The Bandit of Hell's Bend by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Local suspicion pegs the principal masked culprit as Bar-Y cowboy Bull -but is local suspicion correct? And the plot will soon thicken, because both ranch and mine will face a suave menace that fights with the machinery of the law rather than with guns and tomahawks.

In 1880s Arizona, the inhabitants of the Bar-Y Ranch and neighboring Hendersville have to contend with occasional lethal Apache attacks, and the stage carrying bullion from Elias Henders' mine is being held up with disconcerting regularity. I'm not typically a Western fan, because I think modern examples of the genre too often degenerate into cliche ' but the early Westerns produced by the writers of Burrough's generation (which also included Zane Grey, whose influence I think I may recognize here in some ways) preceded the modern cliches,' and possess a more original quality -even if some of the tropes were beaten to death by later writers. So in this novel, he was following the axiomatic advice for authors, 'Write about what you know ' his main weakness in much of his work, his disdain for research, is therefore largely moot here, while his main strengths -an ability to deliver adventurous plots and stirring depictions of action, creation of strong heroes who embody what are traditionally thought of as 'masculine' virtues, moral clarity, and a masterful evocation of the theme of 'primitivism' that can appeal to repressed and regimented readers- are undiminished. Though that was in Idaho, while this novel is set in Arizona, his knowledge of basic ranch life and Western conditions in the frontier era was firsthand and the descriptions here suggest that he had some personal familiarity with the landscape of the Southwest as well. Born in 1875, as a youth Burroughs actually spent time working as a cowboy on a 19th-century Western ranch owned by his brother.

The Bandit of Hell's Bend by Edgar Rice Burroughs