rights and wants her ranch for mere pennies on the dollar.
Less the matriarch rancher seen via Barbara Stanwyck in The Big Valley and more Joan Crawford at her best with a dose of the spooky Maleficent of 1960s Disney, new rancher Victoria Hammond is a scary force. She doesn’t wince when her first son is shot and killed. She reacts only slightly more when her second is shot and killed. All she cares about is her business, and eliminating anyone who gets in her way. She’s not entirely unsympathetic, as a husband, 30 years her elder, that took her, married her, and abused her made her into the hardened woman she became.
The two ranch owners can’t come to an agreement, so they each hire killers for hire from Las Vegas. York as sheriff stands between them to try to keep the peace. The twist on The Magnificent Seven is that Collins has the reader watch the happenings as Hammond’s right hand man interviews and selects the denizens to “protect” her ranch. It’s a fun play on the trope. The best of the supporting bad guy characters stays primarily in the shadows: The Chiricahua Kid would make Magua of The Last of the Mohicans look like a lightweight.
Can a reader identify the familiar Mickey Spillane in this Western? Sure–it comes out when the story adds in some layering, and flips from the John Ford Stagecoach to She Wore a Yellow Ribbon eras to the more technicolor-laden 1960s with shows like George Stevens’ Giant. At 222 pages the story is just right for a Saturday morning at the movies surrounded by serials circa 1952. But it feels edited down–like there was much more to be seen with all these bad guys–many pulled from real life gunfighter clans.
Collins maintains his signature style of realism and action, peppering the story with results from his research into the 19th century Old West. I wish they’d gotten a painted cover with a character looking more like John Wayne, but you can’t have everything.
It’s not just good, but great Western writing. Shoot-Out at Sugar Creek is available in a hardcover edition here at Amazon.
