The Long Vendetta

Clifton Adams (1919-1971) only wrote a handful of crime novels in his career that weren’t also western novels. One of his contemporary crime novels was The Long Vendetta, published in hardcover in 1963 under the pseudonym of Jonathan Gant and re-released in 2026 by Stark House Press as a double with an introduction by someone named Eric Compton.

The Long Vendetta is a hardboiled suspense novel centered on Buck Coyle, a garage owner and former WWII sergeant who becomes the target of a psychologically-driven revenge campaign somehow tied to his time in the war. The novel begins with Buck, our narrator, awakening battered and bruised in a hospital room after a targeted attack by a vehicle swerving to hit pedestrian Buck.

A flashback to his squadron during WW2 details a war atrocity/mistake in which Buck and his men mistakenly opened fire on a house containing civilians, a woman and a child cut down by bullets from Buck’s men. Could this be related to the attempt on Buck’s life? Count on it.

Out of the hospital, a police detective discloses to Buck that several of the other surviving men in his squadron have all been mowed down by hit-and-run drivers in the past two weeks. Buck has no realistic choice other than to accept police protection.

The attempts on Buck’s life and his sanity escalate while the policemen pressure Buck to explore his recollections of wartime events in search of a motive. The author wrote an honest-to-goodness mystery here, shrouded in some serious commentary about the enduring impacts of wartime trauma completely with a climactic showdown revealing the truth behind the terror campaign.

The Long Vendetta is another winner from Clifton Adams, and we have Stark House Press to thank for rescuing this novel from out-of-print hardcover obscurity. Recommended. 

Get the book HERE.