If there’s such a thing as comic violence in the western, Richard Prosch
is a gentle master of it. There is shooting and fighting enough in his Devil’s Run—and work for the undertaker—but
it’s a story told with a wry and barely suppressed grin.
The central character is Prosch’s “Peregrine,” John Coburn, a gun for
hire who’s taken the job of escorting a man improbably named Tie-Down Sam
Gustaffson, from Missouri to Nebraska, where he is to appear as a witness in a
murder trial.
Family ties, however, produce an obstacle as the two men stop overnight
at a river town called Bindlestick, and for a while it looks like they won’t
make it out alive. They are joined in their attempt to escape by Margo Blaze,
proprietress of the town’s hotel and whose bed was warmed the previous night by
our man Coburn.
