In Pursuit of Spenser (28 page)

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.