When Kentuckian Riley Stokes and Texan Cass McCasland team up and head for the frontier there’s plenty of wide open space to get into trouble, and this they do consistently in a series of frontier misadventures generically known as “The Gents“. When they end up guarding the Army’s paywagon, the odds are that things are not going to go as planned. And they don’t.

Bruce Thorstad‘s frontier fiction is as far from the cliched western novel as Abilene is from Boston. Growing up in the northern Wisconsin towns in the 1950’s and ‘60’s his imagination was fueled by the dozens of TV westerns of that era. “Northern Wisconsin is big-woods country…it’s not the West, but it’s relatively unpopulated. I couldn’t look at a hill or a hayfield without mentally populating it with stampeding buffalo or attacking cavalry.”

E-Reads carries three “Gents” novels and a marvelous singleton entitled Deadwood Dick and the Code of the West.

RC