Six Bullets Left

By Barry Cord

Consul Books, 1961

Originally published in 1959

Something was wrong, dead wrong! The Texas Ranger called Solitary felt it before he was ten seconds inside town. Minutes later he knew it for sure – when the honest sheriff who’d sent for him tried to gun him down on sight.

And within the hour Solitary found that almost to a man the whole town hated him, sight unseen . . . even though he was their only chance to survive the terror.

Something was wrong indeed.

And Solitary Jackson was going to find out what it was!

I’ve read quite a few books by Barry Cord and this one was just as enjoyable as any of them. Told in a tough style the story really grabbed my attention from the opening sequence in which a man is killed by a strange arrow that is unrecognized by the townsfolk. So where did this arrow come from? Why was this man killed, after all he was just a tenderfoot Easterner dish washer in the local hotel wasn’t he? What was the note he threw into the Sheriff’s office just before his death? And as the story unfolds these aren’t the only questions that will need answering.

Barry Cord, a pseudonym used by Peter Germano, is a master at writing tense scenes, you share the frustrations, fear, anger and joy of his well-drawn characters who are often hiding their real identities. His pacing is superb as his plots twist their way to their satisfying conclusions. Six Bullets Left contains all these elements and left me wondering if there are any more Barry Cord books featuring Solitary Jackson.

One disappointing thing to note about this particular publication of Six Bullets Left is the amount of typos and the book even has a couple of lines missing in a gunfight that was a little frustrating – although it was possible to work out what had happened by what came next. Of course this isn’t the authors fault but that of the publisher, so you may prefer to find a different pressing to the one shown above and hope it doesn’t contain the typos this one does.