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Audiobook Announcement: Medicine Woman, by Frank Kidd

Get Frank Kidd’s pulp western adventure novel Medicine Woman now in audiobook form, narrated and produced by me, on your platform of choice…

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25 days ago · 6 likes · 4 comments · Jason McGinty

Chapter 1

“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets through many a dark night.”

- Friedrich Nietzsche

If I left now, it would take me 34 minutes to get to the Dodge dealership. Maybe two hours for them to run a credit check and get me in a new Hellcat. After all, I wouldn’t really haggle, or maybe I would. Really ruin the salesman’s day before I left. Black, with a red interior, that’s what I would get. Maybe even trade in my F-150—I wouldn’t need it anymore.

From there I would run it hard, all the way up 101, the Pacific on one side of me, until I finally found a cliff.

I would throw it down a gear and stomp the pedal, and hit the guard rail at 130 mph. The car would buckle, but momentum would carry me over, and I would tumble through the air, a jumbled mass of fiberglass and steel. If I hit it fast enough, the guardrail wouldn’t matter, and I’d make it to the water. I would disappear in the black maw of the ocean, lost at last to the sea, my body given back to the chaos, and I could be free.

This is what I had thought about every day for the last year. The most dramatic, most obnoxious ways to kill myself.

It was a game we used to play in the unit, this was how we wiled away the hours on a long deployment, or during night shift. We came up with the most intricate, obscure, and offensive ways you could kill yourself, and then trotted them out in front each other as if we were in show and tell. We would howl with laughter for hours, snorting and choking, at the images of our best friend hanging themselves from an industrial warehouse ceiling fan. On a long rope, of course, so that when they found the body, he would be whipping around the giant room. Suicide was like going AWOL, except they could never catch you. It was the only real way to say “fuck you” to the world. I think that was the attraction.

I had made my first suicide joke a week after I started at CORPOSUCKCOCK, and my new co-workers’ reactions had been awkward requests to see if “I needed help,” or was “doing ok.” That was the first time I regretted leaving the Corps.

I stared at the fluorescent lights above my cubicle. They buzzed and flickered. Sometimes I swore they flashed messages, but whenever I noticed, they stopped, and the light held droningly steady. I resented being trapped there, held under artificial light while the California sun gleamed brightly outside.

The thing I realize now, is that in the Corps, they were really just jokes. Out here they were an attempt at self-actualization.

I worked for a start up, they had moved out here a year ago, fleeing San Francisco. The company was called Artificial Spaces and was supposedly working on using machine learning to generate virtual spaces. I worked in the finance department, and they were bleeding cash, but it didn’t matter. Most of America is an optical illusion that way, if you cross your eyes, and maintain the proper emotional distance to most of the buggery, you can sort of see what should amount to a culture and a country. Businesses don’t have to be solvent as long as you can sell the vision.

Artificial Spaces had bought out an old aerospace building, and converted it to offices, so the windows were heavily glazed to prevent the soviets or whoever else they thought had been spying at the time from spying, but the Cold War had been over for the better part of 30 years now. So, it just dampened most of the natural light, and turned the inside into a depressing cave of fluorescents and cubicles.

I had worked here a year, and every day seemed a lifetime. The work was tedious. I spent most of my day answering emails, and chasing down spreadsheets, comparing cost proposals and receipts. I often wondered how I ended up here when I had so many other options. But in reality, all options had led to here, or a version of here.

“Let’s meet in the Inspire room,” Luke said, startling me from my thoughts. He stepped into the center aisle. He was a small man, with a well-trimmed beard, and dark rimmed glasses. He was also my boss. His hairline was receding, but I could tell he had not quite given up on it yet.

Three days ago, at a bar, he had confided in me that he was in an open relationship. I don’t know why he did this, but he did, probably because he was sad and drunk, alone at a bar, and saw a familiar face. He also confided in me, that while his wife had slept with several new men, he had been unable to “score” at all. Even worse, he wasn’t completely sure he wanted to. “I still love her,” he had said. Although she apparently thought he was fine with the whole thing, he had only given in to her, because he was scared she would leave him. And who says men aren’t the real romantics.

At the end of the night, he had tried to explain how freeing it all was, and that the experience had really taught him a lot about himself, and how to overcome his insecurities. How he desperately loved his wife, and letting her be with other men, was the surest act of faith in that love. He had told me this teary-eyed, and drunk, without the slightest hint of irony. That’s when I realized the man had spent the whole night convincing himself of the idea. The experience turned my stomach. However, I had glimpsed a mirror image of myself in that instant. Always talking myself into the “right” course of action, the life that was expected, until I too, expected it.

“Actually, the Inspire room is already booked,” Lisa said. Her voice was a cast iron grate scraping over concrete. Her perfume gave me a headache, and I imagined in several different lives she had been the girl to raise her hand at school and remind the teacher about the homework.

Luke looked exasperated at this scheduling mix up. I swallowed my disgust. He overreacted to everything. He acted neurotic, like a beaten woman, flinching at the slightest creak in the house.

“Ok, lets meet in the Believe room,” Luke said at last, finally finished panicking. His voice weak and estrogenic, as if his diaphragm was perpetually compressed.

This was my manager. This was our fearless leader. A man in an open relationship. A man who feared the most basic decisions. He was made for middle management. Born to it, the way a Khan is to the steppe. If only he had ever read Jocko’s Extreme Ownership then he too could command the platoons of corporate America.

The Inspire Room, the Believe Room, I don’t even hear them anymore, it’s normal now. The lights flickered again. They sent messages out in morse code. When I looked up, they stopped.

Everything in a corporate office, in corporate culture, in corporate anything is designed to extract your soul. I had heard startups were better, and if that was true, then I would likely not make it a day under the normal bureaucracy of a fortune 500. They break you down more thoroughly than bootcamp ever had, but never go through the trouble of building you back up. There was no crucible at the end of this mountain. Only a rock, that rolled backwards. An Outlook inbox that never filled. Call me Sisyphus. Somewhere in the distance of my mind’s ear a hellcat savages pavement.

They pair brutalist architecture with stock images of sunrises and grassy hills, and then those are overlaid with inspirational words. Motivate. Learn. Achieve.

They give you pointless tasks. Approval loops that take a day to navigate before you end up back where you started. A tracker for updating the tracker. And then there is email. Thread after thread, of confusion, the shirking of responsibility. You learn other people’s jobs just to tell them how to do it. Zoom meetings that go nowhere.

You think if you gut it out long enough, smile just right and talk at the perfect pitch you will get promoted. And often you do. But it’s never for the reasons you think. It’s never because you had a great quarter, or because you fixed a system and saved x hours of time. No. It’s because you were there. It was your time. You were the one dumb enough to sign up for this, dumb enough to stick around.

And then you get promoted. A whole level. That’s a step up. Your 70k a year becomes 83k a year. But somehow you only see $100 extra a paycheck. That can’t be right, there is a mix up you think. But there wasn’t. The step up puts you in a new tax bracket, which means the government gets its share, and since your health benefits are calculated on a company-wide curve, you are now expected to pay more of the premium compared to the company.

Your yearly raise will be 2-3% if you are lucky, and the company did “well.” Whatever that means. But real inflation (use shadowstats.com and not that CPI calculated garbage) is running hot and has been year after year. If you calculate from three years prior, your dollars go 19% less far.

Quicksand. That’s your life, and every day you are sinking.

But the one rule, and one rule only, is never bring any of this up to anyone ever. To break the illusion, just for a second, to shine a light in the dark corner, or mention that the king has no clothes, is a hard no. They are automatons and programmed to kill.

Why I can’t disappear into collections of poorly made plastic figurines like everyone else, is a question I could never answer. They know it’s bad. Caring just makes it worse.

The Believe Room is white walls, a laminate wood table, circular, the carpet dirty blue. My coworkers shuffle in, pick their spots with strategic precision. Which chair will let them extricate themselves the quickest.

Luke sets up the overhead projector while Lisa tries to help by giving him directions. Small men and wine moms are the slave drivers of the 21st century. They keep the machine moving. They are the ghouls that work for Master. Instead of whips they use empty smiles and nurturing voices, but eyes are empty, and bosoms cold.

“Today, boys and girls, we are learning about diversity, can anyone tell me why it’s wrong to use N***** to describe Terrel?” my boss asked.

He didn’t say this, but it’s what I heard. My mind’s ear again.

I make eye contact with Terrel. He had heard it too. I feel vindicated. Maybe, my boss did say it.

I zoned out for the rest of the meeting, bronze age warriors sack villages in my mind’s eye. Red-bearded Scythian steppe nomads sitting atop squat, muscular ponies as their prey flees before them—the merchants, and the farmers, the self-domesticated. Scalps hang from their intricately decorated saddles, and their helms glittered with rubies. Swords flashed and men fell. One has a black-haired buxom beauty tossed across his saddle.

I wondered if my ancestors would disown me when I got to Valhalla, then I remembered that you had to die with a weapon in your hand. I’d have to rethink my suicide.

I should have died in Iraq. That had been my chance. But they had forced me out, I went to college on the G.I. Bill, after I was too jaded to enjoy it. I got a finance degree.

I had hated the Marine Corps, but in the way you hate a toxic girlfriend—you drive each other wild. She drives you nuts, keys your car, but when it’s good, you are going eighty down a two lane road, smoking a cigarette, and her head is bobbing up and down in your lap. It’s no long-term way to live, but it is a great way to die. She didn’t have to break up with me.

Lunch was at my desk, and I spent the rest of the day sorting emails. When your job is wasting time, your time is wasting.

A black hand waved in front of my face. It was Terrel.

“Smoke?” he asked. Terrel and I were the only two people at the company that smoked.

“Alright, you got a lighter?” I asked.

“You know I do,” he said.

“Cool.”

We had to smoke fifty feet in front of the building. We knew this because we had been chased away from the front door more than once, by more than one sad, strong matriarch.

“This shit is gay as fuck, man.”

I inhaled the cigarette. “I know, I hate it.”

“For real, I would quit if it didn’t pay so well,” Terrel said.

He was doing the thing too, talking himself into it. Talking himself into life in the 21st century.

* * *

I pulled up outside the Palm Vale Apartment complex and waved my key card in front of the access panel. The iron gate grumbled open, and I pulled inside. I drove my F-150 through a maze of drives, cell block after cell block towering over me. My own cell was nine hundred square feet of white walls on the second floor that I paid the jailer $1500 a month to live in.

I parked the car and rolled down my window. I lit another cigarette. The sun had reached that place in the sky, where the palm tree outside of my apartment shaded my specific parking spot, at exactly 4:05 p.m. when I got back from work. I figured it only happened once or twice a year like this. I took a long drag on the cigarette, basking in the serendipity of the moment. This was my summer solstice.

I found a package left by the front door. It was from MedTest Industries. For $150, you could take your own blood work. I set the package on the counter. Sarah had left a note asking me to get groceries. A little smiley face drawn at the end. Sarah was the only reason I was still here, in the country, in the universe, which were not great reasons to be with someone.

I tacked her list to the fridge with a magnet that said, “I love you”. We hadn’t had sex in a month and the problem was me. It had started a year ago, right when I switched jobs, my libido died, or at least that’s what I thought. At some point later in this story I’d realize it was just depression, but alas. My junk works fine now.

I scanned the chore list and wondered why she couldn’t do them. They were always simple things, things that could have been done in the time it took to write them down. Everywhere, my life was managed by women. Things that just a generation ago no woman in her right mind would dare suggest her husband do. But then again, a single man’s job would have kept her fed, and clothes on her children’s backs. I guess ultimately, this was the problem.

Instead, she worked a job. She was a certified girl boss, making twenty eight dollars an hour as a “manager.”

I sat on the couch and googled low testosterone. I had tried it all, raw eggs, working out, vitamin D. Nothing had worked. I googled boxing gyms in my area. I found one ten minutes away, I would try it. Fighting would give me my life back. I ordered a pair of gloves on Amazon.

I boxed in the Marines. We even had to settle a few disagreements that way on deployment. All I knew was I needed something. I was dying. Withering. I could feel my soul leaking out of my ears and I had no way to stop it.

Sarah came through the door. “Did you do anything on the list?” she asked.

“No, I just got home,” I said.

She huffed and disappeared to the bedroom.

I flicked the tv on and looked for a game. Every five minutes an ad for an antidepressant came on, and then one for a new diet, and then one with a mixed-race couple, the white guy cowering beneath the ire of his beautiful ugly afroed wife. Interracial marriage or sex, or whatever you want to call it, had never offended me until it was meant to be offensive, and by then it had become illegal to say it was offensive. What luck. Also what the fuck is with everyone in ads having vitiligo. I’ve never seen one in real life.

* * *

My gloves came three days later. I tore into the amazon box and tried them on. They were black, shiny, and new. Begging me to break them in. I gleamed.

The gym was in a brand-new shopping center. I pulled up and parked. I stared at it. My class started at 7 p.m.

Inside, there were rows of heavy bags. The place gleamed. Pop music blared overhead, and my heart dropped. It was full of women—yoga pants, and athletic wear—the entire gym reeked of anti-septic. I scanned the place quickly, there wasn’t even a place to spar. This wasn’t a boxing gym; it was Pilates with gloves.

“Welcome to Boxer’s,” the woman at the front desk said, “have you been here before?”

I glared.

But it was too late, I couldn’t turn around now. I feigned interest in her droning, and ten minutes later I was signed up for three free sessions. Five minutes after that, I bobbed and weaved, as “our” homosexual Puerto Rican instructor led me and “the girls,” through a series of routines. He wore an earpiece, his spiky hair gelled, and instead of actual work out clothes he bobbed around in an overly tight red polo shirt that had the gym’s logo embroidered on it—Boxer’s.

He looked like he should be selling ShamWow. I imagined the bag was his face. His energetic voice, frenetic over the gym’s speakers, urged all of us on, and by the end of it I was convinced that this class was equal to, if not actual—sodomy.

I walked outside. My bubble of motivation burst, the wave that had given me new hope, dashed upon the fake and gay reality of the 21st century.

When I returned home, I threw my gloves in the corner. I pulled a glass container full of leftovers out of the fridge and sat on the couch. I had thrown all our plastic containers out three months ago and bought glass. I lived in fear of micro-plastics and waged a losing war on parabens. I refused to touch the receipts at the store, convinced that they contained dangerous phytoestrogens. Despite all this, my testosterone still hadn’t improved, or so I thought.

I scrolled on my phone. Wondering why I did it. Every two posts was some sort of ad for a testosterone booster, or a course that would make you a millionaire. Every day, the answer box showed women how ugly they were, and showed men how poor they were.

Again, I googled boxing gyms in my area, but this time I pulled up a crime map of my city. I found a couple streets where the dots clustered, and then searched for a boxing gym in the triangle. I found it, Lion’s Gym. That was my spot. That’s where I would try next.

* * *

I trudged my way through Walmart, gathering the things on the list. I went to Walmart because it was close, and it was cheap, but also because I am a masochist.

Small family-owned grocers gave their life for this. For cheap foreign made bullshit, picked over by white trash and their black neighbors. Obese women, freed from their duties to husband and family over fifty years ago, and given the authority a name tag carries, deputized by Sam Walton himself, now roamed the aisles, some would call them the commissars of a new age.

“Excuse me,” a voice from behind me says.

I have zoned out in the middle of the aisle. I scooch my cart over awkwardly, the wheels groan and creak, I’m suddenly confused, as to how I was even in the way. But then I see the rest of her. She smiles at me as she passes, her smile another fold in her giant neck. She’s a blob, a mass of flesh. A monstrosity of sagging skin stretched to its breaking point underneath pound after pound of pork fed flesh.

She waddled past.

At the front of the store, I went to the self-checkout. There were only two registers manned by human cashiers. Part of me longed for the days when you were forced to talk to an awkward teenager, or the lonely grandma, forced to participate in the community you lived in. Instead, they had replaced all of them with these infernal machines, the ones that beeped at you when you didn’t put your items on the scale fast enough. I finished checking myself out, and bagging all my groceries.

I headed to the exit.

The commissar was there. I tried to avoid eye contact as I wheeled past her.

“Sir, I need to see your receipt,” the woman said.

I stopped the cart, white knuckling the handle.

“The receipt is in that bag,” I said, and pointed to the sack on top of the cart.

“Can you take it out for me?” she asked.

“No, you take it out,” I responded. I have a thing about phytoestrogens remember.

“But we aren’t allowed to touch your things,” she said.

“Not really my problem is it,” I said.

The woman huffed and picked the receipt out of the bag. She scanned it, pretending to check it, never comparing it to any of the items in the cart. She went to hand it back to me, but I pointed at the sack. She huffed again.

“How do you know that what is in the bags is on the receipt, if you aren’t allowed to touch any of my stuff?” I asked as earnestly as I could fake.

She stared at me, her eyes glassy, and then said, “Sir, we do this at every Walmart.”

“Why do I have to show you my receipt if there are CCTV cameras in literally every aisle?” I asked.

At this the woman grew visibly frustrated. “Sir, please leave,” she said.

“That’s what I was trying to do before you stopped me,” I said.

“Sir, if you don’t leave then I will call security,” she commanded.

I wheeled my cart outside.

Available Now

Currently only available on Amazon, but if you prefer KOBO, Apple Books, or Barnes and Noble, it will be available there in a few weeks. It just takes time to distribute.

Complimentary Ebook included with Paperback

I’ve also done something a bit different with this release. If you buy a copy of the Paperback, you will find a QR code at the beginning that links you to a download page for a complimentary ebook version. Mostly because I wish every paperback purchase came packaged this way. If this seems to be popular, I might do it for future releases as well.

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The Life and Adventures of Billy Dixon

I quite enjoyed this book. It is a memoir written by Billy Dixon’s late wife Olive K. Dixon. She essentially interviewed her husband during the last years of his life and on his deathbed, transcribed his life story, and then more or less self published it. That we may all have wives like this.

This book is short, but jam-packed with funny anecdotes about buffalo hunting and life on the plains. It really puts into perspective that men have always been the same. Cracking jokes with the boys, playing pranks. A work hard, play hard attitude runs deep.

Billy is best known for his role at the Second Battle of Adobe Walls, where he and ~30 other buffalo hunters held off a confederation of Comanche, Arapaho, Kiowa, and Cheyanne that was close to 1000 strong. Billy would go on to win the Medal of Honor for his actions at the Buffalo Wallow Fight a few years later, while working as a scout for the US Army. He is one of the few civilians to ever receive the medal.

I actually adapted this book into a screenplay last year. So Paramount, hit me up! At some point I may turn the screenplay into a novella or release it on here just for heck of it, but it was good practice and is a fascinating story.

Rising Wolf the White Blackfoot

This is a somewhat fictionalized account of Hugh Monroe, a trapper and trader and father in-law to the author, who lived among the Blackfoot while working for the Hudson’s Bay Company. He lived with the Blackfoot from 1814 to 1815 in order to learn their ways and their language.

This book is not exactly action packed but is just a riveting first/second hand account of living with the Blackfoot in the very early 1800s. It also helped inform much of the world of Medicine Woman.

Below is a cool anecdote about the indians keeping two bear cubs as pets and fairly par for the course when it comes to interesting bits of the book.

We got down from our horses, and I was about to unsaddle mine, when a woman took him from me, and signed that I was to follow the chief into the lodge. I did so, and, making a step in through the doorway, heard a growling and snorting that made my heart jump. And well it might, for there on each side of me, reared back and hair all bristled up, was a half-grown grizzly bear!

I dared not move, neither to retreat, nor go forward, and thus I stood for what seemed to me hours of time, and then Lone Walker scolded the bears and they dropped down at rest and I passed them and went to the place pointed out to me, the comfortable couch on the left of the chief’s.

I think that the chief allowed me to stand so long facing the bears, just to try me; to learn if I had any nerve. I was glad that I had not cried out or fled. I soon became friendly with those bears, and often played with them. It has been said that grizzlies cannot be tamed. Those two were tame. They had been captured when small cubs, so small that they made no resistance to being taken up, and for months had been held up to the teats of mares, there to get the milk without which they could not have lived. I may say here that they disappeared one night in the spring of their third year, and were never seen again. They had at last answered the call of their kind.

Schultz, James Willard. James Willard Schultz Collection (Annotated): Bird Woman (Sacajawea) the Guide of Lewis and Clark, Lone Bull’s Mistake, Rising Wolf the White Blackfoot and Apauk, Caller of Buffalo (p. 305). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Three Years With Quantrill: A True Story Told By His Scout

This is the memoir of John McCorkle, one of Quantrill’s scouts. This book like The Life and Adventures of Billy Dixon is also filled with humorous anecdotes. These old rogues loved to laugh. But seriously, fascinating read if one is interested in the Missouri bushwhackers or a fan of The Outlaw Josie Wales. Its also impossible to read and not come away with the idea that Quantrill was likely not the monster he was made out to be by the Union and was actually a fairly honorable leader.

The Outlaws

This book was pretty good. A bit hard to follow at times as it follows the Freikorps during the Weimar Republic, and I wasn’t particularly aware of a lot of the history it seemed to be referencing. It’s also somewhat fictionalized, but not clear how much. Lots of bloody commie killing action and a very interesting look at the ennui felt by veterans of WW1 as they dealt with losing their country and culture. A good enough read, but probably a one time thing for me.

Blurb below for those interested.

It is November 1918. Germany has just surrendered after four years of the most savage warfare in history. It is teetering on the brink of total social and economic collapse, and the German people now lie at the mercy of new, liberal politicians who despise everything Germany once stood for. The Communists are rioting in the streets, threatening to topple the new government in Weimar and bring about their own revolution. The frontline soldiers are returning from the hell of the war to find an unrecognizable land, the principles and traditions they had sacrificed so much to defend now the stuff of mockery. The narrator of The Outlaws, a 16-year-old military cadet, is too young to have served in the trenches, but feels the sting of this betrayal no less than they. Since Germany’s armies have been all but disbanded, he joins the paramilitary Freikorps – groups of veterans who refuse to lay down their arms, and who have pledged to stop the Communists – and begins fighting, first in the streets of Germany’s cities, and then in the Baltic states, defending Germany’s eastern frontiers from Communist subversion while ignoring the calls to disengage by the meek politicians at home. After months of intense fighting abroad, the Freikorps soldiers return to settle scores with their enemies in Germany, dreaming of a nationalist counter-revolution, and, their trigger fingers still itchy, fix their sights on bringing down the hated new government once and for all…

The Outlaws is a chronicle of the experiences of the men who fought in the Freikorps, but it is also an adventure and a war story about an entire generation of soldiers who loved their homeland more than peace and comfort, and who refused to accept defeat at any price.

“What we wanted we did not know; but what we knew we did not want. To force a way through the prisoning wall of the world, to march over burning fields, to stamp over ruins and scattered ashes, to dash recklessly through wild forests, over blasted heaths, to push, conquer, eat our way through towards the East, to the white, hot, dark, cold land that stretched between ourselves and Asia – was that what we wanted? I do not know whether that was our desire, but that was what we did. And the search for reasons why was lost in the tumult of continuous fighting.” — p. 65

Ernst von Salomon (1902–1972) was one of the writers of the German Conservative Revolution of the 1920s. Like the narrator of The Outlaws, he was a military cadet at the end of the First World War, and joined the Freikorps, participating in many of the events described in the book, including the assassination of Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau, for which he was imprisoned. He went on to write many books and film scripts.

The Last Ivory Hunter: The Saga of Wally Johnson

No list like this would be complete without a little Peter Hathaway Capstick. And in this case, I saved the best for last.

Capstick, an excellent writer and big game hunter, chronicles the life of African legend and ivory hunter Wally Johnson. Much of the book is in Johnson’s own words, as Capstick sat down and interviewed Wally for the book.

Wally truly lived a life of adventure, hunting elephants for ivory, gold mining, and even trying his hand at an almost cursed attempt at growing bananas. This is a look at a much wilder turn of the century Africa. The book is jam-packed with hunting stories, deadly encounters with snakes, lions, tuskers, and then finally communists.

The last quarter of the book takes a very shocking turn as Mozambique is taken over by a Communist uprising. Wally’s farm and gold is stolen by revolutionaries and he is kicked out of the country he called home for his entire life.

It’s a hell of a story and has a hell of a lot of good fiction fodder. There’s definitely a John Wick/Sisu story to be written about a big game hunter picking off communists in the bush. Maybe, I write someday.

Blurb below for those who need more selling.

A chance meeting around a safari campfire on the banks of the Mupamadazi River leads to The Last Ivory Hunter: The Saga of Wally Johnson, a grand tale of African adventure by renowned hunting author Peter Hathaway Capstick.

Wally Johnson spent half a century in Mozambique hunting white gold—ivory. Most men died at this hazardous trade. He’s the last one able to tell his story.

In hours of conversations by mopane fired in the African bush, Wally described his career—how he survived the massive bite of a Gaboon viper, buffalo gorings, floods, disease, and most dangerous of all, gold fever. He bluffed down 200 armed poachers almost single-handedly, and survived rocket attacks from communist revolutionaries during Mozambique’s plunge into chaos in 1975.

In Botswana, at age 63, Wally continued his career. Though the great tuskers have largely gone and most of Wally’s colleagues are dead, Wally has survived. His words are rugged testimony to an Africa that is now a distant dream.

— Backcover blurb

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If you listened to the latest episode of TFABS, you heard the news… is narrating Medicine Woman, soon to be available as an audiobook on Audible, Amazon.com, and iTunes.

We’ve mostly wrapped production and are currently doing final checks for quality.

Hoping to release sometime in the next few weeks, but no official release date just yet.

I will also be dropping the first chapter as a sample in a couple days so make sure to subscribe if you don’t want to miss.

It sounds awesome, McGinty is a pro, and I’m super excited about how the final product is shaping up.

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It is almost here. A second Frank Kidd novel.

It’s blood soaked, brooding, and dark humored. Tonally, there is perhaps a chance that only vets and people with bad childhoods will find it funny, but that’s a risk we take.

I also channeled my inner Taylor Sheridan and tried to make something of my own “Tacticool Western” see Sicario and Lioness.

As for content, OUATIA is a neo-western/military thriller that follows seven mercenaries tasked with killing Chinese fisherman illegally fishing off the coast of Argentina. It’s a little bit merc hangout novel and a little bit old school shoot em up pulp. And if it’s something of a deconstruction of the military thriller, than I hope it’s simultaneously a reconstruction of the Western.

Official Blurb

Every year, thousands of Chinese fishing vessels descend on Argentina’s territorial waters to fish them dry causing billions of dollars of untold ecological and economic damage.

Ryan McGowan, a disgraced Marine Raider, yearns for a second chance at adventure before fluorescent depression kills him.

Enter Mike Hudson, a private military contractor with a murky past.

Mike recruits Ryan and a team of similarly disgruntled operators for a maritime security detail in Argentina—policing illegal fishing with deadly force.

Part military thriller, part hangout novel, part neo-western… OUATIA is an old school shoot ‘em up.

On the off chance that I have any young subscribers, young men in high school or college age zoomers, than this post is primarily written for you. Its a cogent vision of being that I wish I would’ve arrived at sooner, but then again, maybe that was the whole point of the journey towards it to begin with.

This is also directed at the whiny cohort of older generations that constantly black-pill and doom and talk about adventure being dead and there being no new frontiers—as if the Marine Corps or Merchant Marines or offshore oil drilling or even Key West don’t exist.

I find this dooming and “adventure is dead” talk to be really despicable, ideologically insidious, and potential killing. And I didn’t always find it that way. In fact, I have quite often participated in that sort of discourse myself. And that is especially ironic as a country boy who joined the Air Force right out of high school, had quite a strange and exciting job while I was in, and was stationed in Las Vegas.

I literally did find adventure. I’ve also snowboarded all over the West. I’ve hunted and fished and hiked all over the place. I’ve gotten blackout in bars. And some of my adventures are tinged with a bit of youthful embarrassment. In hindsight, some were preposterously stupid or irresponsible—one of the blessings and curses of the male brain maturing at 25 and finally being able to calculate risk.

There’s not a lot about me that I would say is natural talent. I’ve never found myself to be particularly gifted athletically, at least as far as coordination goes, although I’ve always been very fit. I’m not musically talented and have a singing voice that will clear a pew, and most of my success at any given thing can probably be boiled down to a plough horse like grit, a willingness to learn, and a willingness to try. And I say all that to let you know that I’m not an outlier.

But I did live most of my early twenties with the idea of having an adventure at the very front of my brain. Of doing things for the adventure of it. Sure GI Bill was nice. A steady paycheck was nice. Everything else was nice. I’m not stupid.

But I wanted the stories and experience that come with taking paths less traveled.

This thirst for both stories and adventure is no doubt attributable to just being a man. But I would also credit a steady diet of westerns and military memoirs and Louis L’Amour books in my teenage years for helping to fertilize this wanderlust.

But suffice it to say that I should (should’ve) known better than to ever participate in this whole “adventure is dead talk.”

Modern day ennui gets to us all I guess. I understand it.

And to bring this all back around to why that talk is so harmful, it’s because it’s rooted in learned helplessness. Truly, the disease of our time. AI will only ensure that more people get filtered by it. C'est la vie.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Learned helplessness is defined as “a condition in which a person has a sense of powerlessness, arising from a traumatic event or persistent failure to succeed. It is thought to be one of the underlying causes of depression.”

So what does this have to do with adventure?

Well everything. To strike out on your own, or to have an adventure and survive, means that you must have some level of competence AND some level of confidence in your own competence.

The paradox is, you don’t typically have that competence or confidence when you first strike out. Especially when you are young. The adventure gives it to you. Life kicking you in the shins gives it to you… but the cost of entry is life kicking you in the shins.

Competence is perhaps the primary fantasy of action/adventure fiction. The adventure is the vehicle for arriving at this competence. Part of the reason a training montage trope is so integral to the action/adventure genre.

This is what people intuitively mean but don’t know how to articulate when they say, “adventure fiction is necessary for young men” or “young men need books written for them.”

“Well why?”

“Err… um… to teach them how to be good man… uh positive masculinity…”

“But what does being a good man mean?”

“You know it when you see it!”

Often they won’t even get as far as the homeric virtues, things like courage or loyalty, which would at least be an acceptable answer to the question.

Instead, they stumble past the what and the why.

But what is masculinity if not competence, both as a provider and as a defender—as the ability to solve problems and actualize goals.

It’s not chest hair or Indiana Jones fedoras or beard cream or even being kind, although magnanimity is a virtue.

Women know all of this by the way. Because competence and generosity are the primary things they find attractive when selecting a mate.

Money and “bad boys” are all just surface level markers of competence in a man, either as a provider or protector.

This is why PUAs, if they follow the game’s internal logic far enough, often end up happily married and on a farm somewhere. Picking up women is what they thought they were after, but really it was fixing their own incompetence and insecurities. Women just provided a strong enough motivation to start the adventure and the whole thing ended in self improvement. Many such cases, am I right?

Learned helplessness decapitates all of this potential by keeping you from going on the adventure or trying new things or even trying to do anything at all. Low confidence creates a failure feedback loop that eventually ends in a failure to try. Learned helplessness is the siren song of the incel, the doomer, the black-piller.

Attempt > Failure > low confidence > no new attempts > depression, anxiety, stuck in a rut = learned helplessness

or

Attempt > Success > higher confidence > new attempts > more success = competence

If one stacks enough failures, they run the risk of destroying their own confidence and getting stuck in stasis. Stasis kills you. It keeps you doing the same old same old. It makes you depressed and anxious and neurotic.

Fear is the mind killer.

Stack successes, even just small ones, and it builds your confidence and makes forward action feel good. Testosterone helps modulate this by the way, which is why T levels will surge when playing competitive sports or starting a fight club.

The higher confidence also gives you a higher probability of succeeding because you actually believe in your ability to succeed. Faith being the powerful thing that it is.

The real trick to all of this, like just about anything in life, is both in the knowing and the doing.

You can’t avoid failure, only get used to the idea of it as part of the process. The knowing allows you to rationally override the low confidence brought on by failures and make new attempts even though it feels awful. This is what people are getting at when they say, “fake it until you make it.”

And if you want to be smart about it, you’ll back off trying the thing that keeps making you fail and lower the bar a bit.

That doesn’t mean you give up on the big goal forever, but that you start breaking it down into more achievable parts. This enables you to start stacking successes and build your confidence and continue to build your competence until you are ready to take another swipe at the big goal.

It makes the psychological toll of failure more tolerable because you at least have some successes to show for it. And because you are failing more, you build up a failure callous that makes you able to stomach more of it. Go far enough and failure won’t even touch your confidence, because you will have internalized that it’s part of the process.

Imagine yourself as a platoon leader, but the private you are responsible for is YOU.

It’s your job to give him missions he can complete. It’s your job to monitor his morale and try to keep it high. It’s your job to make sure he has the tools and skills he needs. It's your job to build his confidence and make him a killing machine.

A shitty platoon leader sends his guys on suicide missions. A shitty platoon leader motivates through fear and abuse and shame and guilt.

And in a Vietnam, that guy would get fragged!

A lot of people are working for some of the most abusive and tyrannical platoon leaders imaginable—themselves.

Take this abuse far enough and the private gives up. You give up. You say things like “adventure is dead.”

I like to ragebait my wife… who is a planner like most women are… by telling her that “plans are for the unprepared.”

Of course, she’s right—weekend plans and vacations can typically use more forethought than I like to give them.

But my slogan is still sound. You must be confident in your abilities to adapt.

Plans suck. You often don’t know what the fuck you need until you get where you're going. As Brady taught me on the pod last week solvitur ambulando or “it is solved by walking.” This doesn’t mean go for a literal walk to do more overthinking like a lot of dopes seem to think.

No, it means that you solve the path by walking it. You can’t overthink your way over obstacles. You have to climb them. You figure it out by doing it. The way becomes clear once you are there.

Action trumps thinking, hence retardmaxxing.

But if you are trapped in this cycle of learned helplessness you can’t take the forward action necessary to improve your odds of success.

Special Forces aren’t special because they are extremely fit, or excellent marksman, or even especially large dudes. They are special because they are excellent problem solvers. Of course those other things matter too, but only as tools that help them solve problems more quickly and more decisively than anyone else on the battlefield.

And that is the heart of competence. Its skills and ability to solve any type of problem that comes your way. And you can only attain those by putting yourself in a position to have previously solved them or problems adjacent.

The SAS motto is “Who dares wins.”

And that is this whole essay in three words. Talk about articulate. They get it. When in doubt, dare!

Failure, as we’ve seen, comes with a high amount of psychological risk. So managing your failures needs to be high on your list of priorities. BUT, if in doubt, move forward, take action, and have faith. Failure isn’t the enemy. The faster you fail, the faster you can succeed.

This is all ironically what Jordan Peterson was getting at with “clean your room,” but he likes to talk in riddles instead of plain language. Cleaning your room is the smallest win you can stack. The goal is to keep stacking larger and larger wins.

And this is why doomscrolling and the constant glut of black pills online are so harmful. This learned helplessness is baked in. You can now skip step one and two of the failure arc (the attempt and failure) and cruise right on over to low confidence and stasis and depression and excuses.

These learned helplessness traps are all over the place and they get tossed to you all day long. It might be an offhand comment, someone saying adventure is dead, headlines, X threads, Substackistani whiners, general demoralization.

Running for local government won’t solve anything, Anon.

If you don’t reject even the most benign instances of this way of thinking you run the risk of internalizing it, even subconsciously, and you slowly lose the ability to move forward with max confidence and high aggression. The things most likely to allow you to succeed.

So of course adventure isn’t dead. It is literally scattered across the entire globe. But it’s a trite thing that people say which allows them to stay on the couch.

I recently finished reading The Outlaw Ocean by Ian Urbina as part of my research for my upcoming novel Once Upon A Time in Argentina. And one of the things that really struck me, was how crazy and criminal the oceans still are. They are a true frontier in the sense that International Waters are essentially lawless.

You have slaves on fishing boats. You have poaching. You even have eco-terrorists harassing said fisherman. You have piracy and counter-piracy. Floating arms depots for mercenaries.

When people say adventure is dead, that is all cope.

It’s why the “I don’t want to die for Israel” crowd is coping too. But I get it. I understand this is an ironic time to publish this.

But most young men don’t join the military because they want to die for anything, even your freedoms. It’s for adventure and the promise of personal competence. And so if you want to join the military, do it, but do it for yourself!

There is a reason the recruitment statements are things like “Be all that you can be” or “Army of ONE” or even “Army strong.”

The Marines have had “First to fight” or “We don’t promise you a rose garden” or “The Few, The Proud, The Marines” and now, “Battles won.”

The promise of competence is baked into every single one!

But the military isn’t the only place where adventure and competence live. Its all over the place.

When I was vacationing in Key West, me and my bros chartered a boat to go lobstering. The dude on it was super cool and his job was super cool. He got paid to fish, to guide, to be on the water all day and be in the bars all night.

He said he moved there to fish from who knows where. He was a young guy that just picked up and went. He got a job with another fisherman and saved up enough money to buy his own boat. Then he started chartering. Dude was living his dream. It’s hardly an impossible dream. It just required him to dare.

You can just do things.

An engineering degree and a job at SpaceX is an adventure.

Joining the merchant marines or signing up to be a miner in Australia is an adventure. It’s one you can do today.

Hard and exciting jobs are just lying around waiting to be done.

Shit, even if you aren’t militaristic. There are a thousand peace orgs, some shadier than others, that will ship you off to somewhere godforsaken.

The reason I hate this whole “adventure is dead” refrain is because it’s demonstrably false. And its whole existence is as a means of cope.

Adventures are often miserable. They are hard and challenging and heart wrecking. They can destroy your body. They put you close to death.

That’s why it’s an adventure.

It’s easier to just doom scroll and decry the lack of it, to bury oneself in turn of the century adventure fiction as a means of wish fulfillment and coping. And don’t get me wrong. I like my historical adventures. I write them! But they should never become cope. And sometimes I feel like that’s how they are getting used.

“Ah, if only I was born 100 years earlier.”

Really? Losers outnumbered the adventurous back then too.

This is the magic of Taylor Sheridan’s shows and movies. Whether that be Yellowstone, or Landman, or Sicario, or Lioness, or Tulsa King.

He is a master at finding the adventurous in the modern. Most of it involves crime, and all of it is farfetched. But he finds the plausible opportunities for adventure and drama and competence in the modern day, whether its a washed up mob boss in Oklahoma, a landman in Texas, or a mega-ranch in Yellowstone.

I have no doubt he could do a hell of a take on the international fishing industry.

The dude has made oil drilling in Texas seem glamorous and dangerous and adventurous. That’s writing! Whatever you want to say about it. And those types of stories are everywhere if you look for them.

So as the SAS would say—Who Dares Wins! So dare. Dare to do anything, anon. Retardmaxx and full send. Live life and log off. Pick up a hobby. Fifty of them and get gud. Get gud at things in the real world. Get competent at boxing, or jiu jitsu, or working on cars. Get a motorcycle and take a cross country trip solo. Join the Merchant Marines. Join the real Marines. But don’t walk around with a playstation controller in one hand and a phone in the other and say “adventure is dead.”

For Brad Schaffer, the day was not just a Wednesday, it was THE Wednesday. The one that he had fantasized about for ten long years. He’d downloaded a little countdown timer on his laptop, oh how he hated that laptop, slick black, and underpowered. Only the best for Vantage Aerospace Solutions or VAS (pronounced V-A-S). He had downloaded that countdown timer and mapped out the date of his retirement. And for ten long years, he’d watched earnestly as the days ticked by—even as he had plotted his revenge.

He’d planned his retirement from this godforsaken place that some people still pretended was a business. It was of course, not a business, because corporations are not businesses, they are fiefdoms. Saying a corporation was a business, was like saying middle managers were leaders. It was like saying there was a free market when there was no hard money, he thought.

Regardless, this was his Wednesday, this was the day he retired for good.

He stared at the steaming cup of coffee on his desk. His last morning coffee. The mug said World’s Greatest Dad. It had been a gift from his son on a Father’s day he could no longer clearly remember.

Brad sat there and considered his life. Considered his moment of victory, and somehow, it still felt hollow. He was 55 and no longer recognized the person in the mirror every morning. It was still his face of course, but time had taken its toll. His eyes bulged slightly, and he had gained weight. His skin was sallow, and his hair thinning. Getting old was a bitch, he thought.

He took a sip of coffee. Savored it. The first sip of his last cup, on his last day.

Lisa typed away in the cubicle next to him. She hummed a tune to herself, lost in her work, the blue screen of her laptop reflecting off her store-bought readers.

“Brad,” Lisa, said. “Brad, are you ok?”

She sounded distant, muffled almost. He stood up quickly, so quickly that he felt dizzy. He did, however, feel lighter on his feet.

Had he dozed off?

“I’m fine,” Brad said quickly as he regained his bearings. Lisa stood next to him. She stared at his desk.

“Lisa, what’s wrong?” he asked, but she didn’t respond. Didn’t even acknowledge him.

He followed her eyes to his desk and then gasped in shock. His body—his own slumped form—passed out on the desk before him. He took a step back waiting for the dream to collapse like it did every time he realized that he’d been dreaming.

But it didn’t.

“Brad, wake up,” Lisa cried. She shook the slumped form harder and harder.

“Lisa, I’m right here,” he said. He reached for her shoulder, but his hand passed straight though.

He examined his hand as Lisa continued her bluster. It was a hand. It looked normal enough. He reached for the mug on his desk, absently craving more caffeine, but to his amazement his hand passed through again. Glitched through, like... interrupting a hologram. Except, he was the hologram.

He was nothing.

Brad stared in equal parts shock and horror as the EMTs worked over his empty shell. One-two-three, his ribs cracked beneath the force of the chest compressions. The EMT pinched what used to be Brad’s nose, and then clamped his own lips over the now graying body’s mouth.

How strange? It didn’t seem real.

Brad watched in horror as the show continued, and his anxiety grew as he waited for the dream to fall apart.

Weren’t you supposed to wake up when you die in a dream?

“He’s gone,” the man said at last. “Cardiac arrest.”

The EMT guided Lisa to a seat. Everyone had gathered. Brad watched Jack, his boss, as he forced what seemed like the whole office to take step back.

“Back to your seats, give the men some room,” his boss yelled.

Brad grabbed for the EMT, “But I’m right here, I’m right here I tell you.” But the man didn’t react. Brad watched as they wheeled his body away, and the full weight of the situation finally settled in—he was dead.

He watched as Jack consoled Lisa and then sent her home. He watched as Jack sat back down at his own desk, three spaces up, and just sat, and sat, and stared, and stared.

Brad made another pass at the coffee. The craving for caffeine having grown more intense. God, how he had wanted to finish that coffee. But it was no use. He could not pick it up. He could not lean against his desk. He was nothing. The material world as far away from him as he was to it.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the horror of the situation dawned. He was a ghost. He had died at work, and he was stuck here. Stuck in the very place he had always wanted to escape. And on his last day too. Oh, the irony, oh what a fucking cruel joke of a universe, he thought.

Brad tried to leave through the exit, but some barrier, invisible even to him, kept him from leaving. He pushed on it, and his limbs merely glitched through. He was trapped. This was it. This was home now.

When everyone had left for the night, he walked the halls in the dark. It was only then that he realized the depth of his mistake. The thing that he had left undone. For that was what chained the spirits of the dead to the earthly realm—things undone. He had never left. The thought had barely passed through him, when he wondered how it possible, how he could think without a brain. Unless, thoughts never came from the brain. What were thoughts anyways? Were they real? Or was the brain an antenna that drew in signals from the ether. Messages from some place beyond. Thoughts certainly existed on this side of the veil. Or was the spirit the receptor? And if so, who or what sent the messages?

If only he’d had more time.

But he’d had all the time in the world, had every day since the very first time he realized that his job was killing him. He’d waffled of course. The benefits were so good. The economy was doing badly. But when was it not? No, all those were excuses, he finally admitted to himself.

It was cowardice. Cowardice and laziness and bitterness that had held him back. He’d wasted his time, and this was his reward. He could’ve taken the leap whenever he had wanted to, but he didn’t. And so, he was here, chained to this building, this place he so loathed, bound by his very essence—a collection of vices and cravings and moral failings—all caught in the filter of his own soul.

The days passed slowly and life in the office went on more or less normally. Brad was somewhat surprised by this. He hadn’t really expected there to be a fountain of tears every day, but he had expected something... something more. The fluorescents were harsh on his astral form, their buzzing even louder this side of the veil, and since he had no use or need for sleep, his days had been extended by eight hours. The peace and quiet of after-hours was really the only time he found solace. His spirit ached with a million different cravings—for caffeine, for sugar, for sex even—like one giant itch that was impossible to scratch.

It was a week after his funeral that he saw them. His wife and son came to pick up his things. He sobbed silently as they packed up his little knick knacks and packed them away in a little brown cardboard box. He had decorated his little gray cell with them. Pictures of his family, a small bobblehead of Elvis Presley. A Pez dispenser of David Bowie. The whole of his person, his persona, packed loosely in a cardboard box.

He tried to hug them, but it was no use. But still he tried, channeling all the love in his soul in an attempt to deposit his presence.

His wife picked up the coffee mug, and she smiled gently, eyes brimming with tears, and his soul sang. She had felt his presence, he was sure of it.

His son was 19 now and had turned into a strapping young man. He had played both football and basketball throughout high school, and Brad thought of his late nights in the office that had occasionally made him miss one of the games. It hadn’t happened often. But it happened enough. Regret was the smoky discharge of tragedy, and tragedy the flame of lost potential. He was both.

And then they left, as quickly as they had come, and Brad’s ghostly form retreated to the back halls, where nobody worked anymore, and the lights were dimmed.

The following week, Brad caught a conversation between Lisa and Jack while they lounged in the breakroom.

“Are you going to replace Brad’s position?” Lisa asked.

“Not really planning on it,” Jack said, “we hadn’t needed it for a while.”

Lisa nodded dutifully and Brad drifted closer, venturing from the shadows into the violent lights.

“That job just meant so much to him, you know, I never really had the heart,” Brad continued. “But no, the answer is no. We aren’t planning on replacing him.”

Hadn’t had the heart, Brad thought. He hated this job. Hadn’t they seen that. Had they never seen him seething at his desk? Had his professional maske been that good, or had they never cared? What about his plan? They were supposed to need him. They were supposed to be crippled without him.

Brad retreated again to the back halls of the office building, and there he stayed.

A little over a month had passed since that fateful Wednesday, and the office had all but forgotten that Brad had ever worked there. There was no plaque. No stories or yarns told idly in his remembrance. It was as if he’d never existed. This had bothered Brad at first, but he made peace with the fool he’d been, the time he’d wasted, and the decisions he’d made. He had barely done so when another problem started. One with his astral form.

He was breaking down.

As he glided through the halls at night, he started to lose bits of himself on whatever he came into contact with. A wall, a desk, a cubicle, even the floor became like fly paper for his ghostly bits. Instead of glitching through them, now he left just a bit of his energy behind.

It also became harder and harder to remember things. He just had bad feelings now, and no idea why. The cravings had subsided to some extent, which he was grateful for. And he knew that he had had a family, but he didn’t remember what they looked like. Or even what their names were.

In fact, the only thing he knew for sure was that he was supposed to leave this place—that was all he had owed his own soul. The degeneration continued, and at times, he helped it along, frustrated and aching for it to end.

And after about a year of this, he was gone. Gone at last. No longer a soul, but an energy, a collection of bad vibes soaked into the masonry. And occasionally, someone in the office got a strange chill, or if they stayed late at night, reported that they heard sobbing near the back hall. Some said the office was haunted. Others said it had a weird energy. Still, others said the vibes were off. And occasionally, in a small cautious whisper, they talked about what had happened to Brad.

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Federal Agent Mason Taylor sat somewhat uncomfortably in the small office chair, draped as he was in Kevlar body armor and assorted gear. His brown hair was carefully combed backwards. Two piercing blue eyes perched high up on his hawk-like face.

He stared at cellphone in front of him. He was waiting for a call. At this very moment, the Omaha Field Office was on the phone with the black suits in Washington DC attempting to obtain last minute approvals for their raid. Across from him, sat almost half of the FBI Agents working at the Des Moines Resident Agency.

There were four of them in all, and kitted for bear, or in Mason’s case, whale. For this case was his white whale. It was the sort of case that he’d joined the FBI to solve. He hadn’t known it when he signed up and thrown away a promising career in biotech to go to Quantico. But somewhere deep down, he knew he’d been looking for this… this particular case, this particular suspect, this particular cause…

The conference room itself was fairly drab. Cinderblock walls painted white. Dirty blue carpet that was ripped in several places. A computer in one corner that hooked up to an overhead projector. A whiteboard hung crooked on the wall.

Normally, they would be busting balls, but Omaha had kept them waiting so long that nerves had set in. Agent Kim, a big Mexican looking hulk who was actually half white and half Korean, drummed his fingers lightly on the table. His pencil thin mustache made him look like a cartoon character. Rivera stared at the phone as if her focus would make it ring. Her crow black hair was restrained by a donut shaped bun, just the way the Marine Corps had taught her. Agent Nelson, for his part, was pencil thin. He had a JD and a degree in forensic accounting. He wore wire rimmed glasses that matched his body type and ran a marathon every six months, almost religiously. But looks could be deceiving, for he was also the best shot on the team.

He sat with his eyes closed. His lips moving slightly.

“The fuck are you doing?” Rivera asked.

Nelson opened one of his eyes, looked at her, and then said, “reciting Psalms.”

“How many you have memorized now?” Rivera asked.

“I’m up to 90.”

She gave a slight whistle.

“I can barely remember to pack my lunch,” Kim said.

The cellphone rang, vibrating sideways across the table. Once more the air was sucked out of the room.

Mason picked it up.

“Yes,” he said. Then, “Oh.” Then another, “yes.” Followed by a “thank you, sir.” Followed by a, “Did they say why?” and another “oh.” This continued for upwards of a minute.

He could feel his flush as Omaha talked back at him. And he could feel the words slip out through the opposite ear as his brain scrambled to make sense of them. And then he’d mumbled, “yes, sir,” for the last time and he’d heard the line had gone dead.

“It’s off,” Mason said.

“Did he say why?” Kim asked.

Mason pursed his lips and stood up, ripping the Velcro flaps of his vest. “Washington cockblocked us.”

“Well obviously,” Kim said. “But did he say why.”

“We don’t have enough.”

“That’s bullshit though. We have everything,” Kim said.

“Rangel thinks the Pentagon or the Agency got involved, but he wouldn’t say more.”

“The CIA?” Nelson asked, arching one eyebrow.

Mason shrugged at him. “Maybe.”

“Well what more do they want?” Rivera asked.

“Nothing,” Mason said, feeling the color in his cheeks drain. The pallid hand of helplessness brushed his shoulder, then rested there. The same one he’d felt so many years before.

“You mean they killed the whole thing?” Rivera said, putting a hand up to her mouth. “But…”

“I know,” Mason said, lifting a hand to pause her. “I’m taking the rest of the day. Don’t come looking for me... but if it’s really important, I’ll be at Moe’s—with my cellphone off.”

Moe’s was the type of hole in the wall that one assumed had to be a front for something. There was more homeless out front than customers inside.

He sat in the darkest and dankest corner of the bar, underneath a raggedy old deer head that “bumper tagged” circa 1960. Red neon light from the Budweiser sign illuminated his face. And in front of him, a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue and a small crystal glass.

He only came to Moe’s when things went wrong. The last time was six months ago, when Lena had left him. It He rotated the whiskey glass in his hand and watched the Budweiser sign’s neon light bounce every which way off the crystal bottom.

Before Mason was Agent Taylor, he was just a boy. An eleven year old farm kid from Polk County Florida who had sat across from his father in a bar that looked very similar. Back then, he’d watched his father stare at his whiskey glass in much the same way.

“Well,” his father would finally grunt. “I guess it’s time to head back.” Then he would rise, stagger, catch his balance, and toss his keys to a still bright eyed Mason.

“Sorry Dad,” Mason whispered as he remembered it. He felt like the boy again.

Then they would walk back out to the truck, the sun crawling for the horizon, his father staggering. Mason would help him up into the passenger side, and then he’d shut the door of the old red square bodied Ford behind him.

Mason would sit on the very edge of the bench seat so he could reach the truck’s pedals, and then he’d shift old faithful into gear and start her down the dirt road towards their farm. He’d roll his window down, hang his arm out the window, and the night would smell fresh from one of the showers that made for a Florida afternoon.

They’d enter the back way, and drive past rows and rows of orange trees, the smell of citrus on the breeze, followed by sickly sweet notes of rot and spoil. Some still had their leaves, some were even heavy with fruit, but the oranges that hung from them were diseased, half green things that would never ripen.

Just like us, Mason would think.

He’d only known it as the blight at first. That’s all anyone called it. In University, when he was studying for an undergraduate in Biochemistry, he would learn its official name was Huanglongbing, also known as the Citrus Greening disease. He would do his thesis on it in his Master’s program.

The blight was brought to Florida sometime in the late 90s or early 2000s. It was nearly impossible to pin point an exact date. By 2005 it would go on to affect nearly 90% of the state’s orange groves. For whatever reason, better or worse, Taylor Farms had been hit the hardest.

His dad would never make it to 2005. Because at the end of that summer, the summer of 2004, Old Man Taylor would hang himself from one of his rotting orange trees and Mason would be the one to cut the body down.

Mason took up the glass up and washed down the memory, then he poured another. He looked up to see Michelle on her way over. She was a trim bottle blonde about five years his senior. Laugh lines and the type of freckles that come from too many tanning beds made her look ten years older than that. One of these mornings he would wake up next to her, and whether that would represent rock bottom or not, depended entirely on how good the sex was.

She slid into the booth across from him, dirty dishrag in her hand. Her bust taking up a rather large amount of his field of view.

“That bad?” she asked.

He smiled. “Not good.”

“Can I get you anything,” she asked, her hand brushing his.

“Not tonight,” he smirked at her.

“Well, you just let me know which night,” she teased. “I’ll be over there if you need anything.”

“Thanks,” Mason said.

She glided off and he threw back another slug of whiskey.

Mason woke to drab yellow curtains, wood paneling, and a fly buzzing itself to death on a fly strip. He was in a living room of sorts, right next to a kitchen. The sofa was an ugly green. Yellow light crept in through even more yellowed polycarbonate windows. He was in a mobile home, but who’s he couldn’t even begin to answer.

He sat up, and his head punished him for it. The throbbing went from gentle to jackhammer. He heard movement at the front door, and then a key in the lock, and fully expected Michelle to appear next. But it wasn’t Michelle, it was Rob Lamont.

The throbbing in his head took the form of alarm bells as he tried to stand.

“You were blacked out,” Rob said. “I almost shot you actually, thought you’d come to settle old scores.” He dropped two bags of groceries on the counter.

“How did… I get here?” Mason asked, easing back down onto the sofa.

“You drove,” Rob said, opening the door on the fridge. “You owe me a mailbox by the way.” He walked over with a Busch Light and handed it to Mason. “Hair of the dog, you’ll need it after a night like last night.”

Mason took it. But instead of opening it, he held it against the side of his head. “Did I say anything?”

“You need someone killed,” Rob said.

“Dammit,” Mason said, more to himself than Rob. He cracked the beer open and took a sip. He knew how he’d ended up here now, the idea that had just barely scratched the front of his rational mind last night had parlayed itself into action after so many whiskeys.

Rob returned to the kitchen and started the gas stove with a crackling pop. “You want eggs?”

“I need to be going,” Mason said.

“No you don’t,” Rob called back. “I want to hear how you think The Sons of Chiron can help.”

Mason rubbed his head, and wondered what he’d been thinking. What kind of drunk had brought him all the way out here, looking to farm out a hit to a man that had been one of the prime suspects in a capital murder investigation over a year ago.

Mason ticked off the highlights in the man’s profile. He was a former Navy SEAL. Now he lived in a trailer park on the edge of town. He had been diagnosed with PTSD. Now he collected 100% disability. Received an Other than Honorable discharge for something that Mason had never been able to dig up, even with his own clearances. The military court had sealed the files.

Now he ran with a motorcycle club that called themselves the Sons of Chiron. They weren’t into anything criminal, at least nothing that the FBI could prove. But the FBI did have a file open on them, and they didn’t just do that for everyone.

The murder of a guy named Omar had landed Rob on his radar over two years ago. Omar had been “drawn and quartered” out by Lake Red Rock. A pair of hikers had found him. Motorcycle tracks were left all over the place. The chains that had been used to do it had been soaked in diesel to get rid of any prints or DNA. They’d left the chains tied around the man’s four limbs.

As for motive, Omar was a serial rapist, and a repeat offender to boot. He’d just beat his latest case via a mistrial. The District Attorney had declined to prosecute the case again. There were rumors that the judge was a political appointment.

Regardless, the mistrial had been his death sentence.

Mason had bird dogged the case hard, and he’d never come up with anything but circumstantial evidence. Nothing that a jury wanted to see these days. Not DNA, nor cellphone geo-positioning in the area, no suspect google searches. They’d brought four or five of the club in as suspects, but they hadn’t been able to flip any of them. The case had died.

“Well, what about it?” Rob asked, interrupting him.

“You still going to therapy?” Mason asked, now desperate to change the subject.

“The court ordered stuff is done,” Rob said.

“PTSD, right?” Mason said.

“It’s a moral injury, not PTSD, but if they want to pay me for it I don’t care what they call it.”

“You didn’t answer the question?” Mason asked.

“Therapy is for narcissists and losers,” Rob said. “Now tell me why you want this…” He snapped his fingers. “This Wang Hao.”

“I talked a lot then.” Mason glanced at him.

“Yes you did,” Rob said, not turning around from his eggs.

Mason took a beat, and everything in his body told him to get up and walk out, but those bent and dead orange trees hung heavy in his mind’s eye, like his father, who hung even heavier. “Wang Hao is a professor at Iowa State University,” Mason said. “He teaches a few of the Ag classes. Unknown to the University, he also has another employer—the CCP.”

Rob scooped eggs from the pan onto a plate, and then walked into the living room. “The Chinese?” He handed the plate to Mason.

Mason nodded. “We’ve been keeping tabs on him for a while. Monitoring his communications, tailing him, building a case. The standard shit. But he hadn’t really done anything wrong just yet.”

“And then?” Rob asked.

Mason took a bit of eggs. They were a bit slimy for his taste, but helped curb the acid in his stomach. “Three days ago an agent working for the Chinese Ministry of State Security smuggled a fungal plant pathogen through airport security in Toronto. He landed at Des Moines International Airport. Then he handed it off to our Wang Hao.”

“How’d it get through customs?”

“We think there were payoffs involved. Security is only ever as good as its human factors.” Mason said.

“What does the FBI want with a fungus?” Rob asked.

“It causes fusarium head blight,” Mason said. “Destroys wheat and barley… corn too. It’s almost unstoppable once it gets going in a place. Wang Hao wants to release it here, smack dab in the middle of America’s bread basket. Or at least that’s what we believe. It could be one of the single most devastating cases of agroterrorism ever. Billions in crop damage. Food insecurity… suicides.”

“So arrest him,” Rob said.

“They killed it. They killed the case. One of those smug pricks in Washington killed it. A year down the drain, and they told us to walk away. They told us to do nothing.”

“Why would they kill it?” Rob asked.

“I don’t know,” Mason said. “I racked my brain, and I just don’t know. It could be anything. Maybe some Senator caught wind. They only get caught in bed with a Chinese honeypot every other week. I just don’t know, and that’s what’s killing me.”

Rob said nothing.

“They call it Universal Warfare,” Mason continued. “Two PRC officers wrote a whole paper on it back in the 90s. It’s a strategy for them. The idea is to win without ever declaring war. Sun-Tzu type of shit.”

“Who was a hack by the way,” Rob added.

“But anyways, the best way to weaken your enemy was with a thousand tiny underhanded cuts. Nothing is off limits. Economic, psychological, informational, technological, even cultural warfare. A war with no gloves.

“Every year they fight this war, while we go on about our business as usual. Every year, billions in intellectual property is stolen and shipped back to China to be used in foreign products that undercut the American market.”

“Oh I’m aware,” Rob said.

Mason held up a hand, “Do you know how many Americans fentanyl kills every year?”

“Too many.”

“Almost 70,000 every year. And you know why right?”

Rob shook his head.

“It’s because China provides the precursors to the drug cartels. They provide the money laundering services, and they push the fentanyl. And the Cartel goes along with it. And China gets revenge for the opium wars. And you know what makes it so especially insidious? That by its very nature, you sound nuts if you talk about any of this. It’s almost unthinkable to us to fight this way, to cause this much economic and ecological damage… this much collateral damage, and yet… here we are.”

Rob pursed his lips. “How do I know how I can trust you.”

Mason’s mouth fell open in a stammer but no words come out. The question had thrown him off.

“How do I know this isn’t the FBI creating some type of murder for hire scheme where one never existed?” Rob pushed, pressing his interrogation.

“Have you heard of HLB?” Mason asked, suddenly finding his voice. “Citrus Greening Disease?”

“No,” Rob said.

“It’s caused by a bacterium spread by this special type of gnat called the Psyllid,” Mason said. “Only way to kill it is to burn the trees. There’s no cure. Orange production in Florida has fallen by 86% since the 90s and it’s still going down.” Mason paused. “They don’t know how it got here. Intentional sounds like a conspiracy theory. You can’t prove it. It just happens. The same way this wheat blight would just happen if we hadn’t happened to catch the operation.”

“You still haven’t answered my question?” Rob said. “Why should I trust you.”

“I grew up in Florida. On an Orange farm. And I cut my Dad down from one of those blighted trees.”

Rob looked at him, in silence, then took a sip of his beer. “I still need more.”

Mason let out a sigh. “You know, when we were doing that investigation. We kept hearing things. Through the grapevine, or whispers. Just hearsay. But your club has a reputation.”

“I think all MCs have a reputation,” Rob replied.

“Yeah, but yours is good. Like the Mafia’s in Vegas type of good. People like you. The normal people, the ones that are supposed to like me.”

Rob sat back and rested one leg on the other.

Mason continued, “They feel safe knowing the Club is out there. Omar isn’t the only criminal that has died mysteriously. It seems like anywhere the Club takes an interest, the streets get cleaner, not dirtier.”

“The Club believes in community service.”

“Yeah,” Mason said. “Anyways, that’s the story.”

“You’re going with me then,” Rob said. “And if this is a set-up, well, you are either catching a bullet or we’re both going to the chair together.”

Mason frowned. “Fair enough.”

Wang Hao woke early and padded quietly to the kitchen, careful not to wake his wife. The tile floors felt cool on his bare feet. Sunlight was just starting to stream in through the venetian blinds over his sink. He made a pot of coffee, measured the water, and dumped the grounds. Two heaping spoons of Dunkin’ Donuts French Vanilla and he shuffled back to the little stool behind the breakfast bar to wait for it to brew.

Coffee was something he’d found an affinity for in America, one of the many things. The truth was, he loved this country. He loved the movies and the music and the food and the people. He loved the vain and self-centered will to power that throbbed beneath every advertisement and stood like a clay idol at the end of every job interview. No where else on earth could a man come and have the opportunity to make something different of himself… of his family. Nowhere else could a man start over. In China, a boy had to pick his path early, and if he didn’t get into the top schools, it might as well be over. To the American, collectivism like Confucianism sounded superior, it sounded spiritually healthier, but Wang Hao now remained unconvinced.

The coffee maker gurgled and hissed, startling him back to the present. He glanced around nervously, then checked the blinds. The street looked clear. No cars he didn’t recognize. Just an early morning in an Iowa suburb.

Back in the kitchen he thrummed nervous fingers on the counter. He thought then of his mother and father back in China. He had of course known what the deal was when the PRC agreed to fund his American education. But back then he’d been young and dumb and just approved for a Visa. That was before he’d acquired a taste for french vanilla coffee. Before, his weekly trips to the movie theater. Before, he’d grown so proud of his work. Before, he’d gained the warm respect of his peers. That was when he’d still been Chinese. And while he’d not forgotten about the PRC, he’d hoped that they had forgotten about him.

And then one day, the man had come. He’d been a tall man. Dressed in khakis and a Hawaiian shirt. He’d looked like a Han Chuck Finley. Wang Hao smirked at his own Burn Notice reference. It was bittersweet now, remembering the old days. He’d watched a lot of crap tv when he’d first come to America.

The man had walked into his office, closed the door behind him, and set a manilla envelope on his desk. “Open it.”

Wang Hao still didn’t know why he’d complied. Occasionally, he would wake up from a dream at night where he’d tried to do something different… something silly like, jumping out of the window or calling the police. But it always ended bad, because the consequences held in that envelope were already in play. They’d been at play since that first PRC officer had interviewed him. And so he’d opened the manila envelope, and he’d taken out the pictures of his mother and father.

“That man in the middle,” Han Chuck Finley had said. “Your parents believe him to be a family friend. One that has been known to them for a long time. It is up to you whether he remains their friend or becomes their assassin.”

“What do you want?” Wang Hao asked.

“Three days,” the Han Chuck Finley said. “We make contact.”

The pot beeped twice signaling that the coffee was done, interrupting the ghost of menacings past, and Wang Hao stopped his thrumming.

He poured the coffee into his travel mug, slung the strap of his laptop bag over a shoulder and then grabbed his keys. In the garage, he stopped in front of a mini fridge, bent over, and retrieved the small Styrofoam container that held his mission. Twenty vials containing a special saline infused with millions upon millions of fusarium graminearum spores.

He opened the Mercedes AMG’s front door and set the Styrofoam container on the passenger seat.

Wang Hao’s first stop was at the gas station just down the road from his house. He bought two gallons of distilled water. When he exited the little gas station, and walked to the Mercedes, it was with a heavy mind. And perhaps that is why he didn’t notice the silver F-150 with heavily tinted windows parked four cars down. Inside, sat two figures. Two figures dressed from head to toe in all black.

Wang’s next stop was at Bomgaars. He bought a little two gallon farm sprayer for forty dollars. He wondered if that wasn’t a bit expensive, and thought that maybe he should have driven the extra distance to Home Depot. It was only as he was pulling out of the parking lot that he was struck by the gauche irony of trying to save twenty dollars while in the process of inflicting billions in crop damage. It was not lost on him that he was instigating what would be an apocalyptic famine should it have occurred two centuries ago. Of course no one would truly starve now. Famines did not exist in a global economy, not really, and certainly not if you were America. For America never viewed anything it could buy its way out of as a problem, the Dollar was more powerful than any nuke. The Dollar was almighty.

He braked hard at a stop sign and then pulled out behind an eighteen wheeler. It was ten more minutes until he found his exit and merged onto I-80 headed west.

He’d travelled this route countless times. The University partnered with several farms in the area that let them run studies and conduct field research. This gave him access to thousands of acres of wheat and corn.

His palms were sweaty, and he fumbled with the AMG’s A/C. Someone behind him honked as the cars sensors sounded off warning him that he’d swerved out of his lane. He overcorrected and glanced around nervously. In his rear view mirror, a silver F-150 with heavily tinted windows sped up to him, and then went around.

A motorcycle took up the lane next to him, and he tapped the brakes to let the biker overtake him. He didn’t like when cars hovered in his blind spot let alone motorcycles.

As the man on the bike passed he looked over at Wang. He was clean cut, his hair buzzed close on the sides. He wore a leather vest, one of those biker vests. On the back was a half horse half man looking figure styled as if a marble statue. Wang tried to remember what such a creature was called, something from Greek mythology… but the name escaped him.

He’d audited a class on Greek mythology once, when he’d first started working at the university. All he could remember about the man-horse-things was what they symbolized—man’s dual nature, the tension between civilization and barbarism.

He took his exit after that, happy to finally be off the Interstate. He didn’t enjoy driving the Interstate. It made him nervous.

Twenty more minutes of blacktop roads and he’d be at his destination. A box truck pulled out in front of him nearly ten minutes in and he resigned himself to following along behind it. The road was of a two lane sort, the kind that required one to pass into oncoming traffic, something Wang rarely trusted himself to do.

Just before he got to his turn off another motorcycle crested the hill in front of both him and the box truck. He thought little about it, only barely registering that this biker also wore the same vest as the one he’d seen earlier as he passed into his side mirror… more of the man-horse-things.

Then he saw tail lights in his rearview mirror, and watched as the motorcycle braked, then flipped a U turn, and then rode up behind him. Wang’s stomach dropped. He felt stalked now. As if the biker had been looking for him specifically.

The box truck braked hard and Wang Hao struggled to smash his own in time, distracted as he was by his rearview. Then he watched in disbelief as the truck took his same turn onto a dusty gravel road. Every bone in his body screamed at him to keep driving straight, but still he turned. His heart nearly stopped as the motorcycle followed him through the turn. Green stalks of corn rose as walls on either side of the dusty county road.

Something was off. Fundamentally off, and he couldn’t place what it was. He ignored the skin prickling goose bumps that climbed his neck as paranoia.

He panicked and hit the gas, his wheels spinning gravel as he attempted to cut around the lumbering box truck. But the box truck was already in his way, gently hovering into the center of the road.

Wang hit both the brakes and the loose sand at the edge of the county road. He felt the AMG lose traction and whipsaw violently as he yanked the wheel into an overcorrection. Then the car was out of control.

When the spin was over, Wang Hao lifted his head to find he’d come to a rest in the bar pit, stalks of green corn were pressed up against his rear glass. A cloud of dust hung around the car. The AMG’s dash dinged and blinked.

The box truck was backing up towards him. He watched in disbelief as the rear door slid upward to reveal at least three men dressed totally in black, their faces ski-masked. They held military style rifles. One of them held a wood stocked AK-47.

Wang Hao braced himself against the steering wheel and clinched his eyes shut. The AMG’s windshield burst in an ear shattering sea spray of glass. The rifles sounded like rolling thunder, up close and distant all at once. His chest felt like it was on fire. His arms went numb. He felt his bowels release.

He sat immobile, covered in blood and glass as his chest grew heavy. He couldn’t feel anything except the faint stinging in his cheek where the glass had struck him. He very briefly wondered if he was paralyzed, but the distant sound of his own gurgling distracted him. Something smelled like shit and piss and… copper.

He watched as the door of the box truck was pulled back down. They did that to retain all of the brass, Wang mused, his own calmness catching him off guard. He was outside of the situation. Watching as if a bystander now. Detached.

The biker whipped gasoline from a bright red can all over the hood of Wang’s car. The walls of corn started to close in on him.

He felt sleepy. And then just before curtains, one last satisfying answer was urged to the surface by the last firings of his dying neurons, and he remembered that those man-horse-things were called Centaurs.

The man that sat across from Agent Mason Taylor was cold looking. His eyes were an empty golden green. They were wolfish eyes. Silver hair was swept backwards beneath a pair of Oakley sunglasses. A bandanna hung around the man’s wrinkled neck. He wore a fly fisherman’s vest over a white collared shirt. “You work for us now,” the man said.

Mason pursed his lips and said nothing. He didn’t know who this man was, or how he’d found him. A minute ago he’d been here, inside Moe’s, half a bottle deep into asking forgiveness for his sins.

Then the man had slid into the booth across from him.

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” Mason said. But he did. It was all he could think about.

“That bottle says otherwise,” the man said. He picked it up and poured two fingers into Mason’s own glass and then helped himself to it.

“We look for initiative. Decisiveness. And most of all a certain moral flexibility.” He paused, reaching into one of the pockets of his vest and pulling out a can of wintergreen Copenhagen. “You have all of the above in spades. And the fact you’re here, half a bottle deep, means that flexibility isn’t too flexible… if you know what I mean. Psychos are fine and all but they can be a little hard to manage, and they make bad bunkmates.”

“What do you want?”

“You,” the man said, taking a pinch of Cope and tucking it into his bottom lip. He offered the tin to Mason, but Mason declined. The man shrugged and put it back into his pocket.

“Look,” Mason said, “just tell me what’s going on and let’s stop with the word games. It’s been a long, life changing week.”

The man chuckled. “Life changing is right son. You work for the Company now.”

“The Company?” Mason asked.

The man looked slightly pained. “Don’t make me spell it out. The Agency.”

“You’re CIA,” Mason muttered, feeling the stomach drop out of him.

The man visibly cringed as if he’d taken a bite of something rotten and held up a hand, “we don’t call ourselves that. Also it’s not something you say. Just say The Company.”

“Are the Sons of Chiron…”

“They are what they are,” the man said. “We work with who we need to. We run the underworld while you fools try run the overworld. We just both happened to pick the same guys for our wet work.”

“That’s why Washington called it off,” Mason said.

“Look kid,” the man said. “This is a war. You don’t arrest people and try them. You don’t fuck around with habeus corpus, and you don’t wait for some politically appointed judge to get his marching orders from his donors. You put them in the dirt. You send the pictures back to Beijing. You bleed em dry, scalp them, and hang ‘em high for all to see.” He spat a stream of black juice into the whiskey glass.

“What if I like being in the FBI though,” Mason said.

“It’s this or Federal Prison, son. You either work the overworld or the underworld and you picked the underworld.”

Mason let out a long sigh and watched Michelle as she wiped down the bar. Tonight seemed like the night to test out rock bottom. “I’ll have a pinch.”

The man in the fly fisherman’s vest handed him the tin. “Welcome to the Company, boy.”

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I started Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series over the break and decided I’d try to read in publication order. Chronologically, this is the ninth book. As to whether it’s better to read in publication order or not, it appears fan opions are mixed. Pub order apparently better tracks the development of Richard Sharpe as a character, while chronological is more desirable for those who want a linear story. I’m planning to read them in pub order, mostly because its cool tracking an author’s development as a writer, and also, I’d prefer to read them the way they were originally experienced.

Sharpe’s Gold, published in 1981, is Bernard Cornwell’s second published novel. His first is Sharpe’s Eagle, which was also published in 1981. Whatever list I originally looked at put Sharpe’s Gold first, but I’ve since found that most lists put Sharpe’s Eagle first, so whatever. That’s my next read I guess.

Summary

Set during the Napoleonic Wars, Sharpe’s Gold introduces us to an already mature Captain Sharpe in command of an element of the British Rifles. The Rifles being elite British Infantry. Think Rangers as compared to 101st Airborne. It’s 1810 and the Peninsular War is going full tilt on the Iberian Peninsula. Spain and Portugal are allied with the United Kingdom against the invading First French Empire.

General Wellington gives Sharpe a secret mission—infiltrate French lines and retrieve a hoard of Spanish gold currently being “safe guarded” by Spanish partisans. It’s important to note that although the Spanish and British are technically allies, they don’t exactly trust each other.

The Spanish partisans in control of the gold are led by the sadistic El Católico, an expert swordsman and guerrilla fighter. El Católico also appears to have his own designs on the gold.

What follows is a straight forward action/adventure plot that moves quickly and never lets the momentum drop. Sharpe and his men, undermanned and outnumbered, must locate the gold, secure it, and then extract it, all while a war rages on around them. Added to this the additional complication of the especially duplicitous El Católico and his Spanish guerrillas who are intent on securing the gold for themselves. Due to the clever leadership of Sharpe, the Rifles consistently best both the much larger French forces as well as the Spanish guerillas.

What to Like

For those familiar with Cornwell’s novels, pretty much all of his main characters are archetypal warriors. That’s one of the things that make his novels so popular, and so great. They live to fight and they always do what’s best for their men (almost always past the point of insubordination). They are men of homeric virtue, and immune to 21st century moralizing. They are also typically pretty good with the ladies.

They also typically have a violent Irish sidekick, at least in the case of both Uhtred (The Last Kingdom) and Richard Sharpe. All of that is here and more. Sergeant Harper, Sharpe’s violent Irish sidekick, was one of my favorite parts of this book. Harper is a giant Irishman who carries around a seven barreled rifle (a volley gun or a nock gun) that knocks him on his ass every time he fires it.

Honestly loved this book and am looking forward to continuing the series. I give it 4 dead French out of 5. I’m almost positive anyone reading this is going to be familiar with Cornwell and Sharpe, but I highly recommend to anyone who likes Men’s adventure fiction or historical war fiction.

I just finished A Bullet For Cinderella (originally titled On the Make before being changed back for the second edition) by John D. Macdonald and what a ride. Macdonald is most widely known for his Travis McGee series, a hardboiled character that lives on a houseboat and works as a “salvage expert.” A Bullet For Cinderella is not a McGee novel, nor is it even hardboiled, rather, it is a standalone noir.

Noir and Hardboiled are often treated as interchangeable genres, and some of that is due to the aesthetic definition noir has with regard to film (different than its conventions as a literary genre). If you’re interested in more of a deep dive Vigilante Crime did an excellent little essay on the differences.

Vigilante Crime & Pulp

Hardboiled and Noir Are Not the Same

In the world of crime fiction, the terms noir and hardboiled often get thrown around interchangeably. I do it myself sometimes, probably causing unfair confusion. Both conjure images of cigarette smoke, rainy streets, and morally compromised characters. But while the genres may overlap in dark tone, they’re not the same. Understanding the difference sha…

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a year ago · 66 likes · 22 comments · Philip “Big Philly” Smith

Regardless, A Bullet For Cinderella is a textbook noir. An everyman in over his head, dead private eyes, dames and femme fatales, a pile of stolen cash.

Tal Howard, a Korean War vet and former POW, blows into the small town of Hillston (state never named) about a year after getting back from the war. Tal has just left his long time fiancé who he got engaged to before the war. According to him, they drifted apart, or rather, he had come back changed. A big theme of the novel revolves around this change. More on that later, as that is mostly what I want to talk about.

In the POW camps, Tal was friends with a man named Timmy Warden who died before they could be rescued. Timmy had revealed to Tal that he stole about 60k from his brother George’s company (he was also sleeping with said brother’s wife). Timmy buried the money before he left and it was still there for the taking. Before he dies, Timmy tells Tal that a girl named Cindy will know the spot where he hid the money if he ever wants to go get it.

And so, armed with this single clue, a disillusioned Tal travels to Hillston to find the stolen money and hopefully some type of a new life. In Hillston, Tal looks up Ruth, an old flame of Timmy’s, to see if she has any info as to the identity of this “Cindy.” I should mention here that Tal has carried a picture of Ruth this whole time. He took it off Timmy when he died. To Timmy, Ruth was the girl that got away, and unknown to Tal, she will serve a similar function for him.

Tal also finds out that a man named Fitzmartin has been working for George Warden for the last year. Fitzmartin was a fellow POW in the camps, one that all the other men hated and had vowed to kill. Fitzmartin is very clearly a might makes right type of psychopath. He is strong, mean, and violent. The other POWs hated him because he refused to cooperate with them for the survival of the group and openly despised them for being weak. He was a bully, but he ate well. Fitzmartin, having overheard Timmy’s story about the money, has come to Hillston in order to look for it, but without any leads, he has made very little progress. He also doesn’t know about the girl named Cindy.

George Warden, Timmy’s poor brother, is doing especially bad. His wife ran off with a salesman shortly after Timmy left, and he is also apparently selling off parts of his businesses to fund his newfound alcoholism.

Expect heavy spoilers from here on out.

Tal spends most of the first half of the book looking for Cindy. Around the midpoint he finally finds her. Cindy was a pet name that only Timmy called her, which was itself short for Cinderella, a part she played in the school play. Her real name is Toni Rassell. She is something of a femme fatale and runs in bad circles. She’s been picked up by the police a few times for running a variation of the “badger game” which is a type of con. Tal finds out that she does indeed know where the money is buried. Its in a cave where her and Timmy used to hook up. Tal and Toni agree to go find the money, split it, and run off together for as long as the money will last.

While Tal has been tracking down Cindy, Fitzmartin has been following Tal. Fitzmartin next kidnaps Ruth and brokers a deal with Tal. The money for Ruth. Of course Tal can’t tell Toni because he needs her to show him where the money is buried. The rest of the story barrels towards its conclusion from here.

I’ll stop to avoid totally spoiling how things play out, but I do want to discuss some of the themes at play.

Animal vs. Man

One of the reasons John D. Macdonald has such an enduring legacy and rabid readership is because he had such a keen eye for human nature. That sort of talent is put to good use here. All of the characters are well fleshed out and quite driven by their own demons. But what really kept me thinking about this book long after I put it down was how Macdonald demonstrated his themes.

If you are a writer you may be familiar with John Truby’s Four Corner Opposition Framework.

In average or simple stories, the hero comes into conflict with only one opponent. This standard opposition has the virtue of clarity, but it doesn’t let you develop a deep or powerful sequence of conflicts, and it doesn’t allow the audience to see a hero acting within a larger society…

There are a thousand different ways to diagram characters and the moral polarities they represent, the point is, that by creating thematic conflict between four characters instead of just two, you create a more complex understanding of a theme and/or moral premise.

This is a neat little video if you’re a craft nerd, but I digress.

In A Bullet for Cinderella, we find a Tal that is harder than when he left for the war. Being a POW has changed him. It has hardened him in some ways, and softened him in others. The thematic question revolves around survival and civilization. Are the traits that are good for survival good for society, and if one becomes too good at survival in the most strict, Darwinian sense of the word, can they ever find peace within society?

• Fitzmartin represents pure survival. He is a violent psychopath that despises cooperation as a sign of weakness.

• Ruth represents pure civilization. She is the face of high trust society.

• Tal is caught somewhere between Fitzmartin and Ruth.

• Toni is almost a perfect mirror of Tal. Like him, she is a streetwise survivor. But she’s not particularly depraved. She’s loose, but not a whore, she has standards and has a heart.

The following exchange between Ruth and Tal is very demonstrative of the major changes the POW camp has wrought on Tal’s character. Also it’s just especially great Macdonald dialogue.

I felt ill at ease with her. I had never come across this particular brand of honesty. She had freely given me an uncomfortable truth about herself, and I felt bound to reciprocate.

I said, too quickly, “I know what you mean. I know what it is to feel guilty from the man’s point of view. When they tapped my shoulder I had thirty days grace before I had to report. I had a girl Charlotte. And a pretty good job. We wondered if we ought to get married before I left. We didn’t. But I took advantage of all the corny melodrama. Man going to the wars and so on. I twisted it so she believed it was actually her duty to take full care of the departing warrior. It was a pretty frantic thirty days. So off I went. Smug about the whole thing. What soft words hadn’t been able to accomplish, the North Koreans had done. She’s a good kid.”

“But you’re back and you’re not married?”

“No. I came back in pretty bad shape. My digestive system isn’t back to par yet. I spent quite a while in an army hospital. I got out and went back to my job. I couldn’t enjoy it. I used to enjoy it. I couldn’t do well at it. And Charlotte seemed like a stranger. At least I had enough integrity not to go back to bed with her. She was willing, in the hopes it would cure the mopes. I was listless and restless. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me. Finally they got tired of the way I was goofing off and fired me. So I left. I started this—project. I feel guilty as hell about Charlotte. She was loyal all the time I was gone. She thought marriage would be automatic when I got back. She doesn’t understand all this. And neither do I. I only know that I feel guilty and I still feel restless.”

“What is she like, Tal?”

“Charlotte? She’s dark-haired. Quite pretty. Very nice eyes. She’s a tiny girl, just over five feet and maybe a hundred pounds sopping wet. She’d make a good wife. She’s quick and clean and capable. She has pretty good taste, and her daddy has yea bucks stashed.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t feel guilty.”

I frowned at her. “What do you mean, Ruth?”

“You said she seems like a stranger. Maybe she is a stranger, Tal. Maybe the you who went away would be a stranger to you, too. You said Timmy changed. You could have changed, too. You could have grown up in ways you don’t realize. Maybe the Charlotte who was ample for that other Tal Howard just isn’t enough of a challenge to this one,”

“So I break her heart.”

“Maybe better to break her heart this way than marry her and break it slowly and more thoroughly. I can explain better by talking about Timmy and me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“When Timmy lost interest the blow was less than I thought it would be. I didn’t know why. Now after all this time I know why. Timmy was a less complicated person than I am. His interests were narrower. He lived more on a physical level than I do. Things stir me. I’m more imaginative than he was. Just as you are more imaginative than he was. Suppose I’d married him. It would have been fine for a time. But inevitably I would have begun to feel stifled. Now don’t get the idea that I’m sort of a female long-hair. But I do like books and I do like good talk and I do like all manner of things. And Timmy, with his beer and bowling and sports page attitude, wouldn’t have been able to share. So I would have begun to feel like sticking pins in him. Do you understand?”

“Maybe not I’m the beer, bowling, and sports page type myself.”

She watched me gravely. “Are you, Tal?”

It was an uncomfortable question. I remembered the first few weeks back with Charlotte when I tried to fit back into the pattern of the life I had known before. Our friends had seemed vapid, and their conversation had bored me. Charlotte, with her endless yak about building lots, and what color draperies, and television epics, and aren’t these darling shoes for only four ninety-five, and what color do you like me best in, and yellow kitchens always look so cheerful—Charlotte had bored me, too.

My Charlotte, curled like a kitten against me in the drive-in movie, wide-eyed and entranced at the monster images on the screen who traded platitudes, had bored me.

I began to sense where it had started. It had started in the camp. Boredom was the enemy. And all my traditional defenses against boredom had withered too rapidly. The improvised game of checkers was but another form of boredom. I was used to being with a certain type of man.

He had amused and entertained me and I him. But in the camp he became empty. He with his talk of sexual exploits, boyhood victories, and Gargantuan drunks, he had made me weary just to listen.

The flight from boredom had stretched my mind. I spent more and more time in the company of the off-beat characters, the ones who before capture would have made me feel queer and uncomfortable, the ones I would have made fun of behind their backs. There was a frail headquarters type with a mind stuffed full of things I had never heard of. They seemed like nonsense at first and soon became magical. There was a corporal, muscled like a Tarzan, who argued with a mighty ferocity with a young, intense, mustachioed Marine private about the philosophy and ethics of art, while I sat and listened and felt unknown doors open in my mind.

Ruth’s quiet question gave me the first valid clue to my own discontent. Could I shrink myself back to my previous dimensions, I could once again fit into the world of job and Charlotte and blue draperies and a yellow kitchen and the Saturday night mixed poker game with our crowd.

If I could not shrink myself, I would never fit there again. And I did not wish to shrink. I wished to stay what I had become, because many odd things had become meaningful to me.

“Are you, Tal?” she asked again.

“Maybe not as much as I thought I was.”

“You’re hunting for something,” she said. The strange truth of that statement jolted me. “You’re trying to do a book. That’s just an indication of restlessness. You’re hunting for what you should be, or for what you really are.” She grinned suddenly, a wide grin and I saw that one white tooth was entrancingly crooked. “Dad says I try to be a world mother. Pay no attention to me. I’m always diagnosing and prescribing and meddling.” She looked at her watch. “Wow! He’ll be stomping and thundering. I’ve got to go right now.”

MacDonald, John D.. A Bullet for Cinderella (Murder Room) (Function). Kindle Edition.

In one way, we see the camp has made Tal something closer to Ruth. Someone for who “beer and bowling and sports page attitude” no longer describes, someone interested in art and philosophy and books. But simultaneously, he’s also become more like Fitzmartin. He’s hunting for the same stolen money. Both for the thrill of it, as well as the reward of it… money that a civilized man would give back to George.

Ultimately, Ruth represents a path for him to reintegrate back into society, while Toni represents a path towards the survivalist, the human animal.

I’ll avoid totally spoiling how these potentials and themes end up playing out, but you should pick up a copy (its free on Project Gutenberg).

I give it Five Dead Dicks out of Five.

This is both book review and pitch. Like Elon Musk, I too believe in turning my good ideas loose into the world. So hopefully some big time producer somewhere reads this and steals the idea. Or maybe when I finish with one of my million other projects I’ll sit down and write a pilot and a series bible in about ten years.

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Regardless, many know that Samuel Colt invented the revolver, so foundational to the American Founding Myth, that Samuel Colt closely follows God in its telling: “God created men, Col. Colt made them equal.” Very American—this idea of the gun as perfection of God’s handiwork. What you don’t know, is probably everything about how that story unfolded.

If you read Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynne you might have a better idea. It was this book and its description of the Texas Rangers and the revolvers pivotal role in defeating the Comanches that first turned me on to this story. And so I went looking for a second book that would expand on Colt and his life, and that book was Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter that Changed America by Jim Rasenberger.

Colt’s story is of a man, and subsequently a company, that is about as archetypally American as apple pie. And not just because of his involvement with firearms. Colt is in a lot of ways an early prototype for every eccentric entrepreneur and startup founder we have running around today. His philosophical DNA lurks in Musk, Altman, Bezos, and Zuckerberg. He was a bit businessman, a bit showman, a bit grifter, and a bit mad genius. Always on the hunt for an angel investor and always on the run from those who’d already invested. The story of Colt and his revolver is the story of American Industry.

Early Life (no not that kind, chill)

Samuel Colt was born in 1814 to Sarah and Christopher Colt of Hartford, Connecticut. Samuel Colt was one of eight children and the third youngest. His father, Christopher Colt, was a merchant and made most of his wealth off of the buying and selling of ship’s consignment. However, he went bankrupt in the Panic of 1819. Unfortunately, that was not the last of the family’s troubles. Two years later, and just before Sam’s seventh birthday, his mother died of consumption.

I’ll add here, that one of the things you start to notice when reading history or biographies in general is just how quickly fortunes could be made or lost. How quickly and suddenly loved ones could pass away. Life is truly ephemeral, and it’s not clear that we moderns have benefitted from the lack of reminders. I always find myself impressed by the grit and perseverance on display by our ancestors. Granted, there really is no other option. Life goes on and one either picks up and tries again, or suicides. But still, it’s a nice reminder of just how resilient the human animal is.

But I digress. Colt was a boy born of the fabled Industrial north. In 1829, Colt, now 15 years old, along with the rest of his family all moved to the town of Ware. Ware was like so many other New England towns, a factory town, revolving around a massive textile mill that took advantage of a nearby river and the massive drop an elevation. Steam powered factories were still new at the time, and Ware was of an older sort.

By all accounts, Colt was a precocious boy obsessed with science and invention and little is known about Colt’s life from this time, save for one anecdote:

Incident at Ware Pond

The fifteen year old Colt, in the days leading up to the town’s Fourth of July celebration, had advertised around town that he would blow up a raft on Ware pond.

Colt never left a record of how he carried out his demonstration, so his exact materials are not certain, but he had at least three items with him: a long copper wire, waterproofed with cloth and tar and probably spliced in the middle with a strip of filament; a waterproofed container packed with gunpowder; and an instrument to produce an electrical charge, most likely a simple Leyden jar, a glass vessel covered in foil and filled with water, which stored enough static electricity to generate a spark.

Rasenberger, Jim. Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America (pp. 28-29).

Colt set his gunpowder on the raft, hooked up the cabling and sent it out into the pond. With a massive crowd of spectators looking on, he hooked the cable to his Leyden jar, completed the electrical circuit and exploded the raft. The crowd, quite the opposite of being amazed, was incensed at being doused in the brackish waters of Ware pond and descended on Colt, who was led quickly away by his friend Elisha Root.

Colt’s life is dominated by these sorts of demonstrations. Incredible ideas that either fall flat or are in some ways too advanced for anyone else to grasp the significance of them.

Colt would go on to be kicked out of Amherst boarding school for stealing a cannon with several other schoolmates and firing off a steady volley of shots on another July 4th in Massachusetts.

When a professor named John Fiske—one of the school’s trustees—marched up the hill and demanded that Colt cease fire, Colt “swung his match, & cried out, ‘a gun for Prof. Fiske,’ & touched it off. “The Prof. enquired his name—& he replied, ‘his name was Colt, & he could Kick like Hell’ ” The story of Colt and the cannon had often been repeated in Amherst over the years, Dickinson informed Barnard, but until the biographer’s inquiry Dickinson had never realized that “the celebrated Hartford Sam Colt, was the hero of that occasion.” In any event, wrote Dickinson, “He soon left town, for good.”

Rasenberger, Jim. Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America (p. 33). (Function).

It was this most recent debacle that led to Colt being expelled or pulled from Amherst and sent aboard the Corvo as a sailor.

Legend has it, that it was here where Colt first had his idea for a gun with a revolving cylinder. Colt whittled the first proto-type revolver on the return voyage, after watching either the ship’s wheel, or its windlass, revolve in place.

However, more interesting than this apparent beginning is an incident earlier in the voyage, where a sixteen year old Colt is accused of stealing food from the ship’s stores and subsequently flogged.

If we accept the findings of Captain Spalding and take Colt’s guilt at face value, the whole episode raises at least two questions regarding his character, neither of which can be answered definitively. First, how much weight should be given to his thievery? Should it be viewed as a foolish but forgivable transgression by a miserable sixteen-year-old boy looking for treats to soothe himself? Or did it indicate a larger moral flaw? Not knowing all the facts, the best course might be to give young Sam the benefit of the doubt, for the same reason that most legal systems purge the misdemeanors of minors: we recognize that youths should not be held to the same standards as adults. We give him a pass, in other words, and rule his crime inadmissible in our estimation of him as a man. Of course, that is more easily said than done. Once we know Colt stole, we cannot unknow it.

If the first question is whether Colt’s actions reflect some essential flaw in his character, a second question is what effect the episode had on him. Dana portrayed the men whipped aboard the Pilgrim as profoundly damaged, skulking about afterward like shadows of their former selves. That does not seem to have happened to Colt. On the contrary, he seems to have drawn power from the experience, fortifying his resolve to serve no master but himself.

The flogging was never mentioned by Colt. It was obliterated from all records of his life. The only document naming him as a thief who was flogged was a single page of a missionary’s journal that would end up in the archives of the Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Surely at some moments, though, Colt removed his shirt in the company of another person—the woman he married, for example—and revealed the faint pink stripes on his back. The scars of flogging lasted a long time.

Rasenberger, Jim. Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America (pp. 45-46). (Function).

Unlike most biographies where the Early Life is largely devoid of character and typically the most boring part, Colt’s is swimming with capital C character moments, drama, and adventure. Lots there for a show runner to mine for flashbacks or a pilot episode.

Back from his voyage aboard the Corvo, Samuel Colt would spend the next two years as something of a circus freak. He would go on tour with a portable science lab in which he would go from town to town giving demonstrations of nitrous oxide also known at the time as laughing gas. During this time, and using the proceeds from his nitrous oxide hustle, he commissioned a gunsmith to start making models of guns that utilized a rotating chamber and were capable of firing through a singular barrel. Eventually, Colt would find a gunsmith up to the job, a man named John Pearson, who would be pivotal in bringing the inventions to life. It would not be until 1835 that the models advanced enough for Colt to file a patent, but before he filed one in the United States, he would have to travel to Europe in order to file one in both the Great Britain and France (a filing in the US would preclude a patent in Great Britain).

The next ten years would largely be dominated by failure, dipping out on creditors, and bankruptcy.

The Legend

Colt tried for years to sell his revolver to the U.S. Army, largely failed, and then went bankrupt because the Generals in Washington thought the side-arm too disruptive too their current battle tactics. Armies at the time mostly marched in ranks and met on open fields of battle. Infantry used single-shot muskets, stood in lines, and achieved steady fire by ranks of soldiers firing in sync.

But—not every one saw things this way. Indian fighters, whether US Army or not, all immediately grasped the usefulness of a gun that fired repeatedly. Because of this, Colt’s initial models found some minor use at the tail end of the Seminole War, and then again by the Texas Republic’s Navy (yes, Texas had a Navy).

And it was this latter purchase that eventually catapulted Colt to success. Some of these revolvers purchased by the Texas Navy fell into the hands of the Texas Rangers who were having their numbers halved by Comanches each year.

Comanches fought mounted and could fire off arrow after arrow in quick succession. The rifle was a technological advancement over the bow for sure, but only for its first shot. In a fast moving fight with little time to reload, the single-shot rifle or musket quickly regressed back to the Stone Age and became little better than a club, at least until it could be reloaded again. But when reloading took upwards of a minute, its owner would already be full of arrows.

Enter the revolver:

Scene: In 1844, fifteen Texas Rangers, newly equipped with surplus .36 Colt Paterson revolvers taken from storehouse after the Texas Navy disbanded, find themselves in a running fight with over seventy-five Comanches.

Cut to: A bankrupted Colt trying to hawk naval mines. The factory for revolvers lies dormant and empty. The machinery and tooling all auctioned off to pay off creditors.

Back to Scene:

“They [Comanches] expected the rangers to remain on the defensive, and to finally wear them out and exhaust their ammunition. The rangers ran close beside them and kept up a perfect fusillade with pistols. In vain the Comanches tried to turn their horses and make a stand, but such was the wild confusion of running horses, popping pistols, and yelling rangers, that they abandoned the idea of a rally and sought safety in flight. Some dropped their bows and shields in trying to dodge the flashing pistols. The pursuit lasted three miles, and many Indians were killed or wounded.”

- Andrew Jackson Sowell

As mentioned before, Colt had already gone bankrupt and had no way of manufacturing revolvers anymore. He had already started a new company that was trying to pitch electrically detonated naval mines to the US Department of War with the help of Samuel Morse (the inventor of the telegraph). The incident at Wade pond seems to have been the originating idea for this latest hustle.

But that was soon to change. Samuel Hamilton Walker, a Texas Ranger, would write Colt about the Ranger’s new found success and then offer his feedback to make the revolver a bit more deadly against Comanches. Walker would then go on to help Colt design his next model. He would also become the champion of the Colt revolver to skeptical brass in Washington.

Walker, a decorated Texas Ranger, and hero of the Mexican America War, brought with him a hefty amount of clout. Additionally, Eli Whitney would help Colt design new tools for the gun’s manufacture. And eventually, this new weapon, made to the specs that Walker recommended, would be dubbed the Colt Walker, or the Walker Colt, and be chambered in .44, weigh in at 4.5 lbs, and sport a nine inch barrel.

It was a firearm designed for one purpose, to punch a hole through thick buffalo-hide shields and blow away the Comanche that stood behind them.

“We come now to the first radical adaptation made by the American people as they moved westward from the humid region into the Plains country. The story of this adaptation is the story of the six-shooter, or revolver.

- Walter Prescott Webb

The rest is history. The Colt revolver, in the years that followed, would first and foremost be adopted by the frontiersmen, the homesteader, the cowboy, and the Indian fighter. The US Army would tentatively adopt the revolver, as a sidearm for field officers and it would go on to see limited use by cavalry, but the Army still would not commit to the tactical changes it required to effectively integrate it as a battlefield staple.

We can see this beauracratic inertia, or even obstinance, lasting all the way up to and through most of the Civil War. And by this point, the introduction of the repeating rifle negated the revolver in military matters. It would be the repeating rifle that finally changed formalized war, but it was the revolver that paved the way.

The Civil War in the West (Missouri and Kansas) is marked by bloody guerrilla warfare waged by the very same men that would go on to be western legends such as Cole Younger and the James brothers. These guerrillas fought against Union Troops that were typically armed with nothing but muskets or single-shot rifles. The Missouri guerrillas or bushwhackers as they were often called, sporting long hair, draped in pistols, scalps braided into bridles, fought mounted, and their weapon of choice—the revolver.

Many a story from these engagements starts with a band of guerrillas baiting a much larger union troop into firing on them (to expend their single shots), and then riding hell for leather down on them, their revolvers sparking, before squad-wiping most of the infantry frantically trying to reload.

This specific instance isn’t directly mentioned in the text at hand, but as I’ve been on a Missouri Guerrilla kick, the story of the Colt Revolver has helped slide some other bits of history into sharper focus.

And this is where you start to grasp how mythically American a lot of this. Private citizens adapting disruptive technology and using it to carry civilization forward, while Government and bureaucracy struggle to keep pace.

That’s a good theme for a biopic.

Eventually, things do change. Technology does get adapted. But it takes a long time to be integrated at the institutional level, an important thing to keep in mind as we approach the 20 year anniversary of bitcoin and are now only a few years into “AI.”

The American System of Manufacture

The revolver would of course become a staple of life in the West, and Samuel Colt would go on to become very rich from it. He would perfect the American System of Manufacture.

By the time the exhibition [Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations which would become known as the first World’s Fair] closed on October 11, 1851, the weather had turned cold and rainy and the roof of the Crystal Palace had sprung a few leaks—it really was just a building after all. The entire structure would now be dismantled and moved to Sydenham Hill, in south London, where it would serve as a museum until destroyed by fire in 1936.

The ephemerality of the Crystal Palace notwithstanding, the exhibition had been a transformative event, not just in England, but in the United States, where the acclaim for American products stimulated national pride. The newly enormous nation was evidently as inventive and brilliant as it was large. “Recently America has been put to the test,” boasted one US publication. “But how does the race come out? As no human mind could have anticipated. The trial gives America the command of all the great interests of life.”

When the exhibition prizes were announced in October, the United States won a disproportionate number. McCormick, Goodyear, and a Texan named Gail Borden who had created a dried-meat biscuit (and would later devise his more famous condensed milk) all won medals for original design. Much to the surprise of the American contingent, Colt received only honorable mention for his pistols. Some suggested this result owed more to the influence of the British gun industry than to an honest appraisal by the judges. The gold medal went to a British inventor of a repeating arm named Robert Adams.

The prize that mattered most was public opinion, however, and here Colt prevailed. In early November, British Army Despatch published a glowing and passionate review of Colt’s guns, urging them for use in the British military, especially in its many colonial outposts. “We cannot help expressing our opinion that whoever would deny this weapon to be a valuable auxiliary in anything like irregular warfare, must be either the victim of delusion, or, what is far more difficult to remove, old-fashioned prejudice and antipathy.” Another publication, the Spirit of the Times, called for the deployment of Colt’s revolvers in South Africa. “They make one man equal, in short, to many, and strike fear into the hearts of savages.”

The greatest honor of all came on November 25, when Colt delivered an address to the Institution of Civil Engineers in London. He was the first American ever invited to speak before this august body of British engineers and scientists. In attendance were also a number of prominent Americans stationed in London for various reasons, including Abbott Lawrence, the wealthy textile manufacturer and esteemed benefactor of the Lawrence Scientific School at Harvard, now serving as US minister to Great Britain. Abbott was the older brother of Samuel Lawrence, the friend of Christopher Colt’s who had many years earlier delivered Sam to the Corvo.

Colt’s talk was titled “On the Application of Machinery to the Manufacture of Revolving-Breech Firearms.” He began by discussing prior examples of multifiring guns, wisely wrapping himself in the history of the revolver rather than denying it. He showed some drawings of previous attempts at repeaters that he had discovered in the Tower of London, including a fifteenth-century matchlock with a four-chambered revolving cylinder. The main point of his history lesson was not to praise his predecessors, but to point out that no one had fully succeeded until he came along.

Colt tended to tailor the story of his gun’s origin to the audience he was delivering it to, and he did that now. He claimed that he invented the revolver because he lived in a country “of most extensive frontier, still inhabited by hordes of aborigines.” Inspired by “the insulated position of the enterprising pioneer, and his dependence, sometimes alone, on his personal ability to protect himself and his family,” he had frequently “meditated upon the inefficiency of the ordinary double-barreled gun and pistol, both involving a loss of time in reloading, which was too frequently fatal.”

In fact, Colt had not developed the revolver with pioneers and aborigines in mind—they became pertinent to him only later—but he understood the appeal of this story to English imaginations. Not only did John Bull love tales of the wild American west, he was at that moment particularly interested in weapons to use against aboriginal populations in colonial outposts.

It took a while for Colt to warm to the true subject of his talk, which was not guns but machines. He wanted his audience to understand that his machines and his production methods were every bit as significant—as revolutionary—as his revolver. After chiding the English for continuing to make guns largely by hand, he introduced his audience to what would soon come to be known as the American System of manufacturing: “In America, where manual labor is scarce and expensive, it was imperative to devise means for producing these arms with greatest rapidity and economy.” Machines required less labor, saved costs, and, perhaps most important of all, helped achieve uniformity. Four-fifths of the work at Colt’s factory was now performed by machines, he told his audience. He had broken his gun down into the fewest possible parts (the lock had previously required seventeen components, for example, and now had just five), then replicated each of these parts by a machine dedicated to it alone.

In fact, all the separate parts travel independently through the manufactory, arriving at last, in an almost complete condition, in the hands of the finishing workmen, by whom they are assembled, from promiscuous heaps, and formed into firearms, requiring only the polishing and fitting demanded for ornament.… By this system the machines become almost automatons.

When Colt was done, a few men in the audience rose to defend British industry, but most extolled Colt’s revolver. At one point, Robert Adams, Colt’s British rival and winner of the gold medal at the Crystal Palace, took the floor to describe the merits of his own gun, but several of his countrymen stood to say they did not think much of it in comparison to Colt’s, and Adams quietly resumed his seat. Then a Mr. May stood to object that a discussion about the merits of guns was not a proper subject for the society. He urged everyone to get back to the topic advertised by the title of the speech, which was machinery. Before sitting, Mr. May shared that he was Quaker and believed that all weapons should be dispensed with, “except for protections against wild beasts.”

Rasenberger, Jim. Revolver: Sam Colt and the Six-Shooter That Changed America (pp. 286-288). (Function).

Colt would go on to dominate the gun manufacturing industry in America for the next twenty years, periodically having to defend his patents from other companies. Colt would also sell guns to anyone, something he eventually caught a lot of grief for in the American Civil War, where the Colt company sold guns to both the Union and the Confederacy.

Colt’s death would come in 1862 by complications caused by gout. At the time of his death, his estate was estimated to be worth about 15 million dollars (about $472M adjusted for inflation). The estate was willed to his wife and son.

In conclusion

If you’ve read this far you no doubt see what an interesting biopic this would make. Colt and his invention touched a lot of history. He was both madman, huckster, and visionary. Texas Rangers, Seminoles, Comanches, Napoleon, and World’s Fairs all play a role in this man’s life. In one sense it’s the story of America, its manufacturing, its people, and the tools it used to conquer a continent, and then the world. I recommend the biography by Rasenberger. I simply did not have time to mention or cover much of the most interesting parts of his life. There is a movie moment happening on damn near every page. It’s for this reason that I think a limited series would be the best format. Something with lots of room for subplots and sidebars.

A true crime aside on John C. Colt

One such subplot, which I didn’t have room for here is in regards to John C. Colt, Samuel Colt’s older brother. Known for inventing double-entry bookkeeping, he would be famous for an especially grisly hatchet murder. The murder itself was highly publicized at the time and went on to inspire a story by Edgar Allen Poe. Before he could be hung, John C. Colt “died” from a fire that broke out in the prison after a conspicuously timed visit from his pyrotechnic magician brother Samuel Colt. This led to several conspiracy theories that John never died, but escaped with the help of his brother. I’ll let you decide.

The spacecraft made a distinct hum that Dr. Noah Fischer could only describe as otherworldly. It was the sound of their repulsine engines, the two giant spinning electromagnetics that propelled the bell shaped craft forward through the vaccuum of space. The sound made Noah’s skin crawl. He did not want to be here, and how he’d come to be here was something of a tangled mess. He ran a hand through the equally tangled hair that crowned him and glanced towards the front of the ship as it whined forward.

At the helm, sat Jack Davenport, a former test pilot and ace, and next to him sat Roy Lancaster, his co-pilot and once wingman. Davenport was Commander of the crew. Salt and pepper hair, a square jaw and rock solid frame. He was everything you would expect from an ace fighter pilot, well mannered, decisive, fearless.

If Noah ever had a daughter, Davenport would be his hope for her. Unfortunately, he imagined that she’d probably pick Lancaster. He was younger, less put together, more arrogant. He had an easy swagger, a carefree attitude, and considered himself something of a player. The type to have a woman in every port… or at every airfield… at least that’s what Noah imagined.

The third and final member of the crew, the one who’d started this whole mess, sat across from him—Gail Keats. Black hair, green eyes, and a body made for entrapment.

One month earlier, she’d sat down in the back of Noah’s class. He’d been teaching a class on early Indo-Aryan linguistics at Dartmouth. She’d been dressed like every other college girl, and yet… he should have seen her coming.

Her sweaters had always been a bit too tight, and her skirts, they had a habit of riding a little high up her thigh, nothing too distasteful, but enough to make her long porcelain legs seem even longer. She was whip smart, confident, and feminine. She asked pointed questions, she paid attention, she gave small teasing compliments. She was like no one he’d ever met, much less a student, and definitely not like his wife.

Awkward since birth, it had taken Noah a week just to make eye contact, but once he did, she never dropped it. Several times she stayed after class to continue discussions on topics that most other girls couldn’t pretend to care about. These discussions soon became full study sessions, and then finally research sessions—late nights in the library, talking and giggling as she helped him work on his research.

He’d married a wonderful woman who valued all of the things about him that he did not, and she seemed quite happy being a bookish professor’s wife. To Noah, she was his world, but if she was the world, then Gail had quickly become his moon. For she was clever and funny, and doting without ever being sentimental. She made him feel wanted. Wanted in a way that Evalyn never really had. After half a semester, Gail had him wound so tight around her pale fingers that he could not think straight.

And so, almost inevitably, they’d found themselves next to each other one night. The library’s dim yellow lights and the stale smelling stacks of books providing the sort of romantic ambience that only a bookish professor could ever fantasize about.

They’d been talking about something, he couldn’t remember what now, but he’d removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. And when he’d re-opened his eyes, he’d found hers closer, cat-green emeralds, gently staring back. Her mouth had hung slightly open, pink and wet and wanting… and then they’d kissed.

Her hands had found the edge of his shirt and slipped underneath, fingernails blazing new paths into his skin, and then, as if it was suddenly his idea, the academic in him, the overthinker, the analyzer… they all let go… and the man took over. And he had her, he had right there on top of the table. And when they were done, though he would not know it for another three days, his life was to remain fundamentally changed.

She did not show up to his class the next day, nor the day after that, and he found himself worried sick about her. First for her well-being, and then gradually, over the fact that he’d perhaps done something to offend her. That he’d overstepped somehow. The overthinker was back.

And through all of this, his wife never suspected a thing, and for some reason this made him hate her. She was a fool for not seeing it, no matter that it was he who’d made her one.

Three days later a man had come to see him. He had knocked politely on Noah’s office door. He wore a dark gray suit, and carried a leather brief case. Bushy gray brows hung heavy over a pair of piercing blue eyes.

“Please come in,” Noah said, motioning towards a chair on the other side of his mahogany desk. “How can I help you?”

The man sat, resting the briefcase across his knees. “I work for the United States of America. My name is Mr. Wolff.” The man spoke with a heavy German accent.

“Ok,” Noah said, a bit surprised.

“Your recent paper… I read that. We read that. Interesting stuff.”

“Which one exactly?” Noah asked, “I’ve published several in the last year.”

“Before Silence: An Argument for Ancient Inhabitation and Interplanetary War in Our Solar System.” The man rattled the title off as if he’d come up with it.

Noah grimaced, having been somewhat scared that this was the one the man had wanted to talk about. As the title suggested, it was about as close to career suicide as a linguistics professor could get without just straight up advocating for therapeutic psychedelic use in the Saturday Evening Post.

“We want you to work for us,” the man continued. “We have a special project coming up. It will be about one month of training, and then the project itself will last a week at most.”

“I… don’t think I can,” Noah stammered the words out. “I have my job. My wife.”

“By working for us you can keep both,” the man said, smiling. It was a wolfish smile, and the first since the man had entered. “Look… you are one of the best and brightest linguists working today. You are fluent in Ancient Sumerian, or at least as fluent as one can be in the oldest and deadest language known to man. You’re one of the few professors more interested in doing actual work… less interested in publishing Marxist drivel about earth mothers and peaceful savages. How long can a man like you last in these institutions?”

“I’m sorry,” Noah said. “I just can’t uproot my life.”

“Unfortunately,” the man said, “we thought you’d say that.” Gently, he unbuckled the briefcase and peered inside.

Noah watched him.

The man withdrew a sheet of paper and slid it over to him. “Now, one more time. This is a non-disclosure agreement,” the man continued. “You’ll sign it. And you’ll report to Wright Patterson AFB next Monday. And you won’t like my next offer.”

“But what is the special project?” Noah asked.

“You don’t get to know that,” the man said. “It’s a matter of national security.”

“But what about my wife… We can’t just pick up and leave and go to Ohio.”

“Of course you can,” the man said. “You’ll simply tell her that the University and the Air Force have partnered on a project, and you’ve been recruited for the whole affair on account of your specific set of skills. We have made arrangements for her to stay with you. At this point, all that is needed from you is your signature.”

“I won’t do it,” Noah replied. “And I don’t really see how you can force me to.” He was starting to feel bullied and he was not at all accustomed to being thrust into adventures.

The man pursed his lips and dipped his head again. He re-opened the brief case and withdrew several photographs. They were large, glossy, color photographs printed on 8x11. He tossed them somewhat flippantly onto the desk.

They were obnoxiously large photographs of Noah’s night in the library. It was rather jarring to see oneself flash frozen in pornographic time. The nature of memories and shame make memory of trysts like that somewhat malleable, and eventually, forgettable. But now his sin was memorialized forever. Yet one more death knell for romance, Noah thought, or would think eventually. Just then, he had been too stunned to respond, his mind racing in a thousand different directions.

“You are going,” the man stated flatly. “Or you’ll be going under physical duress and without a wife to go with you and without a career in academia to come back to.”

Reluctantly, Noah picked up the pen and scribbled his signature.

“Gail will meet you at the gate in Wright Patterson to escort you on.”

“So she wasn’t a student,” Noah asked.

“You really think a student would fuck you like that?” the man asked.

The vulgarity with which the man had said it sent shivers down Noah’s spine.

“I don’t… know,” Noah stammered.

The man chuckled and Noah suddenly realized how dogs must feel when you rub their nose into their accidents.

“You keep those for posterity’s sake,” the man said with a wink, motioning to the pictures. “We made copies.” He rose after that, and then pausing at the door, said, “you’ll be receiving a packet in the mail with instructions regarding your move. In a year and a half you can have your life back. Until then, you’re ours. Make the most of it.”

Two days later America had landed on the moon. He’d soon found out, during his very own space training, that it had all been faked, shot on a sound stage in Laurel Canyon. A psyop conducted by NASA, the propaganda arm of the Air Force’s space program. But the lie wasn’t that America had gone to the moon, it was that America hadn’t already been on the moon.

No, the real space mission was kept nowhere near NASA. It was, as Noah had come to find out, kept at Wright Patterson AFB and was two centuries ahead of the rest of the world.

The high-pitched whine turned into a scream as Davenport throttled down. Somewhat counterintuitively, the X-Bell made more noise when it slowed down then it did while speeding up. And even more counterintuitively, none of this speed, or velocity was transmitted to the crew via motion. That was mostly because they weren’t flying in the normal sense. They were sliding through space. There was no gravity, no thrust, no lift, no drag to worry about because space itself was bent around them. The repulsine engines themselves were only really called engines because it was too conceptually tedious to come up with something else to call them.

“This is it,” Davenport said, punching buttons on the ship’s dashboard.

Through the porthole windows that lined either side of the ship, Noah watched as inky blackness swirled past, then suddenly parted in time with the ship’s screaming. Noah clapped hands over his ears but it didn’t help. The sound was vibrational. Exiting subspace was supposed to be uncomfortable, but Noah had not been prepared for just how grating. Then as if a great black veil had been snatched away, stars blinked in the distance, billions of them, then momentarily blotted out as they passed through the shadow of a massive stellar body.

“Switching to manual flight,” Davenport called out.

“Roger,” Lancaster answered him.

Gail stood and straightened her suit. She smiled at Noah. “You ready cowboy?”

He gave a slight nod. The truth was he still had no idea why he was even here.

“The landing zone is 3000 clicks away,” Lancaster said. “Putting in the coordinates now.”

Gail motioned for Noah to follow her. “I’ll help you suit up. Come on.”

He followed her down the stairs to the lower level, the landing level. A terrified heat rose in his chest.

“You ok?” she asked, putting a hand on his arm. “You know I won’t let anything happen to you, right?”

Noah shrugged, and pushed her hand away.

“Noah, you know it was real right?” Gail said.

“It’s over,” Noah said. “You got me where you want me, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got to wallow in it like a pig in shit.”

She’d spent the last month making passes at him. He didn’t know what else to call it. Alternating between seduction, apology, and distress. Something about it had felt like an act, inhuman on one level, animal like on another. She was still beautiful, but the love he’d once felt, or thought he’d felt, had soured as soon as he’d found out it was all a ruse. He’d even surprised himself a little bit, finding a hidden dignity that had never been put to the test before.

He didn’t know why she still tried though. Whether she was being pressured from higher up to keep him strung along… carrot and stick sort of thing. Some sort of fucked up tradecraft to make sure he stayed compliant. Or whether she’d really developed some sort of feelings. He couldn’t say. Maybe she was just one of those women that only wanted what she couldn’t have, and so his sudden principles made him something of a white whale. Of course women like that were never happy when they finally harpooned their white whale, and the emotional butchery that followed was doomed to be more violent and torrid than a Nantucket sleigh ride

He opened the locker that held his space suit. “When do I get to know why I’m here.”

“Now, I guess,” Gail said. “That paper you wrote… Before Silence: An Argument for Ancient Inhabitation…” She snapped her fingers trying to remember the rest.

“…and Interplanetary War in Our Solar System,” Noah finished it for her. It was a bit rambly, he thought.

“You argued that nearly every planet in our solar system was once inhabited. That an intergalactic war had occurred millennia ago, and Earth was the only one left inhabitable.”

“What about it?” Noah replied.

“You were right,” Gail said, moving towards one of the port holes. “Look out there.”

Noah moved to the window, and watched as a massive rocky body slid into view. It reminded him of an asteroid, or at least what he imagined one looked like, but it seemed a bit too big.

“That is Ceres,” Gail said.

“Were in the asteroid belt?” Noah asked.

“That used to be a planet,” Gail said.

“You’ve already been here,” Noah said suddenly, finally having enough information to start piecing together scenarios.

“What makes you think that?” Gail said coyly, her voice almost a purr.

He wondered how long she’d been waiting to tell him this. To let him know what it was all about.

“You wouldn’t have brought me unless you’d already found something.”

“Took you a while,” Gail said. “But yes, we’ve already been here. Several times actually, but not in the way you think.”

Noah ignored the implications of that, and asked the question he was driving at, “What then? What did you find?”

“Ruins,” Gail said.

Noah’s heart skipped a beat.

“Ruins from a previous civilization,” Gail said. “What appears to be an ancient temple.”

“But how do you know all this if you’ve never been here?”

Gail turned and took two steps towards the far wall. She slid a piece of paneling back to reveal a large television set. The lower deck served as both briefing room, loading dock, and locker room. She opened a drawer next, and pulled out a magnetic cassette tape, this she slid into the tape-player beneath the TV. She hit the power button and the TV crackled to life, analog lines cutting across the black and white picture… static… and then the video steadied.

Gail turned the volume up.

In the video, a woman leaned backwards in some sort of recliner. Her head was shaved, and electrodes were taped onto her head, dozens of them.

Next to the woman, sat Ludolph von Wolff. It was the same man that had recruited him.

“Wolff was once the head a top secret occult research group Hitler stood up towards the end of the war,” Gail narrated. “When the war ended, we granted him asylum in exchange for his knowledge.”

Noah leaned forward and squinted at the woman on the TV, he suddenly asked, “Is that you?”

“Yes, that’s me,” Gail said flatly.

“What are you doing?”

“Just watch,” she said.

He watched as Dr. Wolff set something on her outstretched tongue.

“What was that?” Noah asked.

“Serum 44,” Gail said, brushing her hair back, “what you know as LSD.”

On the screen, Dr. Wolff handed her what appeared to be a 3x5 card. Gail took it. Read it. And then handed it back. Then she closed her eyes.

“Are you ready?” Dr. Wolff asked.

“I am,” Gail replied.

“Tell me what you see?”

“I see a mountain. It towers above everything else. I’m in a low point in the land… in a crater of some sort. Lots of ice. The dirt is gray.”

“Try moving,” Dr. Wolff directed. “Can you walk?”

“I think so,” Gail replied.

“Very good,” Dr. Wolff said. “See if you can do a 360 degree turn and tell me if you see anything unique.”

A long moment of silence followed, then Gail replied, “I see a cave… well not quite a cave. It’s an entrance of some sort. Like an underground bunker.”

“Can you get closer?”

“Yes,” Gail said. “I’m moving now.”

“Tell me when you’re there,” Dr. Wolff said.

“I’m going in,” Gail said. “It’s black. I can’t see anything. I need a flashlight.”

Noah watched as Dr. Wolff bent down and retrieved a flashlight from a small basket on the floor next to him. He set it in the incapacitated Gail’s hand. Her hand closed around it.

“How though?” Noah asked.

“It’s magic,” Gail said, snidely, then added, “It’s not of course. It involves quantum entanglement. But it might as well be.”

The tape continued.

“A long hall,” Gail said. “There is writing on the walls. I can’t make it out, but it looks ancient. Like some sort of cuneiform.”

“Where are you now?” Dr. Wolff asked.

“There is a door of some sort. Like a vault door. There’s a panel, with more of the writing. It could be instructions.”

“Can you open it?”

“No,” Gail replied. “It’s locked somehow, but I feel confident that if I could translate the words I’d know how to.”

“Can you transambulate?” Dr. Wolff asked.

“I can try,” she said. A long moment of silence followed, “Something is blocking me.”

“That’s ok,” Dr. Wolff coaxed.

Suddenly Gail sat straight up in the recliner and screamed. Then she collapsed backwards. Dr. Wolff stood over her, he was trying to shake her awake.

“She’s unresponsive,” Dr. Wolff shouted.

Gail cut the tape there. “Anyways, you get the idea.”

“What happened there… at the end?” Noah asked. A white hot chill swept his body. “Were you alright?”

“Never better,” Gail said, and winked. “Now suit up, we should be landing any minute.”

They exited the X-Bell in the shadow of Ahuna Mons. It was the largest mountain on the tiny dwarf planet. Shiny silver streaks ran up and down it’s sides, almost flickering as the light from the sun hit it.

“It’s cryovolcanic,” Gail said, her voice sounding a bit tinny over the spacesuit’s communication system.

“What does that even mean?” Noah said somewhat irritably.

“It erupts gases,” Gail said. “Water, ammonia, hydrocarbons. Those silver streaks are likely salt and ice deposits.”

With that, she bounded forward in a slow arcing jump that deposited her several meters ahead. Noah followed while Davenport and Lancaster brought along the rear, each of them carrying one end of a large tool tote. On earth it would weigh 500 lbs. but on Ceres the tub felt like 15 lbs. or so.

The entrance to the bunker was a black pit on the edge of the crater.

“Does it look the same?” Noah asked, thinking back to the video. He found it uncanny how close it looked to the description she’d given.

Again the white hot chill swept his body as they neared the black maw of an entrance. It was the kind of chill one felt when someone suggested playing with a Ouija board or recommended having their fortunes read. That sense that certain things were left undone and better left undisturbed.

Noah clicked the headlamp built into the side of his helmet. It was clear now that the cave was not a cave, but some sort of structure. Thick angular slabs of rock or concrete framed the dark entrance, stairs leading downward into the spider black heart of the dwarf planet.

They waited for Davenport and Lancaster to catch up, watching as they awkwardly wrangled the chest of tools through low gravity.

“You said you thought this was a temple of some sort earlier,” Noah said. “What do you expect to find?”

“We’re looking for our origins,” Gail said. “The beginning of humanity. The truth about God. You name it.”

“I wasn’t aware the Air Force was so concerned with archeology,” Noah said.

“It’s an exploratory mission,” Gail said, “not everything has to be about war.”

Davenport and Lancaster came flying in hard and almost sent the tools tumbling down the staircase. “Overshot that one a bit,” Davenport said, straightening.

“Come on,” Gail said, leading off.

Noah followed, ice and dust crunching underfoot.

They descended for what seemed like an eternity. The staircase curving down in wide circles. The smooth rock walls guiding them downwards via corkscrew. It was hypnotic in a way. For one could only see so far around the next bend in the stairs, and when one reached it, another blind spot lay just ahead. The only light was from their headlamps. Down and down they went, until Noah’s legs felt shaky, his breathing heavy, and his muscles felt on fire.

So far he’d seen no sign of any cuneiform writing. Just smooth stone walls, as if laser cut.

Once, he turned back around and looked up the steps, but the light from his headlamp only made it a little ways up the staircase before being defeated by the darkness. He could not see any dot of light that could be construed as the entrance. Not finding that dot of light gave him vertigo. He felt clammy and hot and then the suit was beeping at him to slow his breathing.

“You ok, Dr. Fischer?” Davenport asked. He felt a hand close around his elbow, as the pilot helped him straighten up.

“Yeah, I’m good,” Noah said.

At the bottom, it was another hour of walking before they found the first bit of cuneiform writing on the wall. The heads-up display in the top corner of his helmet said they’d walked approximately five miles since leaving the ship. He’d already cycled through his oxygen supply four times, and was rebreathing, the suits carbon extractors working overtime.

“Well?” Gail asked.

Noah lifted a hand to the stone etchings, and ran his fingers over the symbols. “It’s Sumerian,” Noah said. “Or at least uses many of the same symbols.”

“What does it say then?” Gail hissed through the mic.

“Cuneiform is logo-syllabic, meaning some symbols stand for whole words or ideas, while others represent sound or syllables. Without more context, I’m not sure, and half of these logograms I’ve never seen.”

“What about the ones you have seen?” Gail said.

“Death and Queen. Those are the only words I can make out. And that’s what they meant on earth over six thousand years ago. Out here, who knows if they had the same meaning.”

“They do,” Gail said, as if privy to some information he was not. “Count on it.”

A bit further and he heard Gail give a sharp gasp. She froze. Two steps further and Noah realized why, the tunnel dropped off, a deep shaft having opened up in the middle of their path. The gap was about twenty foot wide, with the tunnel continuing on the other side. How deep it was, he couldn’t tell because the blackness swallowed up all of the light from their headlamps.

“We can jump it,” Gail said.

“Are you—”

“—Easy jump,” Davenport said, and then without missing a beat hurled himself across the chasm.

Noah watched as Davenport somewhat effortlessly floated across the canyon. Noah had still not yet fully adjusted to what was physically possible in a low gravity environment. Gail jumped next, not even bothering with a running start. And then went Lancaster, towing the tub of tools along behind him.

“Come on, Noah” Gail said. “We have got to get going.”

Gingerly, Noah took a step forward, gulped hard, and then sprinted towards the edge of the gap. But just as he pushed off, he felt something slip beneath his boot and he lost traction just as he pushed off. Tripping over the edge, he somersaulted headfirst into the chasm.

It was the curse of the overthinker, he thought, even as he gently spun downwards, any opportunity to use his body or his muscles typically ended like this, in some sort of clumsy disaster, his mind failing to get out of his body’s way.

The next few seconds were a mass of awkward tumbling through space. Then finally, he slammed bodily into the far wall of the chasm, lashed out desperately to try and catch the edge, again failed to perform athletically, failed to catch a hold of the ledge he’d lashed out for, and once more started falling down the black well.

He fell for what seemed like an eternity, somewhat exasperated by the slow motion nature of his death.

At last he landed, flat on his back, a bit stunned by the softness of the landing.

“Noah”—hiss—“ok”—hiss—“come in.” The comms were broken up something awful and Gail’s voice sounded even more tinny and distant than usual. The rock walls of the planet were making a mess of their radio signals.

Slowly, he picked himself up. His head lamps sputtered, and he gave them a strong slap to steady them out.

He’d landed on a floor of some sort, almost perfectly flat and marble smooth. Intricate designs were laid into the floor, of birds and fish, and animals he’d never seen before.

Slowly, he turned around and around, finding himself in some sort of enormous chamber. The light from his headlamp reflecting off of intricately carved pillars that traveled upwards. Millenia of dust covered the floors. And then he saw it, a massive statue of a dragon. The figure coiled upwards out of the floor, its base ten or twenty yards across. At the top of the statue, the serpent’s body split into two heads. Forked tongues hung from heavily fanged mouthes. But the eyes, they were the most mesmerizing. They glowed red, almost as if they were alive.

He gasped in awe and fear.

“Hello,” came a voice from the dark.

Noah whirled even as his stomach dropped out of him. With some surprise, he found her the source of the greeting—Gail. She stood right there behind him. But it was Gail minus her space suit. Minus any clothes at all in fact. Her pale naked form alabaster in the glow from his headlamp.

“Gail?” Noah said, hesitantly. “Where is your suit?”

“Who are you?” she asked. “Do you know me?”

“It’s me?” Noah said. “Noah.”

She walked towards him confidently, hips swaying from side to side, as if she was totally unaware that she was naked. She stopped just in front of him. And then slowly, without knowing why he did so, he lifted a hand to touch her. But as he did so, his hand passed right through her.

“A ghost? A mirage?” he whispered.

“We don’t have much time,” Gail said. “You have to listen to me.”

“I was just with Gail, and she had a space suit… and a body…” Noah stammered the words out.

“That’s not Gail,” the spirit replied, and then lifting her eyes towards the statue, she said, “it’s her.”

“Its who?” Noah asked, turning to glance at the twin-headed serpent behind him.

“Something far older and far more evil than you could imagine. She’s been trapped here for thousands of years. Disembodied… imprisoned.”

“What are you talking about?” Noah asked, taking a step forward.

“She stole my body when I was remote viewing this place. Locked me out of my own body. Can you believe it.”

“So you and I never made love?” Noah asked.

“No, what?” the spirit asked.

“Oh God,” Noah cried, “Oh God, what a mess. What the fuck is it?” he reached out to grab her by the shoulders, but his hands slipped right through.

“She’s chaos. The god of it. The mother of monsters. She’s been called many things, but to us on earth, she’s known as Tiamat.”

Noah’s jaw dropped and he felt like he was about to blackout. “Tiamat, the ancient Sumerian goddess. The one Marduk supposedly slew.”

“You have to stop her,” Gail said.

“From what?”

“We were looking for a weapon,” Gail said. “Whatever shattered this planet, or swept away the atmosphere on Mars, the Air Force wanted it.”

“What does the Air Force want with planet killing weapons?” Noah asked. “Gail… or Tiamat… She said this was an expedition to find humanity’s origins.”

“She lied,” Gail said. “The Soviets have already set up a secret colony on Mars. We weren’t the only ones who got their hands on Germany’s scientists. Besides, we don’t know what else is out there. For all we know there’s a whole universe of warmongering empires that haven’t destroyed and enslaved us purely out of the dumb luck fact that they don’t know we exist. But we’ve escaped our planet, and it’s only a matter of time before we meet them.”

“Is there then?” Noah asked. “Is there warmongering empires we should be worried about?”

“That’s classified,” Gail said.

“Ok, but I still don’t get how you switched bodies?”

“When I was remote viewing this place, she found me. She’d been locked off from the physical world. Banished here by the ancients somehow. Trapped on this rocky planet,” Gail said. “I gave her a way back into the physical. I created a door. And she locked me out behind her.”

“So why would she come back here?” Noah asked. “She had your body, she’d escaped?”

“I think,” Gail paused. “I think she needs something. I think whatever was holding her here was magic, or a curse, or something. That or she wants the weapon. I think she wants to kill earth. Wipe all life in the solar system out for good.”

“But you don’t know that,” Noah said.

“I don’t need to,” Gail said. “I’ve explored this place. The murals tell the story, Noah. She’s no good.”

“Ok, and what do you want me to do?” Noah asked.

“Follow me,” Gail said.

The atrium was dominated by a massive altar standing in the center. Five pairs of steps led up to the platform, laid out like the points on a star. Cuneiform script glowed around the altar’s bottom. Three basins were carved into the floor just in front of the altar.

Above the cylindrical altar floated a red cube. It glowed, pulsing with energy. The writing on its surface unreadable from this distance.

“That’s the weapon?” Noah asked. “What does it even do.”

“I think so,” Gail said, pointing to the walls around them. “We didn’t really know what was here, or what we were looking for.”

They were dominated by large colorful murals, one showing a large figure wielding a mace against a dragon, and another showing the figure using it to shatter a planet.

“Now what?” Noah asked.

“You have to get the cube back to the ship,” Gail said. “Leave with it before the others can get down here, before she can get down here.”

“What about Davenport and Lancaster. I can’t fly the ship by myself. What about you?” That last question took him off gaurd.

“Don’t worry about them… don’t worry about any of us,” Gail said. “The ship has a return home function. Hit the bright purple button that says Auto, and it will do everything for you.”

Noah stepped nervously forward, towards the floating cube.

“Stop!” The voice came in loud and clear over his headset. Across from him, having entered on the other side of the room, stood the embodied Gail, Davenport, and Lancaster.

Gail had her sidearm leveled at him. It was special-made for the low-g atmosphere and used rocket propelled ammo. They all had one, except him, even though he’d been trained how to use it should any contingencies arise.

She walked up the steps towards him.

“That’s not Gail,” Noah said, locking eyes with Davenport. “That’s Tiamat.”

The thing that was wearing Gail for a skinsuit stopped suddenly, and smiled wide as if thrilled to hear her real name spoken.

“You’ve cracked, Noah,” Davenport said. “We’re here to take you back to the ship.”

“That weapon,” Noah said. “Do you know why she wants it?”

“Noah, calm down,” Lancaster said, pulling his own sidearm.

Noah glanced around for guidance, but Gail’s ghost was gone. For a moment he faltered, thinking that perhaps the stress of the fall had caused him to hallucinate her.

Then, two gunshots—Tiamat’s gun spit flame.

Noah crouched, clinching his eyes shut as he did so… bracing himself for the impact… ready to bleed out… but no such thing happened.

Slowly, he opened his eyes. Before him, he found Gail, or Tiamat, circling the bodies of Davenport and Lancaster. They lay still.

“You killed them?” Noah asked. “But why?”

“Because I need them,” Tiamat hissed, her voice raspy now, and forceful. Otherworldly.

“I need the hearts of men,” Tiamat said. “I am the dragon. I am Chaos. Men caged me here, and men will set me free. Their blood bound my corporeal form within the cube. Their blood will give it back to me.”

She bent and grabbed Davenport and Lancaster by their collars, then dragged both men up towards the altar.

Without missing a beat, she flicked open a knife and cut open the pilot’s suit. Then she started on his chest cavity, cutting him wide open from stern to stem. She reached into the steaming chest cavity and pulled out his steaming heart. Then unceremoniously, she plopped it into one of the basins. Without missing a beat, she started on the second body.

Three basins, two hearts. Noah had just started doing the math when movement caught his eye from across the room. Gail’s ghost had reappeared, she stood at the far entrance and waved for him to follow.

He bolted for the far exit, took several steps, and somehow, when he’d needed it most, his body had not betrayed him. He was half way across the room before Tiamat realized he was on the run.

He’d just turned the corner out of the atrium when he heard the bark of her pistol and the zing of the slugs as they ricocheted off Ceres’ rock walls.

The X-Bells doors opened with a hiss. Noah flew up the ramp into the space ship and hammered the button to close the door. His spacesuit was screaming at him to stop running, the rebreather failing to keep up.

As he waited for the doors to close he could see Tiamat in the distance. She was jumping towards him, taking long arcing bounds towards the ship.

And then finally, the doors closed. Noah hit the release on his helmet, and gasped for new air.

“Now turn the red lever to manually lock,” Gail commanded. Her ghostly visage still accompanying him.

Noah turned the lever, just as he heard a tremendous thud on the outside of the ship.

“She’s here,” Noah muttered.

“You locked her out,” Gail said. “You’re good. Now go to the helm, and hit the purple button.”

Noah hurried to the front of the ship.

The pounding on the door had subsided, and now, it was eerily quiet. Noah held his hand out over the button, and let it hover there. “Wait,” he said, “what about you?”

“Who cares about me,” Gail said. “Just go.”

“I can’t,” Noah said suddenly. “You need your body back. You’ve helped me too much.”

“This is all of earth we are talking about,” Gail said. “If she gets ahold of your heart, this show is over. She gets her body back. She becomes the dragon. Besides, I can ride along. Better to end up a ghost on earth than here.”

“You’re right,” Noah said, and with that he slapped the purple button. The X-Bells engines whined, and the whole thing began to hover and wobble as it prepared to return to base.

But it was just as they slipped into the inky blackness of hyperspace that he saw her. There, in the door way behind them, stood Tiamat.

“But how?” Noah asked, the words falling out of him.

“You forgot about the weapons bay,” Tiamat said, taking off her helmet. She tossed it casually aside. In her other hand was the pistol. She lifted it, aimed, and then pulled the trigger.

CLICK.

She started laughing maniacally. “Oops, I guess I’m out.”

Noah just stood there, rooted to the floor, in disbelief at her appearance, and at the fact that he was still alive.

“You’ve got to fight her, Noah,” Gail said.

Tiamat stopped laughing. “Shut up you stupid bitch.” Then she pulled the knife from its sheath on her boot and charged Noah.

Noah twisted to the side, spinning one of the pilot chair’s into her hand, disrupting the thrust enough for her to miss.

She countered with a big swiping arc towards his head, and he fell backwards against the control panel. She slashed away at him, and he scrambled sideways, trying to regain his balance.

Then she caught him with a lucky overhand stab. The knife sank into his arm, right into his shoulder, but just as he was twisting away.

He took a long beat, staring somewhat confusedly at the knife sticking out of his shoulder. Finally realizing that he’d managed to wrench it free from her hand when he’d twisted away.

He grasped it, pulled it free, his own hot blood streaming down his arm, and he charged her back, swinging the knife like he’d been born to it.

She sidestepped, then twisted, caught his arm, and then wrenched his whole body downward with a wrist-lock.

He dropped the knife, and it clattered across the floor.

She let up on the wrist lock in an attempt to bring a knee into his face, but it wasn’t enough. He tore his arm free, and just like that night in the library, the academic let go, and the man took over. He picked her up in a great big bear hug, lifting all 120 lbs. of her off the ground, and then he drove forward as hard as he could, gaining tremendous speed before smashing her into the far wall of the cockpit.

A crunch, and then she went limp in his arms. He dropped her, and gasped for air, his hands on his knees. When he’d finally managed to catch his breath, he looked down at Gail’s limp body.

“Oh no,” Noah said. He held two fingers to her neck in search of a pulse.

A faint beat. She was still alive, but unconscious.

Gail’s ghost sidled up next to him. “You need to get her sedated. She’s only as powerful as her human shell.”

“The med kit,” Noah said, without missing a beat. He snatched an emergency case off the wall, and then opened it up. Gail helped him find the right syringes.

Tiamat was just starting to wake.

“Hurry,” Gail said.

Quickly, Noah drew sedative out of the small glass vial, tapped the side of the syringe, and then purged air from the needle.

Tiamat started to rise, but was still trying to place her surroundings.

Noah plunged the syringe into her neck and injected the sedatives. They seemed to hit her almost instantly, and she slipped back under, sliding back down the wall into a pile.

“How long?” Noah asked.

“Should keep her until we land,” Gail said.

“How do we get you back in your body?” Noah asked.

Gail pursed her lips. “Dr. Wolff should know.”

Noah walked towards the helm… watched as the inky blackness slipped over the viewscreens… it looked like they were flying through oil.

About One Year Later

Noah sat in his office, feet on his desk, a cigarette burning between two fingers. There was snow on the bushes outside, and the sky was gloomy and moody—a gray Connecticut day. He was no longer at Dartmouth. Instead he’d taken a position at Yale. A few calls from Dr. Wolff and his ilk and he hadn’t even had to interview.

He looked at his hand, now free of his wedding band. Not even a band of white from the tan lines remained. He was a bachelor now, having screwed up maybe the only thing in his life that he’d ever done right. He’d confessed the affair almost as soon as he’d gotten back home. He left out the part about it being with an embodied eldritch god. She’d left that night, crying something awful. There’d been the usual stages of grief then. There was an attempt to make it work, then more anger, then marriage counseling, sadness, and then finally the divorce papers. And then the body was in the ground, the marriage contract torn up, and he resigned himself to a life of lonely academic study.

He eyed the dumbbells in the corner of the room, next to the weight lifting shoes. A new habit he’d taken up. He woke up with nightmares about Ceres, and most of them revolved around his inability to defend himself. That he’d survived was mostly due to Gail’s clever maneuvering and dumb luck.

And what of Gail? The question that hung ever present in his mind. They’d shuffled him off the base and away from the Air Force and into Yale the day after their ship landed, and they’d not communicated with—

A soft knock on the door frame.

Noah glanced up to find Gail Keats—in the body—standing there. He stood, his face no doubt showing his confusion.

“Hi, Noah,” she said softly.

“Gail?”

“It’s me,” she said. She entered, pushing a stroller in front of her, and then gently closed the door behind her. She sat down, flattening her pencil skirt as she did so.

“They got you back?” Noah asked. “I was worried about you. I was wondering about you. And this…” he motioned towards the stroller. “You had a baby?”

“Noah,” she said. “We can’t stay long. I’m not even supposed to be here.”

“What is it?”

“Dr. Wolff helped me swap back into my body.”

“And what about Tiamat?” Noah asked.

“Noah, I’m scared.” She stood up then, and pulled out the baby. “This is our daughter.”

Noah felt the blood drain from his face. He took two hesitant steps backwards and then fell backwards into his seat. “But how?” he finally muttered.

“When you slept with her… me… her with my body,” Gail said. “You got me pregnant. It pregnant.”

Noah was up then. “Let me see her?”

Slowly, Gail handed the baby over to him. Noah took her.

With two gentle fingers, he pulled down the blanket to reveal a round, cherubic face and a button nose and tiny hands. The little girl’s eyes though. There was something wrong with them. There was no Iris. As if it was all pupil. Just inky blackness the color of subspace.

“I think when I took my body back, Tiamat found another….” Gail offered slowly.

“So this is Tiamat,” Noah said.

Gail gulped and nodded.

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The above edition includes both Gone to Texas & The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales. This review will cover both. Most have likely seen the Clint Eastwood adaptation by the name of The Outlaw Josey Wales. The movie adapts Gone to Texas and follows it quite faithfully for the most part, even adding a bit of connective tissue into the plot, something that works quite well for the movie.

Regardless, the first novel follows our titular character, Josey Wales on his escape from Missouri and into Texas at the end of the Civil War. Wales is a Missouri bushwhacker, one of the famed pistol men that rode with Bloody Bill Anderson and waged guerrilla war on the Union Army.

As Carter puts it in the preface:

Missouri is called the “Mother of Outlaws.” She acquired her title in the aftermath of the Civil War, when bitter men who had fought without benefit of rules in the Border War (a war within a War) could find no place for themselves in a society of old enmities and Reconstruction government. They rode and lived aimlessly, in the vicious circle of reprisal, robbery, and shoot-out that led to nowhere. The Cause was gone, and all that remained was personal feud, retribution … and survival. Many of them drifted to Texas.

If Missouri was the Mother, then Texas was the Father … the refuge, with boundless terrain and bloody frontier, where a proficient pistolman could find reason for existence and room to ride. The initials “GTT,” hurriedly carved on the doorpost of a Southern shack, was message enough to relatives and friends that the carver was in “law trouble,” and Gone To Texas.

In those days they weren’t called “gunfighters”; that came in the 1880’s from the dime noveleers. They were called “pistolmen,” and they referred to their weapon as a “pistol,” or by the make … a “Colts’ .44.” The Missouri guerrilla was the first expert pistolman. According to U.S. Army dispatches, the guerrillas used this “new” war weapon with devastating results.

This is the story of one of those outlaws.

The outlaws … and the Indians … are real … they lived; lived in a time when the meaning of “good” or “bad” depended mostly on the jasper who was saying it. There were too many wrongs mixed in with what we thought were the “rights”; so we shall not try to judge them here … but simply, to the best of our ability, to “tell it like it is” … or was.

The men … white and red … and the times that produced them … and how they lived it out … to finish the course.

Carter, Forrest; Clayton, Lawrence. Josey Wales: Two Westerns (p. 5). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I think you can see from the bit above, that Carter has a fantastic way with words—a singular and masculine voice. The earnestness and vitality with which he writes remind me of Robert E. Howard, someone who, I would imagine, would have absolutely adored both Carter’s novels and the Eastwood movie.

Carter also has a charming prose tic, in that he is not afraid to use exclamation points. Where Elmore Leonard famously cautioned against using more than one per novel, Carter sprinkles them throughout. And while I tend to side with Leonard in my own writing, the exclamation point serves Carter well! I think most of us tend to read sentences capped by an exclamation point with a somewhat feminine rise in pitch. A sort of giddy or placating falsetto. But with Carter, his prose is already so hardy and broad-chested, it’s almost impossible to read his exclamatory sentences with anything other than a forceful bass. I have since dubbed this as: “say it with your chest” prose.

An example:

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 was the Code of the “Boys,” the Missouri guerrillas that shocked a nation.

Carter, Forrest; Clayton, Lawrence. Josey Wales: Two Westerns (p. 214). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Prosody and punctuation aside, Gone to Texas is something of a literary western. The movie turns the novel into something more akin to a revenge thriller by adding Terrill’s Gatling Gun Massacre at the beginning and then sending one of Wale’s former mates, Fletcher, after him at the behest of Senator Lane and Captain Terrill.

Not so in the novel, which is primarily character driven, and much less concerned with any sort of complex story structure or plot. Things happen of course, such as gunfights and rapes and scrapes, but it is much less plotted than the average “stranger comes to town” western. In this way it reads more like an autobiography or a memoir of sorts, something that would be at home if shelved next to The Life Of John Wesley Hardin by Himself. And I get the sense that Carter was trying to evoke this sort of realism with his novel. One can tell that he was steeped in the history of the West and the Civil War, and I would imagine that he’d read many the gunfighter memoir.

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With all of that said, there is a plot, a simple one, which could very loosely be described as bad-ass gunfighter goes on a journey while collecting a wacky and oft-bumbling cast of sidekicks. In this way, it’s a little bit Don Quixote if the Don was an actual Knight, even if a deeply jaded one. I didn’t really pick up on this being the plot formula until I read the second novel, which literally does the exact same thing. Wales is a bushwhacking, tobacco-spitting, Colts .44 wielding, Scots-Irish hillbilly, who becomes something of a recalcitrant knight-errant.

While Wales is chivalric to women and horses, he is downright homeric when dealing with his enemies. He is a man who wages war with the two primary tools of the guerrilla: guile and ultra-violence.

Josey Wales had “taken to the brush,” and there he found others. They were guerrilla veterans, these young farmers, by the time the War between the States began. The formalities of governments in conflict only meant an occupying army that drove them deeper into the brush. They already had their War. It was not a formal conflict with rules and courtesy, battles that began and ended … and rest behind the lines. There were no lines. There were no rules. Theirs was a war to the knife, of burned barn and ravaged countryside, of looted home and outraged womenfolk. It was a blood feud. The Black Flag became a flag of honorable warning: “We ask no quarter, we give none.” And they didn’t.

When Union General Ewing issued General Order Eleven to arrest the womenfolk, to burn the homes, to depopulate the Missouri counties along the Border of Kansas, the guerrilla ranks swelled with more riders. Quantrill, Bloody Bill Anderson, whose sister was killed in a Union prison, George Todd, Dave Pool, Fletcher Taylor, Josey Wales; the names grew in infamy in Kansas and Union territory, but they were the “boys” to the folks.

Union raiders launching the infamous “Night of Blood” in Clay County bombed a farmhouse that tore off the arm of a mother, killed her young son, and sent two more sons to the ranks of the guerrillas. They were Frank and Jesse James.

Revolvers were their weapons. They were the first to perfect pistol work. With reins in teeth, a Colts’ pistol in each hand, their charges were a fury in suicidal mania. Where they struck became names in bloody history. Lawrence, Centralia, Fayette, and Pea Ridge. In 1862 Union General Halleck issued General Order Two: “Exterminate the guerrillas of Missouri; shoot them down like animals, hang all prisoners.” And so it was like animals they became, hunted, turning viciously to strike their adversaries when it was to their advantage. Jennison’s Redlegs sacked and burned Dayton, Missouri, and the “boys” retaliated by burning Aubry, Kansas, to the ground, fighting Union patrols all the way back to the Missouri mountains. They slept in their saddles or rolled up under bushes with reins in their hands. With muffled horses’ hooves, they would slip through Union lines to cross the Indian Nations on their way to Texas to lick their wounds and regroup. But always they came back.

As the tide of the Confederacy ebbed toward defeat, the blue uniforms multiplied along the Border. The ranks of the “boys” began to thin. On October 26, 1864, Bloody Bill died with two smoking pistols in his hands. Hop Wood, George Todd, Noah Webster, Frank Shepard, Bill Quantrill … the list grew longer … the ranks thinner. The peace was signed at Appomattox, and word began to filter into the brush that amnesty-pardons were to be granted to the guerrillas.

Carter, Forrest; Clayton, Lawrence. Josey Wales: Two Westerns (pp. 10-11). (Function). Kindle Edition.

As I am sure you can tell by this point, Carter is not afraid of exposition. I think these are really great examples of what exposition looks like when it is done well. I also think it gives Carter’s novel a very idiosyncratic feel. It also helps keep the reader contextually aware of the history going on around him. I can also see the argument against it, and why it would rub many readers the wrong way. Ultimately, I’m a fan of the style, and can’t say that I’ve ever seen it implemented all that often. It’s a tad Michael Crichton-esque in a way. I do think young men, who are typically more oriented towards non-fiction tend to be more interested in these types of history and science asides than the fairer sex. I think that’s something to remember for those looking to write fiction for men, it’s ok to break the “show don’t tell” rule every once in a while and get a little autistic with it.

However, lest you get the wrong idea, it works because he also knows how to execute a scene. He is quite good at atmosphere, writes really great action, and is quite the technician with regards to dialogue, as you’ll see in the bit below.

“Josey Wales,” he breathed … and then chortled, “Josey Wales, by God! Five thousand gold simoleons walkin’ right in. Mr. Chain Blue Lightening hisself, that ever’body’s so scairt of. Well now, Mr. Lightening, you move a hair, twitch a finger … and I’ll splatter yore guts agin the wall. Come over here, Yoke,” he called aside to his partner.

Yoke shuffled forward, loosing the Indian woman. Zukie was terrified as he looked from Al to Josey. The outlaw was staring steadily into the eyes of Al … he hadn’t moved. Confidence began to return to Zukie.

“Now look, Al,” Zukie whined, “the man is in my place. I recognized him, and I’m due a even split. I … ”

“Shet up,” Al said viciously, without taking his eyes from Josey, “shet up, you goddamned nanny goat. I’m the one that got ’em.”

Al was growing nervous from the strain. “Now,’’ he said testily, “when I tell you to move, Mr. Lightening, you move slow, like ’lasses in the wintertime, or I drop the hammer. You ease yore hands down, take them guns out, butt first, and hold ’em out so Yoke can git ’em. You understand? Nod, damn you.”

Josey nodded his head.

“Now,” Al instructed, “ease the pistols out.”

With painful slowness Josey pulled the Colts and extended them butt first toward Yoke. A finger of each hand was in the trigger guard. Yoke stepped forward and reached for the proffered handles. His hands were almost on the butts of the pistols when they spun on the fingers of Josey with the slightest flick of his wrists. As if by magic the pistols were reversed, barrels pointing at Al and Yoke … but Al never saw it.

The big right-hand .44 exploded with an ear splitting roar that lifted Al from the floor and arched his body backward. Yoke was dumbfounded. A full second ticked by before he clawed for the pistol at his hip. He knew he was making a futile effort, but he read death in the black eyes of Josey Wales. The left-hand Colt boomed, and the top of Yoke’s head … and most of his brains … were splattered against a post.

“My God!” Zukie screamed. “My God!” And he sank sobbing to the floor. He had witnessed the pistol spin. A few years later the Texas gunfighter John Wesley Hardin would execute the same trick to disarm Wild Bill Hickok in Abilene. It would become known in the West as the “Border Roll,” in honor of the Missouri Border pistol fighters who had invented it … but few would dare practice it, for it required a master pistoleer.

Acrid blue smoke filled the room. The Indian woman had not moved, nor did she now, but her eyes followed Josey Wales.

Carter, Forrest; Clayton, Lawrence. Josey Wales: Two Westerns (pp. 63-65). (Function). Kindle Edition.

If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll recognize the scene above. In that sense, the movie follows the novel very closely, lifting conversations and scenes whole cloth. The same black humor that soaks the movie, originates in the book. Many parts being laugh out loud.

Her movements woke Josey before dawn, and he smelled cooking but saw no fire. Little Moonlight had dragged a hollow log close to them, carved a hole in its side, and placed a black pot over a captive, hidden fire.

Lone was already eating. “I’m gonna take up tepee livin’ … if it’s like this,” he grinned. And as Josey stepped to feed the horses Lone said, “She’s already grained ’em … and watered ’em … and rubbed ’em down … and cinched the saddles. Might as well set yore bottom down like a chief and eat.”

Josey took a bowl from her and sat cross-legged by the log. “I see the Cherokee Chief is already eatin’,” he said.

“Cherokee Chiefs have big appetites,” Lone grinned, belched, and stretched. The hound growled at the movement … he was chewing on a mangled rabbit. Josey watched the dog as he ate.

“I see ol’ hound gits his own,” he said. “Rec’lects me of a red-bone we had back home in Tennessee. I went with Pa to tradin’. They had pretty blue ticks, julys, and sich, but Pa, he paid fifty cent and a jug o’ white fer a old red-bone that had a broke tail, one eye out, and half a ear bit off. I ast Pa why, and he said minute he saw that ol’ hound, he knowed he had sand … thet he’d been there and knowed what it was all about … made

Carter, Forrest; Clayton, Lawrence. Josey Wales: Two Westerns (pp. 72-73). (Function). Kindle Edition.

Regardless, as you’ve likely gathered, by the time Josey leaves Missouri, and travels through the Indian Territory he has collected an old Cherokee Indian and a squaw that was put out of her tribe for being a “whore.” In Texas, the party will only grow, as they dodge Union Soldiers, bounty hunters, and Comancheros, until Josey is leading a quite comical band of misfits into the heart of Comanche territory.

After a brush with Comanches, and a peace treaty forged out of “words of iron,” the party can at last find peace, settling in what I can only assume is Palo Duro Canyon by the way it is described. Josey takes on a new identity, and the town folk of Santa Rio (that he helps against the Indians) cover for him when the Law and the Army come looking for him. Thus ends Gone to Texas.

The Vengeance Trail of Josey Wales is much the same book as the first, in that it repeats the recipe, but with a completely new cast of assorted characters. In this book, Mexican Bandits ride over the border and raid the small town of Santa Rio. These bandits very cruelly and brutally slaughter his friends from the first book, murdering Kelly, brutally r*ping and killing Rose the saloon girl, and abducting Ten Spot the gambler in order to sell him as a slave across the border.

Rose, with her dying breath, sends Pablo Gonzales to go find Josey so that he may rescue Ten Spot and avenge herself and Kelly. Thus begins Josey’s new odyssey, one that will see him collect a new cast of noble but bumbling characters who assist his one man army. Josey thus pursues the bandits, who’ve also pissed off a band of Apaches, rescues Ten Spot and wipes them out.

Now, fair warning with regards to this second book. It takes everything that the first did and knocks it up about ten notches. It also includes two very graphic r*pe scenes, and a fair amount of Apache bad-assery. While the first novel is R rated, the second is probably a solid NC-17. Not for the faint of heart, and perhaps the most Heavy Metal western I’ve ever read.

Five Bloody Scalps out of Five

Both novels are a must read for the western connoisseur, the first especially. The second is a hard read just due to its graphicness, but I can’t say it would be better with any of that toned down. I think Carter was very much in his own league and was doing something with the western as a genre that very few people have ever really matched or expanded upon.

Of course, what that blurb leaves out is that the desert school is quite literally a hippie commune full of deformed leftist freaks and very attractive white women. In between blanket weaving, poetry slams, and improv they all talk about how evil the traditional, white townspeople are and how peace and love and “just following your passion, man,” would make the world a paradise.

Now, I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that this was liberal/hippie/boomer core. And seeing that it was made in 1971, I knew it was going to be a little libtarded. I did not expect it to be just straight up gay race marxist propaganda. I’m also watching this four days after a leftist terrorist assassinated Charlie Kirk so maybe it struck home a bit harder.

Anyways, this essay is not really about the movie’s politics, we are all well acquainted, having lived under the thumb of these types for the last ten years. What I’d like to discuss is what made it so effective. The left honestly kind of forgot how good it was at propaganda. Because they really don’t make them like this anymore. As a writer, it’s pretty interesting to reverse engineer a weapons grade mind virus.

The opening of the movie begins with a group of cowboys herding wild mustangs into a pen, and then getting ready to shoot them so that they can be sold to a dog food company for 6 cents a lb.

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The line in question and context is below:

With all that said, this essay isn’t really about Bond, but rather, what is downstream of this type of discourse. There is a lot of talk at any given moment about “taking back men’s fiction” or “making fiction that men and boys would want to read” that amounts to a whole lot of pablum. It is well intentioned, but nearly as harmful as the cultural trends its frantically trying to correct. And that is because 99% of the people involved have been almost permanently and irreparably mind-raped by the idea of “toxic masculinity.” We are all caught in the grips of this term in ways that we don’t even recognize. There is this idea that masculinity would be good if we could take all the little toxic bits out, when the truth is, all the toxic bits are what make masculinity capable of doing good in the first place. Taking the “toxic” out is a little bit like taking the alcohol out of beer. Sure, it tastes like beer, but its capacity to either relax you or fuck you up is completely gone.

According to Webster’s Dictionary, masculinity is the quality or nature of the male sex: the quality, state, or degree of being masculine. In other words, it is a biological reality modulated primarily by the sex hormone testosterone. It is not a philosophy, not aspirational, nor can it be toxic, nor can it be healthy. Masculinity is purely a grouping of biological traits. There really isn’t and shouldn’t be any ethical or moral value judgements assigned. To label some aspects of masculinity as healthy is just as obtuse as labeling some aspects toxic.

There is this idea that Masculinity™ is some sort of “build your own” sandwich, where one can go about picking and choosing traits, while adding and subtracting for severity. The biological reality is that High T levels lend themselves to doing two things really well—fighting and fucking. Those things kind of go together. It’s why the United States Marine Corps has a curfew in Japan.

James Bond, whether he is heroic, aspirational, or was even meant to be, exists at one end of the spectrum as an archetype of extreme masculinity. Also James Bond types abound in Special Forces, if we want to talk power fantasies, there are far better examples. James Bond is a power reality. Regardless, he is always horny, always ready for round two, has a license to kill, and is eager to use it. He puts himself in harms way because no one else is as competent or as willing to as him. Why men find him aspirational is readily apparent. This isn’t hard stuff.

He is not heroic in the traditional sense, because he is not doing any of this for the “right reasons” but purely for the love of the game. And that is ok. In fact, that is mostly how heroism comes packaged. And I actually think it is a precursor to all heroism. To try to cut this step out is nonsense and a misunderstanding of masculinity and the heroic.

Paul Zweig in his very well argued book The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World has this to say:

The lives of these equivocal heroes are articulated by a series of dramatic faults. Starcatherus, in the Gestum Danorum, is a dangerous betrayer. The Third Horace, after his exciting victory over the champions of Alba, kills his own sister in a fit of uncontrollable anger. Indra’s career involves a number of forfeits committed in the line of duty, but nonetheless reprehensible. Behind these widely different heroic figures, one glimpses the profile of an archaic Indo-European adventurer god, a profoundly ambivalent character whose gift for violence and extreme action creates a problem for those who need to make use of him. The unruly wanderer, which his mystical vitality has made of him, must be harnessed and tamed. He must be caught in the snare of civilization (Conchobar’s procession of naked women, the harlot seducing Enkidu in the epic of Gilgamesh) before he can be calmed into a hero. Even then the hero form will alter and slip; the archaic energies will reassert themselves.

These are also reasons that I have always found the reluctant hero to be a fairly noxious genre convention and mostly antithetical to Adventure Fiction™. The reluctant hero assumes the classically liberal framing that violence and masculinity is bad (hetero sex is also on a short leash). BUT, to be fair to this trope, a hero is feminized. As Paul Zweig argues above, the man of action must be caught in the snare of civilization and female magiks before he is pliable enough to be a traditional hero.

Modernity has sought to forget this transformation and just simply skip to the heroism. But there can be no heroism without there first being a berserker fury and strength. Now, the reluctant hero amounts to nothing more than a feminist approved version of a hero. All masculinity is toxic, therefore it follows that all heroes must be reluctant. The hero must be reluctant to use his masculine virtue, reluctant to use violence, reluctant to take forward moving action. He is to be bound behind a glass wall of feminine shame and guilt for ever having had masculine traits at all. At least until there is a big enough emergency, then the glass can be broken, and it should only be broken if the emergency threatens the liberal order. Gone are the stories about answering an ad that promises adventure and treasure and tells you to bring money for your own burial. That inciting incident won't do.

We can watch these gender politics play out in Hollywood in hilarious ways. Gone is the fan favorite plot of a heroic man saving or protecting a female love interest. This of course still remains a fan favorite, so you’ll see it snuck into media as a father figure saves daughter figure. It scratches most of the audience’s itch, but doesn’t step on any liberal sacred cows. Namely, that women can do everything a man can do, just twice as well.

But this essay, as the title alludes, isn’t really directed at the ladies. If some of them don’t find Bond particularly compelling, then I can’t say I’m particularly surprised. In fact, I find it very ironic that the debate itself is so indicative of the very metaphysics Zweig laid out above. Women are the TAMING and CIVILIZING force. It’s to be expected. But we can’t forget the ingredients of heroism. We must strive to promote and cultivate the terrifying and destructive energies first, if women and civilization are to have anything to tame into a hero.

And thus this essay is directed at the poor guys who find themselves brow-beaten by a world full of hormone disruptors and estrogenic foods. Men who've been beaten over the head with this idea of toxic masculinity for most of their lives. The natural reaction is to think that one could have it all back if only they could rehabilitate “masculinity.” Perhaps, if we could just make it “healthy” or demonstrate “healthy masculinity” then we can once again have safe streets and live in a place not ruled over by the tyranny of the masses and administered by eunuchs and women. And so we find ourselves with a glut of “Men’s fiction” that is constantly looking back timidly to see if the spector of schoolmarms past is going to rap them across the knuckles for writing something too violent or too horny or too off color. The truth is, you should be writing to piss everyone off so that the people that love you can find you. And if fiction is going to be advertised as Men’s this or that, then it should have tits, and off color remarks, and sexist jokes, and violence. It should have a vitality and virility that makes some people uncomfortable. Otherwise, just call it Adventure or Action or Crime. What exactly is being advertised by the word Men’s!

I am no better, either. We are all trapped in endocrine disruptor hell and we are all at various stages of trying to escape the humiliation ritual. All our heroes have done nothing but apologize for being heroes. All of them are reluctant. The Joker was outright raped because we dared like a version of him too much. None of them have ever been allowed to scare the hoes. And if they do, then they get updated for modern audiences (see the recent James Bond re-printings).

The mind trick that is “toxic masculinity,” is all in its framing. After all, why are you a sexist misogynistic and evil pig, anon? Why did you beat your wife this morning? There is no way to answer these questions without sounding guilty.

It is one small step between this premise, this idea of toxic masculinity, and the DSM-5. Masculinity itself has been pathologized. Again, according to Webster’s, to pathologize is to view or characterize as medically or psychologically abnormal. This plays out all around us in increments and iotas until we are so captured by a disordered world view that our very attempts to extricate ourselves dig us in a little deeper.

Psychotherapy in and of itself isn’t necessarily bad. I enjoy dipping my toes into some Carl Jung every once in a while. What is bad, is the psychologization of everything. We have all met these people. The ones trapped in a hall of mirrors called self help. They use therapy speak and march around with the sort of authority only the most victimized can muster. Everyone in their life is a narcissist or some flavor of sociopath, even though that is statistically impossible. Just last week, they learned what Machiavellianism is from some article in Buzzfeed or The Atlantic about the Dark Triad.

So let’s talk about the dark triad. The dark triad is narcissism, psychopathy, and machiavellianism. Now, my point in bringing this up is not to run apologia for psychopaths and Cluster B personality types. But it is to show you that these labels can be very dangerous political tools when placed in the hands of a society administered by women and low-T men. As such, let’s play a game and rebrand each of these as masculine traits. Narcissism could look like self confidence, honor, or pride. Psychopathy could look like a capacity to commit violence or even an ability to control one’s emotions. Machiavellianism can look like charisma and guile. Odysseus was known for his guile by the way. He was Odysseus the Cunning not Odysseus the upright citizen. In fact, guile might be one of the most overlooked characteristics of a good adventure hero, but that is probably another essay.

Obviously Odysseus belongs to this second category of heroes who are not heroes at all. They share all the qualities of the “moral” hero, but one: they are not loyal, nor are they disloyal. The question simply does not arise for them. Their loyalty is directed towards the turns and chances of their own destinies. We call such a hero an adventurer.

The Adventurer: The Fate of Adventure in the Western World by Paul Zweig

My point here, and the point in the video above, is that dark triad traits in disordered men attract naive women because they look very similar to highly desirable masculine traits (and in some evolutionary situations might even be highly desirable, see Total Neanderthal Death).

Where all of this becomes more than a bit dangerous, is when normal masculine traits get confused for Dark Triad Traits or outright labeled that way because moderns have gotten so soft. Fighting, disagreeability, competition, charisma, cunning, pride, honor culture, hazing—all of these natural and important masculine impulses get curbed and shamed because they scare both hoes and tyrants alike. This also explains why no one is having sex, because it turns out, despite what they say, the hoes like to be scared (see every romance novel ever written).

Young People Are Having Less Sex Than Their Parents Did at Their Age

What we are seeing is a mass infantilization and sterilization of the populace through safetyism and just outright hormonal hallucination. REN speaks on this. And let’s forget masculinity for a second, a whole essay could probably be written on the pathologization of being human. Lower testosterone, round off the corners, and make it gay, that is what is happening nearly everywhere. It’s leaking into our fiction and into our lives.

It’s a bit disheartening to see pearl clutching over hard-nosed characters in men’s adventure fiction. I hate to break it to you, but nobody is buying your youth pastor as an adventure hero. And nobody wants to. Let’s not confuse castration for virtue. The guy that manages temptation by keeping his libido as low as humanly possible through a mix of prayer, Bisphenol A, Doritos Locos Tacos, and a lack of exercise isn’t who we need to use to rebrand masculinity. Onan the Librarian is relevant here. In fact, I would make the argument that he almost by definition can’t be heroic because he doesn’t have the virility and inherent destructiveness necessary to become one.

A low libido and chronic depression doesn’t make you chaste just because you can’t get laid. You want to test yourself against the sins of the flesh, try walking around with T levels that would make a United States Marine blush while dime-pieces throw themselves at you. Then we can talk about your virtue and discipline.

Let’s take Samson in the Bible, it turns out that a man who was strong enough to kill lions with his bare hands and tear through a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of an ass, also had an achilles heel named Delilah. Or King David and his many wives and concubines. Ironically, I just realized that the Philistines primarily defeated Samson by using the feminine sex magiks on him. I’m not advocating for harems here, but I am trying to get across that character flows logically out of biology. High T males are confident, like to fight, and are very horny. None of this needs to be or should be apologized for or censored. It is reality.

This is important for fiction authors why? Because often I see a lot of well intentioned pablum getting tossed around the space and no real ideation about what is needed or even wanted. I’m writing this mostly to work out my own ideas, but also to give anyone listening some ideas as well. We need more executable ideas in the space. Less hyping each other up. More arguments! We have all allowed ourselves to get much too intellectually lazy.

I’m heartened by the renewed interest in Adventure Fiction that I have been seeing all over the place. I also think it’s telling that Adventure has been identified as this sort of lost category of literature and is at least intuitively linked to masculinity and men’s fiction. But I think it’s a mistake to try and conflate adventure and the heroic too closely. I believe the two stand in tension with each other. That tension can’t exist if we are always trying to castrate masculinity and present it as “healthy.” Adventure is almost by its very name, individualistic and self indulgent. Adventurers do it for the love of the game, for the love of danger, and the idea of proving themselves. Adventure is a man’s game.

For the love of all that is holy, let’s just own toxic masculinity. Fuck it, who cares.

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The Maltese Falcon

First off, The Maltese Falcon is one of those novels that is perhaps overshadowed by its movie adaptation. Sam Spade as played by Humphrey Bogart became the definitive archetype for the hard-boiled detective.

But what was truly impressive, at least to me, was how movie-like the novel itself read. And not only that, but how well that sort of narrative choice worked. There is a lot of talk in writer circles about the movie-if-ication of literature. And I think that discussion often has legs, and I largely agree with it. But, simultaneously, when done well, expertly even, it makes for some quite fun reading.

When he opened his apartment-door Brigid O’Shaughnessy was standing at the bend in the passageway, holding Cairo’s pistol straight down at her side.

“He’s still there,” Spade said.

She bit the inside of her lip and turned slowly, going back into the living room. Spade followed her in, put his hat and overcoat on a chair, said, “So we’ll have time to talk,” and went into the kitchen.

He had put the coffee-pot on the stove when she came to the door, and was slicing a slender loaf of French bread. She stood in the doorway and watched him with preoccupied eyes. The fingers of her left hand idly caressed the body and barrel of the pistol her right hand still held.

“The table-cloth’s in there,” he said, pointing the bread-knife at a cupboard that was one breakfast-nook partition.

She set the table while he spread liverwurst on, or put cold corned beef between, the small ovals of bread he had sliced. Then he poured the coffee, added brandy to it from a squat bottle, and they sat at the table. They sat side by side on one of the benches. She put the pistol down on the end of the bench nearer her.

“You can start now, between bites,” he said.

She made a face at him, complained, “You’re the most insistent person,” and bit a sandwich.

“Yes, and wild and unpredictable. What’s this bird, this falcon, that every-body’s all steamed up about?”

She chewed the beef and bread in her mouth, swallowed it, looked attentively at the small crescent its removal had made in the sandwiches rim, and asked: “Suppose I wouldn’t tell you? Suppose I wouldn’t tell you anything at all about it? What would you do?”

- From The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

I include the excerpt above, because it’s beautiful. At least it is to me. And the whole novel is written like this. It paints a perfect motion-picture in your mind’s eye, with just in time details that make for a quite seamless sort of experience. This much detail would be tedious in the hands of a less skilled writer.

It’s also an incredible example of third person objective. Because the reader is never allowed access to Sam Spade’s mind, we are left to grapple with this man’s character solely through his actions. And through much of the story, we can’t be quite sure whether Sam Spade is a hero, a villain, or an anti-hero. He is a cunning and skillful operator, and as such never fully reveals his hand or his integrity until the very end, when everyone is right where he wants them. And that includes you, the reader.

“…Now on the other side we’ve got what? All we’ve got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.”

“You know,” she whispered. “Whether you do or not.”

“I don’t. It’s easy enough to be nuts about you.” He looked hungrily from her hair to her feet and up to her eyes again. “But I don’t know what that amounts to. Does anybody ever? But suppose I do? What of it? Maybe next month I won’t. I’ve been through it before—when it lasted that long. Then what? Then I’ll think I played the sap. And if I did it and got sent over then I’d be sure I was the sap. Well, if I send you over I’ll be sorry as hell—I’ll have some rotten nights—but that’ll pass…”

- From The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett

Red Harvest

Red Harvest in a lot of ways may have come first for this specific story type, but it certainly did not do it the best. It’s a story/plot that has been dozens of times, inspiring both Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and the Clint Eastwood spaghetti western A Fistful of Dollars.

The steadfast and sturdy Continental Op has been summoned to the town of Personville—known as Poisonville—a dusty mining community splintered by competing factions of gangsters and petty criminals. The Op has been hired by Donald Willsson, publisher of the local newspaper, who gave little indication about the reason for the visit. No sooner does the Op arrive, than the body count begins to climb . . . starting with his client. With this last honest citizen of Poisonville murdered, the Op decides to stay on and force a reckoning—even if that means taking on an entire town.

- Red Harvest, back cover copy

I enjoyed this novel a lot less than the Maltese Falcon and much of that had to do with the narrative style. Where the Maltese Falcon is written in a clear and crisp third person, Red Harvest is written in a choppier more stream of conscious first person. Additionally, it quickly became hard to follow, at least for me. So many competing factions and people and names are hurled at you that it becomes impossible to track what is going on. And in this way, it’s less of a detective novel and more of an action novel. Perhaps, even a western. When seemingly everyone in the entire town is a dirt bag or is somehow crime-involved it’s hard to really care who murdered who other than for the sake of pedantry.

Which is another reason it didn’t quite connect with me. I just didn’t really care at a certain point. The Continental Op (truly the original man with no name) is a fine enough protagonist, but it’s fairly hard to care about his mission when there’s no one in the town really worth saving. Or at least none that we care for. The whole thing is an exercise in cynicism. Even Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars took some time out to make us care about the average townsperson via the enstranged mother and her small child.

I spent most of my week in Ogden trying to fix up my reports so they would not read as if I had broken as many agency rules, state laws and human bones as I had.

From Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett

However, it’s not bad. The few times when I found my footing in a scene, there was some good stuff. Both the opium dream and the reveal of a murdered femme fatale being quite memorable and a remarkably good turning point in any story. There is an energy to the novel that compels you forward, even though it’s mostly a dark energy. For a much better and thoughtful review I recommend Red Horizon’s write up in Copper & Blood: Dashiell Hammett’s Montana Mayhem. Ultimately, I just wish I could’ve enjoyed it as much as I thought I was going to ahead of time.

Mar Argentino

One of the problems with using a working title for a draft is that anything else I come up with just feels wrong. Title may change, but the first draft is already written and fairly clean. An edit and some brushing up and I’m hoping to have this out sometime this year. It’s a bit military thriller, a bit hang-out novel, and a bit neo-western.

Working Blurb:

Every summer, hordes of Chinese fishing vessels descend upon Argentina’s territorial waters, plunders its fishing grounds, and leaves the surrounding ocean on the verge of ecological collapse. Hamstrung by Chinese debt-trap diplomacy, Argentina looks for a kinetic deterrent, one with deniability.

Ryan McGowan, a disgraced Marine Raider, day walks through corporate America as a financial analyst, that is until he meets Mike Hudson, the head of a shadowy private military company. When Mike offers him a chance to return to the fight and join a team of former operators, Ryan seizes it. Their mission: become Argentina’s deterrent.

But when their maritime security detail results in a bloody massacre, Ryan and his team find themselves proxies in a shadow war between the United States and China. With Chinese Special Forces intent on killing them, Ryan and his team have only one job—live to fight another day.

A Man Called Farmer

This is my current work in progress, and I expect I’ll be done with the first draft by June. It’s sitting at about 70k words now, and I’m thinking I have another 10k or 20k to go.

I don’t really have a cover mockup or a proper blurb yet, but this will be another western.

The story follows Billy Farmer, a Seminole Indian whose family and people have been relocated to the Indian Nations (present day Oklahoma). As the Civil War begins, the United States Army pulls out of its frontier forts and the territory descends into guerrilla fighting. But more than that, the lack of soldiers prompts a Comanche uprising further out on the plains. When a Comanche raid results in the kidnapping of Billy’s grandson, he sets off to get him back.

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“I’m sorry you and Gus McCrae ever met. All you two done was ruin one another, not to mention those close to you. Another reason I didn’t marry him was because I didn’t want to fight you for him every day of my life. You men and your promises: they’re just excuse to do what you plan to do anyway, which is leave. You think you’ve always done right—that’s your ugly pride, Mr. Call. But you never did right and it would be a sad woman that needed anything from you. You’re a vain coward, for all your fighting. I despised you then, for what you were, and I despise you now, for what you’re doing.”

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

This novel has made it into my top five all time favorites. Not an easy feat to do, nor one that I expected when I originally started this. Lonesome Dove is a long novel, coming in at 855 pages or about 40 hrs of narration if you go the audiobook route. I would like to add that the Lee Horsely narration is something quite special actually, and probably one of my finer experiences with an audiobook.

Both of my brothers who regularly devour audiobooks due to the nature of their jobs urged me to read it. And so I finally did. A bit of a side-note on the whole men don’t read (listen) thing… it would blow your mind the amount of blue collar men that spend all day in a truck or tractor that devour audiobooks. Bernard Cornwell, Louis L’Amour, and Larry McMurtry are all getting piped into the cabs of John Deere tractors and Peterbilt trucks everyday. Louis L’Amour pretty famously expanded into audiobooks and radio plays early on, before audible was ever a thing, and I wonder if that wasn’t a bit of marketing genius—meeting his target audience in the cabs of their pickups.

The novel is not your typical pulp western paperback with its tight plot and 60k word pacing. It is long and literary and written with third-person omniscient that hops from head to head of each of the characters. Whole chapters are dedicated to talks around the campfire and character backstory. The entire thing is character driven. It is in a sense, the ultimate “hangout” novel. This book was actually one of the things that helped click into place some of the things I wrote about in last week’s essay about the adventure genre.

The story follows Augustus McCrae and Woodrow F. Call, two retired Texas Rangers, and a small cast of characters on a cattle drive from Texas to Montana. It starts in the dusty one horse whore town of Lonesome Dove. Gus spends his time lounging on the porch getting his drunk on and starting friendly arguments with Call the outfit’s stern workhorse. Meanwhile, Call spends his time trying to break a Kiowa mare affectionately dubbed the Hell Bitch. Rounding out the rest of the main crew is Pea Eye, Newt, and Deetz. And then there is Lori, the only sporting woman in town, who wants to leave Lonesome Dove and go to San Francisco, but has no real way out of her present situation.

Now the first quarter of the book sees all the character’s thoroughly introduced and takes a while to do it. So long in fact, that when Jake Spoon blows into town talking about how good grazing in Montana supposedly is you don’t really realize that you’ve just hit the inciting incident. Thus, the crew, who haven’t seen Jake Spoon in about ten years, soon find out that he’s on the run from the law in Arkansas. Call, much to Gus chagrin, then gets it in his head that he wants to be one of the first men to run cattle in Montana. So the gang run a cattle raid into Mexico and steal away a few thousand head from their nemesis Pedro Flores, a Mexican rancher, bandit, and cattle rustler.

Jake Spoon, a perennial womanizer, takes up with Lori who then stops selling pokes to the rest of the town. Subsequently, Gus instigates both of them into going along on the cattle drive, mostly because he knows how much it will irritate both Call and Jake.

I think that’s enough plot, although I likely shouldn’t concern myself as it’s been out for 40 years and was turned into one of your uncle’s favorite miniseries. There will be minor spoilers ahead.

Gus and Call are both tough as nails and down to scrap. You have this sense about them, but don’t really get to see what they are capable of until halfway through the book, and then it’s in some of the best western action writing I’ve ever read.

McMurtry pretty famously intended Lonesome Dove to subvert the western. And at times you catch a whiff of that, but you are having so much fun hanging out with these two bad-ass Texas Rangers that you forget about it moments later.

According to The New Yorker’s story, McMurtry had a complicated relationship with the book because a television adaptation in 1989 starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones paved over many of the anti-western themes. “McMurtry began comparing his most popular book to ‘Gone with the Wind,’” The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe wrote. “He didn’t mean it as a compliment.”

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a64177557/lonesome-dove-book-popularity-2025/

I mean, even the ol’ mossy horn bull gets a nice end to his character arc by fighting a grizzly, winning, and living to wear the battle scars. If McMurtry wanted people to be down on the west, the cowboy, and the western myth, he shouldn’t have written one of the coolest things ever. It really is similar to Dune in that way, the characters and the heroes all kind of get away from McMurtry and do exactly what they want and what the story demands. Which is of course why it's a masterpiece, because good art hunts down the truth and transcends the pettiness of our souls, whether that be the authors or the audience.

Another example of this heroic center, is when Gus and Call track down an outlaw gang that goes about murdering and thieving from innocent folk. They reminded me of the Glanton gang from Blood Meridian to be honest. Perhaps not as effective, but easily as wanton in their appetite for violence. Regardless, the outcome makes me think that Gus and Call probably would’ve mogged the Judge and sent him dancing on into hell if Blood Meridian had taken place about forty years later.

But this book isn’t just testosterone and action. There were more than a few moments that will both break your heart and warm it, often at the same time. Gus’s evolving relationship with Lori might be one of the finer love stories ever put on paper. Then there is a certain visit one of the characters receives from the ghost of his former companion. Or when Call finally gives Newt his horse but can’t bring himself to give him anything else. All of the cowboys are deeply human, and all of them struggle with fears, anxieties, dreams, ghosts, and unrequited loves.

Pea Eye, the tallest man in the group, had developed a new fear, which was that he would be swallowed up in a snowdrift. He had always worried about quicksand, and now he was in a place where all he could see, for miles around, was a colder version of quicksand.

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

This book made me tear up a few times, and the final chapters might be one of the all time greatest odes to brotherhood, camaraderie, and friendship that has ever been written. The final adventure that Gus sends Call of on is both cruel joke and grail quest. It will weigh heavy on your mind and heart for weeks after you set the book down.

All this tends to get back to my point last week, that a good adventure is really about the journey, and nothing drives that point home more clearly than the end of Lonesome Dove.

Finally, I did watch the mini-series with Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones once I finished the book, and I loved it. I am also thankful that I got to experience the book first and then the miniseries and recommend you do that as well should you still have the option.

I have been struggling to find a definitional guide to the adventure genre and its conventions for a while. At least, one that I agree with. I find Big Genre’s definitions unconvincing and poorly thought out at their best, and downright subversive at their worst. Regardless, after a couple of years of stewing on this problem, I feel a series of essays brewing. Ultimately, the purpose of this essay is to try and hyperstition new genre conventions, and subsequently a new style of stories.

So for this essay, I want to start with one of the core promises I think a good adventure delivers on—The Cure To Male Loneliness. Hanging with the bros is one of the most integral fantasies a classic adventure should deliver on. This could further codified as a brotherhood or camaraderie theme.

But first, let’s do an autopsy and address some ways the adventure genre has been degraded, erased, and subverted over the years.

Starting with the most obvious, the categorization itself, it is no longer just called Adventure, but rather, the Action-Adventure genre. And in the most egregious instances, just the action genre. Additionally, everyone now thinks that if they put an explosion or a fist fight every third page it makes for grand adventure.

This forms a sort of feedback loop that gets adventure fiction classified as pulpy schlock with little redeeming intellectual value. Or take the idea that adventure action-adventure fiction can’t or shouldn’t be cerebral (Michael Crichton would like a word). Or literary! Think Moby Dick or The Heart Of Darkness. That it should just be car chases, gun fights, and action set-pieces. And on top of this, action often makes for incredibly boring fiction because fiction is all built around tension. Subsequently, action acts as the release valve for said tension. So, if you are hitting the release valve every third page, it all gets a bit tiresome and boring. You can see this phenomena play-out in real time when you fall asleep during the 20 minute action climax of the newest Hollywood slop. The world is exploding and you are asleep, anon. Why? Because it’s boring.

StoryGrid has totally dropped Adventure from the genre tag and just refers to it as the Action genre now. This is tantamount to total erasure for the Adventure genre. And I say that because StoryGrid is ground zero for Big Craft and Big Genre not only in trad publishing but self-publishing as well. You see, StoryGrid is Oz in the castle called “write to market slop.” We can learn a lot by taking a critical look at what normies are being told to create.

Here are the obligatory moments for the Action-Adventure Action Genre according to Story Grid.

You should read the StoryGrid definition, because it’s quite stupid and largely nonsense. And it really really shows not only how misunderstood men are by the industry but how goofy the industry is when it even tries to think about men’s stories. And I am trying very very hard to keep this from devolving into a rant about how literally any and all media that appeals to men has been ritually massacred.

Also can we acknowledge what a recent invention and feminized beat this is.

Imagine Conan or James Bond “lashing out,” like some effeminate prima donna. This was not a beat 80 years ago. It just wasn’t. (I swear if you come at me with some Joseph Campbell mumbly-gook…")

And why under the Action Genre is The Hobbit, Treasure Island, and The Wonderful Wizard of OZ all listed as trope or convention codifiers. All are clearly Adventure stories more than they are action.

We all know that Adventure is a real genre with real fans (mostly men) and we know it when we see it, so then where did it go? How has it been defined away. Lumped in with Action. As stated earlier, the purpose of this essay is to start the process of hyperstitioning new genre conventions, and hopefully now you see why we even need to.

So how do we do that?

Enter what I would like to call the “hangout plot.”

Some examples of the hangout plot would in my opinion be Lonesome Dove, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Rio Bravo. Or think about Moby Dick, The Wild Bunch, or Master and Commander. Camaraderie would appear to be a pretty big genre convention, but I have never seen anyone point it out.

In the article A Brief History of the Hangout Film, Jake Orthwein postulates:

“Unlike the traditional, narrative-driven film, the hangout film doesn’t rely on tension to maintain interest. Goal-oriented characters with burning wants and needs are traded for principled ones who are just trying to get by. This difference is not merely a matter of narrative strategy; it’s a different view of life. From the standpoint of the hangout film, goals and conflicts aren’t the substance of life but a distraction from it. The emphasis is shifted from action to reflection, from doing to being. These films take to the extreme the old cliché that “it’s about the journey.” Road pictures, for this reason, often make great hangout movies.”

And this sort of ties together my central contention with the Action-Adventure genre as it stands. Action set-pieces, lone-wolf heroes, plot-plot-plot-and-more-plot, are all anathema to “it’s about the journey.” If Adventure as a genre had even a single tag-line one would imagine it to be “it’s about the journey.”

But apparently its actually:

“Life is preserved when the protagonist makes a sacrifice to overpower or outwit their external and internal antagonists. But death results when the protagonist lacks the courage to sacrifice for the survival of self and others.”

- Story Grid

What kind of bullshit… that’s a definition, but not for adventure?

I am telling you. Adventure as a genre has been systemically undermined and erased. Everything about true adventure is anathema to current day safetyism, societal mothering, and general feminization.

Adventure fiction is and always has been about hard or strong men who go looking for danger because they live for it. That is who they are. They are Gus McCrae from Lonesome Dove. They are Bodhi and Johnny Utah in Point Break. They are The Dirty Dozen, The Wild Bunch, and The Professionals.

It is about answering an ad in Soldier of fortune magazine that looks like this.

Adventure genre has been subverted by people who have either no experience with actual adventure or actively hate the genre altogether. Anyone who has served in the military will look back incredibly fondly on the relationships they made while in, even if it was the absolute shittiest of times. That’s called camaraderie. Camraderie and brotherhood are at the heart of a good adventure. And that requires a group of men. Not a group of people. That is called Found Family, and it’s a fine trope for blue-haired baristas, but that’s not who I am writing for or what I like to read.

The Cure to Male Loneliness

All this to say, the central promise (or fantasy) of the adventure genre is camaraderie. Everyone grasps this subconsciously, which is why it is a meme. But where has it been intentionally codified as a genre convention? The answer is nowhere. At least not that I can find.

And I posit that one way to reinvent the adventure genre is to deliver on this promise and this very masculine need. One that seems to have been erased. The last 6,000 years of civilizational progress has been won by the war-band, the mannerbund, the army unit, the tribe, and the gang. Not the Lone Wolf. We can do away with the lone wolf and the reluctant hero. Or at least less of it. Instead, we need a trusty group of men that can bounce off of each other and bond while going through the shit.

Using the hangout formula we can opt for less plot driven adventures and more character driven ones. Sure, you can still have action set pieces and you still need a plot. But really, what dudes want when they read adventure fiction is the cure to male loneliness. Which means spending more time having your characters just hang-out and be fully fleshed humans. We don’t have to rush around from set-piece to set-piece with no time to breathe. It means taking some cues from the literary world and making the adventure novel a bit more character driven.

Like once a week someone publishes an article about men not reading, and it almost always mentions memoirs as one of the genres that men enjoy reading. Common sense and personal experience tells me they aren’t reading Eat, Pray, Love as much as they are reading military memoirs, gang and crime memoirs, etc. I posit that the reason memoirs are so popular among men is because they are essentially adventure fiction. And a key part of many a good memoir, is the friendships made a long the way.

The adventure genre is ripe for innovation. In fact, it’s more or less completely dead. But I think we can resurrect it. But that starts with thinking critically about what promises stories and genres are really looking to deliver on, who our audience is, and then analyzing where current conventions can be changed.