Elmer Kelton, Texas Standoff (Forge Books: New York).  $25.00

Novelist Elmer Kelton was one reason I always looked forward to attending the annual meeting of the Texas Folklore Society.  As long as his health permitted, he would be there, year after year, sitting up near the front, taking notes.

When asked why he took detailed notes, he had a good answer: “I want to keep writing realistic novels about life in Texas, and I can never have too much material, especially the kind of information about everyday life that folklorists collect.  And I sit up front because at my age I don’t hear very well any more.”

When Elmer died last year at the age of 83,  we all hoped that he had left behind another unpublished novel or two.  After all, 48 Kelton novels are not enough. As it turns out, there was at least one more.

Texas Standoff is just now being released as the final novel in the popular Texas Rangers series.  In this novel newly married Ranger Andy Pickard puts aside  his thoughts of settling down and joins his new partner Logan Daggett to investigate a series of cattle thefts and killings in central Texas.

The Rangers quickly learn the first layer of the trouble: the two biggest cattlemen in the region are feuding so publicly that one or the other gets blamed for each new episode of violence.  But Andy soon gets to know each man well enough to doubt that either one is guilty.

Another layer of trouble comes from the rise of the “regulators,” a gang of masked vigilantes who are willing to kill anyone who threatens to reveal their hidden identities.  Then, like the icing on the cake, a hired gunman with a deadly reputation shows up, and no one knows who his employer is.

This book has Kelton’s trademark eye for historical detail,  as well ascharacters you can believe in, and a realistic depiction of old-time Texas.  We would not expect anything less from the man who was honored as the Greatest Western Writer of all time by his fellow writers.

However, Elmer Kelton is more than a “western writer.”  As author Dee Brown, who wrote Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, expressed it: “Elmer Kelton does not write westerns.  He writes fine novels set in the West.  Here a reader meets flesh-and-blood people of an earlier time, in a story that will grab you and hold you from the first to the last page.”

Dr. Jerry Lincecum is professor of English emeritus at Austin College and director of Telling Our Stories.