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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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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10 months 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 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.

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.

“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.

The Hunter is a very tightly written crime novel that spawned 23 more. Parker himself is something of an independent heavy. He takes one or two jobs a year and lives on the proceeds, similar to how John D. Macdonald’s Travis McGee character “takes his retirement in increments” and only comes out to do a salvage job when he is low on cash. A lifestyle that has become a sort of trope in crime novels and thrillers.

Parker is an interesting character because he’s not really a good guy. He’s clearly somewhere on the spectrum between sociopath and psychopath. But like all good hard-boiled characters, he still has a code. Pay me what you owe me and not one red cent more.

The novel introduces us to a penniless and shabbily dressed Parker through a series of small cons that allow him to buy a new suit, a hotel room, and some odds and ends. He is a man simply living off the land, only the land in this case is the concrete jungle of New York City. And if New York City is a jungle, then Parker is its apex predator.

We soon find out that Parker has arrived in New York City to take revenge on his wife Lynn and his one-time partner Mal Resnick who double-crossed him and left him for dead. Little known to them, Parker didn’t die, but he was arrested for vagrancy and thrown into prison.

The rest of the novel unfolds across four perfectly plotted and paced parts as Parker hunts down Mal. Backstory is filled in via timely flash back chapters. And Mal for his part spends most of the novel evading Parker and whining for help from The Syndicate (a shadowy crime organization) which he now works for.

I’ll call it there on the plot, so as to avoid spoilers. Overall, I really enjoyed this novel. It’s so expertly written and plotted and competently crafted that it’s easy to see why Westlake is considered one of the best.

Overall, the novel is both darkly funny and deeply tragic in equal parts. Parker is somehow likable despite his apparent lack of moral compass. Or maybe it’s just the primal simplicity of his drives that are easy to relate to.

Even if you’ve not read any of the Parker novels, you’ve most likely seen an adaptation (Parker novels have been officially adapted for the screen eight times). But if not, you can see some of the tropes the series pioneered pop up in more recent action movies like John Wick or Nobody. I suspect both of which have heavy Parker influences that the writers and directors might not even be conscious of. For example, the Syndicate reminded me of the assassins guild in the wick movies. The most easily placeable direct adaptation is probably Mel Gibson’s Payback, while Jason Statham’s Parker is adapted from the 19th novel in the series.

To expand on an aside I made earlier, that of the aristocratic lifestyle of fictional heavies—a good hardboiled character should refuse to work a regular job or worry about a steady paycheck. Whether mercenary, fixer, or private investigator, a good “knight” character takes after his more noble forbears and loathes normie work. Even Reacher does a similar thing with his drifter/hobo aesthetic (basically the libtard version of Travis McGee (no really, Lee Child has said he modeled Reacher after the much cooler McGee)).

Anyways, my point here is that archetypes and stories represent truths about human nature and types. In this case, that truth is that "work ethic” and “jobs” are anathema to the warrior/knight archetype (Bernard Cornwell nods along solemnly somewhere). A good errant knight character should resemble a big cat in his manner. He should do one good heist, crack one good case, or save one hot damsel before returning to his card games and houseboats and fraternizing. It’s something of a logical cause and effect that many a good hard-boiled character taps into.

I picked up To Tame a Land by Louis L'Amour from Walmart the other day. I think it’s cool that he is still sold so widely and accessibly, despite being written damn near 60 years ago. I also think it’s cool that I am usually picking up the last copy or I find that his book is sold out. Regardless, had never really heard anything of To Tame a Land but it might be one of my new favorites.

This book is one of his classic westerns. Most would argue that all Louis L'Amour books were westerns, but from a genre perspective that's not quite true. A lot of his "westerns" are really adventure stories wearing western clothes, and adhere much more rigorously to the structure and tropes of an adventure novel than a western. Most Sackett books should be categorized as adventure with a few exceptions such as The Lonely Men or The Daybreakers. But overall, many of the books revolve around grand adventure, treasure hunting, revenge seeking or some mix of the three. And I realize I'm splitting hairs that a general audience might not care about, but genre and structure and tropes really kind of obsesses me. Regardless, I think what made To Tame a Land so good was the very deft merging of the two. If you want to read more of my thoughts on Western structure I recommend this essay, The New Western Myth.

The story starts with Rye Tyler and his father being abandoned by their wagon train in Indian Territory. They have broken a wheel and the Captain of the train, pining over the same girl as Rye's father, sees his chance to take some competition of the board. The Captain tells the pair that he will wait a day at the Springs up ahead, but can’t stop the whole train for them here. But when his father fixes the Wagon and they make it to the Springs late that night, they find that the train has not waited.

Forced to stop because their oxen are worn out, they are then attacked by Indians. Rye's father is killed, but Rye manages to escape. Rye isn't your average teenager though, and after recovering his father's body, he takes out after the war party and manages to kill two of them while they are sleeping. When he catches up to the wagon train, he confronts the Captain, who is then relieved of duty by the rest of the wagon train.

The train's scout, Logan Pollard, then takes Rye under his wing and teaches him all that he knows. The next few chapters are big sweeping montages of Rye learning how to track, how to hunt, how to draw. Pollard also gives him a copy of Plutarch’s Lives and tells him to try to read it five times.

One of the really fun things about this 154 page novel is that it really shows L'Amour’s talent for painting a sweeping saga in so little space. The literary power of "tell" versus "show" is on full display. One of the problems with "show don't tell" advice is that it is so vague as to be almost useless, and new writers or even seasoned writers often misinterpret it as every piece of information needs to be transmitted via a scene. This leads to bloat and clunkiness and scenes that slow the story down.

Of course, a skilled hand can "tell" in a way that still feels like "showing." It is essentially the literary version of a montage, which makes me wonder if the montage wasn't a cinema adaptation to try to capture the literary tool of "telling" in a visual form? Chicken and the egg stuff, probably. There's a lot of nuance in the whole "show don't tell" debate, too much for me to go over here. What I do know, is that most modern writing has no idea how to use tell very well and undercuts itself by not even really trying. Maybe it’s the screenplayification of the novel that led to this, or the glut of outright wrong and derivative advice that has been transmitted via craft books and blog posts since the indie boom.

What I am saying is that the ability to montage and/or transmit vast amounts of character or setting history in a page or two is a necessary and neglected literary skill. This sort of texture, depth, and richness is perhaps one of the main things that the novel has going for it when compared to all other forms of media. SO LEAN INTO IT. The third-person-limited-everything-must-be-learned-via-a-scene-and-dragged-out-over-four-books-and-two-thousand-words style of writing genre fiction is stale and lame and holding fiction in general back. It is but one of a million ways to skin a cat. Give me 64,000 words that I can’t stop thinking about.

And some of it is just knowing what the hell your story is about. A quarter of the way in, Rye guns down the wagon train captain that got his father killed at the beginning. L'Amour just nips the revenge arc you were starting to expect right in the bud. He does it because that isn't what the story is about. He didn't leave you hanging via a false promise. The book is about violence and reputation and living by the sword and the cost of it. And it sticks doggedly to that theme, and never gets sidetracked. I also mention this, because as writer’s we often feel compelled to follow false trails instead of sticking to the story we envisioned. Please trust your instincts! You’ll save time and pain.

Regardless, the rest of the book tracks Rye's developing skill and reputation with a gun. He doesn't take lip off of people, he's not after a reputation, he's not bloodthirsty, but he's just really fast on the draw. This means that before long, he has killed a few bad men with a reputation and is thus building one himself. The thing about a reputation though, is you are forced to prove it, even if you don't want to. And by the climax, when he finally has a way out of the gunfighter life, he has to make one last stand in order to save his love interest.

I won't say more, and have kept the plot vague to avoid spoilers. Recommend you don't read the back cover description as it gives away a key twist that I did not appreciate having spoiled. Low-key the world's worst back cover copy.

As an aside, I am constantly left intrigued by the morality of L'Amour characters. I don’t think morality in fiction gets talked about enough. A thread I am recognizing in most of the pulp hero’s we love is how Homeric they often are. Rye Tyler feels like an almost mythical realization of a Homeric or Byronic ideal. For example, in one scene, Rye is propositioned to a card game by card sharps, and instead of turning it down, he accepts, and then proceeds to cheat them by dealing himself aces off the bottom of the deck. When he has most of their money, he dips out with guns drawn. A page later he plays poker again, but notes that he doesn't cheat this time, because he is playing with honest men. That is a very homeric hair to split, and I love it. It’s a very specific sort of morality and character development that you find in the pulp paperbacks but gets kind of lost as media progressed.

Regardless, this is easily a top ten L'Amour book for me, and might take the record for most Plutarch mentions. (Inside joke here is that in almost every single L'Amour book a character either reads, references, or mentions Plutarch's Lives).

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Many fans of the western genre (and lit snobs alike) consider this to be one of the best western novels ever written. You see it pop up all the time in top 20 lists, and I can see the argument for placing it there. The perennial troll in me wants to rage bait by claiming that it’s overrated, but I won’t, because it is pretty dang good.

BLUF:

A bit slow, but technically brilliant. Leonard nails the ending in a way that makes the read worth it.

4 out of 5 stars

From the Back Cover:

John Russell was raised as an Apache, and even served as a member of the tribal police. Now the time has come for him to leave the San Carlos reservation far behind and live again as a white man. The stagecoach passengers he's traveling with want nothing to do with this man they call "Hombre," forcing him to ride in the boot with the driver. But they change their tune when outlaws ride down on them. Suddenly they all must rely on Russell's guns and his ability to survive in the desert. They shunned John Russell, and now they must follow him . . . or die.

My Thoughts:

Like the blurb above states, the story follows John Russel who was raised by Apaches. Russell is white, which is clearly demonstrated by his bright blue A10 eyes, which is also why Paul Newman was actually a good casting in the 1967 movie adaptation. Now, although Russell is white, he is culturally an Apache. After Russel’s father dies, and wills him a ranch, he begins his journey to rejoin civilization and live again with the whites.

The stage is beset by bandits who are after the money one of the passenger’s is carrying. This passenger is a Dr. Alexander Favor, who worked on the Apache reservation as an Indian Agent. Favor has made off with a large sum of cash he made through an embezzlement scheme that cheated the Apache out of their Government food allotment. Essentially, the well to do Doctor was selling off a portion of the cows meant for the Indians and pocketing the profits.

This money becomes the McGuffin that drives most of the story forward. Russell manages to drive off the bandits, but not before they steal the horses. That he manages to get his hands on the money, means the bandits continue to harass them. And that Russell keeps the money in his care, means that the rest of the passengers are unable to buy their way out of the situation by giving it to the bandits. And so begins a game of wills.

Although Russel is clearly the protagonist, he is not the narrator. The narrator is Carl, a young man who works for the stage line and who also ends up as a passenger. Notably, the narrator is fairly unlikeable, if for the simple fact that he is kind of a coward. And not in any insidious or devious way, but the more normal way that 98% of the population are cowards—yes, including us the high minded reader.

We don’t want to be cowardly. We like to think that we are capable of defending ourselves and believe we would stand up for the weak, but at the end of the day, many of us are slaves to our own weakness and incompetence. That we may not have many, if any, martial skills and limited will to commit violence, is no grounds to pretend moral superiority. They say that ignorance of the law is no excuse, and the same holds for the laws of the jungle. When faced with truly violent men, most of us would likely find ourselves so unevenly matched that the only way to survive, is to sit back, sit down, shut up, and go along. This is, in a sense, the real curse of weakness. The curse of the normal guy. Weakness breeds this sort of petty delusion, the kind that prevents us from living out our highest spiritual and moral obligations.

Regardless, placing this specific character as the narrator is what I believe has elevated a fairly routine genre western with a straightforward and well worn plot to top 20 lists. For any writer’s reading this, it is an A++ example of how POV and choice of a narrator can shape a story.

On a related note, I was reading a review of Louis L’Amour’s the First Fast Draw, and the reviewer was complaining about the first person narration (with the narrator as the hero) and how he thought that first person doesn’t work great for westerns. Mainly, because the protagonist can tend to come off as just a giant narcissist or alternately, a bit too soft and introspective. The western trope of a strong, silent stranger coming to town and cleaning up the bad guys almost necessitates a 3rd person POV.

Ultimately, I think this makes for a strong argument, and something to consider when writing westerns. Hombre certainly proves this out. By making the narrator a wimpy normal guy, Leonard allows us to see John Russell from his eyes, and the mysterious stranger effect is dialed up to 100. It also means that almost all of John Russell’s character is shown via action and dialogue, since we never get to peak inside of his head. This provides much of the narrative tension in the story, as I was always trying to figure out if John is truly a good guy, what he will do next, and what makes him tick.

Notably, Russell is established early on as not really giving a rat’s ass what the other passengers think. He lives by his code and his alone. He is immune to peer pressure and appears to feel very little impulse to get involved in another man or woman’s problems. Bullies are the problem of the man bullied. This is what Russel says, but what does he do?

I won’t spoil the ending, because it really is quite good and the whole thing hangs on the tension of what comes next. A warning however, the first two acts move a bit slow.