Homage

Sam Lee Jackson put his "Jackson Blackhawk" series of not-always-legal-but-still-right adventures on the literary map starting in 2018. Thanks to the wonders of modern digital publishing, he had several novels in the series out and and being enjoyed by readers in a short time, and it gave him the space to add another favorite genre, a Western, in 2019, with Shonto's Kid.

Circumstance puts several different individuals on a stagecoach in the Desert Southwest, but it also puts a target on them -- one of the passengers is one step ahead of the law with a lot of money and outlaw Long Bedeaux has it in mind to take that money for himself and not much care what happens to everyone else on the stage. A brothel owner starting over, Miss Lucy, manages to get herself, another woman and a young boy taken along when the outlaws can't find the passenger or the money. None of them, outlaw or innocent alike, know they are headed to a showdown with an orphan raised by legendary tracker and gunfighter Shonto Page and now known to most as Shonto's Kid or just plain Kid. The Kid and his Comanche friend John Daisy don't know the kidnap victims, but since Bedaux and his men have tried to kill the pair they'll be more than happy to rescue the victims in the process of putting the outlaws down.

Shonto's Kid is very much an "old-fashioned" Western, relying as heavily on coincidence and convention as any entry in the genre. It has a more modern lack of squeamishness about things like sex but it seems Jackson intentionally aims at trying to recreate the classic paperbacks of the mid-20th century. In that he succeeds and his straightforward sharp style moves the story along smartly. The action sequences and gun battles tighten down as they should and while Jackson doesn't waste time or words he sets their stages well and tidily ends them up before they start to drag.

In fact, Shonto's Kid is enough of a classic Western that its many antecedents show through a little too clearly. The Kid's origin recalls that of the title character in Louis L'Amour's Flint, and the stagecoach sequences and finale owe a lot to the movie of that name as well as to Paul Newman's Hombre. The patchwork construction and too-lightly disguised source material makes Shonto's Kid more Xerox than homage, something that Jackson's sure-handed prose skill can't quite overcome.