HOW THE WEST WAS WEATHERED

The Western is one of my favorite genres of pop fiction. I sat up until nearly midnight last night reading to the end of my first Western of 2025, Blizzard Pass, written by Theodore V. Olsen (sometimes billed as just T.V. Olsen) and originally published in 1968. T.V. Olsen and I go way back. The first grown-up Western novel I can remember reading was his 1969 masterpiece Arrow in the Sun. For years, I knew that book only as Soldier Blue, because my copy (a Dell paperback with a cover price of sixty cents) was a tie-in edition, published in 1970 to coincide with the release of the book’s film adaptation, directed by Ralph Peters and starring Candice Bergen and Peter Strauss. I probably read the book in 1971, the year I turned 13. I remember being absolutely thrilled by it and, within a month or so, I had read it again. I’ve read it a few more times since then. Over the next few years I read several more T.V. Olsen novels, including 1965’s The Stalking Moon, probably his most famous book and the source of a 1968 film of the same name, which was directed by Robert Mulligan and starred Gregory Peck.

T.V. Olsen was born in 1932, the same year as my father. He published his first novel in 1956, at the age of just 24. According to Wikipedia, he published a total of 44 novels, almost all of them fairly short Westerns (my copy of Soldier Blue runs to a mere 155 pages). Like Louis L’Amour and many other Western writers, he often churned out multiple novels per year. He published three titles in 1960, three in 1971, and three in 1976. At least a dozen times he produced two titles in a single year. Sadly, he died in 1993, when he was only 61 years old. He spent his whole life in his birthplace of Rhinelander, Wisconsin. He never spent much time in the real West, but he was a demon for research and his novels reek of Old West authenticity. He was married to Beverly Butler, a successful author of YA novels. Butler was blind, and her best-known novel was 1962’s Light a Single Candle, about a fourteen-year-old girl who loses her eyesight. Ten years later, she followed it up with a sequel, Gift of Gold. She was just a month younger than her husband, but she outlived him by fifteen years, dying in 2008, at the age of 75.

Blizzard Pass, set sometime around 1880, takes place mostly in Thirty Mile, a Rocky Mountain ghost town somewhere near Silverton, Colorado, where a Polish immigrant named Cernak has been hired to operate the last way station on the High Mountain Stagecoach Company’s line. Stagecoaches generally stop in Thirty Mile only briefly on their way to Silverton, the end of the line. But occasionally a Blizzard forces stagecoach travelers to spend a night or two at Cernak’s rustic roadhouse. Cernak is a crotchety old fart who lives with his daughter, Anna, and her five-year-old son, Laddie (for Ladislaw). They are all immigrants, but the daughter and grandson arrived in America only recently, and speak only rudimentary English. Thirty Mile is a lonely and godforsaken place for a young mother and her son. But Cernak refuses to leave. He has good reasons for staying. A year or so earlier, before the daughter and grandson arrived, Cernak participated with five other members of an outlaw gang, in a bank robbery in Texas. When the robbery went sideways, the outlaws all took off in different directions. Cernak was in possession of all the loot stolen in the robbery. He came to Thirty Mile because he figured no one would ever look for him there. He has stashed the stolen money in an abandoned silver mine located several miles from his roadhouse. He reckons that, if he lies low long enough, his former bandit buddies will give up looking for him, at which point he can retrieve the money and move someplace less miserable with his daughter and grandson. But Cernak is wrong. As the novel opens, several members of his old outlaw gang are slowly making their way to Thirty Mile through a worsening blizzard. Along with the outlaws are two other men, brothers Milt and Cullin Raven. The Raven brothers were not involved in the original bank job, but the outlaws figured they might need some extra muscle in order to wrest the money away from Cernak. They don’t know how many regular hands might be helping Cernak run the roadhouse. As it happens, other than his daughter, who cooks and cleans, Cernak has only one other employee, a retarded man who looks after the horses.

Olsen does a good job of bringing all of his major characters to life, but his primary protagonist is Milt Raven. Milt is 33 years old and has been looking after his brother, Cullin, who’s 26, pretty much his whole life. Milt is basically a decent man but Cullin is a sociopath. Years earlier, when a teenaged Cullin raped and murdered a girl, Milt decided that he could never allow Cullin out of his sight, or his baby brother would surely end up swinging from a rope. Cullin, like a lot of bullies, is a coward at heart. As a teenager and young man he would pick fights with bigger and strong boys and men, knowing that Milt would always bail him out if the fight wasn’t going his way. Milt is only now beginning to see that he did Cullin no favors by helping him escape the rape and murder charge. Cullin has become more and more dangerous, and even Milt is now afraid of him.

The outlaw gang is led by a man named George Shallot. Because Cernak would recognize the outlaws, Shallot sends Milt and Cullin ahead to the roadhouse to seek a meal for themselves. While there, Milt and Cullin are supposed to do some reconnaissance work, find out just how many people are in the roadhouse and how difficult it will be for the outlaw gang to hold them all hostage while they force Cernak to retrieve the stolen money. Milt, not being a thief by nature, isn’t thrilled by his role in this plan. But since Cernak stole the money, Milt figures it’s okay to take it from him. The outlaws have promised to give the Raven brothers equal shares of all the money retrieved. Grudgingly, Milt goes along with the plan. But when he and Cullin set foot inside the roadhouse, Milt starts to regret his involvement in the scheme. For one thing, he takes a bit of a shine to Anna Kosciusko, Cernak’s daughter. What’s more, also lodging at the roadhouse are James and Aimee Parnell, a young preacher and his pretty newlywed wife. And then, of course, there is five-year-old Ladislaw. Milt hates the idea of involving so many innocent people in a potentially dangerous mission. What’s more, Milt can see right away that Cullin, who has been without female companionship for far too long, is eager to force himself on either Anna or Aimee, or possibly both. Nonetheless, after taking a meal with the occupants of the roadhouse, Milt and Cullin leave, claiming that they have to be in Silverton by the end of the day. In fact, they sneak off to the woods beyond the roadhouse and reconnoiter with Shallot and his outlaws.

I have described only the first few pages of this novel. It reminded me a great deal of Quentin Tarantino’s 2015 Western film The Hateful Eight. Both stories involve some seriously rough travelers who hole up at a high-mountain roadhouse during a blizzard. Many of the characters in both stories have dark secrets in their past. Both stories contain a lot of bloodshed and killing. Both stories include powerful female characters and Black characters. In some ways, Olsen’s novel feels more contemporary than Tarantino’s film, because it comments more directly on the racism and misogyny of the Old West. The most sympathetic members of Shallot’s outlaw gang are a Black man and a Mexican. And probably the toughest, most badass character in the whole story is Anna Kosciusko, who is nearly as terrifying as Daisy Domergue, the character played by Jennifer Jason Leigh in The Hateful Eight.

One of the things I like most about the Western genre is the weather. In most contemporary dramas, the weather isn’t a significant factor. It may be storming outside, or it may be 107 degrees Fahrenheit, but the characters are usually insulated from the elements. But that isn’t so in most Westerns. The characters in Western novels are generally at the mercy of the elements. They can’t ride through a snowstorm in the comfort of a four-wheel-drive SUV. They can’t crank up the thermostat when it starts to get cold. One of my favorite Western novelists is Lewis B. Patten. A lot of his novels, like 1978’s Hunt the Man Down, are basically just extended chases, in which a good man is being hunted by his enemies across a vast and merciless landscape. Sometimes that landscape is enveloped in a blizzard, and sometimes it is a burning hot dessert, only passable at night. But the weather is almost always a major character in a Lewis B. Patten novel. And so it is with Blizzard Pass, as the title makes obvious.

A lot of contemporary “serious fiction” takes place in academia or among the professional classes – doctors, lawyers, techies, investment bankers. Characters in these novels rarely have to deal with bad weather directly. It may delay a flight or ruin a backyard barbecue, but it isn’t going to kill anyone. Nowadays, weather plays an important role mainly only in genre fiction, such as George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire. Last year I read several great “weather novels,” but they were all genre works. In The Light Pirate, Lily Brooks-Dalton unleashes a storm upon Florida that permanently alters the landscape. Her earlier novel, Good Morning, Midnight, takes place at an arctic research center, where the weather also plays a major role. Both books are in the fantasy/sci-fi genre. Last year I also read Nathaniel Rich’s Odds Against Tomorrow, in which a massive storm fills New York with enough water to inundate the first few floors of every building. This too was a sci-fi eco-thriller. George R. Stewart’s Fire and Storm are both about man’s helplessness in the face of furious natural elements. Lionel Davidson’s Kolymsky Heights, which I read last year, is set in Siberia, where the weather is always a force to be reckoned with. Weather is a major character in Bess Streeter Aldrich’s historical novel With a Lantern In Her Hand, which I also read last year. Martin Cruz Smith’s Gorky Park, which I re-read last year, is set during a brutal Moscow winter, in which the weather is nearly as frightening as the KGB. The elements often play an important role in all kinds of genres – fantasy, sci-fi, war novels, sea adventures, thrillers like The Eiger Sanction or Ice Station Zebra – but probably no genre exploits the narrative possibilities of extreme weather as frequently as the Western does. One of my favorite Westerns of all time is Clifton’s Adams’s The Hottest Fourth of July in the History of Hangtree County. Like a lot of Westerns – Louis L’Amour’s The Burning Hills, Elmer Kelton’s The Time It Never Rained, Tony Hillerman’s The Wailing Wind, Lucia St. Clair Robson’s Ride the Wind, Lewis B. Patten’s Tincup in the Storm Country and Ride the Hot Wind – the weather is right there in the title. As I write this, an “atmospheric river” is dropping rain all over my region of Northern California. The sound of the wind and the rain just outside my window are very dramatic. But, let’s face it, the storm has very little effect on me. I am sitting at my desk typing away. Unless the power goes out, which is unlikely, I won’t be affected much at all by this massive storm. The weather plays only a small role in my life. But in Westerns, weather conditions are often a matter of life or death. Reading Blizzard Pass reminded me of just what a powerful storytelling element was lost when central heating and air made most of us largely impervious to the weather.

I highly recommend Blizzard Pass, but I should say a word here about the edition I read. It was published by Amazon Encore, which appears to be a print-on-demand press that ships out of Las Vegas. A note at the front of the book informs the reader that this edition was reproduced from an older edition found in the archive files of Dorchester Publishing. It appears that Amazon scanned the older book into a computer file but didn’t have anyone proofread it afterwards. It contains a lot of typographical errors. I usually get annoyed by online reviewers who complain excessively about typos in books. Typos are a bit of a pain, but if you read a lot of pulp fiction, you should be used to seeing a fair amount of typographical errors, misspellings, etc. Those things are part of the charm of cheap old paperback novels. But the Amazon Encore edition has a lot of errors that seem to have occurred during the scanning process. The character named Cernak is sometimes identified as Cemak. That looks less like a typo than an inability of the scanner to detect the microscopic space between the r and the n. Another character is sometimes identified as Albie and sometimes as Alble, suggesting that the scanner couldn’t always detect the space between the i and the dot above it, reading it as an l instead. I suppose those errors could be in the Dorchester edition, but it seems more likely that Amazon’s scanning equipment just can’t always read unfamiliar words – i.e., character names – consistently. But the book contained plenty of other annoying typos that seemed to be the scanner’s fault. Sometimes the word “your” would be misspelled as “tour,” causing some momentary confusion. Also, the characters would frequently interrupt each other’s sentences. Whenever this happened, instead of ending the interrupted sentence with a dash or even an ellipses, this edition would use a long black line that looked like it was meant to underline a five- or six-letter word that wasn’t there. At first I was confused, thinking that Olsen had simply elided an expletive or something. But, no, it appears that this is how the Amazon Encore edition illustrates a sentence being cut off before its conclusion.

Most of the typos were easy to excuse, but a few of them were very annoying. At one point, late in the novel, one of the characters is trying to escape Thirty Mile in a snowstorm, carrying with him the stolen bank robbery loot. As the cold becomes unbearable, he stops and ducks into a cave, where he tries to light a fire. He has matches but nothing he can use to set his kindling afire. Here’s how Olsen describes the scene.

Paper. That would start it. He quickly searched his clothing. Any paper articles he possessed had been discarded with the saddlebags.

Expect.

No, goddammit! Money to burn, all right. But not that way!

What is happening in those three paragraphs is that the character can’t find any paper to burn. And then it occurs to him that he has a whole satchel full of paper he can burn – the cash from the bank robbery. But he certainly doesn’t want to do that. The paragraph that reads simply “Expect,” which makes no sense, is supposed to read “Except,” which does. It is actually a pretty great pulp-fiction one-word paragraph, but Amazon Encore screwed it all up. I had to read it a few times before I figured out what it was supposed to say.

The Amazon Encore edition of Blizzard Pass is actually two books in one. It comes in a single volume that also includes a 1971 T.V. Olsen novel called A Man Named Yuma, which I haven’t read yet. The volume sells for $14.95, which seemed reasonable for two whole novels. But now that I know just how shoddy Amazon Encore’s volumes are, I will try to avoiding buying any more of them in the future. I should have just looked for a used copy of Blizzard Pass online. It probably wouldn’t have been any worse than Amazon Encore’s edition, and it might have been a hell of a lot better.