A Killing in Kiowa by Lewis B. Patten

Patten was the author of more than a hundred western novels. 

Review

A Killing in Kiowa by Lewis B. Patten was first published in 1972 and won the Spur Award for best western novel published that year. The book is a taut, 144-page Signet paperback that covers twenty-four eventful hours in the life of Sheriff Matt Wyatt. It starts with four teenage boys trying to rape a prostitute as she's walking home from work at one in the morning and then beating to death a man who tries to stop them. The boys flee from the scene, and the intended rape victim yells for help. Before he dies, the man names two of his assailants to the doctor who arrives on the scene first. The sheriff learns the two names from the doctor and sets out to arrest the boys. Once they are in jail, he quickly learns the names of the other two from their accomplices and rounds them up as well, though bringing in the last one -- a rancher's boy -- proves to be difficult. 

At times the story feels more like a crime noir novel than a traditional western. As soon as the sheriff has the boys in custody, the rancher and the banker (another of the boys' fathers) begin to bribe and intimidate witnesses. When it looks like that might fail, the rancher gathers his hands to help stage a jailbreak. The murder victim's brothers and friends, meanwhile, begin to threaten that justice will be done by any means necessary -- even if it results in "stringing up" the boys. Sheriff Wyatt has to try to keep a lid on the pressure cooker that the town becomes as the two sides get ready to go to war with each other.

The story is so tightly plotted that not a word is wasted. Every one of the sheriff's moves makes perfect sense, and even so the situation becomes more and more volatile, out of control, and potentially deadly. Adding to the complications for Sheriff Wyatt are the facts that one of the boys is the son of his deputy and the brother of his girlfriend. But he never wavers from trying to do his duty or to confront the violence that is relentlessly headed his way. The ending is fast and the resolution satisfying.

Riders of the Purple Sage by Zane Grey

 

Pearl Zane Grey gave up a promising career as a dentist

Review

If you do any online searches to find out what are the best classic western novels, three books show up on pretty much every list: Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident, Owen Wister's The Virginian, and Zane Grey's Riders of the Purple Sage. Perhaps because Zane Grey's books were all over the paperback racks when I was a kid, I expected Riders of the Purple Sage to consist mostly of pulp-style action. I was surprised to discover that it's really pure melodrama. Western-style action does figure in the novel -- in the form of shootouts and horseback chases -- but the story leans far more heavily on romance, suppressed emotions, dark secrets, and long declarations of love complete with "palpitating" bosoms. The writing is old-fashioned and often repetitious. The long-delayed revelations (of which there are many) are, more often than not, painfully obvious. The intricate web of relationships borders on the absurd. And yet... and yet... I loved this book! 

Early on, the main narrative bifurcates into two almost separate stories. In one, the Mormon woman who has inherited her father's ranch must, with the help of a mysterious lone gunman, defend it from ruthless men who will take it from her by any means necessary. In the other, a young man comes of age as he rescues a beautiful girl and builds a life with her in a hidden valley he discovers that's literally a lost world. (How many genre staples did you count in that description?) The villains of this work have the blackest hearts you've ever encountered, and the twist is that they are all high-ranking Elders of the Mormon church. Indeed, I had decided that Zane Grey must have hated Mormons, but a little research afterwards told me that his feelings were mixed.* 

If you get past the archaisms and give yourself over to the story, you'll find yourself turning pages late into the night to find out what happens next, and what happens after that, and then what... Zane Grey doesn't stint on incidents right up to the very end. On top of that, his descriptive writing (especially in the hidden valley) can be first rate, and his insights into human nature are at times quite profound. There's a reason this particular title makes it onto all the classics lists.

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* See Zane Grey in Zion: An Examination of His Supposed Anti-Mormonism by Gary Topping (https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1918&context=byusq)

The Cowboy and the Cossack by Clair Huffaker

Review

If the cattle drive in the far-better-known Lonesome Dove, from the Rio Grande to Montana, was long, the drive in Clair Huffaker's The Cowboy and the Cossack is far, far longer. The cowboys in this novel must cross an ocean with their beeves, to Vladivistok, Russia, and then push on deep into Siberia with them.

Once on Russian soil, however, the Slash-Diamond outfit is met by a Cossack named Captain Rostov who informs the cowboys that his own men will drive the cattle onward from that point. The outfit's leader, Shad, refuses, insisting that they will complete the job they were hired to do themselves. Thus begins a prickly alliance between the cowboys and Cossacks who will make the grueling trek together to a starved town called Bakaskaya.

Told entirely from the point of view of the youngest cowboy in the outfit, Levi (whose parents named him after the jeans), the novel is a traditional coming-of-age story. It's also an out-and-out men's adventure story. The only women in the tale are glimpsed while serving food and drinks in one of the rare towns but always remain remote, mysterious, and yearned for.

But as manly adventure yarns go, it's a corker. The men of two worlds, suspicious and hostile to each other at first, develop mutual respect and even friendship as they battle weather, imperial soldiers, wild animals, and even wilder men in the form of Genghis Kharlagawl and his Tartars. Adding to the complications, Shad and his men eventually learn that they were brought to Russia under false pretenses.

Much of the fun, of course, derives from our learning about the world of 19th century Russia through the young protagonist's eyes. This is not the Russia of War and Peace or Anna Karenina, though; it's the remote outposts of Eastern Russia and the no-man's land of the Mongolian border. I have no idea how much Russian history Huffaker may have studied to pull this off, but it comes across with complete believability. The writing is clear and compelling, pulling you through the 300 or so pages in a flurry.

Huffaker was a successful novelist, writing mostly Westerns in the 50s and 60s, and a sought-after screen writer with more than a dozen movies credited to him. Many of his Western novels were turned into movies, though, oddly, not the one that was undoubtedly his best.

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

Over the course of his life, McMurtry
managed or owned 26 bookstores.

It certainly took me long enough to get around to reading this one-time bestselling novel from 1985. (I've still never seen the TV miniseries.) I'm glad I finally did read it, though, because it's a wonderful, old-fashioned novel filled with a Dickensian cast of characters, life-and-death perils, and deep emotions. What more could you ask for with your morning coffee?

Review

Prior to reading this, I only knew McMurtry through the movie adaptations of Hud and The Last Picture Show. Those stories were set in modern small-town Texas. By contrast, Lonesome Dove is a full-on Western set in the 1870s. And whereas the movies I mentioned focused on domestic affairs (a failing ranch and failing love affairs), Lonesome Dove follows a Quixotic cattle drive from the Rio Grande to the upper reaches of Montana. Indeed, our main protagonists, Call and Gus, have much in common with the Don and Sancho.

The book features enough hair-raising adventures to keep any fan of traditional genre Westerns entertained for its nearly 900-page length. McMurtry proves to be a masterful conjurer of dramatic confrontations, narrow escapes, and heartbreaking deaths. The book is as male-dominated as you'd expect in a Western about a cattle drive, but two of the novel's most important characters are women. Their stories are hard and unsentimental -- and just as gripping as the men's stories.

As if all that weren't enough, the novel also encompasses a coming-of-age story. While Lonesome Dove is the name of the town where the story begins and ends, the teenaged boy named Newt can also be thought of as the "lonesome dove" at the heart of the tale. The son of a prostitute who died when he was a boy, not knowing who his father is, Newt is offered a place to live on the ranch that belongs to Call and Gus. As he endures the hardships and bitter lessons of the cattle drive to Montana, he is also searching for his place in the world, trying to understand who he is and where he belongs.

I can't imagine anyone reading this book and not enjoying its many twists and turns or appreciating its fully imagined characters. But its mood is elegiac throughout, its affairs all lacerating, its outcomes all tragic. As with life itself, you won't make it through to the end unscarred.

The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward

As a young teen, Ward woke up each night feeling a
hand in the small of her back pushing her out of bed.

Review

You should go into this novel knowing nothing about it. I'll do my best to avoid "spoilers" in this part of the review because they really would spoil it.* 

The author writes with sensitivity and the best of intentions, seeking to reveal aspects of how the human mind can work that are puzzling and, possibly, signposts pointing toward a better way of understanding who we are. That sounds pretty heavy, and I suppose it is. I have to admit, though, that I respected this book more than I enjoyed it. The author uses misdirection, unreliable narrators, and slow reveals to keep the reader off balance and guessing for two-thirds of the book. Even as certain truths begin to come clear, other layers remain to be peeled away. Frankly, my patience was tried almost to the point of giving up by all this peeling away. I'm glad, however, that I did stick with it. The author rewards your patience, though perhaps only just.

While The Last House on Needless Street uses certain tropes of the horror novel, it is not, in the end, what it appears to be. The author herself admits the novel is "disguised as horror." However you decide to categorize it, the work sits more comfortably at the literary than at the genre end of the spectrum. It has garnered high praise from many critics, but I found it only mildly interesting and not entirely convincing.

I have more to say, but in doing so I have to give away some of the twists. I've moved the rest of the review to a new section below the footnote.

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*And, by all means, avoid looking at the author's afterword and end notes for the book until you have either finished reading it or until you've gotten at least two-thirds of the way through.

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Commentary with Spoilers

The Last House on Needless Street attempts to show how a mind can deal with trauma through dissociative identity disorder (DID), which used to be known as multiple personality disorder. In the early chapters of the book, we see events unfolding through different first-person perspectives -- a man named Ted, his daughter Lauren, and his cat Olivia -- as well as from the perspective of a young woman named Dee who suspects the Ted of having abducted and/or murdered her sister Lulu when the sister was a young girl. As the story unfolds, we suspect Ted's "daughter" is really the abducted girl and that perhaps the "cat" is really a second personality Lauren/Lulu has created to deal with the abuse dealt out by Ted. 

Dee buys the house next door to Ted's house and uses it as a base to spy on his activities. As she does so, she becomes more and more certain that Lulu is a prisoner in the house, though at one point she breaks into the house and doesn't discover her. Ted makes trips to see a psychiatrist who he tries to fool, trying to get information about how to deal with Lauren by describing situations on TV shows that he makes up. The psychiatrist isn't fooled, except that he really is fooled in a way that finally becomes clear. Like Dee, the psychiatrist believes that Ted may be abusing a young girl that he is holding prisoner. He doesn't report his suspicions, though, because he wants to use Ted as the subject for a book.

But Lauren doesn't exist. She is another facet of Ted's personality. As is Olivia. It is Ted who was abused as a child, and Ted whose personality has fragmented into separate "people." All those years ago, when Lulu disappeared, it was Dee who was responsible for her falling onto the rocks at the nearby lake. Dee began to run away in a panic, but turned back when she realized her little sister might not be dead, When she returned to the rocks, the little girl was gone. Dee saw someone driving away with the body and came to believe it was Ted who stole the dying child, but it was Ted's mother. Ted's mother saw it all, and Ted's mother liked to perform "experiments."

There are more twists and turns, but this is the essence of the book. The author keeps the reader disoriented and guessing through most of the book, which isn't a bad thing at all. Nevertheless the story is filled with implausible coincidences and convenient plot devices that, for me at least, make the whole thing hard to swallow. Ward might have gotten away with those infelicities in a more fast-paced or thrilling narrative.