BOWDRIE

I finished reading BOWDRIE this morning. It's the second Louis L'Amour book I've read recently after being given a couple of boxes full of Western paperbacks by my mother-in-law a couple of months back. Published in March, 1983, BOWDRIE is a collection of eight short stories starring Texas Ranger Chick Bowdrie. The stories are interspersed with factoids about Texas Ranger history. The stories all first appeared in various issues of the pulp magazine POPULAR WESTERN published from 1946 to 1950. L'Amour, a young writer just beginning his career in the pulps, had his name on the cover of only three of the issues that featured his work that is reprinted here. But here we are, more than seventy-years later and it's L'Amour whose work is still in print while most of the other authors whose stories appeared in those magazines, L'amour's "stablemates" (pardon the pun), are almost all forgotten except to hardcore devotees of the pulp Western genre.

There's nothing remarkable in these formulaic stories except to show a writer learning his craft and, most importantly, selling his stuff, even if it was for only a penny a word. Chick Bowdrie is a typical L'Amour hero, a Texas Ranger who could have become an outlaw but was instead recruited into the ranks of the most famous law enforcement agency of the Old West (an organization that continues to this day). In each story, Bowdrie rides into a small town in pursuit of some bad guy. He quickly encounters a sizable cast of characters, most of them sporting colorful names. One of them is the man he seeks, while there's almost always a pretty girl to tempt Bowdrie into settling down. Bowdrie, a expert tracker, plays detective fairly well, gathering clues and evidence and revealing the culprit at the climax of the story wherein the bad guy draws his gun on Bowdrie only to be struck down by the lawman's faster gun hand. His job done, it's on to the next assignment as Bowdrie rides off into the sunset.

Bowdrie has no family and no home. Wherever he rides, he does so alone. I guess that makes him a "lone" Ranger.

BOWDRIE is a nice collection of good pulpy Western action. Thumbs up.