The Quick and the Dead

The Quick and the Dead is a novel by the American writer Louis L'Amour, published in 1973 and set in Wyoming in the 1870s.

Duncan McKaskel has left a wagon train after an outbreak of disease and is heading west with his wife and son when they meet a group of men who take two of their horses. Vallian, who is chasing one of the same gang for reasons of his own, warns the family and then stays close, which does not entirely reassure them. Duncan's problem is that he has no intention of becoming a killer and every intention of protecting his family, and the two cannot both survive contact with the men who are following them. L'Amour writes the country as a set of practical difficulties, water and horses and shelter, and the strangers in it as people whose motives have to be worked out from what they do.

It is one of the author's shorter novels, and it keeps its attention on a single family over a few days.