On the Wrong Track by Steve Hockensmith

On the Wrong Track is the sequel to Holmes on the Range, which I reviewed last winter.  It is the further adventures of Gustav and Otto Amlingmeyer, known more often as Old Red and Big Red.  They are brothers, and cowboys, and are all that the other has left in the world, after a flood wiped out the family farm and the rest of their family.  Otto is literate, and reads the stories in magazines around the campfire or in the bunkhouse to Gustav.  Gustav is particularly taken with the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and dreams of becoming a detective himself.  In Holmes on the Range, he used his observations and his brain to solve a crime, and now he's anxious to do it for a living.

They apply to various detective agencies, and are repeatedly turned down.  Finally someone gives them a tip, and they are hired on as guards for the Southern Pacific Railroad.  They are on their way to San Francisco for training when several very bad things happen on their train, and they are the only ones handy to do something about it.  This is exacerbated by the fact the conductor despises them and keeps threatening to fire them.  A man is murdered, the train is held up, and they both get the tar beat out of them, but that's not going to stop them from getting to the bottom of things.

I had a blast with On the Wrong Track.  The narrative voice of story, Big Red, is quirky and entertaining.  Like Watson, or Captain Hastings, he often doesn't know what his smarter companion is thinking, but he is no fool himself (unlike Captain Hastings).  I appreciated the relationship the brothers have, and there's some lovely character-revealing conversation late in the book, told nevertheless in a suitably gruff and manly way.  It was also kind of cool that they were traveling over the Sierra Nevada, as I drove through there myself a couple of months ago, between Sacramento and Reno.  It's very dramatic countryside.  And Hockensmith does a nice job with revealing things about the time and setting without slowing down to lecture.  Really, these stories are just delightful and a lot of fun, even though I don't usually read Westerns and tend to avoid historicals.  If they can win me over, they've got to be good.