Marshal

by Frank Gruber

This book is in great condition, cover shows some wear and spine has a few creases. There is a name in pen on the inside and the glue is starting to give way with the cover. Ships very quickly and packaged carefully!

Genres: Westerns

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 11, 1950

About the author

Librarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name

Frank Gruber was an enormously prolific author of pulp fiction. A stalwart contributor to Black Mask magazine, he also wrote novels, producing as many as four a year during the 1940s. His best-known character was Oliver Quade, “the Human Encyclopedia,” whose adventures were collected in Brass Knuckles (1966), and will soon be republished in ebook format as Oliver Quade, the Human Encyclopedia,featuring brand-new material, from MysteriousPress.com, Open Road Integrated Media, and Black Mask magazine.

Reviews

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just grabbed this book from a stack of random things in a secondhand shop, I really didn't expect it to be so entertaining. A little tropey but in a good way with exciting, human characters, The Marshal is a solid story for Western first-timers like myself. I strongly recommend it

[Randy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tad Shay should have died during the late stages of the war. The doctors had given up on him and pushed him aside. But he hung on and spent two years in a hospital recovering. During that time, he read every law book he could find, eventually earning a law license.

He headed west to find a small town where he could practice law. He;d seen enough violence in the war to fill him and he wanted no more.

It wasn't to be.

Alder City was where he ended up, breaking up a robbery on the stage on the way in. The robbers wanted his three hundred dollars, all he'd saved.

The town was to small for a lawyer to make a living and he did something he never would have believed. After a couple of Texans, who'd bulled their way into a half interest in one of the saloons, killed the Marshal, he took a gun and went into the saloon to arrest them. They weren't interested and he ended up killing both.

He took the Marshal job to everyone's delight and began to practice with his gun, getting better and faster.

But, as usually happens, when keeping the peace gets in the way of large profits from the trail herds coming up from Texas, his supporters wanted him to back off. But Tad was bound and determined to uphold the law.

Lucy, the girl who'd come in on the stage with him, had become a successful businesswoman, unknown to her chiefly because of him. She wanted him to stop being a lawman and he was bound and determined to finish the job he'd reluctantly started.

And then he got word that a killer had been hired to come up from Texas and kill him.

I love Frank Gruber's writing, both westerns and mysteries.

[Matt Kight · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first Frank Gruber novel but it won't be last, God willing! Great simple classic western with a satisfying conclusion. My only complaint, and it's a silly minor complaint, is that there were too many characters with first and last names that started with "H" and it made it a little more confusing remembering who's who.