Vintage Golden Age Mystery
Wild Wild West Reading Challenge #2
Just the Facts Category: When — A historical crime
Cloak and Dagger Challenge #40
TBR #25
Key Word: Luck
Date Finished: March 31, 2018

I’m going out on a ledge here and counting this both as a historical mystery and a western, as this is more mystery than western. We’ll see if Bev allows it, though someone has been counting golden age mysteries as silver age ones for years and hasn’t been called on it.

A man returns to his former town after five years in prison, naturally for a crime he didn’t commit. The town expects him to raise trouble with those who sent him to prison, as well as locate the hidden loot from the robberies. Meanwhile, the shady lawyer has arranged for a San Francisco woman to pose as a heiress to a local cattle ranch. When that woman is killed in an accident, her penniless roommate secretly takes her place. Paths cross and trouble ensues. When a man is mysteriously shot to death, Hashknife Hartley and Sleepy Stevens arrive in town to investigate.

The detective duo of Hashknife and Sleepy appeared in many of the 1000s of pulp stories that Tuttle wrote, as well as several novels. This mystery is not terribly complicated, but Tuttle’s writing is very entertaining. The slapstick nature of some of his writing is not as evident here, though elements of humor appear. There are no shoot-outs, cattle drives, or other Western cliches here, just detectives arriving on horseback.