Book Review: ‘Arizona Bounty’

There is no genre more American than the Western. It is easy, given the Western’s omnipresence on TV, in movies, documentaries, visual arts, music, comic books and rodeos, to forget that the genre began – and continues to thrive despite cultural pressure – as a literary form. The release of James Reasoner’s latest, Arizona Bounty, provides a fine addition to a literary tradition that began in the 1860s and appears to be having something of a moment–a fact recently acknowledged in contemporary publishing.

Arizona Bounty begins with all the ingredients of a top-notch thriller: a bounty hunter chasing a merciless desperado, a chance encounter via stagecoach and a fateful coincidence that pits six-guns against psychological (and supernatural) evil. Combining classic Western character types and set pieces with originality is what distinguishes the superior western. Reasoner, the author of some 350 novels under both his own name and dozens of pseudonyms, skilfully combines the well-known archetypes of western fiction in a way that is deeply original while maintaining the “enchantment of the familiar” that has been the hallmark of the genre from its outset.

Reid Dawson is a bounty hunter–considered lowest of the low among polite folk, yet his skills and services have proven a boon in taming a lawless frontier. While transporting the devilish Santee Joe to jail in the town of Plata, he crosses paths with a stagecoach full of passengers, each with their own agenda. Despite the indignant protestations of his fellow passengers, Dawson secures his prisoner to the roof in chains and takes a fateful ride into town.

Dostoyevsky said there are only two stories: one, a man goes on a journey and two, a stranger comes to town. Dawson’s arrival in Plata will set off a series of events that will ignite when efforts to collect the bounty on his prisoner collide with the schemes of a duo of high-class confidence tricksters. Good versus evil is a time-worn theme in Westerns, with modern writers now tending to either blur black and white together into shades of grey or else portray the difference too starkly. With Arizona Bounty we see an unsentimental portrayal of strong good and evil characters in collision. That Reasoner pulls off this time-worn theme with subtlety and aplomb speaks volumes about his skills as a storyteller. Indeed, the difference between good and evil could not be starker, or more original.

We have written elsewhere in these pages about the collision between literature and our current cultural moment. At a time when the U.S. is asking itself deeply moral questions, the persistent popularity of the western form–a genre preoccupied with morality–is perhaps not surprising. The U.S. frontier was still in its infancy when Beadle began publishing Dime Novels in 1860. These cheaply printed entertainments set the stage for the pulp novels that would later flourish, occupying spinning racks in drug stores and truck stops into the 1980s.

The move in publishing to exclusively white paper in the 1980s signalled the end of the pulp novel era. While it still persists in India, the worldwide pulp printing industry vanished overnight. While some authors and series made the jump to the more lucrative format, many did not, robbing readers of some of their favorite characters and series.

James Reasoner was among those able to survive the transition and remains thankfully present to help midwife the classic “pulp” format into its new e-book form. Publishers like Wolfpack, Dusty Saddle, Kensington and Two Gun Publishing are profitably producing new western content while reprinting old books that go against the social grain – if not, more precisely, the cultural grain of modern publishing. In an era of cancel culture, self-consciously woke book deals and marketing campaigns with aggressively anti-traditional offerings, the Western crashes this posh cocktail party like John Wayne in rhino-skin boots. It is as easy to dismiss the lumbering pilgrim shouldering his way through polite guests as a dinosaur until we recall his stubbornly moral character, and his annoying persistence in adapting to change.

Reasoner has set Arizona Bounty, like many good Westerns, in a time and place in transition. This tension between past and present is what not only characterizes the western thematically but also accounts for its enduring relevance. Those who would dismiss America’s national literary form would do well to consider its timeless popularity. And those who would dismiss its heroes as patriarchal throwbacks usually sing a different tune once the Apache (or Antifa) descend.

The Western’s true value in a time of moral conflict lies in its ability to reduce complex ethical and cultural questions to manageable scale. The small town with its one saloon, its sheriff and innocent townsfolk in need of protection are known quantities. Part of the “enchantment of the familiar” lies in reminding us of the enduring values that keep us human: our civilizational determination to defend the weak, to challenge evil and to preserve the rule of law in the face of chaos.

Westerns remind us of the uncomfortable fact that there is always a wilderness. Louis L’Amour’s protagonists and the heroes of John Ford’s films faced an actual wilderness of wild men and beasts, while the complex heroes of Yellowstone and C.J. Box’s novels face psychological and bureaucratic wildernesses. In ARIZONA BOUNTY, we have a nice balance between the two – fully-imagined characters, brimming with secret motives and emotional complexity in a wilderness in mid-colonization that is every bit as human as it is natural, every bit as sinister as it is primeval.

Arizona Bounty is a richly imagined, generously written novel that will keep you glued to your seat and your eyes transfixed to the page. As a Western, it definitely brings the goods. As a novel, it is a satisfying and deeply enjoyable reading experience. In this, it satisfies both the imperatives of its genre and the high standards of the modern novel. I cannot recommend it highly enough.