Fracas in the Foothills, first published in 1940, is a rollicking, fast-paced action – western – mystery – adventure story set in the 1930s and moving from Paris to the American West (especially in the lower Yellowstone River valley Montana). The book features scholar-sleuth Homer Evans, the subject of several books by author Elliot Paul, and a host of additional, often wacky characters including his French cohorts, gangsters, Native Americans, ranchers, rustlers, and even rattlesnakes. Evans and his group return to Montana to solve a murder but the plot takes many often humorous twists along the way.