0.44
H. A. DeRosso
Dreamscape Media
Fiction, Western
Themes: Classics, Frontier Tales
***+
Description
Dan Harland never set out to be a hired gun, but few people do. He was just a cowhand on a frontier ranch until fate found him outdrawing an outlaw with his trusty 0.44 gun. Not even thirty yet, Harland already has a name and a reputation, and the harder he tries to escape it, the more impossible it becomes, until he has no choice but to simply start taking money to kill. This latest job should be routine, and for all that "routine" sickens him, he needs money the same as anyone else, and it's never personal... until it is. As usual, Harland insists on a face-to-face shooting - and, this time, he shouldn't win. The man outdraws him, but doesn't fire. It's almost like he wants to die. Unsettled, Harland does the one thing no hired gun should ever do: he starts asking questions. In the process, he kicks up a hornet's nest worth of trouble that may well end his life when it's barely begun.
Review
This 1953 Western is considered a classic, melding Western themes with a noir atmosphere. A sense of doom hangs over Dan Harland from the first pages, as he broods over a life gone wrong even as he prepares to kill a stranger in cold blood. His target understands him better than he himself does in their brief conversation before the draw, an encounter that deeply unsettles the reluctant gunslinger and prompts him to dig into the question of who hired him and why. He tracks the matter back to a small town riddled with secrets and lowlifes, uncovering a tangled web of deception and darkness and some secret figure pulling the strings. When people ask him why he's there, why he's bothering when he made his kill and got his pay, what he possibly thinks he'll acccomplish, he doesn't answer, and that's in part because he himself doesn't understand why he feels so compelled to do this one thing, atone for this one life taken out of all the lives that have ended by his bullets. What, truly, can he hope to gain? Certainly not a salvation that he knows is beyond his reach, or a chance at a clean and straight life that perhaps would never have been his even if he'd never fired his gun in the first place. It's a dark fate that hangs over his head, as inescapable as nightfall and Death itself. As one might expect from a Western and a pulp-style book from the 1950's, there's a certain implausibility if you dig too deep and look too hard, and the women characters aren't exactly deep or nuanced... but, then, the males aren't generally much deeper. It all comes together in a climax that sees the various threads resolved, the culprit revealed, and Harland's fateful journey coming at last to a conclusion. All things considered, I've read worse, and there is something oddly compelling about the noir flavor in the Western setting.