FROM HELL TO MIDNIGHT. What a great title for a traditional Western. Too bad this novel isn’t exactly a traditional Western.

Most of Richard S. Wheeler’s books should be described that way, but most of them contain elements that move them to the head of the line. Wheeler is a fine writer with a sense of tragedy underlining the melodrama that is the genre’s great appeal. Even this book, which is a comedy, hints at tragic circumstances: One woman, we learn, has been used repeatedly as a “poker chip” in her husband’s gambling.

He bets one night with her against another gambler’s money – a move reminiscent of the auctioning off of a wife and child in Thomas Hardy’s THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE. Wheeler also hints that in the war between chaos and order, put your money on chaos to win.

Hannibal Jones is a mining engineer/geologist whose job it is to examine closed and abandoned mines to determine if they are as played-out as their owners think they are. He’s in Nevada taking a look at the Alice mine, which was shut down on the death of its owner, Lucky Haggarty. The property has been protected for years by a ghost that drives away the curious.

Jones estimates that another $5 million could be extracted with relative ease, but Lucky’s will complicates matters.

Actually, it’s his lack of a will. He was married legally to wife #1, bigamously to wives #2 and #3, but spent most of his time with his mistress. Each of these ladies insists that she is the only one with a legal claim to Lucky’s money, but the ornery mine owner did leave a note informing all that whoever finds the deed to the Alice gets to keep it.

When word of Jones’ discovery gets out, all of the women and their children converge on the Alice claim, along with Jones, a Russian soldier now working as a cook, a gang of six Wobblies convicted of sedition and anarchy who have been promised full pardon for their crimes if they can open the mine and remove the remaining gold, and the resident ghost.

Even with this overabundance of female lead characters, the book is still a pretty conventional Western. What could Wheeler throw in to change that? How about a protagonist who wears jodhpurs, a red polka-dot bow tie and a pith helmet? Yup. That’ll do it.

Add to that Jones’ almost complete naivety when it comes to Lucky’s mistress, who seduces the geologist every chance she gets, and some unexpected snarkiness in the prose – “He headed into the early afternoon looking for a lunch, and finally settled on La Grande Maison de Florentine. It lived up to Carson City’s reputation as the Bad Food Capital of the World, surpassing even Tulsa” – and you have a nifty little nugget from Wheeler.

FROM HELL TO MIDNIGHT – surely an editor came up with that title – provides an amusing break from a steady diet of Westerns with steely-eyed gunmen dressed in black leather going mano y mano with greedy, big-time ranchers/land promoters/hired guns/bankers. Comic Western novels are not that common, and this is a good one. –Doug Bentin

Buy it at Amazon.