Book: H. B. Broome: Gunfighters
This post contains minor spoilers.
- Published: 1987
I picked up five westerns at a community flea market this summer. The other four are by Louis L'Amour; this particular book, by H. B. Broome, is a sequel to The Meanest Man in West Texas, which I don't have.
Tom English is a rancher who lives with his wife and daughter in Texas. He has gained significant wealth from past adventures, but his reputation as a former gunslinger continually attracts assassins who want the fame and glory of having killed him. English plans to start over with a new name and a ranch in the Montana Territory; shortly upon arriving, he is harassed by the local outlaws, and the cycle of violence starts again.
This is a decent story that fulfills the expectations of a genre western. English, the book's first person narrator, is a thoughtful and relatively unpresuming character who happens to be impossibly skilled at gunfighting. The adventure is rounded out with some business dealings, ranch work, and drinking at the saloon.
I was a little worried at first, because the author bio mostly talks about Broome's ancestors who have some connection to the book's setting. Only one of the three sentences is about Broome himself: that he lives in Arlington, Texas. The blurb being written this way almost suggests that the author is not substantial enough to stand on his own. Thankfully, that was not the case.