42 Days for Murder

The original reviewer wrote a well constructed piece on 42DTM. He made a couple of key points. The first being that the 'lone man takes on a whole town' genre has a WHOLE lot of entrants, many of them from more prolific writers (e.g., Cain, Bellem). The second point was that the pacing of the book has its fits and starts, and that it slackens at the end when the genre inevitably rises to the cliched 'fever pitch.' I can't disagree with either of those points, but I must say that I was really taken back in time to the early part of the last century when I read this. If you've ever heard about and been intrigued by 'wide open towns', 'roadhouses', or 'towns where the fix is in', then there are few finer books for you to hear with your own ear what it felt like to move around in one. I agree that Bellem or Cain gives the reader more rock 'em, sock 'em pacing, but the machinations of the protagonist as he fights a town built to keep insiders safe and outsiders out really is quite interesting. There are many admirable scenes in this book that I would expect to find in someone like Jim Thompson, who could pull this stuff off without even breaking a sweat. This is definitely a book for a narrow taste range, but if you have interest in what life was like in the west 70-80 years ago, and it was a hack of an interesting life even without the Internet, then dive right in.