Every new writer of popular Westerns who’s entered the scene since 1988 at one time or another has been blurbed as “the next Louis L’Amour.” Ain’t gonna happen. L’Amour had a special thing going with his readers, even the ones who couldn’t pronounce his name. I chatted about Westerns one time with a fella who told me his favorite writer was “Lewis L. Amour.”

Plus, on the more cynical side – which is, after all, my favorite one – no publisher is ever again going to put the kind of money into promoting a Western writer that Bantam put into L’Amour. Another writer of Westerns once told me — and I’d rat him out if I could remember now who it was — that Bantam shopped around looking for someone it could turn into a star and L’Amour was willing to do what was required if the publisher would back him. This story came to me with a heaping helping of envy, so take it as you will.

Peter Brandvold has been selling traditional Westerns for about a decade now, and he, too, has been nominated to take L’Amour’s place. He has quite a long list of titles to his credit and he doesn’t need to worry about becoming the next Anybody Else because he’s a damn good Peter Brandvold. His early books were more than readable, but I think he’s gotten better with practice, and his latest novel, HELL ON WHEELS, is one of his best. It’s the seventh sequel to his first book, ONCE A MARSHAL, and once again stars Sheriff Ben Stillman.

This time, Ben and his wife Fay, along with two other couples, a female friend and two stage line employees, have gone to a wedding in another town. While they’re gone, old Angus Whateley is released from prison after serving six years. All Whateley wants to do is hook up with his disreputable male kin – and one wild, sexy, speechless female – and kill Judge Bannon, one of Ben’s party. It seems that the judge is suspected by the Whateleys of having taken a bribe to hang two of Angus’ sons for crimes the old con thinks they didn’t commit, and Angus can’t move along with his life until he sees Bannon hang as his sons did.

Brandvold isn’t afraid to allow his characters to change in the course of the novel and the series, discovering things about themselves and each other that are surprising to everyone. He handles the action well, and action is one of the hardest things to write. I also like the way he plays around lightly with the iconographic elements of the popular Western without giving himself completely to cliché. Sheriff Stillman gets involved in a saloon shootout early in the book which conjures up memories of Buck Jones and George O’Brian. The main storyline is reminiscent of STAGECOACH without being a hack retread.

And without sending the needle off the Violence-o-Meter, Brandvold makes it very clear that getting shot not only hurts, but that it can send your insides flying out the holes bullets make in your chest or head or gut. You won’t find any of that B-movie “shucks, ma’am, it’s only a flesh wound” nonsense here. It takes a while for these characters to recover from these blasts.

You don’t have to have read any of the previous Ben Stillman novels to appreciate this one. Brandvold tells you everything you need to know to distinguish the characters and follow the plot. You can say Brandvold is the next Louis L’Amour if you want to — but when you call him that, smile. –Doug Bentin

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