After listening to a Louis L'Amour short-story collection I got a hankering to revisit this Western that I first read when I found it on our family's bookshelves as a kid. One gruesome scene in particular (and pretty much nothing else) stood out in my memory and I wondered if it would have the same effect on me as an adult.

The short answer is not quite, but it was still quite affecting. And the plot line — powerful evil rancher plots to kill or drive out the other nearby ranchers, giving himself control of the entire valley — wasn't exceptional. The main character, a drifter named Rainey passing through who gets drawn into the fight against his will, was appealing enough but none of the characters was fleshed out enough to make you feel much about them or their eventual fates. And there were some glaring inconsistencies in the plot (in one scene Rainey has a falling out with the local sheriff who tells him to leave town and not come back, and then a few scenes later they are teaming up against the bad guy with no mention of their previous disagreement) that drove Adult Julia a little bit nuts.

The two most interesting things have nothing to do with the narrative, though. First, as you can see in that cover image (a bad shot taken by me of my hard copy) the author's name is listed as "Claude Campell" on the cover and the title page even though everything I found online indicates his name is actually Claude Campbell. How on earth does that get through Quality Control?!

And second, in my research to figure out this guy's actual name I found out he has a much more interesting life story than having written this book. In fact, this was his one and only Western. He didn't publish another book until he retired. So what was he doing before that? From his website:
Claude Campbell, professor, union activist, artist, and world traveler, has also written several books. Starting at a young age with a western,“Looped Lariats”, his work and family took up most of his time until he retired from the City University of New York, College of Staten Island, in 1984. Then Abou and the Angel Cohen was the first novel published after his retirement. He traveled the country with his wife Audrey, gathering material for a Civil War novel. Meanwhile, he dabbled in oil painting, taking classes and becoming rather accomplished.
Campbell died in 2015 after publishing three more books: the aforementioned Civil War novel, "Cry War I"; a spy thriller "Haphazard" and a domestic novel "In a Yellow Wood". The last two are not catalogued in LibraryThing. ( )