| ED GORMAN |
AS THE REAL West was being settled, numerous writers back East were penning adventures about a mythic West that fascinated readers of every age. It was good versus evil, it was slap leather and draw, it was saving the schoolmarm’s virtue and then marryin’ her to produce a whole passel of young ’uns.
These cowboys, lawmen, and quick-draws were not much different from the knights of old. They were virtuous, clever, brave, and fearless. They were perfect for inspiring the day-dreams of boys not only in America but around the world. Real Western figures were used to sell novels, too. Books supposedly written by Buffalo Bill became bestsellers of their day. That the derring-do the books described was fictional didn’t matter. If Buffalo Bill said it was true, then, damn it, it was true.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the dime novels dealing with the West faced competition from a new kind of hero. With the industrialization of America that followed the Civil War, detective Nick Carter and other urban heroes came to the fore. Carter and his imitators were forerunners of the James Bondian protagonist. They used a variety of gizmos to help them solve their crimes and triumph in the name of all that was good and holy. Carter also introduced American boys and girls to the wider world. Carter villains represented some of the real-life forces that troubled our country. Urban crime was much more complex and in many ways more vicious than the crimes of the mythic West.
But soon enough the Western dominated popular culture once again. In 1903 there appeared a twelve-minute film called The Great Train Robbery, and silent films and America were never the same. Folks knew the film was authentic because it was filmed right out there in the Old West itself—Milltown, New Jersey.
It is impossible to guess how many Westerns were filmed in the century just past. From the A pictures with big stars, such as Stagecoach with John Wayne, High Noon with Gary Cooper, and Unforgiven with Clint Eastwood, to B pictures with rooster-like scrappers such as Bob Steele, to glitzy singing cowboys such as Roy Rogers and Gene Autry (though early on, Gene was a cowboy trapped in a terrible sci-fi serial called The Phantom Empire), lawmen, cowpokes, ranchers, farmers, and even preachers (Bible in one hand, six-gun in the other) took turns settling the mythic West.
The small screen had its turn at taming the Wild West as well; television was dominated by the genre in the ’50s and into the middle ’60s. There were some very good ones (Gunsmoke and Have Gun, Will Travel) and some very bad ones (Father Murphy and Here Come the Brides). In general, though, TV Westerns weren’t any better or any worse than the hundreds of motion pictures the studios had produced.
I mention all this to demonstrate that there’s a straight line from the fanciful dime novels to the pulps and films we’ve come to see as “Westerns.” Even John Ford, certainly the most celebrated of Western directors, chose the mythic West over the real West until late in his career. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is almost a repudiation of the themes Ford used in his earlier movies. In it he not only questions the veracity of legend and myth but is sardonic in the way he undermines it. James Stewart, a peace-loving man, must face down a very nasty Lee Marvin, who means to kill him. Somehow, against all odds, Stewart wins the gunfight and becomes a hero. Even Stewart believes he killed Marvin, but it is actually John Wayne hiding in the shadows behind Stewart who fires the fatal shot. I’ve never been a John Wayne fan, but the way Ford uses him here is unique, and powerful in Wayne’s final scenes. Fifty years after the movie appeared, critics still argue about what the film means in light of Ford’s earlier productions.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence was only one of the many movies and TV shows that chipped away at the mythic West. Earlier films, such as The Ox-Bow Incident, The Gunfighter, The Naked Spur, and numerous others, had already shown that the standard Hollywood depiction of frontier life was false. And only a few years after Liberty Valence, the first so-called Spaghetti Westerns began appearing in Italy and quickly throughout Europe. The Spaghetti Westerns demolished the Hollywood myth of the West but created one even more stylized and (in most cases) just as fraudulent. The Spaghettis created a West that was nothing more than drinking, whoring, killing, and dying, all rendered in grim close-ups and accompanied by music that was often more thrilling that the films themselves.
Meanwhile, television had been at its own revisionism. On radio, Gunsmoke had been the most intelligent and violent of all Westerns. It was toned down somewhat for TV, but its adult themes and Old Testament sense of justice brought many brutal truths into the living rooms of America. Maverick toyed with the myths using humor. Gambler James Garner had two interests—poker and beautiful women—and wasn’t much for fighting or gunplay. In fact, in many episodes he ran from fights. Have Gun, Will Travel featured Richard Boone as a quite literate man of exquisite and expensive tastes who hired out to right wrongs. The liberal political beliefs of the show’s writers and producers were often on display in the scripts; many of them dealt with racism, religion gone awry, and rich people who virtually enslaved those around them. The ’50s and ’60s were the boom decades for the TV Western, and many changes—at least a few of them ludicrous—were wrought on the standard formulas.
This was the state of the popular culture Robert B. Parker grew up in. I have no idea if he was a fan of Westerns, but based on his Spenser novels I suspect he was. It’s not difficult to imagine many of the Spenser novels as Westerns. (The same can be said for Elmore Leonard’s crime novels.) Both Spenser and his sidekick Hawk are larger than life, and their mission is to bring justice to situations that might otherwise favor the dark side. They ride into town and make everything right, while having a lot of adventures in the process. The difference here is that the Spenser novels are nuanced in ways few Westerns ever were. One of Parker’s greatest strengths was his social eye. The Spenser novels offer a running commentary on the foibles and excesses of middle and upper class American life.
Still, for all the reality in the Spenser series, it’s really about myth. For all his awareness and grumbly wisdom, Spenser is not much different from the private eyes in the pulps of the ’30s and ’40s. Much of what he does in the books would land him in jail for interfering with police investigations. The fights he gets into would result in lawsuits, if not arrests. And his ability to solve murders would make him a TV legend. Forget ESP; just give Spenser a gourmet meal, a glass of fine wine, and a night of blabber and sex with Susan Silverman, and the identity of the miscreant will be waiting for him in the morning.
This is by no means criticism. Parker just did what two centuries of American writers before him had done—created vivid romances involving derring-do and meting out justice. If it was good enough for Sir Walter Scott, it was good enough for Robert B. Parker.
Readers were surprised a few years ago when they heard Parker was publishing a Western. Why did this most urban of writers decide to ride the dusty trails of the traditional Western? Well, I would guess he liked the form and saw it as a challenge. Most importantly, he did with the Western what he’d done with the private eye novel: he reinvented it, made it completely his own. Yes, all the familiar elements of frontier tales were here—just as all the familiar elements of the private detective tale were in the Spenser novels—but with Parker’s intelligence, his worldview, and his style, he made the genre completely his own. There are no other Westerns like the five he wrote. And, no surprise here, Parker’s Westerns are very much like his Spenser novels, informed as they are by both violence and an entrenched melancholy.
Legend and myth had to have been on Robert B. Parker’s mind when he sat down to write his Westerns. Even though his Wyatt and Virgil Earp in his first Western, Gunman’s Rhapsody, were involved in the gunfight at O.K. Corral, neither was the folkloric figure popular in dime novels. Yes, Wyatt was a lawman, but he was also a businessman. He was attracted to boomtowns at least partly because of opportunities to make money while wearing a badge. He often bought and ran saloons and sometimes whorehouses. His older brother Virgil, who was the Tombstone city marshal at the time of the O.K. Corral gunfight, spent much of his early years as an efficient and effective peace officer until, later on in Tombstone, outlaws collected in the street and fired on him, shattering his left arm. Wyatt became the star of the family because of a largely fictional biography written during his lifetime. We do love our heroic stories. Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal by Stuart N. Lake became a long-running bestseller.
The Wyatt myths have led to innumerable books and films. In the ’50s, Hugh O’Brien’s Wyatt was in the top ten most popular TV shows. Even back then it was kind of goofy and dull, without any of the darker aspects I’d enjoyed even at twelve years old. On the other hand, the Earp story gave John Ford material for his excellent movie My Darling Clementine. Excellent, that is, as drama. As history, it was less than accurate—Ford and his writers based their script on the Stuart N. Lake book, which was filled with fictional derring-do.
Welcome to the fungible, fictional world of the legendary Earp brothers.
These are the raw facts and assorted pieces of hokum that Parker faced when creating his own version of the mythic West. Now, I have no idea if he ever watched the HBO series Deadwood, which came along in 2004. By then Parker’s first Western was finished and he was well on his way to creating a successful and appealing new Western series with his own creations, Cole and Hitch. But Deadwood is important in any discussion of contemporary Western fiction because it redefined the entire genre, just as Parker himself did. Deadwood and Parker’s Westerns are similar in many ways, in fact. They both depict the West as it was, a maelstrom of rich versus poor and politics as dirty as our own.
In Deadwood, the powerful families of the East paid surrogates to make them equally powerful—and rich—in the West. And as with any land that was being settled, Darwin’s laws applied absolutely. The strong not only survived but prospered. Read any serious book about daily frontier life and you soon real realize how many families were impoverished. These themes had been touched on in various ways by traditional Western writers, but few had dealt with it in any depth. In short, Deadwood is about barbaric capitalism in the Old West. And it trashed just about every mythic Western cliché that publishing and Hollywood had ever created.
These days the conventional wisdom is that the dime novel Western heroes were the basis for the private eyes who began appearing in detective pulps. What needs to be added to this point is that the private eyes and assorted tough guys were also unlike the heroic and squeaky-clean cowboy heroes. For instance, Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams bragged about the psychopathic pleasure he took in slaughtering dozens of bad guys. And the milieu of the pulp tough guys was different, too. Their authors allowed them to see and react to the poverty, the injustice, and the violence that was endemic in cities. The one thing pulp cowboys and pulp mystery protagonists had in common was that they faced the same kind of political forces that ruled their environments. In the Old West, robber barons and other wealthy miscreants were often the culprits; in the cities the culprits were many and varied, reaching from the privileged domain of businessmen to the brass-knuckled ruthlessness of mobsters and ward healers. The heroic spirit of the cowboy stars was replaced by the tough guys’ well-earned cynicism.
The characters in Deadwood, men and women alike, would have been much more at home in the pages of the crime pulp Black Mask than Weekly Western Tales. Once you see Deadwood, it’s difficult to return to the conventional Western that is light on the true historical reality.
It was with all this as background that I picked up Gunman’s Rhapsody, Parker’s first Western, a few years after it appeared. I’d put off buying a copy because I really didn’t want to read a Western by Robert B. Parker. I liked Parker’s crime novels very much. In fact, I felt that I owed him a percentage of what I made on my first private eye novel. (He could’ve bought a pack of gum with it.) Without his presence in the market I doubt I would have been able to sell it.
In the ’70s, private eyes were out of fashion. This continued into the early ’80s. But as Parker’s popularity grew, the private eye form became popular again. Parker did more than reinvigorate PI fiction—he reinvented it. These books were brand new, fresh, vivid, witty, abundantly violent, and very true (and wise) about the decades in which the novels were being produced.
I had no such hopes for Parker’s attempt at Western fiction. I just assumed, incorrectly, that he needed a break from his various crime series and thought saddling up might be a lark. Thirty pages into Gunman’s Rhapsody I knew better. It turned out to be an exciting and gripping novel.
The shootout at the O.K. Corral has been depicted numerous times in books and films. But Parker’s take on Tombstone, filled as it is with Wyatt Earp and the others associated with the event, works especially well because Parker uses a number of devices (news stories, bulletins, etc.) to lend the story real historical context.
The plot spins on Wyatt’s unexpected love for the beautiful lady friend of Johnny Behan, a local politician whose sway in the town allows Parker room to give us a real sense of how towns like Tombstone were run.
Parker suggests the whole war between the Earps and the McLaurys and the Clantons was due to the woman Wyatt falls in love with, Josie Marcus. At the beginning of the novel, Wyatt is living with his “domestic partner,” Mattie Blaylock. They live together, but it is an utterly loveless relationship.
She’d been fun once. A good-natured whore with an easy temperament when he’d met her in Dodge. His brothers had women with them, and Mattie Blaylock was eager to accommodate the man who’d run Clay Allison. But the fun had been mostly saloon fun. At home ironing his shirts, Mattie had lost much of the brightness that had gleamed in the gaslit cheer of the Long Branch. In truth, he realized, much of the brightness and the good nature had come from alcohol, and, domesticated, she could no longer consume enough of it, even boosted with laudanum, to be much more than the petulant slattern that was probably who she really was. Still, she could cook and her sewing brought in some money. And he didn’t have to spend much time with her.
This description sets the stage for the romance to come between Wyatt and Josie, a relationship as powerful and painful as the one that haunts Parker’s Jesse Stone, and one that will lead to violence and despair.
Johnny Behan’s relationship with Josie is similar to Wyatt and Mattie’s—a loveless one. When Wyatt and Josie meet, there are sparks and a romance begins. As the relationship between Wyatt and Josie grows, Johnny Behan, who becomes sheriff, becomes more and more angry. Not because he is the jilted lover, but because he has political ambitions and Wyatt and Josie’s relationship is known publicly; he is being made to look foolish in front of the whole town. This anger will drive Behan to bring hostility between the Earps and McLaurys and Clantons. This is a conversation between Wyatt and Josie as they discuss Behan:
“It’s complicated being a man,” Josie said.
“It’s easy enough,” Wyatt said, “knowing what to do. It’s hard sometimes to do it.”
“I don’t think it’s hard for you.”
“Hard for everybody, Josie.” He smiled and kissed her again. “Even us.”
“I think even knowing what he should do was hard for Johnny.”
“He sure as hell doesn’t know what he shouldn’t do,” Wyatt said.
“I don’t think Johnny is a bad man,” Josie said. “He’s more a bad combination of weak and ambitious, I think.”
“Doesn’t finally matter which it is,” Wyatt said. “Comes to the same thing. It can get him killed.”
Parker’s crime novels often turn on matters of honor and integrity. To Josie’s mind, Behan is not a “bad man” when you understand him on his own terms. He starts a war in which many die because he needs to avenge his honor, which Earp has destroyed by wooing Josie away from him. By that logic just about any kind of crime, including war, can be justified, but it’s telling that Josie would think this way. She is used to justifying her own wrongdoing to anybody who will listen.
Gunman’s Rhapsody is about people acting and reacting to the circumstances around them. We see a key driving factor between the Earps late in the novel. The O.K. Corral gunfight has taken place and Virgil Earp has been badly injured in a later bushwhacking. There are elegiac moments, laments for times past—for women, places, plans that went awry. Parker hints at fate in certain passages, how the Earps had seemed driven past reason, past common sense in some cases. But in an extended scene with Virgil we see the heroic notion of brothers who are lashed together by blood and tradition.
Virgil says to Wyatt:
“You want Josie. I want Josie. Morg wants Josie. James and Warren want Josie. People don’t like it, they don’t like us. You do something. We do it with you. Brothers. The Earp brothers.”
“I know.”
“Don’t never think anything else is true,” Virgil said.
“That’s who we are. That’s what we got. It’s what we always had.”
In these passages we have the heart of the book. No matter what grief comes to them, the Earps can always rely on each other—not only for back-up in gunfights, but even more importantly, for understanding and acceptance in a world that frequently spurns them. The Earps finds the same kind of support in each other that Spenser finds in Susan Silverman and Hawk.
It is in the four Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch novels, the series of Westerns Parker wrote following Gunman’s Rhapsody, that we really see the connection between Spenser and at least a version of Hawk in the Old West. Though Gunman’s Rhapsody brought us the quick-take chapters and the pitch-perfect dialogue of the Spenser books, in Appaloosa, Resolution, Brimstone, and Blue-Eyed Devil we have not only the literary tactics of Parker’s private eye novels, we also have the themes—a less-than-perfect protagonist meting out justice in a less-than-perfect world with a less-than-perfect woman always in his mind and heart. Hitch is not quite as tight-lipped as Cole, but his days as a buffalo hunter make him a sturdy and trustworthy deputy.
The set-up in Appaloosa is familiar, with a murderous ranch owner and his murderous crew doing as they please whenever they come to town. Killing lawmen is their specialty. They’ve also murdered a rancher and savagely raped and killed his wife. Parker redeems the familiarity immediately. Cole and Hitch sign on for good money to clean up the town, but only if the town council agrees to honor every single one of the laws Cole has written. No changes or he walks.
Parker did his homework in creating the social landscape of Appaloosa. He gives us a real glimpse into the daily lives of the important citizens and the politics of keeping a town safe. Louis L’Amour once argued that towns were rarely overrun because the local citizens just grabbed their shotguns and took care of the bad guys themselves. This implies that the idea of “town tamers” was exaggerated. I can’t say for sure, but I think that somewhere in his numerous novels, which he always claimed were carefully researched, L’Amour used the trope of the “town tamer.” And in authentic histories of the Old West there are references to such men, including the Earps and others.
Parker does well by Virgil Cole here, creating a believable and curiously melancholy figure who remains enigmatic to a fault. In the longstanding tradition of the traditional hero, generally Virgil lets his actions suffice for his words, though his conversations offer intriguing glimpses of his feelings. Hitch, who tells the story, is the open one, reporting what he’s experienced with both his mind and heart. He’s a likable character.
Parker’s handling of the main female character, Allie French, is amusing and occasionally moving. A widow who has little or no money and is not sure what to do next is rescued by Cole’s offer of getting her a job as piano player in the hotel. She has insisted that her background is musical—she emphasizes that she is not “common”—and so it may well be. But a good piano player she ain’t. Cole doesn’t laugh about this, but the reader certainly does.
One reviewer disliked Allie French enough to say that she is “manipulative” and implies that she is Susan Silverman redux. At the very least, like Spenser, Cole seems to enjoy women who make him work hard for his perch in their lives.
To his credit, Parker gives Allie a complexity that is sometimes maddening to Virgil. She is a woman who is never comfortable with herself or her circumstances. A prostitute, Katie, explains in a brief exchange with Everett Hitch how she understands Allie, at the same time giving us a glimpse of what it was like being a woman during those times and in those conditions. In these brief conversations, we see that many women back then were probably as strong as the men. Read any good history of frontier women and you’ll find how difficult their work was, far more difficult in many ways than the men’s.
“Most of us understand Allie French,” Katie said.
“What do you all understand?”
“She ain’t no different,” Katie said, “from any of us working girls. She’s willing to fuck who she got to fuck, so she can get what she needs to get.”
“How ’bout love?” I said. “Love got anything to do with it?”
“Out here, love’s pretty hard for a woman,” Katie said. “Mostly it’s the men worry about love. You know how many miners and cowboys told me they loved me just before they, ah, emptied their chamber?”
“Tell you the truth, Katie,” I said, “I guess I don’t want to know that.”
“Men maybe can worry ’bout love,” Katie said. “Most women out here got to think ’bout other things.”
Appaloosa is as well written, as character-ripe and thrilling, as the finest Spenser or Jesse Stone novel. It is a magnificent piece of craft.
You don’t have to read much of this novel to see why Hollywood was so eager to film it. (Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen starred.) The book is packed with outsize, fascinating characters, and the pace builds perfectly to the inevitable but still provocative ending. Appaloosa became a memorable movie that the critics understandably loved.
The Cole-Hitch saga continued with Resolution and Brimstone. Private detective novels generally take place in a telescoped period of time. Ross Macdonald favored twenty-four hours, honoring the classical form of tragedy. In his Westerns, Parker breaks time frequently. Days, months, even years pass in the saga, lending the books a real sense of lives lived, lives subtly changed. The time frames for his Spenser and Jesse Stone novels are much more telescoped.
Resolution is largely Hitch’s story. He’s hired to watch over the Blackfoot Saloon, which is shorthand for “hell hole.” After killing a man long overdue for death and making sure the prostitutes are treated better, Hitch becomes the point man for law and order in this small town. But widespread violence is inevitable. Then his friend Virgil Cole shows up, and the battle is really joined. What makes this novel work is the Deadwood-like squalor of the people and the setting. Parker shows us the lives of average citizens, and as I read I thought of how the gold and silver boomtowns operated: bad water, tainted food, filthy sanitary facilities.
There is an interesting exchange between Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. Please note this is a spoiler alert. If you have not read Appaloosa, then this exchange will give away a key part of the ending of that novel. However, it explains where Virgil’s mind is as Resolution starts. It also shows the bond and friendship between Cole and Hitch. And it sheds light on Hitch’s behavior at the end of Appaloosa.
The two are sitting alone on the front porch of a hotel in Resolution, talking. Virgil Cole explains how he continued to be a lawman in Appaloosa after Everett Hitch had left town (after that novel ended). Virgil says he walked away from his job when Allie ran away with a “tinhorn” who promised to take her to his ranch in New Mexico. Of course, the tinhorn is lying; he has no ranch, he just says these things to “fuck her.” Virgil explains how he leaves Appaloosa and chases them down and finds Allie left behind in a town called Little Springs with the tinhorn gone. He chases after the tinhorn and eventually catches up with him. He offers the tinhorn a chance to draw, but he refuses, so Cole draws and kills him in cold blood. Cole then reveals that Hitch shot Bragg because of Allie. Even though Allie is not seen in this novel, her presence is still looms large.
Brimstone also has some of the brooding qualities of the Jesse Stone books. Virgil Cole is still looking for Allie French. He is determined to find her, but when he does he almost wishes he hadn’t. The very proper Allie has turned prostitute, and Virgil can’t deal with that. This is the same way Jesse Stone’s ex-wife haunts the Stone books.
Of all Parker’s Westerns, Appaloosa is my favorite, but the following scene from Brimstone is the single most powerful moment in any of the Westerns. It occurs early in the novel.
The book begins with Cole and Hitch looking for Allie French. They have been searching for almost a year. They ride into a nothing town and find her working in a dump of a saloon as a whore, looking terrible. Cole and Hitch take her out, much to the displeasure of the owner and bartender. When the bouncer tries to stop them, Cole knocks him on his ass with the butt of his revolver. The next day, they get ready to leave town, and the boys from the whorehouse are waiting for them to get Allie back. The gunfight is Parker’s masterstroke. The clipped prose and stark dialogue conveys Virgil’s courage and Allie’s terror.
“I count six,” Virgil said to me softly. “Anything develops, I’ll take the first man. You take the last, and we’ll work our way to the middle.”
I nodded. At this range, with the eight-gauge, I might get two at a time.
“Virgil,” Allie said. “What is it.”
“Nothing to worry about,” Virgil said.
Allie looked for the first time at the men across the street.
“Oh my God, Virgil, it’s Pig.”
“That his name?” Virgil said.
“Don’t let him take me back.”
“Nope,” Virgil said.
“We’re fine, Allie,” I said. “We’re fine.”
Pig was carrying a big old Navy Colt in a gun belt that sagged under his belly. There was dried blood on his shirt. It appeared that he hadn’t changed it since Virgil hit him. The left side of Pig’s face was swollen and dark, with a long scab where Virgil’s front sight had dragged across the cheekbone. The five men with him were all carrying. I thumbed back both hammers on the eight-gauge.
We kept walking our parallel walk. Allie held tight to Virgil’s left arm. At the end of the street was the Barbary Coast Café, and across the street from that the railroad station, and beyond that the river. And nothing else. It was obvious where we were going.
“I need you to let go of my arm now, Allie,” Virgil said.
The gunfight itself, like many of the scenes in all of Parker’s Westerns, is so cinematic a director could shoot the printed page and knock off for the day. The final Cole-Hitch book is Blue-Eyed Devil. The police chief of a small town invites Cole and Hitch to his office to introduce himself and to offer them jobs as part of his force. The problem is that Cole and Hitch have already figured out that Chief Amos Callico (great name) is a pig. Callico, of course, has political ambitions (governor) and won’t abide these two standing in his way. Blue-Eyed Devil has a little bit of everything, including pissed-off Apaches and a mysterious stranger who Parker describes thusly:
He was wearing a beaded buckskin shirt, an ivory-handled Colt on his hip, and a derby hat tilted forward over the bridge of his nose. He looked like somebody from a wild west show, except, somehow, I knew he wasn’t . . .
He had black-and-white striped pants tucked into high black boots, and his skin was smooth and kind of pale, like a woman’s. He didn’t look like he spent much time outside. His hands were pale, too, with long fingers.
In Western fiction lore there is always room for an eccentric killer.
The stranger’s name is Chauncey Teagarden (another great name) and he is a gunman too, possibly sent to kill Virgil Cole. And Allie, in her sad yet infuriating way, shows she hasn’t changed one bit as Cole finds her buttering up the gunman. Virgil and Everett watch, and this is the conversation between the two about Allie’s nature:
“And she knows that Chauncey is here sooner or later to kill me,” Virgil said.
I nodded.
“And she knows that he might succeed.”
“Always possible,” I said.
“And so you know she’s thinking ahead,” Virgil said.
I was quiet for a moment, looking across the street. Then I took in some air and blew it out slowly.
“And lining up replacements,” I said.
Once again a Parker protagonist must face the sorrow of love gone awry. Spenser and Stone have both faced this kind of grief.
There’s more gunplay and dying here than in any of the previous books, and the pages turn even faster. An exciting and fitting conclusion to the Cole-Hitch saga.
The Westerns of Robert B. Parker work within the parameters of popular culture. In reviewing them we’ve dealt with crooked sheriffs, gunfights, women who can’t be tamed, male bonding, and lawless towns. These are the mythic elements of a century and a half of Western genre fiction. And for the most part Parker presents them as they’re usually depicted. Readers of traditional Westerns will not feel cheated by these books. Parker knows you have to give readers what they pay for. In this case, they want the myth.
But, again, as with his crime novels, he brings his world-view and his own sensibility into play, enriching the books for more demanding readers. While the trappings may be mythic, the characters are more realistic. There are many legends about the Earp brothers, but as we see with Virgil, the legends forgot to include the human element.
For all the action, for all the crossing and double-crossing, for all the colorful and clamorous history of the mythic West, finally it is the characters we will remember most about Parker’s Westerns. The same way we recall the characters in the Spenser and Stone novels.