Tony Casper stood at the Colombian bar with
his friends, drinking wine, acquiring that tipsy feeling of magnitude. Hat
pushed up on jet black hair, accentuating his narrow, handsome face in which
his mother's blood dominated, he laughed uproariously at a joke and lifted his
glass. This was his element-- the cheap bar, the cheap
wine, the friendless friends.
That character description is from the 1959
novel Desperate Rider by Mr. O’Rourke. I’ve said it before, I’ll say it
again, the man is practically second to none when it comes to limning a
character or even a town in a line.
Where many stick with the physical description,
O’Rourke let’s us know his weary opinion of Tony and the Tonys of the world
with the single line: This was his element-- the cheap bar, the cheap wine,
the friendless friends.
O’Rourke’s characters and towns are seldom
all good, or all bad. Seldom are they mere plot pawns, they are human beings or
environments that shape the human beings that inhabit it.
The novel plays like a Western version of
the classic gangster flick The Desperate Hours. It is a self-contained
piece.
While not O’Rourke’s strongest work, there
is more than enough intelligence, human observation and fine craft to keep the
Western genre appreciator turning the pages.
I’ve said before, Mr. O’Rourke, is one of my
favorite genre novelists, even if his work is inconsistent—I still always find
something worthy of mulling within.