Sunday, August 05, 2012

Who is Nevada Carter?

Dallas Wayne…a voice that rustled like silk…a gun that spat sudden death.

It’s been a while since I wrote about the new and used books I have added to my ever-growing collection. 

Last week, I picked up a secondhand western paperback called Frontier Steel by Nevada Carter. I liked the cover image and the blurb on the back promised a tale of intense action and adventure, set in Nevada Territory just after the war.

It says, “Dallas Wayne was a Texan who’d come out of the war with nothing more than a powerful urge to make up for lost time. He settled north-west of Virginia City and within four years was a rich man. Then out of the past one blustery day rode a rider who told the men in the Green Door Saloon a grisly tale of murder…”

I’m not going to spoil the fun by revealing the rest of it. However, I’m intrigued by the writer, Nevada Carter, who appears to have no presence in cyberspace. A few sites, including Amazon (see below), have a list of his novels written between 1965 and 1997, assuming that Frontier Steel is his first book. I’m not sure that it is.


1965: Frontier Steel
1966: Hangtown Sheriff
1972: Gunsight Range
1973: The Green Hills
1974: A Man Called Faro
1975: Badlands Trail
1975: Fugitive Trail
1977: Lost Trail
1979: The Outsiders
1980: Buffalo Range
1981: Perdition Range
1981: Chaparral Trail
1985: Texan Fast Gun
1986: Horse Camp
1993: Cedar Valley
1996: Perdition Wells
1997: Bear Paw


Frontier Steel has managed to push its way up my current list of to-be-read books chiefly because I read a couple of pages and liked the way Carter writes. He has me hooked. It sounds like your traditional western novel with a small-town saloon, a ranch named Circle S, a pretty girl on horseback, cowhands, bushwhackers, and gunslingers, miles of cattle drag, and a range boss who hates Indians, even half-breeds.

In case I’ve tickled your curiosity, about Carter’s writing style, here’s the opening paragraph.

“He was almost a courtly man the way he tipped his hat and softly spoke, the way he smiled easily and laughed noiselessly with his blue-steel eyes, and this was part of the competence a man acquired on the frontier where other men were sensitive to slight and quick to react to insult.”

So who is Nevada Carter? Any answers?


Note: For earlier posts on Book Buys, see under Labels.

10 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Patti, I need to read more westerns too. I'm slowly getting into it but there's so much to read.

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  2. I don't know, but I bet James REasoner would. If this is a pseudonym for someone.

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    1. Charles, I'm sure Mr. Reasoner would know, so I'll probably drop him a mail. I think, too, that it is a pseudonym for someone.

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  3. It looks like it's Lauran Paine, a very psuedonymous kind of guy. Tracked down the facts HERE, particularly comment 2.

    I haven't read many westerns, though I'm not sure why. I enjoyed a lot of them on television.

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    1. Seana, thanks very much for the information. I checked out the link and found Lauran Paine had one of the highest number of pseudonyms, about 68, that included Nevada Carter. Many of the other pseudonyms look familiar though I'd have never known they were all Paine.

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  4. He's not showing up in any of my (few) references. All I've found is a birthday online, 1916.

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    1. Ron, I didn't even find his birthday online but at least now we have something to go by. Seana thinks Carter is a pseudonym for Lauran Paine and the link she provides indicates that he was, one of many pseudonyms. According to Wikipedia, Paine, who died in 2003, wrote over 900 novels including westerns, romance, science fiction, and mystery.

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  5. It is great how you post on near unknown books and movies

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  6. Thanks, Mel. I haven't even begun to scratch the surface of unknown writers and their books. It's a very satisfying pastime.

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