Scott Phillips is full of creosote and horseshit*

Scott Phillips' novels Cottonwood and the new Hop Alley take farmer/salonkeeper/photographer Bill Ogden through Kansas, Nebraska, and into Denver in the 1870s, and Hop Alley's final chapter suggests that a sojourn in San Francisco is not out of the question:

"And what would you say is the worst part of [California], Mister? South or north?"

"I'll tell you, I've never encountered a worse or baser bunch than those in San Francisco. Debauchery and vice, and all in the name of mammon. It was gold that cursed that town, sir, and the more gold they brought up from the ground, the more Satan smiled."

"I nodded and thanked him ... and as I boarded the train I found the idea growing in me: William Sadlaw, Photographic Gallery, San Francisco, Cal., Sittings by Appointment Only."

That's where Kevin Starr comes in. Phillips writes fiction so rich and detailed that it could be history; Starr writes histories of California so vivid that they could be fiction, and he singles out San Francisco for its blend of frontier lawlessness and the hastily imported cosmopolitan sophistication of an Atlantic trading port. It's the perfect destination for Ogden (who here calls himself Bill Sadlaw, in an effort to escape the law's attention).

Phillips' version of the American West is richer, bawdier, and funnier than most, but there's no hint of the self-congratulatory alternative about it. Phillips simply has a breathtaking sense of the possibilities open to a young man on the run, plunked down amid wide-open spaces and credulous populations. There's even a whodunit at the heart of Hop Alley: Ogden/Sadlaw knows the real killer of a pressman for the local newspaper (It wasn't the Chinese residents of Hop Alley, attacked by angry mobs.) He saves an innocent victim from lynching, but he moves on rather than going to the law and trying to set things right. Hop Alley is no conventional crime novel, after all, but if you're looking for a richly detailed picaresque crime Western of America, you won't go wrong with Scott Phillips.

(The Ogden name will be familiar to readers of Phillips' novels set in more recent times. Wayne Ogden is the protagonist of The Adjustment, a spiritual as well as a familial descendant of Bill Ogden.)

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* "With the eastern range of the Rocky Mountains in the near distance and the smell of creosote and horseshit mingling in my nostrils I sat on the flat rooftop, exposing prints and idly contemplating the great rectangles of glass that comprised the skylights of my studio."

— Hop Alley, page 33

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

In memory of Elmore Leonard: The Westerns

In honor of Elmore Leonard, who died today after one of the longest and most influential careers in crime fiction, here's a Detectives Beyond Borders post from last year about the still-vital Westerns he wrote way back at the beginning. And here's a link to previous DBB posts about Leonard. Click the link, then scroll down. 

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Before I head east, a post about the West.

I don't know where Elmore Leonard fits in the history of the Western, other than that he wrote some good ones, Hombre and "3:10 to Yuma," to name two. But to this neophyte reader in the genre, Leonard's early stories make an instructive comparison with American crime fiction of the same time: the early 1950s. (That's right, the early 1950s. Leonard, whose latest novel, Raylan, has recently hit the shelves, was a published author at least as early as 1951.)

Here's the conclusion to one story:

"The Southwest was full of Hydes. And as long as there were Hydes, there were Billy Guays. Big talkers with big guns who ended up lying dead, after a while, in a Mimbre rancheria. Angsman would go back to Fort Bowie. Even if it got slow sometimes, there’d always be plenty to do."

The matter-of-fact resignation reminds me of hard-boiled crime writing from a few decades earlier. It's as if hard-boiled writing decamped for the West around 1951, leaving American crime fiction to the twisted mental worlds of Jim Thompson and David Goodis.

Leonard's Western stories are almost breathtakingly free of political correctness, unsparing in their discussions both of the counterproductive brutality of American policy toward the Apaches of the Southwest and of the blood-curdling violence and internecine feuds of some of those Apaches. Leonard is careful, too, to delineate different habits and war customs of various Apache bands, thus honoring their humanity more fully than do blanket views of Indians as bloodthirsty savages or creative and ecologically sensitive innocents.

Leonard gets great mileage of the tension between experienced Western scouts and hot-shot young military officers from back East, mining the theme both for dramatic conflict:

"It was his patrol and he was supposed to have the answers. That’s why he had a commission. But the face bore a puzzled expression. It was young, and lobster-red, and told openly that he was new to frontier station, though he had learned all the answers at the Point. You hesitate when it’s your command, your responsibility. When a dirty old man in an undershirt is studying you to see what you’ve got, waiting to pick you apart. And if he finds the wrong thing, the buzzards do the rest of the picking."

and for humor:

"`I’m only saying what if,' Travisin agreed, with a faint smile. `Could be one way or the other. I just want to impress you that we’re not chasing Harvard sophomores across the Boston Common.'''

And, Leonard being Leonard, he could work a good line out of a routine bit of description:

"A hundred things raced through his mind, and every one of them was a question."

or

"Six enlisted troopers prayed to six interpretations of God that the young lieutenant wasn’t a glory seeker … at least not on this patrol."

OK, that's it for now. More on Leonard later, and the next time I mention Western in a post, it will be next to Wall.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Western

I felt right at home  in my first visit to Jerusalem in many years because the shuttle driver from Tel Aviv's Ben-Gurion Airport was impatient, as his kind proverbially are, but with a penchant for explaining things to the drivers at whom he raged (though no more than one could possibly have heard him). I didn't understand all his cursing, but the end of one string of invective sounded like simcha, the Hebrew word for happiness.

Spent my first evening wandering around the Old City, and I didn't get lost, at least not in any way worthy of the name.  The Old City is divided into Armenian, Christian, Jewish and Muslim quarters, so I saw:  Orthodox priests who, with just a splash of color in their garb, could have been Piero della Francesca's King Solomon; Chassidic Jews with hats cooler than those you'd see on any American hipster, and young Israeli Arabs who were more than happy to offer spur-of-the-moment advice, including one about 12 years old, who said, "It's closed" when I tried to wander down a side street to see the Al-Aqsa Mosque. "Only for Muslims."

Read some more Elmore Leonard on the plane over, including one story that began with a long, stolid, grimly straightforward description of a buffalo hunt that ended thus (the description, not the hunt):

"Wait until he rode into Leverette with a wagon full of hides, he thought. He’d watch close, pretending he didn’t care, and he’d see if anybody laughed at him then."

The man knows how to create tension.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Stuffed crowdedly with adverbs

Adverbs are out of favor in crime fiction these days, but American pulp writing in the middle of the last century was full of them — stuffedly full.

In Norbert Davis' stories, characters shave, kick, flip, search, punch, stab, fade, and flip through hotel registration cards "expertly." A  street car clangs its way emptily down the street. Raoul Whitfield, too, used adverbs more than is fashionable today and, if my memory serves me well, Raymond Chandler and perhaps even Dashiell Hammett would have a light blinking redly from time to time.

When did adverbs slip out of fashion? And why?

***

Was good grammar ever looked down on in tough-guy crime writing? The first-person narrator of a Mickey Spillane story originally published in Manhunt in 1953 tells us that "But having learned my lesson the hard way, he never got the chance to impose upon me again."

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Finally, here's a bit from one of Elmore Leonard's stories published in 1951 (yes, the man has been writing for that long) that may be more pertinent today than ever:

"When he was through, he shook his head and silently cursed the stupidity of men trying to control a powder-keg situation two thousand miles from the likely explosion. ... Sometimes things get a bit hot; otherwise you just sit around and watch the desert."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

History, humor and violence

How does an author of historical fiction evoke momentous events and famous names without growing turgidly self-important?

James R. Benn' s most recent Billy Boyle mystery, A Mortal Terror, opens with a giant wink to the reader that promises a fair bit of fun along with the human drama and military history: "Kim Philby owed me one."

That's a wonderfully disarming invocation of one of the twentieth century's most notorious celebrity spies.

***

Back in the American West, I've read a few more of Edward A. Grainger's Cash Laramie and Gideon Miles stories, and I can add pulp appeal to the reasons crime readers might like these Westerns:

"Cash cleared leather first and opened a dark hole in the rapscallion's forehead. A third blast came through the shattered door and then a stream of small fire joined in the dance."

or

"Miles rolled sideways, ignoring the pain, and popped the third man in the right eye, sending chunks of brain out the back of the man's head."

If you like Mickey Spillane's action but are leery of his politics, try some Cash Laramie!
© Peter Rozovsky 2012

DBB reads a Western!

Edward A. Grainger's Cash Laramie stories are full of mysterious origins, lawmen both upright and crooked, cowboys and Indians, and saloons with bat-wing doors.

But they're also hard-boiled crime stories, and why not?  What is Sam Spade but a lone wolf riding into town wearing a trench coat and a fedora?

The stories portray a West more fraught with racial conflict than I expected from Westerns, and they treat sex more frankly. At the same time, there is nothing jokingly or preciously revisionist or politically correct about them; they feel like old-time Westerns.

But they feel like crime stories, too. So, while Grainger pays tribute to such Western classics as The Searchers, "Maggie's Promise" gives chilling new meaning to the line "It was a wandering daughter job."

I'll read the first collection of Laramie/Miles stories next, and I'll be thinking about Westerns that might appeal to crime-fiction readers. Any suggestions?
© Peter Rozovsky 2012

A hit and myth by Elmore Leonard

My recent reading of Daniel Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy got me thinking of other regions of the United States that are foreign to me. And that led me to Elmore Leonard's 2005 novel The Hot Kid, a crime story that reads like a Western and spans an intermediate era between the two.

The good guys are federal agents and the bad guys bank robbers, but the hero in particular gets a mythlike origin story and accompanying legend more reminiscent of the lawmen of America's storied Western past. That Leonard updates that past with realistic sexual and ethnic detail is part of the book's fun.

Leonard began his career writing Westerns before becoming famous as a crime writer. His melding of the two in this book got me reflecting on the common roots of those two great genres of American popular writing.

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More than the previous Leonard I'd read, The Hot Kid made me understand what younger crime writers mean when they say they love his work. The rhythm of the man's sentences reminds me of John McFetridge, an avowed Elmore Leonard admirer, and also of Declan Burke, another Detectives Beyond Borders friend whose name often calls forth mentions of Leonard.

***

I'm always on the lookout for appearances of my profession in crime novels. There's a nice one here about a reporter who wants to write about the Ku Klux Klan's hatred of Italians and Catholics but whose editor has other ideas:

"Tony wrote a story about the happy Fassino family's popular macaroni factory. Another one about a social club, the Christopher Columbus Society and its twenty-five piece band that at festivals and on the Fourth of July.

"The editor said, `I think you're getting the hang of it. Now write one about the tendency of your people to overindulge in Choctaw beer and homemade wine.'

"That did it. Tony Antonelli quit ... "

© Peter Rozovsky 2011