Vintage Western
Wild Wild West Reading Challenge #10
TBR #80
Date Finished: August 8, 2018

This Tor Double Action Western series contained two pulp novellas for each author. Here we have “Look Behind Every Hill” from the December 1952 issue of Complete Western Book Magazine and “The Big Trouble” from the July 1953 issue of the same magazine. Both are outstanding stories with good characters and plot with plenty of suspense to keep me from putting it down until each story was done.

“Look Behind Every Hill” tells of a young man whose homesteading father has been killed by powerful ranchers. Taken in by a taciturn man who has his own reasons to fight the ranchers, the boy grows and learns how to fight, leading into the final confrontation of all the various factions in the valley.

“The Big Trouble” is a bit more unusual in that it follows a young Ute boy whose family is murdered by white miners, his growth into a young warrior, and the battles his band fights against the whites, the Arapahos, and his own tribe. A touching story in an unwinnable battle told from a very different perspective than most other pulp westerns that I’ve ever read.