Showdown at Yellowstone River by Angelia Sparrow and Naomi Brooks

Title: Showdown at Yellowstone River
Author: Angelia Sparrow and Naomi Brooks
Publisher: Pink Petal Books
Length: Novella, 62 pages
Buy the Book: Publisher

Blurb:

Gunslinger Matt Court has hung it up for good after a disastrous encounter in El Paso. He moved to Dakota Territory, took out a homestead and started courting Annie, the banker’s daughter. But when Annie comes up pregnant and runs away with her lover, her father calls in the notorious killer, Paz, to eliminate Matt.

But the mysterious Paz holds many secrets and Matt discovers not only the gunfighter’s personal code of honor, but a truth that is worth both their lives.

Review:

In the late 1970s and early 80s, a rash of cheap pulp Westerns sprung up like sagebrush in Wyoming, and the cover of nearly every paperback featured the same set of elements in one form or another: a flinty-eyed gunslinger (mustache optional), a rearing horse, some flames, and a doe-eyed damsel in a stage of undress that necessitates hiding her unmentionables with either a flimsy nightgown, a flimsy men’s shirt or a random piece of torn and flimsy cloth. One enterprising book in my collection features the woman doe-eyed in a bathtub, unmentionables covered in bubbles, despite the fact that when I read the book, I could locate no bathtub and nary a single bubble.

Generally, the interiors of these slim volumes consistently provided two things: one, a historically accurate small-town being terrorized (by such notable villains as cattle rustlers, cattle, evil Civil War veterans, unscrupulous bankers and in one memorable case, President Chester A. Arthur), and two, copious amounts of bodice-ripping.

Oh how those poor bodices suffered.

And the vast majority of those bodices belonged to women being indoctrinated into the historically accurate ways of love by the flinty-eyed gunslinging hero, who would then git ‘er done, so to speak, and move on to the next imperiled, historically accurate town and the next doe-eyed woman in a flimsy cloth.

What I’m getting at here is that there’s good news and there’s bad news about Showdown at Yellowstone River.

The good news is that this is a genuine pulp Western of the kind I adore, complete with flinty-eyed hero, historically accurate imperiled town, scenery-chewing bad guy and plenty of doe eyes for everybody.

In 1884, Matt Court is a gunslinger who doesn’t expect to live beyond the next hour, let alone the next day. So when 1886 rolls around and he’s not dead, it pleases him very much and he retires to the town of Williston, in the Dakota Territory, to take up homesteading, mustang-breaking and courting the banker’s eligible daughter, Annie.

Of course this all goes horribly wrong, and before you can say “Manifest Destiny”, Court finds himself blackmailed into serving as Williston’s first sheriff, and tasked with arresting and/or shooting (preferably both) Paz, an outlaw gunslinger the banker hired to kill Court when everything went horribly wrong. To add to the complications, Court takes one look at Paz and feels a funny tingling feeling Down There.

The plot picks up from there on out, with a number of interesting twists and turns that nearly distracted me from the fact that it’s never quite explained why Court goes from being a death-dealing gunslinger to a mild-mannered homesteader with a heart of gold. In point of fact, Court shows little if any remorse for his past deeds; the one explanation we are given is that when Court attempts to send for the pretty senorita he knocked up two years earlier, he finds out she and the baby died in a diptheria outbreak. He pauses a moment to wipe a manly tear from his eye and then sets his hat on straight and chugs on over to the banker’s house see if Annie’s free for a little skirt-over-the-head action. And that’s about all the grieving that Court–and by extension, the reader, is expected to do.

Which brings me to the start of the bad things:

This is not the only instance where the death of a supporting character is used as nothing more than a blatant attempt to engender sympathy for Court. There is also the bit where Court returns home to find the body of his beloved dog, Duke. He pauses a moment to wipe a manly tear from his eye, then sets his hat on straight and goes off to kick some dog-killing butt.

As novelist Marissa Lingen puts it, “There was a dog who was there to garner our sympathy for the stupid odious heroine when it was killed by the Meany Mean Meanhead Peasants, which was really a waste, because [they] could have killed the girl to garner our sympathy for the dog instead and improved the book immensely.”

Should we even talk about the bit where the dead dog gets more manly tears than the dead wife and child?

You’re right. Let’s leave that for later.

Another good thing about this story is that the characters who are not Matt Court are likeable and interesting. Harriet, the parson’s wife, was an utter hoot, as was her husband; Catherine the saloon-keeper was flinty-eyed, smart and powerful without falling into the dread trap of the angel-in-the-whorehouse; the villainous banker does chew the scenery, it’s true, but I suspect that was written into his contract and besides, unlike most other pulp Western villains, he practices smart villainy. Much appreciated. And Paz, the problem outlaw, is ornery and powerful and complicated.

I adore complicated characters. I could read about them for days. I could, in fact, read a wholly different novella where Catherine sets her sights on Paz and then they both corrupt the parson’s wife and possibly the parson, too. But I’m just that type of girl.

Now for the other bad thing about this story:

I found the sex scenes to be–and I use this word advisedly–atrocious. They are some of the worst I have ever read, in a long history of dirty book-reading. In one of them it took me three tries to figure out if Court had gotten his cock actually in on or near his intended target, and in one of them I still have no idea where his hand went. Nor do I care. This is problematic because a) there are quite a few sex scenes in the book, and b) it really robs the main pairing of a lot of its punch. For the reader to believe that Matt is driven to be with Paz, that he cannot stand for them to be apart, there needs to be some enjoyment of when they’re actually together.

Part of the problem is that I genuinely did not care for Court at all as a character, and the other part was poor execution. For instance, take this encounter between Court and Annie:

Matt laid a trail of kisses on her burning skin, the kisses making her blush even harder. He made his way to the neckline of her dress and tasted the plump globes that teased him.
Carefully, before she could protest, he unlaced her just a bit and her breasts popped out, white and capped with dark red nipples that stood tall from their crinkled halos.

Now, if that example works for you, you’re going to enjoy this story a lot more than I did and I’m glad of it. But for me, all that did was make me think of cooking, and I was glad Court managed to get those cupcakes out before their fancy toppings burned. But again, individual reader mileage may vary. For me, it just all went downhill from there.

I also strongly disagree with the designation of this book as a bisexual romance; indeed, the publishers classify it as a m/f romance with a bisexual hero. As saying anything further would be some major spoilage, I’m simply going to leave it at that.

All in all, this is a classically pulp Western novella that’s sadly hampered by an unlikeable protagonist, ham-handed grief-telling and badly written sex scenes. However, given the historical accuracy and the nuanced cast of supporting characters, the story will likely find a fan base.