The Naked Noose

 

Riders

 

(Needs Image) Quickshots: Cimarron #19- On a Texas Manhunt

 

I read this one on a camping trip to West Texas, and read it mostly in the afternoons after a long day of hiking the Guadalupe mountains, pounding down Powerade as I sat in the rare shade of my campsite in the flats hoping the temperature would drop below 100 soon. 

Does that explain why I don’t remember much of the plot?  Rapine, kidnapping, revenge, ego, chase, gunfights, fatherly advice, sudden death, and maybe some fucking with a smidge of “the wilderness is the best” thrown in. This is the kind of book that fits great for me out in the woods.  I don’t need lofty literature, I just need to roam and ramble and let me mind do the same.  On a Texas Manhunt was an ideal campfire book.

The fact that I finished it, but have never been able to finish a Longarm book, should speak volumes. 

Smart, Horny, Foolish, Outdoorsy

I started writing in this blog years ago as a way to define what I liked most about westerns.  While my enthusiasm to write regularly has waned, my enthusiasm for westerns has not.  My definition of a “western” is quite wide, meaning almost anything taking place between the late 17^th century and the early 20^th century on a North American frontier.  It was while reading The Dakota Cipher, third in William Dietrich’s series about Napoleonic era rapscallion Ethan Gage, that I stumbled upon the recipe for a perfect western.  A perfect western should take place in the time and place described above, and have a hero who is smart, horny, foolish, and outdoorsy.   

Allow me to explain.  A good yarn should allow the audience to identify with the characters and at the same time have elements of wish fulfillment. 

I have a fondness for main characters that are smart and horny, because, well, that’s me.  It sounds pompous to say that I’m smart, but it’s true (despite what a lack of solid proofreading in this blog might suggest).  As to horny, a quick tour through this blog (particularly anything tagged Randy Cowpoke) will show that is an apt description as well. 

Foolish?  Let’s instead call that prone to acting with without thinking, and the start of the wish fulfillment phase.  I typically think before acting, drink very little, never gamble, and rarely exceed the speed limit.  Frankly, it’s boring, and in fiction I love when otherwise smart characters leap into danger without forethought as I long to do, especially when their boldness is rewarded when danger slaps them upside the head.

Let’s turn outdoorsy into at home in the wilderness.  The older I get the more handy I become in the woods, the desert, the mountains, the river, and with a kayak, tent, fire, and axe.  I’m still no mountain man and would probably go under after a week alone in the woods (mostly because of my cardiac issues).  In my dreams, though, I read the wilderness like the back of my hand as I stride through the plains and can capably fell deer and owlhoots alike with a smokestick, tomahawk, or my bare fists.

So let’s take a look at some of my favorite characters and how they stack up.

George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman

Smart, stupidly horny, undoubtedly foolish, but although his adventures often take place in far flung frontiers he is much more at home in the parlor. 

Any hero in a Louis L’Amour story

Smart and outdoorsy to a man, but rarely horny and seldom foolish.

Robert E. Howard’s Breckenridge Elkins

Somewhat horny, very foolish, so outdoorsy he barely fits between four walls, but Breck can hardly be considered smart (I’ve mapped him out as a D&D character many times, never with an intelligence greater than 7).

William Dietrich’s Ethan Gage

Now this is the stuff.  Gage is smart.  He’s a savant, a scientist of the Ben Franklin persuasion, known as a master of electricity in a world still lit by candles.  After a spell at Harvard he spent time as a fur trapper in the Great Lakes, learning woodscraft, sharpshooting, and tomahawking.  Gage then made his way to Paris during the Revolution, and picked up the habit of leaping into danger, usually also involving first leaping between the legs of whatever woman happened to available at the time.

Gage is “lazy as an aristocrat, but without the manners,” and finds himself in various adventures across the globe, often as not tied to ancient mystical conspiracies.  In one spectacular tale (the aforementioned Dakota Cipher) Gage tumbles in and out of Louisa Bonaparte’s petticoats before hightailing it to the wilderness of North America, running from cultists and British spies while searching for, of all things...

 

Don't fuck with Thor's hammer

Sadly, I don’t believe that Dietrich managed to take Ethan Gage back to North America over the course of the series, which was cut short at eight books out of a planned fifteen.  Gage does set a high bar for the smart, horny, foolish, outdoorsy hero that I love to read about.

Colt's Revolving Rifle; or, the Viagra of Longarms

I’ve been surprised recently at how often the Colt Revolving Rifle pops up in fiction.  One appears in the hands of former mountain man Jim Beckwourth in Robert F. Jones’ Deadville, another in Mike Long’s No Good Like It Is, and in the movie Barquero, and finally as one of the better guns in the Facebook game Boomtown.  I’m surprised because it is one of the worst guns ever invented.

Colt’s Revolving rifle worked like a big revolver, but with a long barrel and a stock.  It was made in the days before cartridges, so each chamber was loaded with powder and shot, with a percussion cap nested on the back of the chamber.  Pull the trigger, drop the hammer, and BANG!, your shot was away.

The problem was that sometimes your shot would ignite stray powder, and all of the chambers would fire at once.  That is, down the front of the gun and into the arm that you are using to hold up the barrel.  This kind of misfire was so notorious that the rifle went from being one of the most sought after longarms of the Civil War to one of the most despised.  Officers eventually asked their soldiers to load only one chamber at a time, defeating the purpose of the weapon entirely.  One regiment was completely outfitted in 1863 with Colt Revolving Rifles at the cost of $42 per weapon; they sold them two years later for 44 cents each.

Why do these weapons keep popping up in fiction?  Because they look cool, and whole notion of a rapid fire longarm in the 1850’s and in the Civil War gives western writers substantial wood.  Much like a Viagra commercial, however, it is fake wood, and doesn’t last much past a couple of bangs. 

Four Stations of the Western Literary Cross

After a long, sweaty day of yard work, Mrs. Slap and I sat out on the back deck over moonshine and tea discussing what books we intend to start next.  After years on the sidelines, Mrs. Slap recently read Riders of the Purple Sage and liked it so much that she picked up Call of the Canyon soon after.  I was thinking of other literary westerns with strong character development when it occurs to me that there are four stations of the western cross, if you will, that create a well read western reader.  These include:

Riders of the Purple Sage, Zane Grey

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

Shane, Jack Schaefer

The Virginian, Owen Wister

What do you think?  What did I leave out?  Comments, please, comments!

Lou Prophet, Where Have You Gone?

Earlier this year I wrote a lukewarm review of Peter Brandvold’s The Devil’s Winchester, an entry in a long running series about bounty hunter Lou Prophet (which you can find much more about by clicking on the Peter Brandvold tag below).  I didn’t like the book so much because it lacked the fun and character development of the earlier Prophet books.  Brandvold wrote back and asked me to stick around for the next one, sure to be to my liking.  Heck, he even offered to eat the manuscript on youtube if I didn't like it.  I pre-ordered The Devil Laughter right away, sure I’d love it.

I don’t.  Brandvold is still a good writer, but the Lou Prophet that I enjoyed so much, and frankly got me into reading westerns in the first place, is pretty much gone.  The books are all grimdark now, with lots of violence, and not much levity.  That was the genius of the early books- tales of an emotionally scarred Civil War vet who makes a deal with the devil to accept his eventual place in Hell as long as he can party as hard as he can on Earth.  All the bounty hunting stuff use to be just about funding the whiskey and whores, and those debauched and funny chapters were a blast.  My favorite chapter of any Prophet book is the opening of The Devil Gets His Due, where Lou wrestles a drunken mountain man’s drunken pet bear to impress a buxom saloon girl.  I still pull that chapter out from time to time for laughs.  I can’t even imagine a scene like that in these books any more.

Actually I can, because I saw a couple of preview images from a dormant Lou Prophet comic book years ago.  And damn, son, they were funny.  Unfortunately, I can’t find them anywhere on-line any more.  If anyone has them, send a link!  As the Prophet books continue I really do think that they’d play better as comic books, as the characters are vividly described oddities of the west, almost like Arkham Asylum let loose in the 1880’s.  

 

The Lou Prophet books could use a little more of this...

Let me make one thing clear- Brandvold is a great writer.  If action packed, blood and guts books are your thing, you need look no further.  They’re just not my thing, at least not all the time. 

Why Do We Write Westerns?

Steve Hockensmith, the author of the Holmes on the Range series (I really should check that out) interviews ten western writers and asks them why they chose westerns.  See the results here. 

Joe Abercrombie- Fantasy Author's Take on Genre and Westerns

I’ve made a lot of grumpy comments over the last year about the failure of genre fiction, particularly the western genre.  As a fantasy reader I find the same true over in that neck of the bookshelf.  One writer that I have come to enjoy, Joe Abercrombie, seems to agree.  This is good news, as it looks like he is moving the timeline of his low fantasy (ie no dragons and little magic) First Law series up a couple centuries of technology to “combine fantasy with some western influences. Expect narrowed eyes, expansive skies, tough one-liners, and lots of dust...”

Can’t wait to read that one.  Below are Abercrombie’s thoughts on breaking genre fiction loose from its shackles.

Epic fantasy. It’s all the same, no?

There’s a grumpy wizard, a deadly barbarian, a jumped-up nobleman and some feisty girl, more than likely. They’re all engaged in a mysterious quest to bring that from there, and they’re all made out of cardboard. Probably there’s a dark lord of some kind involved. They talk like extras from a bad soap opera. They fight like extras from a bad cop show. Probably there’s a prophecy, and a farmboy with mysterious parentage, and if not a magic tower, then certainly a strange tall building of some kind. There’ll be battles, there’ll be intrigue, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a magic sword came up somewhere along the way.

I don’t need to read that again.

I want to read a fantasy with all the grit, and cruelty, and humour of real life. Where good and evil are a matter of where you stand, just like in the real world. I want dialogue that actually sounds like people talking, and action that actually feels like people fighting. I want magic and adventure, sure, but I want it to hurt. I want blood, sweat, and tears, and plenty of them. I want to read about characters as selfish, as flawed, as complicated, and as unpredictable as real people. I want a fantasy that can shock and surprise, amuse and horrify, delight and excite me, all at once.

I spent a long time looking, and I couldn’t find a set of books quite like that. So I thought I’d write some.

You like your fantasy with the edges left on?

Try The First Law.