BOOK REVIEW: Bodie the Stalker #3: "High Hell" by Neil Hunter (Mike Linaker)

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I discovered the so-called “Piccadilly Cowboys” series back in the pre-internet days, mostly by stumbling across them in my endless haunting of used bookshops. But somehow I missed Bodie the Stalker. Edge, Steele, The Undertaker, Jubal Cade, Breed … they all made their way onto my bookshelves, but it was only a few years ago I discovered there were other Piccadilly Cowboy series. I started reading Bodie the same time I started reading Claw, Crow, and Hawk (all excellent series as well). And yes, thanks to Google, I am now fully aware that there are even more Piccadilly Cowboy series I need to track down. Anybody know where I can find Gringos #1?

Anyway, if you get high on violent, bloody action-westerns, then you need to be reading the Bodie the Stalker series. They’re written by Mike Linaker (under the Neil Hunter pseudonym), an expert word-slinger who would later become one of the fan-favorite authors of The Executioner series. This time around, our titular bounty hunter comes to the aid—and the bed—of a beautiful copper mine owner who is being bullied to sell her claim, and as the title suggests, all sorts of hell explodes. Along with some dynamite.

While nobody will mistake Bodie for being one of those white-hat heroes, he’s not as rattlesnake-mean as some of his contemporaries (we’re looking at you, Crow). So yeah, maybe he’s not Edge … but he isn’t John Wayne either. He takes no crap, never backs down, and is perfectly willing to go to guns (or fists) if that's what the situation requires. Bodie ain’t afraid of bullets, that’s for sure. No, he’s not an assassin, but he’ll blast a hole in your heart if you need killing. And thank the gods of gunpowder, there always seem to be lots of unsavory folks that need killing when Bodie rides into town.

Speaking of killing, the carnage quotient is high—that’s praise, not criticism, by the way—and in keeping with the Piccadilly Cowboys tradition, the violence is fairly graphic. We're not talking Edge levels of gore, but brain matter gets blown to bits on more than one occasion. Other things get blown too, nudging this toward "adult western" territory at times. Bodie definitely knows how to handle his six-gun, but his love-gun skills are in fine form as well. Yeah, you won’t be mistaking this for a Louis L'Amour novel…

High Hell is the 3rd Bodie title I've read and while the series is not my favorite of the "violent western" era (that title still goes to Edge, with Breed and Crow as runner-ups), they feature enough fast-paced, bullet-blazing escapism to keep me coming back for more. As sure as a vulture will eat a dead man's eyes, if you enjoy blood-soaked six-gun action, you need to hunt this series down.