Though author Dan Hendrickson no longer lives in Sheridan, Wyoming, he has nothing but affection for his hometown. Now a native of Manheim, Pennsylvania, where he runs an auto body and detail shop, Hendrickson revisits Wyoming in his latest novel, The Legend of Deputy Jim. Kirkus calls the book a “Western worth its salt” and praises its “exciting pacing” and “climactic violence.”

Deputy Jim is a prequel to a trio of novels that comprise The Last Enemy series: The Good Fight (2018), The Cartel Crusher (2018), and The Last Enemy (2019). The trilogy focuses on the adventures of Deputy Jim’s son, Jacob Edwards, and Jacob’s daughter, Danielle, as they battle drug cartels and ruthless pirates. The central figure of the series is Jacob, a U.S. Coast Guard officer nicknamed the Hero of Cozumel. But for the Edwardses, heroism is a family trait; Hendrickson wanted to show that Jacob’s courage came from his dad. 

“Jim Edwards had a big role in the first and second books,” says Hendrickson, “and The Last Enemy alludes to him. But in the series’ three books, he’s a 70-year-old guy.” To go back in time to tell the story of young Jim’s exploits in Deputy Jim, Hendrickson decided to return to a familiar setting—small-town Wyoming. He relied on memories of youth to describe Sheridan of the 1970s. “A lot of it is very accurate as far as how my hometown is laid out, the park, the mountains,” he says. “All from my past.” But other autobiographical details made their way into the novel. 

“Thunder was our family dog,” says Hendrickson. “The .357 that Jim carries? I had a short stint in law enforcement in Ohio, and that’s the gun I carried.” These touches of specificity give Hendrickson’s book a plausible vividness. Even real-life events show up in his books. 

“It’s really hard to say what’s [fiction] and what’s not,” says Hendrickson. “A lot of the events did happen.” In particular, he says Sheridan really was beset by motorcycle gangs at that time. “A couple times [the sheriff’s department] even put us under marshal law when they were hunting some bad bikers,” he recalls. 

The worst of the bad guys brought out the best in the good guys, those being, in Hendrickson’s mind, the local law enforcement. “When I was a kid, those sheriff’s deputies were like heroes,” he says. “They weren’t afraid of [the] biker gangs and stood up to them. We really liked them.” 

The novel opens with a present-day prologue: an old regular at the Rainbow Bar (a real bar in Sheridan) reminiscing about bygone days. When he realizes his drinking buddies know more about Jacob than Jim Edwards, he decides to set the record straight: “Boys, the whole damn world knows about the Hero of Cozumel, but I’m going to tell you about the legend of Deputy Jim.”

Then the story jumps back to 1972: Jim Edwards is a spry 21. He’s married to Linda, his high school sweetheart; Jacob is just 3 years old. In the first scene, Jim fights in a “smoker,” a local boxing match. Really, it’s a mismatch: Jim’s pitted against the area’s best fighter. But he outfoxes his opponent to earn a hard-won tie.

Driving home from the fight, Jim notices trouble on the side of the road: Sheriff Manning in a standoff with members of the Wild Wolves, a dangerous biker gang. The bikers have taken hostages, and the sheriff can’t radio for backup.

Jim, a week shy of becoming a proper deputy, has his shotgun, his courage, and his smarts. Hendrickson shows him put all three to good use when he uses a hostage’s abandoned car to cause a distraction:

Jim gets in, starts the engine, maneuvers the steering wheel so that the car will go straight at the five Harleys, puts it in gear, and opens the door. He steps on the gas and rolls out of the car at the same time. The little Ford Falcon gains just enough momentum to smash into the five bikes, doing considerable damage to the first two.

Nothing pisses a biker off more than having his pride and joy messed with. All five of them forget what they are doing and run to their bikes. Jim sees that the hostages and Sheriff Manning are free, so he steps around the corner and unloads two shotgun shells into one of the bikes that didn’t get much damage from the Falcon. He then points his shotgun at the obvious leader. “You boys better just get down on your knees and put your hands up on top of your heads, or this henhouse is going to be minus one rooster real quick.”

Jim’s heroics make him a town celebrity, but the Wild Wolves mark him as a new target. Though the gang’s noisy antics—engine revving, public howling—might suggest a bark worse than a bite, the Wolves are involved in some serious lawbreaking. They run drugs in the area, and their ties go all the way to the Mexican cartels. The more Jim proves to be a thorn in the gang’s side, the more desperate and violent their actions become. 

Hendrickson gives Jim’s character an interesting wrinkle by introducing the notion of the “berserker”—someone who, in combat, “loses all awareness of self-preservation and throws himself into the battle with no other goal than destroying the enemy.” While this makes Jim a worthy adversary to the Wolves, it also puts his life, and the lives of his family, in increasing jeopardy. 

Westerns often rely on the trope of the lone-rider hero. The rider’s alone for a reason: Without the attachments of home and family, he protects himself (and others) from pain and loss. But Jim’s not a lone rider; he has friends, a family, a home. Hendrickson wanted Jim to have to face up to the fact that being heroic can be a risk. 

“When I was growing up, there was still the old idealism of the cowboy in the white hat,” he says. “He lives for a greater ideal. He does what’s right no matter what it costs him.” In Deputy Jim, Hendrickson reexamines the risks and rewards of heroism, in the process producing a novel that’s both an exciting stand-alone and a worthy prequel to The Last Enemy series.

Walker Rutter-Bowman is a writer and teacher living in Washington, D.C.