Mount TBR #16

I read this book for the Mount TBR 2018 Reading Challenge.

The Trail to Ogallala – Benjamin Capps

Unlike the herculean characters and melodramatic plots of Louis L’Amour, Benjamin Capps (1922 -  2001) wrote about relatable characters and realistic situations.  This 1964 western tells the story of a cattle drive dogged by jittery cattle, natural phenomenon from cyclones to skunk stink, and man’s inability to get along with his fellow man due to his stubborn inability to admit inability.

Our hero is Billy Scott, determined to do well in his first experience at being trail boss. However, he agrees to become a hired hand when the boss' widow hires an ex-Confederate colonel as trail boss. The colonel hires a big dumb bastard as his second in command. Telling more of the story would spoil the surprises so I can only urge readers to read this superior western.

During World War II, Capps was trained as a navigator of a B-24 Liberator. He flew forty bombing missions in the Pacific and attained the rank of first lieutenant. Taking advantage of the GI Bill, Capps enrolled in UT at Austin. He was graduated in 1948 with a B.A. and Phi Beta Kappa in English and in 1949 he received his masters in English. Clearly he was no stranger to painstaking research and this novel shows that he did his homework with regard to the challenges of cattle drives in the late 19th century. He coupled this reading with boyhood growing up on a ranch near Archer City, Texas, no doubt getting a sense of what recalcitrant creatures cows can be. Capps’ other notable books are Sam Chance, The White Man’s Road, and A Woman of the People.

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.

Mount TBR #14

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.

Mister St. John – Loren D. Estleman

This 1983 Western has a Wild Bunch theme. An outlaw turned peacekeeper, Irons St. John, collects a motley group to chase down the daring bank and train robbing Buckner gang. The gang hasn’t killed anybody but used smooth con-artist methods to get past guards and bank managers. In fact, the posse knocks off more people getting to the gang, an irony Estleman has the taste not beat us readers over the head with. The gun-play and fisticuffs violence are gritty and gory, but never gratuitous.

The members of the posse are George American Horse, Crow man and experienced bad-guy chaser, and his colleague in a Wild West Show, Wild Bill Edwards, a sharpshooter with worsening glaucoma. Paco and Diego are two roughnecks from Mexico. A Pinkerton agent named Rawlings wants to go by the book. The bloodthirsty Midian Pierce is the interrogator. A pastor with an ugly eye for young girls, he is a malignant character out of a noir novel. Pierce’s ironic epithet is “the Sunday School Teacher.”

The gang is made up of handless Jim Shirley, whose assistive device that lets him shoot a colt is strapped to him by his partner Woman Watching (the nasty word “squaw” is tossed around a little too much in the exposition). The dumb thug Merle Buckner is oddly mentioned more often than his cousin the leader the gang, Race Buckner. Race is the smarter of the two; he recognizes that the 20^th century is going to make little room for desperadoes like them. Estleman liked the theme The Passing of the West, a theme used by the better genre writers like Jack Shaefer and Elmer Kelton.

Like with his Page Murdock stories like Port Hazard and Stamping Ground, Estleman keeps his middle-aged male readers in mind by making the title character a fifty-year-old guy that is mighty tough in many ways, but losing the battle nobody wins against aging and ailing. The epithet for St. John is “The Old Lawman,” an appellation that brings to mind the repeated “old man” in The Old Man and The Sea.

For people who like to think a little when they read genre fiction, he includes enough details and background to make these stories like historical westerns, not only gun-play westerns. Estleman is also good with sensory details to describe smells, scenery, subtle sounds, and temperature.

Mount TBR #61

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Stamping Ground – Loren D. Estleman

This is the second of the Page Murdock series, published way back in 1980. Estleman , a professional writer down to his fingertips, has written for the western, crime, and mystery markets his whole career. This story offers the action adventure we like in westerns combined with noir elements of his own Amos Walker PI stories.

In the late 1870s, Union veteran of the Civil War and ex-cowboy, Murdock finds himself as a lawman since long days and nights on the trail were taking their toll on his middle-aged body. His supervisor sends him to Dakota to bring in a rebel Cheyenne for hanging. Murdock goes on the mission with another middle-aged lawman and a meti guide. All the characters are sketched out briskly and clearly. The action never lets up. Estleman brilliantly describes landscape. He is vivid with sensory details involving hearing, texture, and smell. Like Cormac McCarthy, he has no illusions  about ethnic cleansing, but unlike with CM, we readers don’t need a week to recover from Estleman’s depictions of violence. The Cheyenne and tribe members are depicted as defiant, brutal, war-loving fighters, an image that I, being a brute, much prefer to the caring and sharing natural aristocrats living in harmony with nature stuff of which stereotypes are made.

I used to read a lot of westerns by notable writers in the genre, but gradually grew tired of them because the characters started to feel all the same: stoic, tight-lipped, amazingly quick-thinking, and never apologizing because it shows weakness - that hyper-masculine bullshit that never realizes if you don't say "I'm sorry" over screw-ups friends and relatives won't trust you. Also I grew weary of that constant theme, both latent and manifest, of the “inevitability” of the “vanishing” of the Red Man.

But in the last year or so I have made the exception for Loren D. Estleman. I’ve found his historical novel westerns to be well-written and clear eyed about the social and political context the time. Readers looking to stretch a little and get out of the comfort zone, I think, may want to consider these historical westerns by Estleman:  The Branch and the Scaffold and Port Hazard

Mount TBR #44

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Branch and the Scaffold: A Novel of Judge Parker – Loren D. Estlemann

This historical western examines Hanging Judge Isaac Parker. Serving on the federal bench for the western district of Arkansas and Indian territory from 1875 to 1896, Parker sentenced 160 people to the scaffold, 79 of whom were executed. Parker was the judge in the movie versions of the Charles Portis’ novel True Grit, a western to read even if a reader thinks she doesn’t like westerns.

Estleman uses the techniques of a novelist. He manufactures dialogue. He blends two real people into one fictional character. He adds business to make scenes more literary and compelling. He punctuates the exposition with action scenes that a guy would expect in a western. But all the characters are real historical characters; a reader can tell Estleman has read memoirs, transcripts, and newspaper accounts relevant to his subjects. He makes indirect critiques of journalists who portrayed depraved thieves and mean harlots into figures of romance for over-civilized readers in Eastern cities. In an afterward, Estelman clearly states the literary techniques he used to make history come alive.

I recommend this book to readers who as kids liked stories about figures I daresay kids don’t hear much anymore, such as the James Brothers, the Dalton Gang, Belle Starr, Cherokee Bill, Bill Doolin, and Heck Thomas. Any novel that features kind of sympathetic chapters to badass Cherokee Ned Christie gets three stars in my universe.

Mount TBR #15

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

Port Hazard – Loren D. Estleman

Published in 2004, this is the seventh, and to date the next to the latest, novel featuring deputy US marshal Page Murdock. With three dozen or so westerns, mysteries, and stand-alones to his credit by the time he wrote this one, Estleman challenges himself and his readers by writing in the extravagant style of dime novels and sensational novels of the later Victorian era. Of a theater in Port Hazard:

Cabbage roses exploded on burgundy runners in the aisles. Laurels of gold leaf encircled a coffered ceiling with a Greek Bacchanal enshrined in stained glass in the center, lighted from above so that the chubby nymphs’ nipples and the blubbery lips of the bloated male gods and demigods glittered like rubies.

The dialogue however brings to mind the pithy skepticism about the conventions that we enjoy in noir novels.  There is also much crook argot, which makes sense if you don’t overthink it. A glossary is provided for readers with a low tolerance for ambiguity.

The story opens in Montana, which is more or less the homeless Murdock’s base. His boss, federal judge Harlan Blackthorne, sends his the Barbary Coast on a dangerous assignment. Murdock is to determine if indeed an organization called the Sons of the Confederacy is headed by the Honorable D.W. Wheelock, city alderman and captain in the San Francisco fire brigade. On the way to San Francisco, he persuades Edward Anderson Beecher—a railroad porter (who were all African-American) to watch his back. Murdock trusts the ex-cavalryman to be a fighter.

Rendered well are the gamblers, drunks, vigilantes, prostitutes, thugs, bent politicians and Chinese gangsters. Secondary characters include a gambler who is an undercover Pinkerton gumshoe and a dwarf whose forearm and hand lost in a maritime accident has been replaced with a curious assistive device: an iron ball on a chain attached to the stump. The action is violent, some of the jokes are definitely of the guy variety.

Recommended for those readers who find no problem dipping into the Western genre. No snobs allowed.

Mount TBR #12

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2016. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

The Hider – Loren D. Estleman

This 1978 western combines elements of the genres historical novel, action chase, coming of age, and the passing of the old west. You’d think keeping these balls in the air would tax any writer that was writing his first western. But not when that writer is Estleman, who has been writing popular westerns and mysteries ever since.

The novel opens with 18-year-old Jeff Curry, winding up a skimpy estate after the death of this dipsomaniac father. He meets Jack Butterworth, an old hider who is on the trail of the last buffalo in the US. But Jack is unlike the psychotic Ahab in his quest after the white whale. Jack possesses stoic virtues. He accepts events as they turn out, without fretting and fuming that reality isn’t working out the way it is supposed to. He rolls with adversity and misfortune, flexible enough to identify what he can control and what is out of his hands.

The young ‘un and old hider meet Sleeping Bow, a Nez Perce who is fleeing the corrupted bosses of the reserve. The bosses have sent a killing machine of a lawman after him. So the duo chasing the buffalo turns into a trio being hunted by crazy lawman, who is turn is pursued—but that would be giving away the show.

Well-worth reading for even for readers who think that Westerns may not be their cup of tea.