Thursday, January 14, 2016

Trackdown by Neil Hunter - Bodie the Stalker 1

Trackdown
by Neil Hunter (Mike Linaker)
Bodie the Stalker 1
Star 1979



Bodie is a bounty hunter who kills people.  A rich guy seeking public office wants him to kill some bandits that stole some guns.  Some people try to kill Bodie, he kills them and then sleeps with a prostitute then kills some more people.

I have a pretty high tolerance for cliches in my popular fiction, but Westerns may be worse than Romance as far as following a formula.  And Bodie seems worse than most about being a string of action and sex scenes with barely a page connecting them.

Which is entirely forgivable, as they're some fine action scenes.  Not to be outdone by his contemporaries in the Picadilly Cowboy scene, Linaker turns up the gore, including a lengthy description of a gunman getting caught under a moving train.  Maybe I'm the one getting jaded, but the violence seemed a little perfunctory this time around.

Linaker really excels in using outdoors setting, and I appreciate that it looks like he did a smidgen of research about Central Texas.


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