Review: A Single Story from a Collection of Linked Weird West Tales
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 2, 2013
A Single Story from a Collection of Linked Weird West Tales"The Mighty Peculiar Incident at Muddy Creek" comes from the author's "Tales of the Weird, Wild West," a collection of stories with shared characters set in the town Muddy Creek. At the beginning of this excerpted story the author introduces characters who have nothing to do with the resolution of the conflict.  As a stand-alone story, this piece has disappointed some reviewers because the end of the story doesn't tie up all the loose ends.  Nevertheless, the story does entertain and thus does succeed as a teaser.A PUZZLE STORYAt heart, "The Mighty Peculiar Incident at Muddy Creek" is a puzzle story and a good one.  Protagonist Jesse Hawkins is sheriff of Muddy Creek, a small Western town where a train stops twice a week.  One day the train passes through without stopping.  Sheriff Hawkins deputizes the town's barber, and together they ride out to catch the train and investigate.  He solves the mystery with logic and gunfire, so fans of both science fiction and Western stories may be satisfied, to an extent, by the ending.  Others may yearn for an emotional resolution, which the author does not present here.ACTION, INGENUITY, AND EDITINGI give this story four stars because the author writes clear and direct action scenes, because he makes Sheriff Hawkins ingenious enough to solve a science-fiction problem with nineteenth-century methods, and because the story is edited and formatted well for Kindle.LOW COMEDYThe beginning of the story is a stereotypical scene of Western-style low comedy that is irrelevant to the action of the story proper.  I can forgive the introduction of extraneous characters that might be used in later stories, but I wish the author found a more interesting way to show the characters to us.