A 1001 Midnights Review: A. B. GUTHRIE, JR. – No Second Wind.

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Bill Pronzini A. B. GUTHRIE, JR. – No Second Wind. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover, 1980. Bison Books, softcover, 2010. Best known for his skillful novels of the westward expansion — among them the Pulitzer Prize-winning Big Sky (1948), A. B. Guthrie, Jr., is also an accomplished crime novelist. His first book, Murders at Moon Dance (1943), is a western mystery: so are four others written in the l970s and 1980s, all featuring the likable detective team of Sheriff Chick Charleston and his young “Watson,” Deputy Jason Beard, of the small town of Midbury, Montana. No Second Wind is perhaps the best of the Charleston / Beard adventures. In the middle of a particularly icy winter, the town and its citizens are being heated up by a strip mining feud between local ranchers who don’t want their land destroyed and a large mining conglomerate and its transient workers. The conflict erupts into fisticuffs and then into murder at a local miner’s hangout called the Chicken…