I thought that the novel Holmes on the Range (2006) by Steve Hockensmith was the first time he wrote about crime-solving cowboy Gustav ‘Old Red’ Amlingmeyer, so imagine my surprise when I discovered that some earlier short stories had featured the character first.

Now, I’ll be honest, neither Holmes on the Range nor its successor On the Wrong Track (2007) filled me with boundless enthusiasm for the series, but since I had the collection Dear Mr. Holmes (2011) on my Kindle already, and since I’m apparently doing Sherlock Holmes-related books on Saturdays this month — no, I’m not sure why, either — well, you can see how a man gets to thinking. So, do the Amlingmeyers fare better in their original incarnations? Let us find out…

The original idea seems to have first found expression in ‘Dear Mr. Holmes’ (2003), with the Amlingmeyers stumbling across ‘The Red-Headed League’ (1891), their first exposure to the Sherlock Holmes canon, which has a profound effect on Gustav.

“[H]e don’t need no book-learnin’ to do what he does. He didn’t catch them bank-robbin’ snakes with some trick he learned at a university. He caught ’em cuz he knows how to look at things. Look and really see ’em.”

An opportunity for Old Red to put this to the test comes as a cattle stampede leaves two dead bodies in its wake, and a chance encounter brings a new man to the droving team to make up for lost numbers. The world Hockensmith operates within is well-realised (“When it comes to superstitions, cowboys have got everybody beat but gypsies and Irishmen…I myself get the sweats whenever I see a white dog or a man in yellow trousers.”) and this follows on in the Holmesian tradition well, in that the detective has a lot of information the reader doesn’t…but this only goes to underline how easy it is to write this style of mystery. It worked in Victorian England, when the concept was slightly new, but mystery writing evolved well past this at least 70 years before these stories were written, and I wonder if it might get old repeated over and over here.

The apparently-impossible poisoning of an unpleasant patron at a café the Amlingmeyers buy forms the criminous basis of ‘Gustav Amlingmeyer, Holmes of the Range’ (2005), and the story demonstrates perfectly both what I really enjoy and what I struggle with in Hockensmith’s writing. The characters, the setting, the general sense of immersion in the era — all of this is superb, and as a narrator Gustav’s brother Otto ‘Big Red’ Amlingmeyer has much to recommend him…

[Gustav’s] mind was dying of thirst, and this Sherlock Holmes was a cool drink of water.

…but, damn, I wish he’d learn from the original Holmes canon and get on with it. I feel my impatience might be to blame here, but at the same time a good editor could have stripped out so much of this and lost none of its ambience. Hell, Cornell Woolrich used this exact same trick in an atmosphere-laden story that’s about a third of the length, so I know it can be done. In fairness, however, Hockensmith is fairly new to this, so hopefully he’ll have learned from this experience and things will improve as a result.

Okay, no, not so much. ‘Wolves in Winter’ (2006) is again loooooong on setup — I don’t see why it can’t skip the first third and start with the Amlingmeyers riding in the woods and set upon by hungry wolves — before eventually, almost reluctantly, stumbling over an obvious crime and then slowly unpicking that. Sure, you’d suggest that the well-explored financial difficulties which form the backbone (“When giants fall, little folk get squished.”) would then be expunged, but it could be introduced a damn sight more lightly than it is in what’s essentially an extended prologue. I want to like what Hockensmith’s doing, but at the moment I’m not sure I did the wrong thing by not reading him further. So, onwards…

Gritting my teeth, girding my loins, and probably clenching other parts of my body as well, I venture forth into ‘Dear Dr. Watson’ (2007). Framed in the form of a letter to Holmes’ biographer offering condolences on the detective’s death — if I remember correctly, the brothers learn of this in their first novel — it goes on to tell the story of the Bloembaum Detective Agency offering Otto and Gustav a try-out in the form of recovering a stolen letter.

This has echoes — faint ones — of the Holmes story ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ (1904), in that it’s mostly about breaking in and stealing something, then leaving, and, once again, the sole piece of logical reasoning relies on information the reader does not have. But it gets to its point a lot more quickly than the earlier stories, and is enlivened by an unexpected Chihuahua, and so represents an improvement on the content preceding it. Best one so far, even if the detection is in much shorter supply than elsewhere. Crikey, there’s no pleasing me, is there?

Next, ‘The Water Indian’ (2010), which Otto tells us is going to be a “spook story”. And, sure enough, there’s a mysterious creature: large of wingspan, fiery of eye, webbed of foot, and apparently dwelling in the swamp they stumble over deep in Mormon country. As befits Doyle’s original tales, the Mormons are the enemy here, with a single family of “Gentiles” holding out against them a living in fear of the eponymous ghoul.

The story is…fine, but it reminds me of why Doyle was best when sticking to terrestrial matters, and while the debunking of the creature itself is pretty quotidian there’s a nice sinister edge to proceedings as things progress. Nevertheless, the story is most notable for its wry tone (“[We] are in Utah, and we haven’t witnessed a murder in minutes!”) and Hockensmith’s continued excellent capturing of the sense of history marching on as the idea of a romantic Old West becomes increasingly distant:

[T]hese days “Indian troubles” are suffered almost entirely by the Indians alone, and they run to starvation and disease rather than raiding and killing.

The Amlingmeyers find themselves next in ‘The Devil’s Acre’ (2008), which “had every appearance of being one of Hell’s more swarming quarters” with its various forms of iniquity. When Old Red goes missing, it’s up to Big Red — not the brains of the operation, in case you haven’t been paying attention — to find him and try to figure out why anyone would want to kidnap him in the first place.

This is fun, if inconsequential, with the greatest merriment coming from Otto’s refusal to write out the various expletives thrown around by the coarse folk they encounter:

“No h______ f_______s gonna l_____ with my j___-y_____ customers in my w_______ place. So you’d better t____ s______ your v______ r______s outta here…and you can go l____ your u____ g____s up your d____ m____s while you’re at it!”

Honestly, I found that whole section far, far funnier than a man of my refinement should ever admit.

Last up, ‘Greetings from Purgatory!’ (2009). We’re post-The Black Dove (2008), the third of Hockensmith’s novels in the series, as Otto relates the story of how the brothers came to be marooned in the town of the title following a hold-up of the train they were travelling on. This contains the best detecting in this collection, with Holmesian precepts woven in not just to show Old Red’s growing skill but also to further the wider plot overall, and a canny use of the old ‘gang hold up a train’ trope of Western stories. Nice nod to the use of Mormons in A Study in Scarlet (1887), too, and fun to see the usual narrative structure of these short tales played around with a little. Saving the best ’til last, no doubt.

There’s little point selecting a top five from a collection only seven stories long, and only really ‘Greetings from Purgatory!’ is notable. The impossible poisoning of the second story commends itself to those who have an interest in these things, but I’d recommend tracking down the Woolrich version of it instead, found in the posthumous Darkness at Dawn (1988) collection.

As to Dear Mr. Holmes, it’s probably fine if you’re on board with Hockensmith’s laid-back, easygoing storytelling style, and anyone who has enjoyed crime-solving cowboy stories elsewhere will doubtless find much here to enjoy, given how acutely the sense of place and the people therein are captured. It’s not quite my thing, however, and I leave this collection fairly assured that I did the right thing in giving up on this series after two novels. The facets of the Holmes canon it evinces — spinning small indications into clever reasoning, without ever bringing the reader in on (at least…!) half the information — feel outdated given the era in which the books were written, and I’m happy to pass them over for genuinely clued detection.

Something something saddle up, yee-haw, etc. Rest assured, we’ll be going a little more traditional for next Saturday’s Sherlock Holmes pastiche.