Drifter Carmody, who drifts just this side of the law, ends up being talked into helping out his cousin as sheriff of a small town in the Old West; but he takes up law enforcement at an untimely moment, as a bandit gang and a murderous backwoods family have the town in its crosshairs.
Carmody was a Western series character of Peter McCurtin, a very busy pulp scribe of the 60s-80s and beyond who many speculated was actually a pseudonymous legion of writers. Apparently he was a real person after all, and if this outing is any indication he was also a talented writer.
McCurtin's Carmody is a bit more tongue in cheek than the average Western hero, and McCurtin also writes in the first person, less common in Westerns than, for instance, the private eye genre. Overall the various elements made The Killers a slight cut above.
I got a mixed batch of 50-cent paperbacks at a flea market which included a lot of authors I had not heard of before, including McCurtin, and I'm always eager to find new writers and stories. I also found another McCurtin Western series character, Sundance, which I am sure I will dig into before long.
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