The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

I actually only read "The Hanging Tree" so far. I'm not very impressed with the writing, which features so much head hopping there is no mystery at all. The characters are essentially a doctor haunted by his past, a man he presses into servitude to take him down a notch, and an impulsive child-like woman incapable of any agency until the end of the story when she buys his life with all her gold. It was not an awful story, but it does have everything bad about bad genre fiction: stereotypes, on-the-nose dialogue, tropes (especially the damsel-in-distress), and the diction isn't great either.