TRAGG'S CHOICE

 

TRAGG’S CHOICE
By Clifton Adams
Tandem, 1975
First published in 1969
Spur Award Winner for Best Western Novel, 1969

For ten years, Owen Tragg lived on his reputation as a hero – exploited by a slick showman who dressed him up in fringed and beaded buckskin and billed him as ‘the man who killed Jody Barker’.

When the act finally folded, Tragg was relieved. But before he could head for El Paso to apply for a deputy’s job, he had some unpleasant business to take care of at Boser’s Creek. There, Jody Barker’s widow waited for him; and there, by a twist of fate that had sent a half-starved sodbuster on a killing spree, Tragg the man was forced to separate himself from Tragg the legend.

He was all that stood between two people and death.

There are four lead characters in this suspense filled book. They all meet on a stagecoach journey. The author fleshes them out superbly, filling in their backgrounds and their dreams for the future. Guilt and greed drive most of them. Each takes centre stage at different points in the book. The titular character is kept mostly in the background for the first half of the story.

I found it fascinating to watch how Morrasey, a down on his luck sodbuster, desperate for something more in his life, becomes a merciless killer. The story begins with him watching a man die, which is right up there with the best opening scenes to a book I’ve ever read. Gripping indeed.

Jessie Ross is the girl who is intent on turning in her dying outlaw boyfriend for the bounty on him. Then there’s Callahan, a bounty hunter who is eager to get part of that reward, and soon has the opportunity to add to that money when he’s hired to kill one of the other three.

Tragg really doesn’t want to get involved with any of them, but fate has other plans and he finds himself wearing a deputy’s star and is sent out to bring in Morrasey. This supposedly simple task is complicated by the involvement of a revenge hungry lynch mob.

Clifton Adams brings all his characters together for a nail-biting final confrontation from which I began to think none of them would survive. The book has a noir feel at times which adds a hard edge to the storyline. 

This is a book that should satisfy all readers of westerns as Clifton Adams proves once again why his work is held in such high regard. The fact that it won a Spur Award should be enough to recommend it to those who’ve yet to read it without my encouragement. Tragg’s Choice really is a terrific western read. 

Note of interest. Tragg’s Choice was first published in Great Britain in 1970 under the title of Dude Sheriff by Robert Hale & Company.