“Beyond the Frontier” by Dorothy M. Johnson

 

It was right that Edwards should think of Blossom first; she was his wife. She was standing in the yard in front of the still smoking log house, her long skirts blowing, her hands up to her mouth in a theatrical gesture that said Rancher’s Wife Waiting for Husband’s Return After Indian Raid.

How have I missed this story?

I am a fan of Miss Johnson. “The Lost Sister” and “The Hanging Tree” are acknowledged classics, but this little gem escaped me until now.

It packs a wallop of character in its brief page count. There is more limned in single sentences than many novelists pack into overthick covers.

Art, craft, narrative force—packed tight.

Simply superlative.

West Texas by Al Sarrantonio

 

“The killer’s name is Curtis Marks?”

“Not much of a name for a man who's murdered so many, is it? He must be”-- Thomas studied the short entry—“twenty years old now. This explains almost everything.” He looked up at Lincoln, eyes bright. “The mystery is solved, Trooper Reeves. I not only know where the killer is, but who he is, why he kills and why we'll find him where he is now.”

Um...if that passage feels a bit like the third act wrap-up of a third-rate English murder mystery, well, that’s because that is just one of the shoehorned elements in this mish-mash of a novel.

We take Buffalo Soldiers in West Texas, mix in a serial killer with baroque motivation and apparent superpowers, add a cavalryman who has trained himself to be a detective reading Sherlock Holmes stories, add some various kitchen sinks here and there and you get, well, writing like the opening extract.

The author clearly knows what he has in mind, our Sherlock Holmes wannabe knows what’s what, the problem is, we the reader are never offered the same insight to, well, much of anything.

That is not just referring to the motivation and ability to track down the serial killer [which is well nigh nonsensical] it is also down to standard elements.

I was well into the novel before we are privileged to the information that our protagonist is black and the victim of prejudice. The information just seems to come out of nowhere.

Each additional character along the way, we are never quite certain who they are, or why we are even meeting them.

There are entire chapters that pop up towards the end involving Mescalero Apache—they feel dropped in from a completely separate nonsensical novel.

My first from Mr. Sarrantonio, and perhaps there are excellent choices out there—we can all have a bad day.

But I gotta say, this one is, well…

The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones by Charles Neider

 

Now if you'll be patient I guarantee you'll get your money's worth but it's the truth I'm getting at and if you're not interested I suggest you run along to the stores and pick up one of the little books full of lies about the Kid’s life, written by some smartaleck easterner that never sat in a western saddle, never smelt good horse flesh or a campfire dying in the hills and yet is ready to tell the country all about the Kid. I was there and I know what happened. With a little patience you will know it too before long, what I aim to tell is exactly how he died, when there was no reason for him to have died at all.

This 1956 novel by Neider is a riff on the Billy the Kid tale, it was adapted into the 1961 film One-Eyed Jacks starring and directed by Marlon Brando.

The film is fine; no classic.

As for the Billy the Kid tale, I am no fan, thusly I came to this novel reluctantly.

I was wrong.

This novel is simply superlative.

Hendry Jones is definitely Billy the Kid in outline but there is no legend here.

There is no romance.

No studio picture gloss.

Neider gives us grit and dirt and reality and the smallness of killing.

It is a surprisingly candid novel for 1956.

When they put the hemp around his neck and jerked how long would it take for him to choke to death? What would his legs be doing? How would his face look? Would it turn purple and look like a dried prune, making the kids laugh when he pissed in his pants and be buried with it stinking on him?

With its brief page count-144—Neider accomplishes more than many at four times the length.

Easily moves into the pantheon of one of my favorite Westerns.

The Genuine Article by A.B. Guthrie

 

She collapsed by the roadside and moaned. She could have been pretty, I thought, grade-school pretty, but now her clothes were dirty and torn, and her face swollen and red, like a man’s marked by booze.

A volume in the Sheriff Chick Charleston series by the Pulitzer Prize winning author of the classic Western The Way West, and the screenwriter who adapted Shane for the big screen.

The Chick Charleston series was a series of 5 contemporary crime novels in Big Sky country.

This volume is brief, full of on-point observations such as the one we opened with and the following examples:

The morning was as fair as ever nature could give. The sky was tall, to the end of sight and beyond. The horizons lay peaceful and distant, drowsing under the early sun. I thought of a statement I had read somewhere: values arise by contrast. So, sure, we needed cold and wind and rain for a full appreciation of days like this one.

Or…

It was hard to believe, on this quiet and tranquil morning, that murder could have been done, that violence could exist. Had the killer only counted to ten, so to speak, a day like today would have soothed him. The whole sky said peace.

Gorgeous writing up and down the line.

If there is a problem, and there was to this reader, it is the mystery itself, the reason for the novel’s existence. It is simply formula and, well, unnecessary.

To be candid, I feel that way about many “mystery/crime” novels.

I formerly was a big fan of the genre but now find much of it tedious wheel-spinning no matter how skilled the execution.

They all must wind up being the same.

The end is a foregone conclusion or we, the reader, are left unsatisfied with an unsolved mystery.

Whereas other genres, the Western in particular, to my eye, when skillfully executed may only be predictable in setting. Nothing more.

One opens the pages of a western not knowing if it is a de regueur shoot-em-up, a man vs. land tale, a fable told from the point of view of a dog, the exploits of a frontier newspaper publisher, a verité of a life among the Indians, or…examples and variations abound.

Whereas the murder “mystery” is no mystery at all.

One opens the cover, and one knows there will be a murder. There will be complications to keep the page count on point, and the book exists to solve the “mystery.”

All art that is found within must be shoved aside at some point to fulfill the genre’s dictates.

A shame here, as Guthrie’s skill is so high, I would have loved to see him use it on something less predictable as a “mystery” to be solved.

Again, if you are enamored of the crime-mystery genre, well, you might be in for a treat.

A well-written volume with a gorgeous setting.