FIGHT FOR THE VALLEY

 

FIGHT FOR THE VALLEY
By Lee Leighton
Panther Books, January 1962
Originally published by Ballantine Books, 1960

Five long years of waiting…nursing and nourishing his hatred…learning how to slap leather fast enough…growing from a frightened young boy to a fast and fighting man…waiting, always waiting for the final day of reckoning – until, with savage suddenness – it came!

The above blurb makes this sound like it’s going to be a tough, dark, brutal read to me. Boy, was I wrong. The book is beautifully written and I soon found myself caught up in the storyline. I wanted to know what would happen, so had to keep turning the pages. But, where was the action? 

The book is split into three parts; The Boy, The Youth, and The Man. The story follows Tommy Gordon as he grows from a naïve youngster struggling to understand adults and his feelings towards two young women. He lives on a ranch but is not wanted by the owner, Mike Dugan, although the rest of the family accept him with open arms. Witnessing a horrific beating, Gordon leaves. He drifts from place to place. Grows into a capable young man. Gordon is then drawn back to the area of the ranch he once called home and it seems inevitable this will lead to a violent confrontation between him and Dugan.

Lee Leighton is a pseudonym used by Wayne D. Overholser, and I think this is the first full-length book I’ve read by him, although I have read a couple of his short stories. Overholser began his career by writing for the western pulps in 1936. 

Here's a quote from Overholser discussing his output in general “I have tried to be accurate in describing my settings and consider character more important than action.” That is exactly what you get in Fight for the Valley. It’s an excellent portrayal of character development, of a growing young man. Although there is very little in the way of gunfights the book does contain a couple of hard-hitting scenes that help shape Gordon and some of the other characters, one of these scenes being quite heart-wrenching and I though Overholser handled this particularly well. It was obvious from the beginning that Gordon and Dugan would face-off and I was glad to find that it didn’t quite play out as I expected and that it provided a satisfactory conclusion to the tale.

I have a couple of other westerns put out under Overholser’s own name and one co-authored with Lewis B. Patten – this latter book written for the children’s market – and a few short stories, so I guess the question is will I be reading any of them anytime soon? The answer has to be nope, not in the foreseeable future as I prefer my westerns to have a lot more action in them. Having said that, if I pick out a pulp or anthology that includes one of his stories I will read it, and I aim intrigued by the book he wrote with Patten to see how their styles mix and how they went about writing a children’s story.