#60: Tall Man Riding by Peter McCurtin

 Gun-hand Carmody decides, at the spur of the moment, to rob a small bank, only to cross a gang who also wanted to rob it; when they beat him mercilessly in the middle of the street, he won't rest until the whole gang is dead in Peter McCurtin's Tall Man Riding.

McCurtin was an extremely prolific writer and editor across many genres; Carmody was a western series character that appeared in a number of volumes.  

To say Carmody is an anti-hero is putting it mildly; he kills men and beds women without much of a thought for either throughout.  To that end, it would be most polite to say that the book is a product of its time, with race relations and gender relations not portrayed in a contemporary vein.

But McCurtin is just a cracking good paperback writer, and I've found his books to be enjoyable for discriminating readers.

I got this in a batch of mixed western paperbacks from a friend and read it quickly.

#47: The Killers by Peter McCurtin

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.