John “Son” Martin, Jr made one slip-up in the Army. Drunk with a fellow soldier, he bragged about the massive store of illegal whiskey his father had distilled and hidden away on their family property. Years later, Son’s father is long gone and he’s in charge of the land and the whiskey, but his old Army buddy has an idea. Frank Long has become a federal prohibition agent, and he’s come into town threatening to shut down all the bootleggers in the county unless Son tells him where the whiskey cache is hidden.
Long isn’t there on official business, however. He’s brought a dentist-slash-bootlegger-felon of his acquaintance, and the two of them don’t want to confiscate Son’s whiskey as much as they went to steal it and sell it for profit. They’ve got a maniac gunman, a pretty, young prostitute, and a dozen hastily-hired “deputies” to make the whiskey distillers buy into the idea that this is the federal government cracking down on them.
Son is a stubborn country boy who refuses to disclose the location of the whiskey, even when the whole town turns against him thanks to Frank’s crackdown. What follows is the titular “war”, wherein the fake deputies lay siege on Son’s farm, while Son and his few allies try to hold them off with pluck and guile.
This is a rip-roaring action story from Leonard, a bit of a cross between his early Western stories and his later crime fiction. There’s quite a bit of humor, but it’s all pitch-black dark and sandpaper-dry. There’s no message or meaning involved, which makes it perfectly Leonard.
