Elmer Kelton’s the Unlikely Lawman: A Hewey Calloway Adventure

Elmer Kelton’s Hewey Calloway, one of the best-loved cowboys in all of Western fiction, returns in this novel of his middling years, as he looks for work--but not too much work--in 1904 West Texas.

Hewey Calloway is heading north to Colorado, on a horse drive for an old friend, Alvin Lawdermilk, when he gets word that one of his hired hands is planning to rob him. After the plot is foiled, the fugitive horsehand is on the run and leaving bodies in his wake.

Deputized to help bring the criminal to justice, Hewey is bestowed with a weight of responsibility that he’s long avoided. Never known for his skill--or lack thereof--with a pistol, he can only pray that he and retired Texas Ranger Hanley Baker will be enough to put an end to this trail of dastardly deeds.

Steve Kelton’s The Unlikely Lawman will transport you to an Old West full of duplicity, gunfights, and the often-unforgiving hardships of frontier life.

STEVE KELTON is retired from the San Angelo-based Livestock Weekly, where he spent 42 years, the last 25 as editor. A West Texas native, he is a son of the late Western novelist and livestock journalist Elmer Kelton. During his youth, Steve spent as much time as possible on the McElroy Ranch in West Texas’s Crane and Upton counties. Managed by his grandfather, Buck Kelton, the McElroy was where Elmer and his brothers grew up. Aside from journalism, Steve is the author of the nonfiction books, Renderbrook, A Century Under The Spade Brand, a history of the Renderbrook Spade ranch in West Texas; and Grassroots Legacy, a commissioned history of the Texas Farm Bureau’s first 50 years. He lives in San Angelo with his wife.

ELMER KELTON (1926-2009) was the seven-time Spur Award-winning author of more than forty novels, including the Texas Rangers series, the Hewey Calloway series, and the Buckalew Family series. He was also the recipient of the Owen Wister Lifetime Achievement award. In addition to his novels, Kelton worked as an agricultural journalist for forty-two years, and served in the infantry in World War II.