Review Roundup: The Quick and the Dying

Wolf Creek Book 7: The Quick and the Dying
By Ford Fargo
Western Fictioneers, August 2013
$8.09 paperback, ISBN 0615887309
$2.99 Kindle, ASIN B00F6B4KX6
$2.99 other e-formats, ISBN 9781301457243
118 pages

The last time former outlaw leader Sampson Quick encountered his old gang, he had to kill a couple of the ingrates to convince them he was out of the business for good. Now the notorious Hounds gang is back, looking for Quick’s help with a raid on Wolf Creek’s bank — and they’re not inclined to take “no” for an answer.

Since his arrival a few short months ago, the good folks of Wolf Creek have embraced Quick, whom they know as effete British painter James Reginald De Courcey. They consider him a mite odd, but mostly harmless. If only they knew….

The Quick and the Dying, the seventh book in the Wolf Creek series, seems almost a transitional piece. Things have settled down a bit in town now that the Kiowa are talking peace, the gang of leftover border ruffians that terrorized everyone in books 1 and 5 have been dispatched once and for all, and the megalomaniacal rancher nearby was handed his hat, at least temporarily.

Nothing is ever as it seems in Wolf Creek, though. Even the peace isn’t very peaceful, as town drunk Rupe Tingley discovers when the mugging he’s trying to avoid turns into accidental arson. Tingley’s creator, Matthew Mayo, does a remarkable job of conveying a drunk’s alcoholic haze in the first chapter. While the flophouse in which he lives burns around him, Tingley descends into an imaginary hell of flashbacks interspersed with eerie lightning strikes of clarity in the present. By the time De Courcey shocks the entire town by singlehandedly dragging Tingley from the inferno, readers will be ready to hop on the sobriety wagon themselves.

From there, the story departs into a rattlesnake’s nest of plots, subplots, counterplots, double-dealing, and assorted intrigue that is nothing short of dizzying. Quick/De Coursey (written by Kerry Newcomb) and his dilemma, which form the spine of the tale, rapidly recede behind a handful of other schemers who seem to be laying foundations for double-crosses in the future. Chief schemer to watch: photographer Wilson Marsh, who’s scummier than ever before. In Marsh, Jackson Lowry has created a skin-crawling everyday evil that fascinates.

Except for town marshal Sam Gardner (Troy Smith) and deputy Seamus O'Connor (Wayne Dundee), the point-of-view characters in The Quick and the Dying are ones who haven’t been heard from in a while. In addition to De Coursey, Tingley, and Marsh, bounty hunter Rattlesnake Jake (Phil Dunlap) is back and as casually intimidating as ever. Frank Roderus’s barber John Hix continues his understated channeling of Sweeney Todd in the Old West. By the time all the unusual suspects finish laying their plans and forming unholy alliances at the climax, a shootout in the bank should be the least of anyone’s concerns.

The Quick and the Dying ties up one loose series thread quite tidily. At the same time, the book opens so many new cans of worms that the writers should have enough bait for years. How all of the new threads ravel ought to be interesting to watch.


Kathleen Rice Adams is a Texan, a voracious reader, a professional journalist, and an author. She received a review copy of Wolf Creek Book 7: The Quick and the Dying from the publisher. Her opinions are her own and are neither endorsed nor necessarily supported by Western Fictioneers or individual members of the organization. Links in the review are for convenience only; they do not produce affiliate revenue.

Wolf Creek: Kiowa Vengeance

Welcome to Wolf Creek.

Here you will find many of your favorite authors, working together as Ford Fargo to weave a complex and textured series of Old West adventures like no one has ever seen. Each author writes from the perspective of his or her own unique character, blended together into a single novel. In our latest adventure, Wolf Creek is threatened by marauding Kiowa warriors who seek to avenge the deaths of their comrades at the hands of buffalo hunters. While the town fortifies itself, and a cavalry detachment looks for the raiders, the stage from Wichita is attacked –leaving a handful of Wolf Creek citizens alone and on foot in hostile territory…

About the author: Beneath the mask, Ford Fargo is not one but a posse of America's leading western authors who have pooled their talents to create a series of rip-snortin', old fashioned sagebrush sagas. Saddle up. Read ‘em Cowboy! These are the legends of Wolf Creek.

Appearing as Ford Fargo in this installment:

Bill Crider, Jackson Lowry, Kerry Newcomb, Troy D. Smith, Frank Roderus, Robert J. Randisi.

Trade paperback only $8.99 

Ebook only $2.99

   Barnes & Noble Nook

Bless My Soul Pilgrim

By Kerry Newcomb

I’m just sitting back and letting the mind wander which it tends to do whether I will it or not, sort of like nodding off while in the middle of a scene or a conversation or halfway through the preacher’s sermon, alas. I grow old and like some Prufrock wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled. But all decrepitude aside, I shall press on with an actual blog entry, although I like to think of it as a morsel of my own brand of idyllic mind chatter, though my non-fans (and you know who you are) might think of it as mind swill. Dear me do I digress? Shall I stop to eat a peach? I always say there is nothing better than a good old-fashioned digression. Actually I don’t always say that, in fact I don’t even know what it means. And I could care even less. Why?

I write fiction, like a sailor setting out without his charts, spinning yarns and typing my manuscripts by the seat of my pants (which really looks odd at the local Starbucks) and hoping against hope I’ll not be hoisted on my own petard for taking liberties with the facts. Just the facts…ma’am.

Writers get asked a lot of things by their editors and fans. Often it’s about a manuscript that might have been turned in several months, maybe even a year ago. One’s head is jam-packed with the necessary information relating to the next work in progress. And then suddenly out of the blue….

(Ring ring)

“Hello.”

“Hey, Newcomb, it’s Smartypants, your editor on that book you handed in last September.”

“Oh. (gulp) Hi. Nice to hear from you.”

“I’ve got a question for you, about that scene on page 432.”

(Holy crap was the book that long?) “No problem.”

“How far can a man run without a head?”

“Uh, how far did I have him run, counting momentum and all?”

“You wrote that he covers about seven feet and then collapses.”

“Yep. That’s it. A man with a good full out run can continue on for about seven feet after losing his head, provided he doesn’t run into a tree first.”

“Ok. I’ll tell the copy editor. Thanks.”

OR

(Ring ring)

“Hello.”

“Newcomb, Smartypants here. Say, do alligators eat raccoons?"

(A pregnant pause. Huh? Say something you fool. What alligator? Raccoon who? Bluff. Bluff.)

“Yep.”

“Ok. I’ll tell the copy editor. Thanks.”

OR

Many years after my novel Dawn Wind saw the light of day, I had a chance meeting with a fan who loved the book. He approached me with this:

“Hi Mr. Newcomb. Would you sign this for me? Say I loved the story. It was sure different. You know there is something I have been meaning to ask you. In the first part of the novel, that section in the town in Maine before the Confederate states secede and the war starts, you have a trio of children in the town running along the street, playing with a leopard stick. I hate to show my ignorance but I have always wondered, what exactly is a “leopard stick”? Was it some Colonial American toy?”

My mind went blank. I mumbled something about Yankee woodsmiths and the curious names for children’s amusements. As soon as I returned home from the signing I dug out a copy of the book and found the passage in question. Leopard stick? What on earth. In those days I hand wrote every novel and used a typist to turn my manuscript into a finished product that I could send off to the publishing house. As luck would have it I kept the handwritten manuscript.

I searched through the yellowed pages and came to at last to the scene. My penmanship was then, and still is, terrible. Dialogue and description tended to crawl off into the margins, whole passages were marked out and resembled barbed wire fences separating the sentences. And there it was.

Leopard stick…?

Wait…no, oh for pete’s sake, that’s “hoop and stick!”

My typist making the best of my handiwork had read it as “leopard stick” and never looked back. It had slipped past me. It had slipped past all the editors. And escaped.

My name is Kerry Newcomb. I write fiction.

Trust me.