Shalom on the Range
The title pretty much sums up the whole concept of this fish-out-of-water tale, of a big-city Jewish railroad detective plunked down in the middle of the post-Civil-War Wild West to investigate an elaborately-planned and lethal robbery of a mail trail with a lot of money on board. The year is 1870; the detective is David Goldstein, an easterner with no discernible frontier-appropriate skills. He does have a facility for solving puzzles… and the gift of being able to speak coherently with his foot in his mouth up to his kneecap. On that basis of that thin resume, he is assigned by the owner of the railroad to hunt down the gang who blew up the K&P train with 22 people in it to cover their getaway with $200,000 of someone elses’ money.
Eager to experience the West, which he has only known through dime novels, David at least has the wits to hire a gruff but competent ex-soldier and bounty-hunter to aid him in his search for the gang: “Red” Parker and his sidekick, Jake – of whom Red growls “He’s one of those fellers we have out West here, you may not have heard of back East. They’re called a**holes.” Joined by a silent Ute Indian tracker named White Crow and a lovely woman who claims to be a Pinkerton detective, this oddly assorted group is off on a wild romp through every western movie convention imaginable, except for the cattle ranch with no apparent cattle anywhere around.
The dialog snaps with wit, except for those occasional times when a moral lesson is being imparted; fortunately, that does not slow down the action very much. The writer has obviously had a wonderful time reassembling Old West conventions to kosher specifications, as well as making the point obvious that there was much more going on in the Wild West – and there was a greater variety of people encompassed in it – than it would seem from dime novels and their 20th century equivalents, the B-movie and the TV Western.
(In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that the author Mike Katz is also the part-publisher of the Adelsverein Trilogy, and editor of 2/3rds of it, as well as being a fellow member of the Independent Authors’ Guild)
Celia Hayes is the author of several accounts of adventure on the wild American frontier, to include “To Truckee’s Trail” and the “Adelsverein Trilogy.” Her website is at www.celiahayes.com.
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