Book Report: Blood for a Dirty Dollar by Joe Millard (1975)

This is a small paperback from the same publisher as the Adam-12 books I read recently. It’s a book from the “Man with No Name” series tied into the Sergio Leone films starring Clint Eastwood. The book features an ensemble of characters and sort of plays up the camp of the series. The Man With No Name is the best shooter ever and always shoots four times to hit four bad guys as fast as he can. Unfortunately, as he has no name, the other characters call him Nameless, which is troublesome.

In it, the Man with No Name comes upon a town at the edge of a badlands. The badlands feature a group of bandits, of course. At the outskirts of the town, an Englishman has built a castle and staffed it with hired guns. An insurance salesman–or is he?–proves to be almost as good with a gun as the Man with No Name. Two scientists, one British and one American, have gone missing and are presumably held by the bandits who have not made ransom demands for some reason. The Man with No Name investigates and eventually has to storm the castle, of course, with his compatriots who also include the sheriff of the town and the cranky old editor of the local paper.

It’s not a bad book; pulpy and paperbacky, but not poorly written. In fact, the book has a number of similes that are plain awesome, like “shrieked like a banshee in labor.” That’s some shrieking.

Books mentioned in this review:

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