Partners of Chance

Partners of Chance is a Western novel by Henry Herbert Knibbs, originally published in 1921. Knibbs, who lived from 1874 to 1945, produced a substantial body of Western fiction and verse during the first decades of the twentieth century and was one of the more capable writers of commercial Western fiction during the period when the genre was establishing itself as a major form of American popular literature.

The novel belongs to the classic Western tradition and follows the developing partnership between two main characters who come together through chance circumstance and who find themselves working together through various adventures in the American Western setting. The partners of chance of the title is the central organizing concept of the novel, with the various complications of the plot arising from the working out of the unlikely partnership across the events of the story.

Knibbs was working within the well established conventions of the early twentieth century Western. The novel includes the standard ingredients of the genre including ranch and cattle work, encounters with various dangerous characters, romantic interest involving young women whose families are connected to the broader story, physical action including riding and shooting skill demonstrations, and the kind of moral framework in which the central characters demonstrate the qualities of courage, loyalty, and rough justice that the genre celebrated.

Knibbs had personal knowledge of the American West and brought to his fiction the kind of practical familiarity with horses, cattle, ranch work, and the country itself that the genre rewarded. His prose has the direct unornamented quality that the Western tradition favoured, and his various Western novels and poems collectively present a substantial body of early twentieth century commercial Western fiction at its more competent level.

The novel runs about two hundred and fifty pages and reads quickly. For readers interested in early twentieth century American Western fiction, this is a representative example by one of the more capable writers of the period. It pairs naturally with Knibbs’s other Western novels including The Ridin’ Kid from Powder River and Sundown Slim, and with the broader Western fiction tradition that includes Zane Grey, B M Bower, and various others working in the same general territory during the same general period.