Gunslinger by Ed Gorman

 

No lead-off quote; more about that in a moment.

This is an anthology of Western Stories, the full title being Gunslinger and Nine Other Action-Packed Stories of the Wild West.

In this volume we are treated to nine stories ranging from the late-80s thru the 90s and two non-fiction essays: “On Roy Rogers” and “Writing the Modern Western.”

Gorman is an author I have read much of and yet, and be advised this is the reader’s fault, he leaves very little impression on me.

Don’t get me wrong, the craft is there. There is a smoothness of tale that is undeniable.

There is simply some disconnection between this smoothness of a journeyman’s offerings and this reader that simply does not click.

I would easily rate the stories here as solid B’s top to bottom and yet, as I finished each one, I had to rouse myself to move on to the next.

All the elements are there but there is a remove there [to my eye], something that says, “Hmm, this is a skilled craftsman concocting what a good Western story should be” as opposed to the lived-in crispness of air from an author who has lived outdoors.

Gorman writes with a correctness to the genre that raises it above formula, but it strikes me that it is an “expertness” borne of research. There is an authenticity lacking as we find when Frank O’Rourke causally mentions the tang in the air after a brief rain, or Frank Bonham gets the naturalness of men sizing each other up no matter the encounter.

Gorman has craft. Gorman has skill.

If you have a fondness for Gorman, jump all over this volume and you will find much to enjoy.

Any fault in the volume here is likely on my end.

Sam Chance by Benjamin Capps

 

Chance mused about the way the young colored man found a place among them. “We three are not really southerners,” he thought, “certainly the Mexicans are not, and this is not really anything like the South at all.” This was that West he had thought about as bigger than the North and South put together, a place where an ex-slave could be a top hand or an ex-sergeant could be anything he was big enough to be.

This 1965 Spur Award Winner for Best Novel is, indeed, a fine work but there is a curious remove to it. A distance between the reader and the protagonist Sam Chance.

Capps knows his ranching, his cattle lore, his Texas history and politics. As evidenced in his 1964 novel Trail to Ogallala, that extensive knowledge rendered that narrative more as a cattle-drive procedural, rife with “How to” info than narrative drive. [That novel is also reviewed in this blog.]

This novel has a similar, “In the know” veracity to it, but it also is packed with incident. So much incident that it plays as a condensed epic.

It spans from the Civil War to 1922 and my page count has it at 261.

That may be the trouble. Capps has packed so much into this novel that he left the episodes and plot points intact, but we never really know much about Sam Chance himself. His character, his relations.

Sure, we are introduced to a raft of characters, but all seem there to speed along an expansive yarn.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a fine novel, but it seems that it could easily be double its size so that we garner a bit of emotional resonance and not lose an ounce of that precious lore he is so knowledgeable with.

Nuggets of lore like the following.

Chance had trouble with prairie fires that fall. Some of them were set by spiteful farmers, whose crops had failed; some were set by careless cowhands; some were possibly set by nothing more than a steel shod hoof against a stone, for the grass was dry and thin like tinder. They usually fought the fires without water. They fought them by killing a cow and ripping her open for a drag. They would pull the carcass along the fire front by ropes from neck to saddle horn and from hind legs to saddle horn. It was hot, exhausting work for man and horse, dangerous when wind whipped the fire. The horses would give out, from nervous fear as much as from the work, and have to be relieved. The men worked on through it, breathing smoke through the bandanas, eyes smarting.

And that is the novel in a nutshell. A paragraph telling of a marvelous truth of the Western life. An incident that would easily make a chapter in prime McMurtry.

This is a good novel, and it is a rare thing to say, but at twice the length it might have been a great novel.