Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Paperback 171: Hell on the Pecos / Ed Earl Repp (Western Novel of the Month 4)

Paperback 171: Western Novel of the Month No. 4 (1st ptg, n.d.)

Title: Hell on the Pecos
Author: Ed Earl Repp
Cover artist: [A. Leslie Ross?]

Yours for: $15


Best things about this cover:

  • I love how excited the book is that it's "FULL-LENGTH"
  • This early western version of polo never caught on, for some reason
  • Impossibly positioned horses engaging in some kind of horse ballet while ruddy-cheeked young men with fancy neckwear fire over yonder.
  • What is that cloud under the horse's snout? Is that his breath? Given what the cowboys are wearing, I don't think it's cold enough out to see a horse's breath. Maybe Jim's bullets release a little burst of perfume midair to cover the stench of manure / death.
  • Seriously, their cheeks are ruddy. Either they're very ashamed of something or they both insulted the same dame. Or their gigantically-lipped grandmother just kissed them both goodbye.

Back cover, shmack cover. It's the same boring word pattern that all Western Novel Classics have.

Page 123~

"Kelton - Burt Kelton!" panted the old man laboriously. "He come t' the house about a half hour ago! Knocked me out, but I come t' pronto an' sneaked away t' find yuh! That jasper's gone plumb loco, Montany! Yuh better go there!"


Behold the majesty of Western Dialogue! Not surprisingly, this guy is addressing someone named "Montana." Apparently old men in the west were required to change terminal "a"s to "y"s. "That jasper's gone plumb loco!" may take over as the subtitle of this blog some day.

~RP

5 comments:

pious agnostic said...

This book cover deserves at least one comment; here it is.

Michael5000 said...

Yeah, but it deserved a FULL-LENGTH comment!

Anonymous said...

OK, how about "Those cowboys look like they had rouge put on by a schizophrenic bag lady"?

pious agnostic said...

I'd like to see a book cover depicting a schizophrenic bag lady applying rouge to cowboys. Got anything like that in the library?

Sobriquet Magazine said...

Before I read your post, Rex, I just assumed that the two men chose to be cowboys because they'd fallen off of bikes on pavement one two many times, as evinced by the horrible concrete scrape marks on their faces.