Bullet Barricade

by Leslie Ernenwein

"He was muy hombre, this Clay Spain, tough as all the trails he had ridden, ruthless as the frontier he roamed - intimate with death more than once.

And he was a loner.

Then he rode into Apache Basin - the torn and bloody range straddled by violence, trampled by a cattle king hungry for power.

It was none of Clay Spain's business, not his brand of trouble.

Until a girl's angry challenge got under his hide - and then Clay Spain rode out, armed with his gun and his careless courage - to dispense justice where the law had never reached!"

175 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1955

Reviews

[Still · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was Sonora, with moon's shadowless sun scorching the high-walled slot of the Barranca Prieta, where one man crouched beyhind a scabrous rock reef while another man lay groaning on the ground. Beyond them, protected by a protruding ledge, stood a sorrel horse whose heaving sides dripped sweat; farther up the canyone a dust-veiled herd of cattle tromped steadily northward in desperate retreat.

The man on the ground propped himself on an elbow. He gagged and spat blood and said, 'I got something to tell you, Clay -something important.'


Clay Spain fired two shots before turning away from the reef. Dirty and dog-tired, he moved with a slow-motion reluctance, keeping his tall frame hunched so that it wouldn't be skylined. His blue eyes were bloodshot from lack of sleep, but there was a devil-be-damned glint in them as he said, 'We'll make another rrun for it, Dan, soon as the pony gets his wind back.'



'Run, hell', Dan Tennant scoffed. He glanced at the bloody makeshift bandage across his chest: 'You expect a man to keep going with a slug in his lung?' Blood got into Tennant's throat and choked him. He mumbled a curse in the confused, slobbering way of a drunken man; he wheezed, 'Give my share to Lace Fayette at Hondo.'



The above is from the first page of this routine action-adventure- packed Fawcett Gold Medal original published in 1955.

The writing never rises to those promising opening lines again.
It's overly long and padded with too many extraneous characters but would have made a jim-dandy of a Western hardboiled pulp short story.

Unfortunately this novel meanders through 175 pages with many repetitive shoot-outs & ruminations along the lines of 'a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do .

Clearly the author envisioned this paperback original getting a Hollywood cinematic treatment back in the day when Hollywood had a major crush on Westerns and routinely optioned this kind of material.

I had fun with it but ran out of patience 2/3rds of the way through.
If you ever happen stumble across it in a used paperbacks store, pick it up.

It is after all a Gold Medal original.