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Sundown Riders #4
Devil's Canyon
A crew of gunslingers take on a deadly challenge in this Ralph Compton western.
They are four hired guns who haul freight for a price into the treacherous, untamed wilderness. Having already risked their lives for the Confederacy, now they’re fighting for themselves—and for a stake in the future—on the great frontier. Led by the poker-playing Faro Duval, these soldiers of fortune are about to take the biggest gamble of delivering an explosive cargo from Santa Fe to southwestern Utah. Their destination is Devil’s Canyon…and a mountain of gold.
But there’s a wild card in the a man who is one jump ahead of an unsavory past and one piece of silver away from selling them out. In a land of savage outlaws and hostile Utes, with a rattlesnake named Hal Durham in their midst, Duval and his men are running out of time and out of luck…
More Than Six Million Ralph Compton Books In Print!
They are four hired guns who haul freight for a price into the treacherous, untamed wilderness. Having already risked their lives for the Confederacy, now they’re fighting for themselves—and for a stake in the future—on the great frontier. Led by the poker-playing Faro Duval, these soldiers of fortune are about to take the biggest gamble of delivering an explosive cargo from Santa Fe to southwestern Utah. Their destination is Devil’s Canyon…and a mountain of gold.
But there’s a wild card in the a man who is one jump ahead of an unsavory past and one piece of silver away from selling them out. In a land of savage outlaws and hostile Utes, with a rattlesnake named Hal Durham in their midst, Duval and his men are running out of time and out of luck…
More Than Six Million Ralph Compton Books In Print!
352 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1998
8 people are currently reading
58 people want to read
About the author
Ralph Compton
247 books84 followersRalph Compton (April 11, 1934—September 16, 1998) was an American writer of western fiction.
A native of St. Clair County, Alabama, Compton began his writing career with a notable work, The Goodnight Trail, which was chosen as a finalist for the Western Writers of America "Medicine Pipe Bearer Award" bestowed upon the "Best Debut Novel". He was also the author of the Sundown Rider series and the Border Empire series. In the last decade of his life, he authored more than two dozen novels, some of which made it onto the USA Today bestseller list for fiction.
Ralph Compton died in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 64. Since his passing, Signet Books has continued the author's legacy, releasing new novels, written by authors such as Joseph A. West and David Robbins, under Compton's byline.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/ralphc...
A native of St. Clair County, Alabama, Compton began his writing career with a notable work, The Goodnight Trail, which was chosen as a finalist for the Western Writers of America "Medicine Pipe Bearer Award" bestowed upon the "Best Debut Novel". He was also the author of the Sundown Rider series and the Border Empire series. In the last decade of his life, he authored more than two dozen novels, some of which made it onto the USA Today bestseller list for fiction.
Ralph Compton died in Nashville, Tennessee at the age of 64. Since his passing, Signet Books has continued the author's legacy, releasing new novels, written by authors such as Joseph A. West and David Robbins, under Compton's byline.
http://us.macmillan.com/author/ralphc...
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
December 31, 2025
Well, it delivered what it promised, a straight-up old school Western yarn. No complaints on that account, I generally enjoy these horse operas as a diversion from more serious things. Trying to sell Compton as a replacement level Louis L'Amour though does L'Amour and the reader a disservice. One thing Compton should have learned from Louis was pacing; that a simple plot needs to move fast to be interesting. What L'Amour accomplished with one hundred page novels Compton drags out for more than three times that length. Also Compton needed to know when to end his novel. Even he must have realized that the yarn he was telling ended more than a hundred pages before the book ended because the book suddenly lurches into light-speed after the showdown with Dog Face. Two hundred and fifty pages of repetitious overly-detailed slog followed immediately by one hundred of hurried, but boring non-action. The fun part though is that this hurried coda is when we find out a lot of things that should have been up front, such as just why these four prospectors were looking for gold deep in hostile territory to begin with. The entire novel is like this. We are given no reason to be invested in the action until it all winds down and people start talking about it afterwards, which is really bad storytelling.
Anyway, for a subpar Western this was acceptable, but not good. Since this is my last review of the year, here's what I objected to in particular aside from the pacing.
1. Idiots and paragons: It's impossible to square these characters because they are uniformly idiots masked as paragons. Our hero, Faro, appears to be impossibly competent and experienced. He hints at a troubled backstory that we are never told. We have no idea how he fell in with his current partners. All we are shown is their respect for him and his certain competence. Then he does the dumbest thing imaginable and survives only for reasons of plot armor. For someone with his background and in their current situation, his continuing to allow the McCutcheon sisters and Hal Durham to travel with them raises hundreds of questions about his leadership. Not just once but a couple of times. Dog Face, the guy who is supposed to be the Big Bad, turns out to have only one consistent trait which I will call, team of rivals. Most of his scenes in the novel are spent explaining why he is so clever for not killing an obvious enemy, or adopting some more opposition members into his raiding party. He never really does anything worse than the other bad guys and he dies really easily, so I'm not convinced he was a real problem for the teamsters. Mostly he was an idiot. Other idiots are even more obviously idiots, but I'll talk about them below.
2. Repetitive repetition: Most of the novel is exposition, characters telling us in dialogue what we should be shown. The rest is characters telling us in dialogue what we were told before about what we should have been shown.
3. Chekhov's Gun never goes off: There are a number of very strange moments in this novel where we are told about something with enough detail and over enough pages that it leads you to believe that it's important. The googley eyes a woman makes toward a man in the party. An antique gold cross taken from the body of a dead padre, carefully described and given with ceremony to a member of the party. An Indian with a complex backstory is rescued from a snowdrift. All this detail would matter in a well written story. Not this one though. These are all details that get no further attention. Like none.
4. Unfunny sex comedy: I don't really want to talk about this in detail. Let's just be very clear that the addition of the sisters McCutcheon to the book leads to a lot of clothes getting shredded. It's dumb and unfunny.
5. Sprechen sie Spanish?: If you are claiming characters a fluent in Spanish maybe learn some. Maybe have a Spanish speaker review your translations. Maybe have an editor who cares about anything other than page length. That way you avoid mistakes like this...
No one who "spoke Spanish fluently" would say these things. This is what I think of as translation math, where you assume words in one language equal the translated word in another while ignoring syntax, usage, and grammar. Nombre translates to name, but it's not how you ask for someone's name. Tarno here basically asked, "Name of thing?". But let us assume Spirit Bear understands that Tarno has a limited vocabulary and that he meant to ask, "¿Cuál es su nombre?", or even "¿Cómo te llamas?", he wouldn't reply with Oso Espiritu because that is meaningless. Because the Bear Spirit is a nombre in Indian culture for a specific concept that translated into Spanish would be either El Oso Espiritu or Oso Espiritual. Another option is that the Paiute who cast him out were referencing the bear that stole the man's spirit, meaning he would be named Espiritu [del] Oso. I would expect the second given the circumstances, but why would he translate his Paiute name anyway or not give his prior name? Weird. Similarly, Dog Face is misnamed Perro Cara, but because in Spanish the face belongs to the dog, thus it should be Cara del Perro. This kind of thing bugged me throughout.
6. It's a Lost Cause: Okay fine. This novel was written at the high tide of '90s Civil War nostalgia and so an 1870's Western that doesn't mention the war would be weird. That it props up the Lost Cause nonsense is bad, that it valorizes J.S. Mosby is marginally okay since he was among the least worst of the traitorous vermin who fought for slavery, but having Faro be a member of the Mosby Rangers while also having him watch his brother die in a last stand at Gettysburg is really not okay. Basically Faro comes off a bit of a Forrest Gump here. He was at Gettysburg, where famously there was no cavalry, but then drifted somehow into an elite horseback unit that consisted largely of men local to Northern Virginia and very few with prior military service.It's as illogical as it is impossible and serves only to pluck the strings of the Lost Cause Theme Song. What this war record has to do with his being a master scout, tracker, and teamster is never defined. Instead it's just name checking the war so that Faro can face down opposition.
7. Horsepower: Faro regularly rides dozens of miles in search of the enemy camp or a place they can hole up during a blizzard, then rides back to lead the train ten miles out of their way. Think about that. The impossibility of this really came home to me when Faro rides out one morning to locate storm shelter. We are told he searches a really long time looking for a canyon or other windbreak, but ends up having to settle for an exposed declivity. He then rides back to the train, which has been moving without him, he then explains that the dip where they will make camp is ten miles off to the south. No one thinks this is impossible and they are able to set up a storm proof camp at that location before the storm hits. Let's do some math on this. On their best day, the train is able to move 15 miles a day over this ground. We are told this. Southern Utah has twelve hours of daylight in late September, and if setting up camp and gathering enough wood to outlast a lengthy blizzard are factored in at maybe four hours, that gives eight hours of travel time on this day. Given there are no suitable canyons we will also assume that in this stretch the ground is smooth enough for their best pace, and that they could make the full fifteen miles. If they are easily able to move the ten miles to the sheltered location then they cannot have gone more than a third of their travel day, so the most time Faro has to scout for this camp is (to be extra generous) three hours. the very minimum distance Faro covered in that time would be (to make the math easy) twenty-four miles [10 to the campsite + 10 back to the train + 4 of the miles the train had already covered since Faro set out] twenty-four miles divided by three hours has Faro moving at eight miles per hour without stop. That is a constant trot for three hours, minimum. Even horses bred for endurance and in peak condition are harmed by a trot of more than a half hour and this guy is supposed to know horses, is careful of his horse because he needs to have it ready to move at a high gallop at any second if pursued, and is carefully scouting for a possible shelter. The travel math just doesn't work anywhere in this novel, this is just the most extreme example. The horses are basically moving a automobile speeds throughout and are often ridden out at night without rest following a day of travel. The people following this wagon train are wasting their time tracking. They would be able to locate the gold claim simply by following the trail of dead horses Faro leaves behind.
8. Race to the Bottom: Every Oater has to confront the native genocide at the frontier to some degree. This book makes the interesting decision to make one of the former confederate teamsters a half-Comanche so that he can speak pidgin Spanish to the random Paiute the gang picks up along the way. That random Paiute is "fluent in Spanish" despite living his entire life in areas never settled by the Spanish, but because Tarno says all Injun speek espianole real good Oso Espiritu must also. Oso Espiritu also commits suicide by wolf a few pages later for Indian reasons. Tarno's half-Comanche half also explains why he is willing to castrate another character, improves his tracking ability, and makes him an infallible weather forecaster despite his being a thousand miles from where Comanches spent their time learning about the weather. Now you can say that this is just something of an inside joke among the four teamsters and that Tarno is just very accomplished at these things, but when these exact traits are uniformly ascribed to the Utes pursuing them... it's harder to forgive that. Also, please do notice that the only really dangerous Utes are those led by Dog Face, Sangre, and Hueso, three white fellows. The other Utes are uniformly superstitious, and while certainly dangerous when they can pick off the weak, are also cowardly and relegated early into an ineffectual presence in the novel so we can pay attention to the renegade band.
So this book is really bad, but I read it expecting it to be bad since it was pitched to fans of Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey. What I didn't expect was how hilariously bad it was, right from the first page it's obvious, and then I became fascinated with just how much worse it got as it went. It was what I needed to read because I was looking for some low effort reading, but I can't lie. This is just a bad dumb book.
Anyway, for a subpar Western this was acceptable, but not good. Since this is my last review of the year, here's what I objected to in particular aside from the pacing.
1. Idiots and paragons: It's impossible to square these characters because they are uniformly idiots masked as paragons. Our hero, Faro, appears to be impossibly competent and experienced. He hints at a troubled backstory that we are never told. We have no idea how he fell in with his current partners. All we are shown is their respect for him and his certain competence. Then he does the dumbest thing imaginable and survives only for reasons of plot armor. For someone with his background and in their current situation, his continuing to allow the McCutcheon sisters and Hal Durham to travel with them raises hundreds of questions about his leadership. Not just once but a couple of times. Dog Face, the guy who is supposed to be the Big Bad, turns out to have only one consistent trait which I will call, team of rivals. Most of his scenes in the novel are spent explaining why he is so clever for not killing an obvious enemy, or adopting some more opposition members into his raiding party. He never really does anything worse than the other bad guys and he dies really easily, so I'm not convinced he was a real problem for the teamsters. Mostly he was an idiot. Other idiots are even more obviously idiots, but I'll talk about them below.
2. Repetitive repetition: Most of the novel is exposition, characters telling us in dialogue what we should be shown. The rest is characters telling us in dialogue what we were told before about what we should have been shown.
3. Chekhov's Gun never goes off: There are a number of very strange moments in this novel where we are told about something with enough detail and over enough pages that it leads you to believe that it's important. The googley eyes a woman makes toward a man in the party. An antique gold cross taken from the body of a dead padre, carefully described and given with ceremony to a member of the party. An Indian with a complex backstory is rescued from a snowdrift. All this detail would matter in a well written story. Not this one though. These are all details that get no further attention. Like none.
4. Unfunny sex comedy: I don't really want to talk about this in detail. Let's just be very clear that the addition of the sisters McCutcheon to the book leads to a lot of clothes getting shredded. It's dumb and unfunny.
5. Sprechen sie Spanish?: If you are claiming characters a fluent in Spanish maybe learn some. Maybe have a Spanish speaker review your translations. Maybe have an editor who cares about anything other than page length. That way you avoid mistakes like this...
"The Spanish once owned this country," Tarno said. "If he knows any Spanish, we can talk."
"Nombre? said Tarno, kneeling beside the Indian.
"Oso Espiritu," the Indian replied.
The Indian spoke Spanish fluently.... [T]hey named him Bear Spirit and cast him out.
No one who "spoke Spanish fluently" would say these things. This is what I think of as translation math, where you assume words in one language equal the translated word in another while ignoring syntax, usage, and grammar. Nombre translates to name, but it's not how you ask for someone's name. Tarno here basically asked, "Name of thing?". But let us assume Spirit Bear understands that Tarno has a limited vocabulary and that he meant to ask, "¿Cuál es su nombre?", or even "¿Cómo te llamas?", he wouldn't reply with Oso Espiritu because that is meaningless. Because the Bear Spirit is a nombre in Indian culture for a specific concept that translated into Spanish would be either El Oso Espiritu or Oso Espiritual. Another option is that the Paiute who cast him out were referencing the bear that stole the man's spirit, meaning he would be named Espiritu [del] Oso. I would expect the second given the circumstances, but why would he translate his Paiute name anyway or not give his prior name? Weird. Similarly, Dog Face is misnamed Perro Cara, but because in Spanish the face belongs to the dog, thus it should be Cara del Perro. This kind of thing bugged me throughout.
6. It's a Lost Cause: Okay fine. This novel was written at the high tide of '90s Civil War nostalgia and so an 1870's Western that doesn't mention the war would be weird. That it props up the Lost Cause nonsense is bad, that it valorizes J.S. Mosby is marginally okay since he was among the least worst of the traitorous vermin who fought for slavery, but having Faro be a member of the Mosby Rangers while also having him watch his brother die in a last stand at Gettysburg is really not okay. Basically Faro comes off a bit of a Forrest Gump here. He was at Gettysburg, where famously there was no cavalry, but then drifted somehow into an elite horseback unit that consisted largely of men local to Northern Virginia and very few with prior military service.It's as illogical as it is impossible and serves only to pluck the strings of the Lost Cause Theme Song. What this war record has to do with his being a master scout, tracker, and teamster is never defined. Instead it's just name checking the war so that Faro can face down opposition.
7. Horsepower: Faro regularly rides dozens of miles in search of the enemy camp or a place they can hole up during a blizzard, then rides back to lead the train ten miles out of their way. Think about that. The impossibility of this really came home to me when Faro rides out one morning to locate storm shelter. We are told he searches a really long time looking for a canyon or other windbreak, but ends up having to settle for an exposed declivity. He then rides back to the train, which has been moving without him, he then explains that the dip where they will make camp is ten miles off to the south. No one thinks this is impossible and they are able to set up a storm proof camp at that location before the storm hits. Let's do some math on this. On their best day, the train is able to move 15 miles a day over this ground. We are told this. Southern Utah has twelve hours of daylight in late September, and if setting up camp and gathering enough wood to outlast a lengthy blizzard are factored in at maybe four hours, that gives eight hours of travel time on this day. Given there are no suitable canyons we will also assume that in this stretch the ground is smooth enough for their best pace, and that they could make the full fifteen miles. If they are easily able to move the ten miles to the sheltered location then they cannot have gone more than a third of their travel day, so the most time Faro has to scout for this camp is (to be extra generous) three hours. the very minimum distance Faro covered in that time would be (to make the math easy) twenty-four miles [10 to the campsite + 10 back to the train + 4 of the miles the train had already covered since Faro set out] twenty-four miles divided by three hours has Faro moving at eight miles per hour without stop. That is a constant trot for three hours, minimum. Even horses bred for endurance and in peak condition are harmed by a trot of more than a half hour and this guy is supposed to know horses, is careful of his horse because he needs to have it ready to move at a high gallop at any second if pursued, and is carefully scouting for a possible shelter. The travel math just doesn't work anywhere in this novel, this is just the most extreme example. The horses are basically moving a automobile speeds throughout and are often ridden out at night without rest following a day of travel. The people following this wagon train are wasting their time tracking. They would be able to locate the gold claim simply by following the trail of dead horses Faro leaves behind.
8. Race to the Bottom: Every Oater has to confront the native genocide at the frontier to some degree. This book makes the interesting decision to make one of the former confederate teamsters a half-Comanche so that he can speak pidgin Spanish to the random Paiute the gang picks up along the way. That random Paiute is "fluent in Spanish" despite living his entire life in areas never settled by the Spanish, but because Tarno says all Injun speek espianole real good Oso Espiritu must also. Oso Espiritu also commits suicide by wolf a few pages later for Indian reasons. Tarno's half-Comanche half also explains why he is willing to castrate another character, improves his tracking ability, and makes him an infallible weather forecaster despite his being a thousand miles from where Comanches spent their time learning about the weather. Now you can say that this is just something of an inside joke among the four teamsters and that Tarno is just very accomplished at these things, but when these exact traits are uniformly ascribed to the Utes pursuing them... it's harder to forgive that. Also, please do notice that the only really dangerous Utes are those led by Dog Face, Sangre, and Hueso, three white fellows. The other Utes are uniformly superstitious, and while certainly dangerous when they can pick off the weak, are also cowardly and relegated early into an ineffectual presence in the novel so we can pay attention to the renegade band.
So this book is really bad, but I read it expecting it to be bad since it was pitched to fans of Louis L'Amour and Zane Grey. What I didn't expect was how hilariously bad it was, right from the first page it's obvious, and then I became fascinated with just how much worse it got as it went. It was what I needed to read because I was looking for some low effort reading, but I can't lie. This is just a bad dumb book.
June 28, 2020
This is my first Ralph Compton book that I have read. I by no means was looking for historical accuracy in this book neither do I in any of the westerns available. While the authors of all westerns try their best to be accurate in locations and details that they portray in their books, it is not what I look for each time I open a book to read it. Reading is a way for me to escape from work or worldly issues. It is entertainment for my mind.
With that said Devils Canyon delivered exactly what I was looking for. This book kept me interested from beginning to end. Sleep and work was just some of the things that made me put this book down. The suspense and wanting to know what was going to happen on the next page kept me turning the page.
If you like Lamour you will like this book is the catch line. This is true to a sense. I do like Lamour but just like any other author some of his books are lack luster. Compton is by no means Lamour but he can tell a story that could be considered equivalent.
Devils Canyon is number 5 in the Sundown series and while this is the first book I have read in the series I found I did not need to go back and read books 1-4 as they appear to be their own standalone series. If your looking for a new author to read in the Western or Historical Fiction genre I recommend for you to give Compton a try.
With that said Devils Canyon delivered exactly what I was looking for. This book kept me interested from beginning to end. Sleep and work was just some of the things that made me put this book down. The suspense and wanting to know what was going to happen on the next page kept me turning the page.
If you like Lamour you will like this book is the catch line. This is true to a sense. I do like Lamour but just like any other author some of his books are lack luster. Compton is by no means Lamour but he can tell a story that could be considered equivalent.
Devils Canyon is number 5 in the Sundown series and while this is the first book I have read in the series I found I did not need to go back and read books 1-4 as they appear to be their own standalone series. If your looking for a new author to read in the Western or Historical Fiction genre I recommend for you to give Compton a try.
July 6, 2021
Definitely enjoyed this! Probably one of my favorites by Compton, so far.
April 26, 2022
A enjoyable story. A couple of twists that in some ways were funny.
July 22, 2016
The blurb on the Ralph Compton's books continue to tell me that if I like Louis L'amour's novels I will love those written by Ralph Compton. I have to say that is an overstatement-- in other words there is a measure of validity. In some ways the author's style is similar to that of L'amour.
And while this is the fourth in a series -- let me just tell you up front-- you don't have to read # 1-3 to enjoy this one.
So, first, let me just go through the pluses and minuses =-- not necessarily in that order
PLUS: A good mix of interesting characters, especially the two women, Mamie and Odessa, who follow the good-looking gambler Durham in order to get vengeance, but cannot decide whether they are done with him or not. The Renegade called Dog Face is interesting, and even the gambler\traitor\con man Durham is fleshed out a bit.
MINUS: LENGTH... The book offers a few too many of those exhilarating encounters in which scores of Indians and bad guys are dispatched. Finally, with all enemies defeated, a long passage about dynamiting a canyon to divert a river in order to mine gold takes place, making the final conclusion very anti-climactic.
MINUS: Realism --- The author does a great job of portraying teamsters and even knowledge of history (in a few brief footnotes) as well as the makeup and layout of teamster wagons and problems. That part is pretty realistic-- but--- The author makes the CLASSIC mistake of having wounds washed out with whiskey. Western whiskey wasn't a good purification agent and while wounds were washed for germs-- whiskey was used to numb the victim.-- also-- the writer depicts people with arrow or gunshot wounds recovering in a matter of days. The truth is, many people died of wounds from infection-- Very few deaths occur among the party of the "good guys." The good guys make a number of forays into enemy camps that are both foolhardy and overly too successful to be realistic. The renegades have outfitted their Ute allies with Winchesters.. the author writes this as if Winchester was the only rifle around in the old west and as if in 1870 they were easy to come by. While they were around-- They were not (in 1870) available in such huge lots as to make certain that all of our heroes have them, a large number of the Ute Indians have them, the renegade gang have them, and another outlaw gang have them. Even Colt gets overemphasized a bit.
PLUS: The dialogue is fairly decent and reminds me of westerner talk, though at times it is overly sprinkle with Spanish words used for emphasis.
SUMMMARY: Devil's Canyon isn't the best western ever written-- but it also doesn't follow a L'amourish formula. It stands on its own two feet as a decent book, with a decent story, that cannot be truly outguessed. And even all the bad guys aren't killed-- probably leaving a confrontation with one of them for a later book. However, it lacks realism and I would only recommend it for those seeking truly escapism western action.
And while this is the fourth in a series -- let me just tell you up front-- you don't have to read # 1-3 to enjoy this one.
So, first, let me just go through the pluses and minuses =-- not necessarily in that order
PLUS: A good mix of interesting characters, especially the two women, Mamie and Odessa, who follow the good-looking gambler Durham in order to get vengeance, but cannot decide whether they are done with him or not. The Renegade called Dog Face is interesting, and even the gambler\traitor\con man Durham is fleshed out a bit.
MINUS: LENGTH... The book offers a few too many of those exhilarating encounters in which scores of Indians and bad guys are dispatched. Finally, with all enemies defeated, a long passage about dynamiting a canyon to divert a river in order to mine gold takes place, making the final conclusion very anti-climactic.
MINUS: Realism --- The author does a great job of portraying teamsters and even knowledge of history (in a few brief footnotes) as well as the makeup and layout of teamster wagons and problems. That part is pretty realistic-- but--- The author makes the CLASSIC mistake of having wounds washed out with whiskey. Western whiskey wasn't a good purification agent and while wounds were washed for germs-- whiskey was used to numb the victim.-- also-- the writer depicts people with arrow or gunshot wounds recovering in a matter of days. The truth is, many people died of wounds from infection-- Very few deaths occur among the party of the "good guys." The good guys make a number of forays into enemy camps that are both foolhardy and overly too successful to be realistic. The renegades have outfitted their Ute allies with Winchesters.. the author writes this as if Winchester was the only rifle around in the old west and as if in 1870 they were easy to come by. While they were around-- They were not (in 1870) available in such huge lots as to make certain that all of our heroes have them, a large number of the Ute Indians have them, the renegade gang have them, and another outlaw gang have them. Even Colt gets overemphasized a bit.
PLUS: The dialogue is fairly decent and reminds me of westerner talk, though at times it is overly sprinkle with Spanish words used for emphasis.
SUMMMARY: Devil's Canyon isn't the best western ever written-- but it also doesn't follow a L'amourish formula. It stands on its own two feet as a decent book, with a decent story, that cannot be truly outguessed. And even all the bad guys aren't killed-- probably leaving a confrontation with one of them for a later book. However, it lacks realism and I would only recommend it for those seeking truly escapism western action.
February 16, 2018
"The Sundown Riders" is a series of loosely-connected novels by Ralph Compton focusing on wagon-drivers and teamsters in the American West. Devil's Canyon was the fourth of six and the last one to be published before Compton's death in 1998. None of the series re-use the exact same characters, although along with most Western heroes, they tend to be cut from the same cloth.
Faro Duval and his three partners take on a job to get mining and food supplies from Santa Fe in New Mexico territory to a potentially amazing gold strike in Utah. They will have to battle the elements and deadly bands of Ute tribesmen whose territory lies between the city and the claim site. And although the claim owners have tried to keep the news of their find a secret, other and less scrupulous ears have heard the news and make their own plans to acquire the gold. Some of those ears may be a part of the supply train itself.
Compton writes a straight-up, no frills "story of the old West" after the pattern of Louis L'Amour. He lacks L'Amour's style and skill, but he doesn't pretend to have them and keeps within his limitations. There are more than a few clumsy story elements and scenes that don't have much purpose other than to offer yet one more obstacle for Faro and his partners to (naturally) overcome, but someone who picks up one of Compton's books seeking highbrow literature has been, like Rick Blaine seeking the "waters of Casablanca," misinformed.
Original available here.
Faro Duval and his three partners take on a job to get mining and food supplies from Santa Fe in New Mexico territory to a potentially amazing gold strike in Utah. They will have to battle the elements and deadly bands of Ute tribesmen whose territory lies between the city and the claim site. And although the claim owners have tried to keep the news of their find a secret, other and less scrupulous ears have heard the news and make their own plans to acquire the gold. Some of those ears may be a part of the supply train itself.
Compton writes a straight-up, no frills "story of the old West" after the pattern of Louis L'Amour. He lacks L'Amour's style and skill, but he doesn't pretend to have them and keeps within his limitations. There are more than a few clumsy story elements and scenes that don't have much purpose other than to offer yet one more obstacle for Faro and his partners to (naturally) overcome, but someone who picks up one of Compton's books seeking highbrow literature has been, like Rick Blaine seeking the "waters of Casablanca," misinformed.
Original available here.
October 8, 2015
Very good story
Told much about hardships pioneers had in settling the West
All of them and not just the miners! Glad I wasn't there!
Told much about hardships pioneers had in settling the West
All of them and not just the miners! Glad I wasn't there!
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews