Mount TBR #43

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Sudden Country - Loren D. Estleman

After reading a lot of them for a couple of years, I stopped reading westerns even by good writers like Benjamin Capps and Elmer Kelton. The reason is that two persistent clichés and tropes drove me off: the go-to characterizations (such as the strong stoic hero) and the “inevitability” of the passing of the redman, as if prejudice, corruption, fraud, and government policy had little to do with oppression.

But for Loren D. Estleman, I make an exception because he writes historical westerns. The reader knows that he had done research. Plus, the reader can trust that Estleman’s imagination will draw together unexpected elements in an engaging way. Sudden Country, for example, is narrated by a middle-aged publisher of pulps in 1930, as he looks back to the time when he was 13 years old in 1890. Obviously a coming-of-age story is on tap.

But it is also a quest story.  Narrator David Grayle's mother runs a rooming house where she provides extra services to preferred travelers. David does not seem cut up over these boardinghouse antics so Estleman neatly sidesteps the cliché of the angry young male. A writer of dime novels, Judge Blod, boards in the house while he awaits the arrival of Jotham Flynn. The cut-throat Flynn has been released from jail and is going to tell Blod his story so Blod can get copy for his awful western tales. Flynn also has a treasure map that locates a horde of gold robbed by Quantrill's Raiders from the Union Army during the hostilities.

Flynn is murdered by a gang in the middle of the night in a helluva scene but David gains possession of the map. Judge Blod, David and David's schoolteacher, stalwart ex-Union officer Henry Knox, decide to visit the Dakota Badlands to recover the Black Hills country of the Sioux. Our trio of heroes hires Ben Wedlock and his cohorts as guards and guides. As we rather suspect, Wedlock and his cronies turn out not to be exactly upright men.

The story is full of surprises, solid characterization, funny asides, and nods to Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic. Estleman uses tried-and-true elements of the western, coming-of-age story, and quest ingeniously. Anybody looking for airplane reading or waiting room distraction won’t go wrong with this novel.