Book Review: The Guns of Sonora | Black Buzzards of Bueno by Ben Smith and Tom West respectively
Let’s look at another Ace Double Western, two exciting short novels upside down from each other!
The Guns of Sonora takes place in Mexico, on and around the rancho of Don Valentine, a wealthy cattle baron. It’s late fall, and almost time to gather the herd in for the winter. It’s not going to be a simple matter this year, as different people have conflicting plans for the coming days.
Juan Hernandez, foreman of the ranch and Don Valentine’s cousin, is planning to take full control of the place. The Don is old and crippled, his widowed daughter Maria is after all just a woman, and her son Timeo ran off somewhere. He just needs a good excuse to force the Don into giving him financial control as well.
In the hills, a man named Slater has gathered a group of desperate fellows to assist him in rustling part of the herd. Even a relatively small portion of the cattle could be sold for enough to give each man a nest egg. If they don’t kill each other first.
And drifting in like a ghost is Jason Kirksey, long thought dead, looking for the family that was stolen from him.
None of them have considered that Don Valentine might have plans of his own that will tangle everything up for them.
This short Western novel has a lot of moving parts, so the plotting is more intricate than usual, but it’s not that hard to follow. It’s clear from fairly early on who we’re supposed to be rooting for, or at least aren’t the villains here.
Comic relief is supplied by Manuel de Vaca, a bar owner who is lazy, cowardly and a bad husband/father, winding up as something of a sidekick to Hernandez. He’s one of the story’s survivors, though whether he has truly learned his lesson and turned over a new leaf remains to be seen.
Content note: Gun violence, often lethal. Torture. Alcohol abuse. Implied extramarital sex. (In perhaps his one boundary, Hernandez never forces himself on Maria.) Ethnic prejudice between Mexicans and Yankees.
There’s a movie titled Guns of Sonora, other than being a Western, it has no connection to this book.
Black Buzzards of Bueno takes place in Arizona, and starts off as a bit of a mystery. Jack Hagen saw an advertisement from a widow who needed help to keep her ranch running, and was thus looking for a male partner. He gathered up his savings and headed on over. Jack’s last known location was a village called Bullhead Crossing, a stage stop a few miles from Juanita Johnstone’s ranch. His brother Bill got the postcard from there weeks back, and heard nothing since.
Worried, Bill has come over from Texas to find his brother. However, the widow Johnstone says Jack never arrived, the last news from him she got was a telegram from Santa Fe saying he was coming. And when Bill asks around in Bullhead Crossing, no one remembers Jack at all, even the storekeeper who takes in the mail (though he’s got a few letters for Jack that were never picked up.) It’s as though the earth swallowed him up.
Bill gets no help from the town marshal, who claims nothing outside the town limits is his responsibility, and since Jack is clearly not inside the town limits, he’s not going to investigate further. Worse, though Bill doesn’t know this yet, there’s an old warrant out for him from his rustling days and the town marshal has found it and wired the sheriff who posted it.
The mystery gets shoved into the background a bit when Bill Hagen gets entangled in a range war between the CCC ranch who have taken over most of the valley and the displaced “nesters” who’ve been chased off their claims. Might have something to do with the fiery-tempered red haired young woman who’s the heir to the ranch.
The unmarked graves in Boot Hill are multiplying!
The basic question of what happened to Jack is pretty obvious to answer but its relationship to the other happenings in the area gets a bit more complex. Bill Hagen comes across as a typical late-period Western protagonist, highly competent, prone to involving himself in situations that are honestly none of his business, and good with a gun.
The romance subplot is perfunctory and kind of forced. I suspect the writer had seen McLintock!, but lifted only a fraction of it.
Content note: Lots of gun violence, most lethal. Attempted assault. A stereotypical mixed-race tracker named “Pache”.
Tom West (pen name of Fred East) was a fairly prolific author of Westerns, and headlined several Ace Doubles.
Neither of these novels seem to have been reprinted, so this is more of a must-have for Western fans than some other Ace books. The stories are fast-moving, have plenty of rip-roaring action, and work well as fun short reads.
