Front Sight by Stephen Hunter

 

Stephen Hunter, a poet of accurate gunplay among thriller writers. A man who often gets the violence right and extracts as much of the romanticism as he can to lean into realism offers us three novellas in this volume.

The first, “City of Meat” puts it in western territory by my reckoning as it takes place in the Depression Era Gangster days and is built on the premise of a Pretty Boy Floyd sighting in Chicago.

The writing quality is high, as the following extract shows regarding a visit to the massive stockyards and slaughter pens.

In a few minutes, he was sitting next to an elderly black man who owed him nothing and hardly noticed them. A slatternly old pony pulled a little cart along, driven by the casual slash of a whip Cracker snapped into its flanks. The pony, which could only be called You Poor Thing, pulled his wagon to the right under Cracker’s ungentle mandate, and they left the administrative city behind, entering the pens, unprotected by the bubble of his car, Charles experienced the smell full on. It seemed to double or triple, like a palpable cloud, a tear-bringer, like a phenomenon of the weather. It was everywhere and could not be avoided. Worse still, its fetid promise of nourishment brought flies in the billions, even some carrying birds silhouetted on bare branches, ready to pounce on the gobbet of beef, a foot, an eye, whatever spillage there was.

The other two novellas advance in time, one a 1940s noir piece and the final, a 1970s tribute to Italian giallo cinema.

The quality is high in all, if there is a quibble, it is that of all series characters—the end is a foregone conclusion—the author cannot risk killing the cash-cow, so there is seldom much surprise in these endeavors.

Still, the writing across all three is high.

I would love to see Mr. Hunter dip full-bore into the Western with no onus of preserving a character. Simply allow his muse to craft and beguile.

Three novellas, not a bad deal for the buck.

The Invader by Richard Wormser

 

Ken felt he'd have gone crazy sitting in an office staring at papers and talking to people who wanted to buy or sell houses or the like. And the time was long past when a married man could support himself decently by riding fence or punching cows. If the pay was good--being foreman one of the big spreads paid more than the county gave him--the owner was a movie star or a Texas oilman, and the ramrod had to go through three bookkeepers, a secretary, and an accountant, and a business manager before he could buy a sack of fence staples.

So Sheriff Ken Craigie would stick to driving the roads. He and his four deputies put in a thousand miles a day in the three cruisers and a Jeep that were the county fleet; Not that they expected to run into enough crime to pay for all that gas and oil and wear and tear, but because it was good crime prevention.

Not to mention that it was good public relations. Law abiding people like to know that the law was keeping an eye on them, and lawbreakers disliked the same thing and even proportion.

This Fawcett Gold Medal paperback from 1972 features the tag “From the Publishers of The Godfather” on the cover. The sales of that novel were so high you could feel the idea of, “Hey, all you Gold Medal authors out there, ya mind shoe-horning the mob into your tales?”

Mr. Wormser, a fine writer of Westerns, gives us a neo-Western that feels like something Brian Garfield may have offered us. Lots of desert country, lots of informed ranch lore [Mr. Wormer himself owned a ranch and writes of this authentically.] The mob element is introduced with subtlety and does not feel intrusive.

Until it is…

The first 2/3rds of this book are mighty enjoyable fare, then the author seems to realize he has to leave all this wonderful groundwork behind to get all La Cosa Nostra.

Here, the novel becomes rushed and reliant on Agatha Christie level plot machinations to make it work in the end.

Too bad, I was enjoying the ride and kinda sorta would like to see what Sherriff Craigie got up to if Mr. Wormser were left to his own devices.

The Journal of Francois Antoine Larocque

 

The Journal was composed in French concerning events occurring in 1805 along the Assiniboine River to the Yellowstone. A translation was offered in 1911. A few other examinations of scraps of Larocque’s journal survive but his own words capture the rawness of the early fur-trading expeditions.

The tribes referred to within are variously called “Rocky Mountain Indians,” “Assiniboine,” and the offered incident below takes place near the Little Big Horn, 71 years before the notorious battle.

The tribal combatants in the well-known battle were Lakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapaho. It is only a surmise that any of these tribes could be a portion of what is referred to in the described incident.

[See here for a further Arapaho offering.]

All escaped with the exception of two of the most advanced, who sent as spies, had drawn nearer to us than the others without perceiving us. After a long pursuit they were surrounded then killed and scalped in the twinkling of an eye. When I arrived near to the body I ascertained that the scalp and the fingers on the right hand had been taken off and that those who had done the trick had left. They borrowed my hunting knife to cut off the left hand and returned it to me all covered with blood as witness of esteem and expressed to me the desire “to […?] at him.”  Men, women, and children crowded to see the cadavers and tasted the blood. Each desired to poignard the corpse to show us what he would have done if he had met them living and to pour out then on these remains insult and outrage in a horrible language.  In a little while it became difficult to recognize in this debris that form of a human body. All the young men had attached a piece of flesh to their gun or on their spears, then they retook, while singing, the rush to the camp and showed their trophies with pride to all the young persons they met. A few women had an entire limb suspended from their saddle. The spectacle of such inhumanity made me shiver with horror and the sentiments that I had felt in setting out had made place for its state of mind very different.

The journals are rife with raw incident and ingenious scoutcraft. A treasure trove for historians, and Western genre readers who like to understand the reality behind the legend.

Resources for the Lived Side of Things.

“THE SECRET OF MACARGER’S GULCH” by Ambrose Bierce

 

Nevertheless, there was something lacking. I had a sense of comfort, but not of security. I detected myself staring more frequently at the open doorway and blank window than I could find warrant for doing. Outside these apertures all was black, and I was unable to repress a certain feeling of apprehension as my fancy pictured the outer world and filled it with unfriendly entities, natural and supernatural - chief among which, in their respective classes, were the grizzly bear, which I knew was occasionally still seen in that region, and the ghost, which I had reason to think was not. Unfortunately, our feelings do not always respect the law of probabilities, and to me that evening, the possible and the impossible were equally disquieting.

A Ghost Story disguised as a Western story.

We find this one buried in Bierce’s collection Can Such Things Be?

I’ve enjoyed Bierce and I have also found some of his work to be slight.

This one falls into the latter category.

Caveat: One of my faults, I do not enjoy the subtle oblique ghost stories of M.R. James.

If you do, your tolerance for this tale may be higher.

Building a State in Apache Land by Charles D. (Charles Debrille) Poston

 

L'il Ol' Me

We could not explore the country north of the Gila River, because of the Apaches, who then numbered fully twenty thousand. For three hundred years they have killed Spaniards, Mexicans, and Americans, which makes about the longest continuous war on record.

Poston, a miner, a poet, an explorer, a superintendent of Indian Affairs, a delegate to the House of Representatives, a rousing figure in the early rowdy days of the Arizona Territory composed a series of articles for the Overland Monthly in 1894.

These articles tell his experiences in the wildly violent Arizona pre-statehood and his sojourn as miner, Indian proponent and ultimately statesman to the region.

It is a political tract in some respects but not dry at all.

Full of incident.

A reference that sings to me is the following…

These Arizona cliff dwellings are the only edifices of the kind that are known to have been inhabited by mankind. They exist mostly in the mountains in the northern portion of Arizona. A more ancient race, still, lived in the excavations on the sides of the mountains, prepared, no doubt, as a refuge against enemies.

For the past two years my wife and I have made sojourns to Northern Arizona to track down many of these awe-inspiring edifices just as found mentioned in this work, Bourke’s and many other Hosses of the early days.

It is gratifying and soul-stirring to stand where these prior men and women stood and admire the work of the Sinagua who came far before us, far before the Apache.

A fine volume. A fine land.

An Historical Account of the Settlement of Scotch Highlanders in America by J.P. MacLean

The Real Josey Wales

Let us begin with an extract from Josey Wales creator, Forest Carter’s novel The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales.

This extract was Carter’s explanation for Wales’ background.

THE MOUNTAIN CODE.

“The Code was as necessary to survival on the lean soil of mountains, as it had been on the rock ground of Scotland and Wales. Clannish people. Outside governments erected by people of kindlier land, of wealth, of power, made no allowance for the scrabbler.

“As a man had no coin, his coin was his word. His loyalty, his bond. He was the rebel of establishment, born in this environment. To injure one to whom he was obliged was personal; more, it was blasphemy. The Code, a religion without catechism, having no chronicler of words to explain or to offer apologia.

“Bone-deep feuds were the result. War to the knife. Seldom if ever over land, or money, or possessions. But injury to the Code meant---WAR!

“Marrowed in the bone, singing in the blood, the Code was brought to the mountains of Virginia and Tennessee and the Ozarks of Missouri. Instantaneously it could change a shy farm boy into a vicious killer, like a sailing hawk, quartering its wings in the death dive.

“It all was puzzling to those who lived within government cut from cloth to fit their comfort. Only those forced outside the pale could understand. The Indian—Cherokee, Comanche, Apache. The Jew.

“The unspoken nature of Josey Wales was the clannish code. No common interest of business, politics, land or profit bound his people to him. It was unseen and therefore stronger than any of these. Rooted in human beings’ most powerful urge—preservation. The unyielding, binding thong was loyalty. The trigger was obligation.”

I offer that fictional extract as it mirrors the factual found in this volume of 1900 that tells the history of the hard men and women who settled the Appalachias.

I was raised in this region, still reside here and find much of what is outlined in this volume still pertinent and explanatory of mindset—something that many outsiders will never get.

Let us go to an extract from the factual.

“These Highlanders were a race of tall, robust men, who lived simply and frugally and slept on the heath among their flocks in all weathers, with no other covering from rain and snow than their plaidies. It is reported of the Laird of Keppoch, who was leading his clan to war in winter time, that his men were divided as to the propriety of following him further because he rolled a snowball to rest his head upon when he lay down. "Now we despair of victory," they said, "since our leader has become so effeminate he cannot sleep without a pillow!"

Hardness was a virtue.

Now there are some dry places here and there as the author lists families that crossed the pond and settled, but for those of the region or who have an interest in what was considered the original Wild West, well, this is a mighty fine read for that cadre.

Enjoy!

A Tenderfoot Bride by Clarice E. Richards

 

This memoir, composed in 1920, tells the tale of Mrs. Richards and her husband Owen, Easterners, who decided to go West and run a ranch in the Colorado of 1900.

Her penetrating eye limns the contrasts between two lifestyles better than mere observers of the literature.

Here we have a wise intelligent woman who had lived in one Life [the Eastern Way] and then plunged whole-heartedly into another Life of a different, more vital timbre [The Western.]

To Mrs. Richards, the West was not just a region, but an entire state of mind.

Allow me to remove myself while Mrs. Richards testifies for herself.

[On the rough men she met upon arrival West. Keep in mind, she came from polite Eastern society, and yet here…]

I was becoming very much interested. This man was a distinctly new type to me. I did not know then that he was the old-time cowpuncher, with an ease of manner a Chesterfield might have envied, and an unfailing, almost deferential, courtesy toward women.

[There is no higher praise in comportment than to be compared to Chesterfield.]

[The next lengthy passage really gets to the meat of what makes the Western mind different.]

“For East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” The phrase kept haunting me all through these first days when everything was so new and strange. I almost felt as though I had passed into a new phase of existence….

 The compelling reality of this new life affected me deeply. Non-essentials counted for nothing. There were no artificial problems or values.

No one in the country cared who you might have been or who you were. The Mayflower and Plymouth Rock meant nothing here. It would be thought you were speaking of some garden flowers or some breed of chickens.

The one thing of vital importance was what you were-- how you adjusted yourself to meet conditions as you found them, and how nearly you reached, or how far you fell below their measure of man or woman.

I felt as though up to this time I had been in life's kindergarten, but that I had now entered into its school, and I realized that only as I passed the given tests should I succeed.

I learned much from the rough, untutored men with whom I was in daily association. They were men whose rules of conduct were governed by individual choice, unhampered by conventions. They were so direct and honest, so unfailingly kind and gentle toward any weaker thing, and so simple and responsive, that I liked and trusted them from the first.

·        An association based upon ability or at least the gumption to try.

·        Assigned identity means nothing, be you Lord, Lady, Aristocrat, Commoner, or any identity label we apply today.

·        You were judged and valued for what you did or waded into to or attempted to do.

·        Labels, titles, pronouns, certificates…all paper dolls to the squared away.

Ranch life might be difficult; It was never commonplace. The mere sight of a lone horseman on a distant hill suggested greater possibilities of excitement than a multitude of people in a city street.

·        Streets, screens, movie theater crowds—predictable.

·        Not the case with who you meet in areas where it is hard to get to.

·        Personally, I have met many an intriguing cat on backcountry outings, standing in the pit at demolition derbies, waiting my turn to plunge a rapid, generally anyplace that most don’t go.

·        If you are where it is uncommon to go, those you meet will be uncommon souls.

[The next, a lesson in facing life, and then facing it again—no need for back pats or commemorative t-shirts. The reward is the act and the satisfaction garnered for the next round of life experience.]

Should the horse rear and throw himself backward, there is the greatest danger that the man may be caught under him and killed, it happens so quickly, but these quiet, diffident chaps are absolutely fearless, past masters in the art of riding, facing death each time they ride a new horse, but facing it with the supreme courage of the commonplace, sitting calmly in the saddle, racked, shaken, jolted until at times the blood streams from their nose, yet after a short rest the rider “took up the next one” quite as though nothing at all had happened.

[Men and Woman of Courtesy & Chivalry, but…a little bit of Outlaw to the Soul—My cuppa!]

It was an unusual experience to live in daily association with these men, in whom were combined characteristics of the Knights of the Round Table and those peculiar to the followers of Jesse James.

[The world is levelled and we only raise another by dint of ability.]

Strange, contrasting personalities—in awe of nobody, quite as ready to converse familiarly with the President as with Owen, but probably preferring Owen because they knew he was a fine horseman.

[In the next lengthy bit, Mrs. Richards expounds on ethics, philosophy, and religion as she saw it there.]

Improvident and generous, however great their vices might be, their lives were free from petty meanness; the prairies had seemed to

“Give them their own deep breadth of view

The largeness of the cloudless blue.” [Lucretius]

The religion of the cow puncture? My impression was that he had none, for certainly he subscribed to no conventional creed or dogma. Yet what was it that gave him a code of honor which made cheating or a lie an unforgivable offense and a man guilty of either an outcast scorned by his associates, and what was it that would have made him go without bread or shelter that a woman or child might not suffer?

Rough and gentle, brutal and tender, good and bad, not angel at one time and devil at another, but rather saint and sinner at the same time.  Little of religious influence came into his life, and as for bibles--- there were none.

[Her sister Alice came to visit with her new husband in tow—a bonafide “Dude” of almost stereotypical fashion. The contrast between this man [lower case “m”] and the Men of the Weast is, well, a bit withering. To be candid, we must ask ourselves—How do we measure stacked against Upper case Men?]

During the drive back to the ranch I thought of Alice and her future by the side of a man of that type. Our [hers and Owen’s] future was uncertain enough, but if trouble and vicissitudes were our portion, at least I had someone with whom to share them.

[Calls to mind Steinbeck’s observation on men often growing more whiny and complaining as they age. “My wife married a man; I see no reason why should inherit a baby.”]

Unless we chanced to have guests come for weeks at a time the only women I saw were those in our employ, but I resented having any of my friends think of my life as “dull” or “lonely.” On the contrary it was fascinating, full of incident, rich in experience which money could not buy. Living so close to the great heart of nature during those years in the planes, the vision of life partook of their breadth and a new sense of values replaced old, artificial standards.  To be alone in the vast prairie was to gain a new conception of infinity and--eternity.

[The next on the diversity of those who went West, and decided to raise up to what it is to be a Westerner. One must not be born there to adopt the full-throated way of life.]

There was nothing prosaic about those who group themselves around the great stone fireplaces on the ranches in the old days. Here again were found those contrasts, so striking and unexpected; university men who had come West for adventure or investment, men of wealth whose predisposition to weak lungs had sent them in exile to the wilderness, modest young Englishmen, those younger sons so often found in the most out of-the-way corners of the earth, and who, through the sudden demise of a near relative, has such a startling way of becoming earls and lords overnight; adventurous Scotchmen, brilliant young Irishmen, all smoking contentedly there in the firelight discussing the “isms” and “ogies” and every other subject under heaven. But most interesting of all were their own reminiscences.

[All the philosophies, politics, et cetera of the world could be offered, but nothing matched the reminiscences, the lived experience. Perhaps we spend too much time in abstraction and not enough “get out there” living bumps and bruises to have reminiscences worthy to share around a ranch’s stone fireplace. May that not be true for us. Sad for us if it is.]

In the East life seems to be static. But in the West it is in a state of flux and conditions are constantly changing.

[In a truly lived life, more things occur and change than in our newsfeed.]

[Towards the end of the volume she offers the below, a more fitting prescription for living I can not fathom.]

From the vast spaces, under the guardianship of that commanding summit, we had gained a new sense of proportion, freedom from hampering trivialities and a broader vision of life and its responsibilities.

May we all learn from Mrs. Richards and get out there and live, gain a new sense of proportion and freedom from hampering trivialities and a broader vision of life and its responsibilities.

I simply adore this book.