The Primrose Try

By Luke Short

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553241257
• ISBN13: 9780553241259
• Release Date: January 1984
• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Length: 154 Pages
• Weight: 0.24 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A good introduction to this author

The prolific Luke Short (real name: Frederick Glidden, 1907-75) is my all-time favorite writer of Westerns, and while this may not be the very best of his novels, it has all the elements that show why I'm so fond of his work (to the point of having collected everything of it that I could find in book form). Sam Kennery is a U.S. Marshal who got himself appointed to the position years ago so he could legally hunt down the men who'd killed the woman he planned to marry. (It appears, from the story as told, to have been an accident, but that's beside the point.) He's been sent to the town of Primrose, where he isn't known, to get the goods on an Indian agent and a Texas cattleman who are believed to have bilked the government out of thousands of dollars--and bought the murder of the only witness against them. To do that, he must pose as a hardcase himself and hope they'll take him into their confidence. And he succeeds--to a point. How he gets to that point, and what he does after he reaches it, is the meat of the tale. Kennery is a typical Short hero, strong, quiet, sure of himself, yet able to think and plan and pose as more, or perhaps less, than his real persona. Also a signature element of the cast is Tenney Payne, the oddly-named hotel waitress who (with her widowed mother, the cook) becomes one of his few allies: brave, resourceful, and in her own way as strong as the man she comes to love. Even the villains and minor characters are individuals, clearly drawn and with understandable (if not always laudable) motives. Short's plotting is tight and well-organized, yet he's a craftsman who can show the entire story turning on a minor insult offered one lesser character (if it didn't, the book would end about 50% shorter). Though he tends to tell rather than show (a cardinal sin according to some teachers of writing), he does it in such a way that it works and doesn't seem obtrusive. And while violence is perhaps less a part of the story than in some of his other works, when it happens it's explosive and expertly choreographed. At the same time, having written mostly before 1970, he didn't see a need to insert blood and sex and filthy language for their own sake, which makes his books excellent introductions to the Western genre for the younger readers in your life. Short is an author every Western reader should know, and this novel would be a good example to begin the process with.