Clifton Adams books

Amos Flagg Reading Order

Black Gat Reading Order

Standalone Novels

Clifton Adams wrote prolifically across a career that stretched from the mid-1940s through the early 2000s. With 71 books to his name, he split his output between two distinct worlds: hard-boiled crime fiction in the Black Gat series and Western stories anchored by the Amos Flagg character. The Black Gat books, starting with Two Names for Death in 1945, make up the larger portion of his catalog with 23 entries, while the six Amos Flagg novels appeared in the mid-to-late 1960s.

His standalone novels lean heavily toward the Western genre, with titles like The Desperado, Six-Gun Boss, and The Dangerous Days of Kiowa Jones filling out a busy stretch of publishing through the 1950s, 1960s, and into the 1970s. Adams was remarkably consistent during his peak years, sometimes releasing three or four books in a single year. The gap between his 1984 standalone Day Of The Gun and the 2001 Black Gat entry Eddie’s World suggests a long late-career pause before one final publication.