"Hell. Mexico. Same blessed thing.": a recap of West Texas Kill by .

artist would perpetrate), but it's astoundingly, egregiously, head-slappingly wrong: there are no Indians "on level" in West Texas Kill, war-bonneted or otherwise.It's obvious that the publishers were defeated with the painting, given that they reduced it to one-third of the front cover.

West Texas Kill is a decent, workmanlike, pulp fiction-y action adventure that one can easily figure as a square B movie (although with an aspirational blockbuster set-piece).Set in the fall of 1885, West Texas Kill revolves round the level of an especially bad case of a Texas Ranger, Hector ("Hec") Savage, deciding to carve off three counties of Texas to give up his own country, the area of Savage; he has the help of 14 like-minded Rangers and a bigger grouping of Mexican bandidos (some of whom seem to be duly deputized Rurales.), led by the Shakespeare-quoting Juan Lo Grande.Opposing these nefarious no-goodniks are the Ranger Dave Chance (who, although he owes his spirit to Savage, is operating under no misapprehensions as to his character) and his prisoner, the gambler, horse-thief and murderer (one should think that, in the Old West, being a horse thief was much regarded with more infamy than being a liquidator in the definition of the law.), Moses Albavera, a 6',3" gregarious black man who is proud of what he calls his "Moorish" heritage.Considering that a Moor usually denotes a Berber occupying the Iberian Peninsula in the Middle Ages - although the condition was likewise variously used by Europeans to mention to Arabs, Muslim Iberians and West Africans - I was lost by this.The condition has likewise been deemed in the otherwise rather racist article "Moors" in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannicato have "no real ethnological value.")

If Boggs' prose never quite reaches the poetic heights of Rider Haggard, Robert E. Howard or even Edgar Rice Burroughs at their peak, it never drags, which is virtually always fatal to the reader's interest in an adventure story.If Boggs verges on cutesyness with some of his character names (a right and tough grass widow who runs a bar in a camp is named Grace Profit; the heron is named "Chance;" the primary villain is named "Savage;" and the hero's eventual buddy is named "Edge of Daybreak" in Spanish, with a Christian name that suggests a leader who won't actually cause it to the promised land but who will see that his people do), one should likely be grateful that he resisted the impulse to make his main villain "Helstrom Savage," giving him a nickname of "Hell."("Savage Hec" reminded me of the case in the devil suit and keeping a giant spoon from Scott Adams' Dilbert strip.)

Still, Boggs keeps things humming along: the force and language get increasingly brutal, grisly, and salty as the book rolls along, verging perhaps a tone into the region of overkill towards the end; but he lightens things up periodically with touches of grim humor, and one's confidence that he really knows his material never flags.While brand names (chiefly of firearms and railroad engines) are often dropped, what was particularly interesting to me was the "Apache trick" performed on telegraph lines: "'Cut the wire.Splice it with a rubber band.Tie it cover to the pole.Takes a very good eye to distinguish it.The railroad crews'll likely spend a few days just trying to see the cut.'" (p. 119)

One could care for a little more background on the hostility between Mexicans and the Texas Rangers - the Mexicans call them rinches, which is far from a free term - but one gets the general idea, based on the actions and language of Hec Savage, et al, and the dogmatism of the early "good" Rangers (save only for Chance, of course).

There was a proofreading error on p. 100 that made me chuckle: the names of the principal villain and his lieutenant, Doc Shaw, are compounded, so that Doc Savage makes an apocryphal appearance in West Texas in 1885.The time in question reads: "'Damn you, Savage,' Grace cried, but had to measure out of the way of Doc Savage as he led the former Rangers after the captain.")

I'll definitely be on the outlook for more books by Boggs; if his literary qualities are weak, at least he doesn't succumb to the downfalls of the genre that other writers have: the pompous and dubious racial theories of Forrest Carter's Josey Wales books; the pompous bombast about manhood and manifest destiny of Louis L'Amour; the vaguely fascistic, anti-democratic bloviations (to say nothing of rampant sexism and dated ideas of manhood) of Owen Wister's The Virginian.

Boggs could easily turn West Texas Kill into a series; if it's made into a movie, I'd love to see Mario Van Peebles play Moses Albavera.A film adaptation of West Texas Kill could be still more fun than Van Peebles' 1993 movie Posse.