Guy Vanderhaeghe, A Good Man

I wanted to like this novel more than I did. For its length (464 pages), it promises somewhat more than it delivers. I had the same reaction to the author’s The Last Crossing (reviewed here a while ago). There are a lot of ideas and food for thought in this novel about character, friendship, responsibility, Native Americans, the frontier, and U.S.-Canadian relations. But in the end it’s hard to say what it all adds up to. You can puzzle if you like over the title. Who among the novel’s male characters is the “good man”? Is there one at all?

Set in the late 1870s, partly in the Cypress Hills of Saskatchewan where Fort Walsh was headquarters for the North-West Mounted Police; but mostly in the frontier settlement of Fort Benton, Montana, on the upper Missouri River, the action takes place in the aftermath of Custer’s defeat at the Little Bighorn and settlers of the sparsely populated prairie live in terror of the Sioux and other tribes who seem to be organizing under the leadership of Sitting Bull to rid the West of whites altogether.

Giles A. Lutz, The Honyocker (1961)

Giles A. Lutz (1910-1982) was a prolific writer, with over 60 western novels published under his own name and a half dozen pseudonyms. During the 1940s and 1950s, he published more than 200 stories in the pulps, mostly westerns, but also sports fiction. In 1962, he received the Spur Award for this novel, The Honyocker, from Western Writers of America.

Plot. “Honyocker” was an insulting term bestowed by cattlemen and cowboys on homesteaders in the far West, who attempted to make a living from subsistence farming on what had at one time been open range. Turning the prairie sod, they were destroying not only free grass for the ranchers. Unknown to them, they were also permanently disturbing a fragile ecology too arid for cultivation of dryland crops that would support a family of settlers.

B. M. Bower, Jean of the Lazy A (1915)

Jean and Lite

This was B. M. Bower’s 15th novel, and like her The Phantom Herd a year later, it draws on her knowledge of the movie business. Sixteen-year-old Jean Douglas, the title character, is a no-nonsense daughter of a Montana rancher, Aleck Douglas, who in the opening chapters is wrongly found guilty of murder and sent to prison. With the help of a ranch hand, Lite Avery, she spends the rest of the novel finding the real killer.

Help also comes in the form of a movie company from Hollywood, which hires her as the stunt double for the leading lady of an action-packed western. Able to ride, rope, and shoot with ease, Jean also contributes ideas for making the film more realistic. Before long she is dreaming up scenarios for a Perils-of-Pauline style serial, with herself in the starring role.

Kim Zupan, The Ploughmen

One reader has compared this novel to No Country For Old Men because of a murderous central character, John Cload, who brings to mind yet another dark work of fiction The Silence of the Lambs. Cload is more than a little like Hannibal Lecter, as he befriends a deputy sheriff who keeps him company from outside his jail cell through long, sleepless nights and escorts him to and from the county courthouse where he is under trial.

The deputy, Valentine Millimaki, has been encouraged by the sheriff to learn what he can about Cload that might help in the trial. But besides a single killing, for which there was a witness, the deputy remains unaware that Cload has bodies buried all over the rough Montana country along the northern shores of the upper Missouri River.

Not more than marginally interested in Cload anyway, Millimaki has troubles of his own. Cload correctly senses that they are woman troubles. As a schoolboy, Millimaki once discovered the body of his mother, who had hanged herself in a barn on the family farm. Now, his young wife has left him, weary and depressed by life in a backwater Montana town.

Willard Wyman, Blue Heaven

Can’t say how many times I have anticipated the opening of a review with the words, “This is really an unusual book.” For all the predictable conventions of storytelling, I am still often surprised by the unexpected turns a writer’s story takes. I don’t mean turns of plot, because we expect that in a novel. They are, in fact, a convention of the form. A novel would not be a novel without them.

What I mean is the presence or absence of conventions so out of the ordinary and unusual, you feel like your GPS has purposely taken you someplace you never intended to go, and could not find on your own if you tried. This happened to me with this novel.

Blue Heaven is a prequel, preceding in time Wyman’s earlier High Country (reviewed here a while ago). It introduces in its later chapters a character who is at the center of High Country, and is the link between them. Blue Heaven takes place during the 1910s to 1940s. High Country unfolds in the years that followed.

While Blue Heaven is set in the Swan range north of Missoula in Montana, High Country follows its characters southward to California’s High Sierras. Both novels are about wilderness packers and the mystique of being in the mountains, especially at high elevations, over passes, and along watersheds in hard to access back country.

Film review: Jimmy P.

Actor Benicio del Toro is a personal favorite of mine, since we once lived in the same building in LA, and riding the elevator together one day I got to tell him how he made me cry at the end of Traffic. He plays a Blackfeet Indian in the new film Jimmy P., and he darn near made me cry again.

The film is based on a 1951 book, Reality and Dream: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, by George Devereux, an ethnologist and Freudian psychoanalyst. Played by French actor Mathieu Almaric, Devereux comes to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, to diagnosis del Toro’s Jimmy Picard, who is suffering from brain injury-related trauma following service in Europe during World War II.

Carol Buchanan, Gold Under Ice

Since reading Carol Buchanan’s excellent Spur Award-winning God’s Thunderbolt a while ago, I have been meaning to get to its sequel, Gold Under Ice, which continues the story of frontier lawyer, Dan Stark. In the 1860s gold-mining community of Virginia City, in territory that is now part of Montana, he finds himself an active participant among a group of vigilantes, who hang a number of thieves and killers, who have been menacing the lives and welfare of more law-abiding residents.

Background. Besides the limited authority of the miners courts, there is in fact no law in the gold fields, and in the first volume of the series, Buchanan explores the realities facing honorable men driven to enforce justice and preserve public safety where they lack legal authority to do so. After much soul-searching and debate, they must resort to extra-legal means, which for a man like Dan Stark contradicts all he has been taught to believe about due process. Necessary as the lynching of bad men happens to be, Stark is haunted by those hangings and what they represent as a betrayal of civilized democratic values, guaranteed in the Bill of Rights, and long practiced in his chosen profession.

Buchanan’s telling of his story in God’s Thunderbolt is a corrective to the easy acceptance of lynch law in the formula western, where villains often get their punishment without benefit of trial. Her novel also immerses readers in another kind of frontier, where a continent separates westerners isolated from the centers of power, capital, and civilization, a distance that takes many weeks of primitive travel to cross. 

Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (1929)

First edition

Set in a fictionalized Butte, Montana, this novel has been on my to-read list for a long time. Maybe least known of the five novels by Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961), it is based in part on his employment as a Pinkerton detective in San Francisco, 1915-1922.

Plot. An unnamed detective (“Op”) for the Continental Detective Agency is assigned to a job in Personville, a western mining town often called “Poisonville” for its pollution from nearby copper smelters. The town is crime ridden and run by mob bosses operating in every form of unlawful activity, chief among them bootlegging and gambling.

Dashiell Hammett

After a crusading newspaper editor is murdered before the Op even has a chance to meet him, he discovers the extent of lawless chicanery in town. Aided and abetted by a woman implicated in the murder, Dinah Brand, he decides to clean up the town himself, a classic plot line from countless cowboy westerns.

Think of 1930s gangster films, and you get a picture of the action Hammett’s Op gets himself involved in. It’s a nighttime world of car chases, abandoned warehouses, machine guns, and killing. Long after you’ve lost count of the deaths, he takes a moment to list them:

There’s been what? A dozen and a half murders since I’ve been here; Donald Willson; Ike Bush; the four wops and the dick at Cedar Hill; Jerry; Lew Yard; Dutch Jake; Blackie Whalen and Put Collings at the Silver Arrow; Big Nick, the copper I potted; the blond kid Whisper dropped here; Yakima Shorty, old Elihu’s prowler; and now Noonan. That’s sixteen of them in less than a week, and more coming up.

Soon there are 17, and it’s a big one that has the hard-drinking Op not so sure he isn’t the murderer himself.

Storytelling style. Hammett, of course, defines a whole genre of fiction known as “hard-boiled.” The talk is tough and violence is always about to break out. The influence in pop culture seems to have been pervasive. Reading Black Mask magazine, you find the style often imitated, though rarely as successfully. And here it is in the movies, a scene from The Roaring Twenties (1939):

The tone of Hammett’s writing is not humorless. There’s a wry, poker-faced delivery, matter of fact, sometimes resigned and world-weary. It lives on years later in the clipped flat voice of Sgt. Joe Friday of Dragnet (on radio, 1949-1957, and TV, 1951-1959). But combine Hammett’s narrative style and the wild excesses of the novel’s storyline, and you have something that goes beyond deadpan to undisguised farce.

Organized crime is just plain butt ugly, and the people drawn to it are shallow and stupid—ugly, too. In Hammett, the same goes for the local police, incompetent and easily corruptible. It’s not the Three Stooges, but you can see them from here.

Red Harvest was originally published in four parts (1927-28) in Black Mask magazine. It was followed in hardcover by The Dain Curse (1929), The Maltese Falcon (1930), The Glass Key (1931), and The Thin Man (1934). It is currently available in print, audio, and ebook formats at amazon, Barnes&Noble, Powell’s Books, and AbeBooks. For more of Friday's Forgotten Books, click on over to Patti Abbott's blog.

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Image credits: 

Author's photo, Wikimedia Commons

Coming up: Glossary of frontier fiction

The Hanging Tree (1959)

Based on a novel by Montana writer Dorothy M. Johnson, this western film is a dark study of mob violence. By unfolding the backstory preceding the attempt to lynch a man (Gary Cooper) in a Montana mining camp, it traces a tangled web of deceit, lust, self-righteousness, and avarice.

Plot and characters. At the center of it is Cooper, whose character is a mix of good will and a shadowy past. Though physically strong and a skilled doctor, he lives under an assumed name, Frail, as a reminder to himself that he is weak and vulnerable in ways that are otherwise hidden.

A loner, arriving with a packhorse in the Montana gold fields in 1873, he allows two people into his life, while keeping each of them at a safe emotional distance. One is a young thief (Ben Piazza), shot by pursuers and rescued by Cooper, who removes a bullet from his chest, then retains him as an unpaid bond servant.

Maria Schell, Gary Cooper

The other is the lovely Maria Schell, a Swiss emigrant to the West, whose father is killed in a stage holdup. She nearly dies of exposure in the mountain wilderness before being found, blinded and burned by the sun. Nursed back to health by Cooper and recovering her vision, she falls in love with him. He eventually sets Piazza free, and unknown to Schell, he grubstakes a mine she and Piazza invest in.

Dorothy M. Johnson: Gravel in Her Gut and Spit in Her Eye (2005)

A BITS reader recently sent me a copy of this 30-minute video made for Montana PBS about the life of western writer Dorothy M. Johnson (1905-1984). It is an informative, entertaining, and expertly told account of a determined and inventive writer who made a difference in the way western stories are conceived and told.

Her influence remains a strong presence in the unfolding genre of frontier fiction today. Hers was an intelligence that inquired of both myth and history and returned from that inquiry with discoveries that many other western writers, steeped in convention, could not see, or did not care to—a condition, alas, that sometimes continues in places today.

There are a number of talking heads in the video, and the memories of those who were friends, students, and acquaintances reveal much of her temperament, her humor, and her grit. With Margot Kidder as the voice of Johnson and Stan Lynde as narrator, the warmth and affection for the western story that Johnson brought to its writing come persuasively through.

The efforts of others to put into words the genuine contribution she made to western storytelling fall a bit short of really measuring her stature. Academics interviewed fall into what feel like tentative generalities about how she anticipated the “revisionism” of the 1960s and 70s. Even the late Elmer Kelton seems to regard her only as an accomplished woman writer. And while he may rank her with Mari Sandoz and Willa Cather, why does she not bear comparison with others who happen to be male?

Altogether, director Bill Bilverstone and writer Sue Hart have paid honest tribute to their subject. They include many photos of Johnson over her lifetime, and their narrative reminds us of the lean times she lived through and survived as a struggling writer, working for many years in New York, far from her home ground in Whitefish, Montana—before The Saturday Evening Post and then Hollywood found her.

Dorothy M. Johnson

Wrapping up. At the time of the film’s release, writer-producer Sue Hart noted that people know the films based on Johnson’s stories but do not know of Johnson herself;  “I wanted to make sure that people never forget her.” This video bio makes a notable effort to rectify that.

Gravel in Her Gut and Spit in Her Eye is currently available on DVD from Montana PBS. For more Overlooked movies and TV, click on over to Todd Mason’s blog, Sweet Freedom.

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Further reading:

Dorothy Johnson, Montana’s First Lady of Letters

Coming up: Dane Coolidge, The Soldier’s Way (1917)

Richard S. Wheeler, The Richest Hill on Earth

Review and interview

This is a novel for every reader who wanted Deadwood to go on indefinitely. In The Richest Hill on Earth, Montana writer Richard Wheeler turns his particular storytelling skills to an account of the copper mining town, Butte, at the turn of the last century. Here there are familiar names: William Andrews Clark and the other copper kings as they dig fabulous fortunes from a mountain slope near the Continental Divide. And there are the many who do the digging, as well as those scratching out a living above ground.

Besides the widow of an Irish miner and a woman with second sight, Wheeler’s novel follows an ambitious newspaperman and an enterprising mortician. There are also glancing appearances by a cop on the beat, a miner dying of consumption, a union boss, a woman on the hunt for a wealthy husband, and the residents of the red light district. Meanwhile, the bustling and rapidly growing town is a blighted, noisy, toxic environment, the often-wintry air laden with arsenic.

Butte, Montana, c1910

Plot. The stories of the novel’s several characters interweave. What lies at the center of them is a portrayal of monumental avarice that feeds the appetites of a few and leaves a host of others hungry. There are a lot of ways to take an attitude toward such extreme social disparity. You can imagine what a writer like Emile Zola or Victor Hugo would do with the material. And you would end up with Les Misérables. A Dickens might give us a Bleak House.

Wheeler finds a more ironic tone. One irony is that he does not villainize the three capitalists who compete for control of this “richest hill on earth.” They are no more evil than nearly anyone else around them, just vastly cunning in their deployment of their resources, and largely unaffected by the consequences for others. Pitting three of them against each other—Clark, Marcus Daly, and Augustus Heinze, Wheeler encourages a fascination in this gladiatorial contest among titans.

James Welch, The Indian Lawyer

First published in 1990, this is a thoughtful and suspenseful novel by a Native American writer from Montana. I had previously read his Winter in the Blood (1974) and The Death of Jim Loney (1979). All three novels concern the complexities of living as an Indian in a white-dominated world.

Unlike the struggling social cast-offs in the earlier novels, the protagonist of The Indian Lawyer has by all appearances successfully assimilated to white culture. Sylvester Yellow Calf has parlayed statewide recognition on the high school basketball court into a university education and law school. He is now one of the rising members of a high-end law firm in Helena.

With influential friends, he may well rise further from his humble origins on the Blackfeet reservation, where he was abandoned by parents and raised by a grandmother. Early in the novel he is approached by a member of the Democratic national committee to run for Congress.

His pleased but almost diffident response to that offer signals something not quite substantial in the identity he has assumed as a promising young lawyer. Beneath his confident surface is an uncertainty that the reader suspects and that he is mostly unaware of. The break from his reservation past has left him without either real roots or clear ambitions. Despite his achievements, he remains an outsider.

Blackfeet reservation, Montana

Single, he has known a good many women in his short life, and his current girlfriend is the daughter of a rancher and former Senator. While she is ready for a deepening relationship with Sylvester, he remains tentative, conscious of the disapproving glances of whites when the two are out together in public.

He lets her slip away, as he has done earlier with a high school counselor he was once fond of. Sliding into what seems to be an old groove, he violates all professional standards by allowing himself to be sexually intimate with a new client. It may be an old groove for him, but it’s also thin ice.

Gary J. Cook, A Murder of Wolves

Here’s another book that came over the transom at BITS, not the usual fare here, but its Montana writer more or less dared me to read it. It’s a hard one for me, a western reader, to categorize—call it a political thriller set in the modern-day West. But there’s a good deal more going on between its covers.

Plot.  The novel has three plots. One is the slow and suspenseful unfolding of the other two, a plot and a counterplot involving federal law enforcement and domestic terrorists. By slow I don’t mean it ever flags, at least not for long. It’s structured like a mystery, so that mysterious events transpire and it’s not clear who the villains are or what they are up to. Like the traditional western or spy novel, it’s also a kill or be killed world, with the added factor that characters have ready access to the weaponry of modern-day combat.

The telling of the story itself has many parallels with current Hollywood action-adventure fare. The central characters are a pair of sheriff’s deputies, both highly trained veterans of the war in Afghanistan. Their scenes together are a nonstop flow of banter, as in a buddy movie, even as bullets fly. A set piece in the middle of the novel is a car chase along a busy highway.

The novel even comes with its own product placement (Mountain Dew, Starbucks, Pilates) and a soundtrack. Here’s a song playing on a truck stereo in one scene:

Characters. J. L. “Barney” Lambier and Joe Big Snake Person are the deputies, assigned to an anti-terrorist task force based in Missoula. They report to a hard-nosed FBI agent, Quinn McBride, who scolds them like an older sister barely tolerating the antics of two ungovernable brothers.

Joe Big, a Force Recon marine, is a mixed-blood Blackfeet who is ambivalent about his Indian heritage and just wants to be an “American.” A loner and not a joiner, he has no wish to be a member of the tribe and rejects its exalted mythology, but he admires an uncle whose stealth and mysterious power seem super-human.

Barney, who was trained to the Army Special Forces, is a Southerner, whose wife has just left him. A man obsessively devoted to the pursuit of bad guys, he seems not to miss her or even remember her, which says enough about how that marriage fell apart. His bringing home an STD acquired “in the line of duty” was for her the last straw.

Guy Vanderhaeghe, The Last Crossing

This is a western for people who don’t like westerns. It takes a reader onto the raw frontier of 1871 and, like Lonesome Dove, follows a small band of characters as they make a long overland journey. In this case, the novel opens in Fort Benton on the upper reaches of the Missouri River in Montana Territory, and its characters travel to Edmonton, Alberta, and back.

Like McMurtry’s novel, its story is different from the traditional western’s more usual quest of an individual hero to bring outlaws to justice against all odds. McMurtry and Vanderhaeghe take the usual topics of frontier fiction—loyalty, friendship, love, courage, family, integrity, and so on. But enliven them in a way meant to appeal to a broad audience.

Plot.  The back cover will tell you that the story is about two English brothers in search of a third one who has disappeared in the American wilderness. That’s only one thread of a tangled plot line that involves a battle-scarred Civil War veteran, an Irish saloon keeper, a mixed-blood Blackfeet-Scots scout, a writer of adventure books, a woman abandoned by her husband, and yet another pair of brothers believed to have murdered the woman’s sister.

The characters press northward from Fort Benton into Canada, following scant evidence that the missing brother is still alive. He seems likely to have died from misadventure or to have been killed by Indians. Members of the search party itself are hardly sanguine in each other’s company. Addington and Charles, the missing man’s brothers, have a long history of mutual distrust. Meanwhile, two of the men are enamored of the woman traveling with them.

Red River carts, near Edmonton, Alberta, c1870

Near the end of almost 400 pages, there are revelations that clear up some mysteries while producing others. Before the story is done, we have lost a character or two along the way, and in the final chapters, one of the brothers returns to England.

Character. Charles is a modestly talented portraitist, who has disappointed both Addington and their wealthy father by having no talent for brutal domination of others. Addington, who represents the high tide of British imperialism, is a proud, angry man, determined to leave his mark by killing a grizzly with a longbow. Given to pontificating, he says that what defines a man is his relentless effort to overcome any obstacle. To that end, he has engaged a writer to enshrine his achievements in a book about himself.

We get to know the third brother, Simon, in the memories that Charles has of him. Simon has been swept up by the Victorian interest in spiritualism. A student at Oxford and dressed like Matthew Arnold’s “scholar gypsy,” he abandons his books to learn directly from nature. Before leaving for America, he becomes involved in a dubious religious sect that believes Indians are the Lost Tribes of Israel.

Gertrude Atherton, Perch of the Devil (1914)

A New York Times reviewer called this novel “crude, shrill, unscrupulous, splendid,” which no doubt pleased its author. Atherton seems to have been bent on twisting conventional literary expectations by its ear. This novel is a wry and ironic take on all manner of romantic notions about love, money, and power. Its in-your-face title comes from the name given by early prospectors to the mining camp that became Butte, Montana, where the novel is set.

The story is “western” in a modern sense of the word, for it mixes a favorite theme of early western fiction—mining and sudden riches—with a story of two wealthy socialites. Both women are married, but one loses her heart to the other one’s husband. So it is a love story, too, played out in elegant gowns, well-furnished drawing rooms, and the fashionable watering holes of Europe.

Plot. Gregory Compton is a man obsessed with extracting a fortune from the earth. Son of a rancher, he is forced to interrupt a course of study at the School of Mines in Butte when his father dies. After a time, he excavates a rocky hill on the ranch, believing he will find gold. Instead, it is rich with copper, and he soon becomes a new Copper King.

Colorado Smelting and Refining Co., Butte, c1900

His wife, Ida, born into poverty, rises swiftly from rags to riches. Embarrassed by her unpolished speech and manners, Compton hires a tutor to act as Henry Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle. The tutor so enrages her with his snobbery that she pitches him out a window. Taking his place is the other woman of the story, Ora Blake, who befriends her and, by her own example, helps Ida learn to be a lady.

Ora grew up in the lap of luxury but was left almost penniless when her father died. She has married one of her father’s employees, a lawyer. A lover of books and the arts, she is a sleeping beauty, content with her modestly secure life and a little agoraphobic. Meeting the energetic Ida, she is amused an entertained by her, and like true opposites they quickly bond.

All Ora needs to come out of her long dream-like seclusion from the world is an infusion of capital. This occurs in the form of an old mining claim of her father’s long thought worthless. A short walk from Compton’s claim, it is discovered to have deposits of copper ore as well. She quickly finds herself a well-to-do woman again and getting more so.

Deer Lodge Valley, Montana, 1906

Romance. Wealth offers Ora a degree of independence, and she realizes that she is married to the wrong man. After a moonstruck meeting with Gregory Compton, she becomes convinced that the two of them are soul mates. During a year in Europe with Ida, she falls deeply into an imagined love affair, writing him letters that she never sends.

We know from page one that there’s not a romantic bone in Ida’s body. Gregory, a handsome rancher, is a “catch” and little more to her. It hardly matters that he gives all his time to his mine. She is fancy free, on a grand tour of Europe, buying clothes and socializing with the titled and the upper crust.

When the two women return to Montana, Ora informs her husband that she wants a divorce and secretly sets about separating Ida from her husband. Gregory, it turns out, has been fostering a smoldering attraction to Ora. It looks like the two of them will become the answer to each other’s dreams.

Women's fashions, 1910

But Ida isn’t about to give up Gregory. And it turns out that she is really the better match for him. His true love is really his mine. Only the sensible, rational, and independent Ida can grant him the freedom to give himself completely to his business interests. With his millions, she graces his achievements by being the grand dame of Butte society.

Women. You gather that Atherton does not waste a lot of sentiment on women as a gender. When Gregory tells Ida that she is “an extraordinary woman,” she scoffs and says “the extraordinary woman hasn’t been born yet.” Like men, such a woman would be fully engaged in the world and unable to live on love alone.

Women’s weakness, Ida argues, is their fairy-tale wish for a Prince Charming. Despite appearances “they are just one perpetual shriek for the right man to come along.” When women achieve true independence, she says, “they will be just as happy without men as they now want to be with them.”

Thomas McGuane, Gallatin Canyon

I sat recently with an auditorium full of appreciative folks gathered in Missoula to hear McGuane read one of his stories. The laughter in the darkened house was broad and genuine, and afterwards the lobby was jammed with people waiting for their turn at the autograph table. The man has that effect—part celebrity, part entertainer.

The story was one of his patented ironic introductions to characters shambling through life in a comic world overflowing with stuff, like a hoarder’s garage. It’s really not so much a story even. The characters are so specific that they come with their own biographies, and the narrative is often more about everything that’s led up to the present moment.

A story may shamble on indefinitely, a compendium of back-stories for their own sake, and all the time sort of amused by the arbitrariness of people’s lives. Sometimes those lives have derailed long ago, and the characters are still plugging along, a little disoriented but believing that meaning can still be salvaged from it all.

Gallatin Canyon is like that, a collection of ten stories, one of them long enough to be a novella. Some take place in McGuane’s Montana. The aptly named novella, “The Refugee,” is mostly set on a sailing boat in the Caribbean. “The Miracle Boy” concerns a family gathering in an unnamed New England city, Boston or Providence. In “Ice,” a boy sets out to skate across the frozen surface of Lake Erie.

Gallatin Range, Montana © Ron Scheer  

Alcohol tends to figure prominently, sometimes drugs. In “Aliens,” a divorced couple has a dispute over a collection of commemorative whiskey bottles. Two backpackers in “North Coast” trade purloined native art for heroin from a Sikh dealer in Vancouver. Not surprisingly, the occasional character has a criminal history.

“Cowboy” turns out to be a life story, told in the flat vernacular of an ex-con who gets work with a Hereford stockbreeder and his sister. As years pass, the partners die off, and the cowhand ends up with the business. The story ends as it began with a refusal to let a saddle horse get sent to a slaughterhouse. The brilliance of the storytelling lies in how it captures the matter-of-fact mindset of a man who spends his life in the precisely defined world of a “goddam ranch.”

Taking a turn on similar material, “Old Friends” tells of an old college friend who comes to Montana with the idea of starting a new life as a cowboy. The cards are pretty much stacked against him, as he is already in his 70s, and he is on the run from the feds, who eventually catch up with him. You might feel some sympathy for him, except that he is mindlessly rude to everyone, including his old friend.

Richard Wheeler, The Buffalo Commons

Written in the late 1990s, Richard Wheeler’s novel is set in what was then (and still is) the near future. A Ted Turner style billionaire, Laslo Horoney, has been buying up ranchland in Eastern Montana, Wyoming, and South Dakota to create a grassland wilderness preserve. He plans to stock it with bison and other species of wildlife for whom this vast region of prairie was once home.

Sounds like a great idea, except for a ranching family, the Nicholses, who decide not to sell out to him. Ranching is tough, but they don’t want to give up their livelihood or the property that has been the family home for generations. “Pain and struggle make the deepest, toughest roots of all,” Cameron Nichols tells Horoney. The novel is a long account of the conflict and eventual friendship that develop between them.

Plot.  That conflict is no simple one of black vs. white, or one man against another. It quickly mushrooms into a battle among forces that are way beyond the control of either of them.

Ranchland, eastern Montana

An immediate complication is the illegal importing of wolves from Canada, which are set free on the Nichols ranch by an environmental activist. Designated an endangered species, they trigger the interest of the US Field and Wildlife Service, and the Nicholses soon find themselves embroiled in a host of government regulations. Failing to fully comply, they are at risk of having their ranch seized.

Meanwhile, Horoney discovers he’s up against nearly every interested federal agency eager to take possession of his grassland project for themselves. In league with them are the state authorities, who hope to milk him for millions in property taxes. Thus the use and misuse of power, at the expense of the individual, is a prevailing theme throughout the book.

The scope of this 380-page novel is as big as Montana. Besides the Nichols holdings in the southeast quadrant of the state, the geographical leaps take us back and forth along the I-90/94 corridor, from Miles City to Bozeman and north to Helena.  I also counted more than 35 characters who get themselves involved in one way or another, right up to the President of the United States.

Wheat, eastern Montana

Issues. Richard Wheeler is best known for his historical fiction. This novel is a departure, using a mode of speculative fiction to address a lot of current issues. But they’re issues that have a long history, particularly the rights of the individual vs. government. The villains in the novel are clearly those who do not respect those rights. Reading this book, a person can get a good idea of what animates voters for whom “big government” is a chief complaint.

Western fiction from 100 years ago often casts government and judicial systems as corrupted by moneyed monopolists. In Wheeler’s novel, government bureaucrats are in league with scientists providing research that supports policies biased by favored ideologies. The results are much the same.

Character. Among the handful of admirable characters in the novel is Sanford Kouric, a USFWS “wolf biologist.” He loses his job when he fails to give his full support to one of the agency’s rulings affecting the Nichols ranch. But like the others who refuse to knuckle under to the bureaucracy, he is not daunted.

Therese Broderick, The Brand (1909)

The Brand takes its title from a key moment in the novel’s closing chapters as Broderick’s feminist message is burned permanently into the hide of its villain. But the novel’s subtitle, A Tale of the Flathead Reservation, promises somewhat more than it delivers. Full-blooded Indians are mostly peripheral to its story of a “quarter-breed’s” forbidden love of a white woman.

Plot. Young Bess Fletcher arrives by train in Montana with her brother Jim. They are on their way to the cattle ranch of Jim’s college pal, Henry West, a fellow Harvard graduate. The ranch is on the Flathead reservation close to Polson and Flathead Lake. Jim, who has lived and worked on the ranch before, has been hired as Henry’s foreman.

Bess Fletcher

The West is all new to 20-year-old Bess, who is enraptured by its promise of “untrammeled freedom.” She will hear nothing, she says, of “don’ts and can’ts.” However, a Big Don’t governs much of the plot of the novel.

Henry West is a handsome man, well polished and a gentleman. One look at Bess, and he recognizes her as the sweetheart he has long dreamed of and yearned for. He is, alas, only three-quarters white and, for her, on the wrong side of the color line.

Meanwhile, she is being courted by David Davis, the government agent of the Flathead reservation. He is an oily and manipulative character, entirely too pushy in his seductive advances. Henry despises Davis but has a horrible secret involving the honor of his dead sister, Helen, which prevents him from speaking up about the man. We gather that Davis was the contributing cause of her death, though Broderick is not specific about the details.

Bess was schooled by convent nuns and is an innocent about affairs of the heart. She feels no real affection for Davis but is too polite to turn him away. In time, she persuades herself that he is the right man for her. But on the day of their wedding, seeing Davis for the first time, her bridesmaid recognizes him. He is the man who once seduced and abandoned her sister—which brings an abrupt end to the ceremony.

Indian farmer, Flathead Reservation, 1914

Character. An irony in the novel is that Henry is as thoroughly schooled in matters of character as any of the other men. Being an exemplary gentleman is as close as he can come to being white. At first meeting, Bess finds him “splendid,” and Jim tells her,

At college he was so superior in mind, ability, and morals to the majority of his colleagues, that every one looked up to him. He was one of them and no gathering was quite complete without Henry West.

She says to her brother, “I had no idea there were such men as he away out here in the West! No wonder you rave over him and always sing his praises.”

Oats field, Flathead Reservation, 1912

Villainy. Davis (or Davies as he is revealed at the end) is first and last a cad. If he is guilty of the usual corruption ascribed to government agents of Indian reservations, we get no hint of it. But we gather that he freely takes liberties with the native women. We get a sample of this when Bess has playfully dressed and made herself up as a squaw, and he mistakes her for an Indian. Altogether, he is a lesson in the employment of seductive maneuvers to weaken a woman’s resistance.

Even revealed at last for his truly evil self, he is fiercely unrepentant. We see the full extent of his cunning when he returns to take Bess by force. She has to pull a revolver on him to defend herself. He doesn’t relent until Henry drags him to the branding fires where the ranch’s brand “HW” is burned into his chest. That means “Honor Women,” Henry tells him.

Ralph Beer, “The Other James Crumley”

When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahaerne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon. 
— The Last Good Kiss

I was somewhat timidly holding a can of Rainier Beer at my first faculty/graduate-student/local writers’ bash in Missoula, Montana, the first time I saw him. It was the fall of 1978, at Lee Bassett’s house, and there, standing above Dick Hugo — who was seated at the dining room table — was this rugged piece of work who looked like a cat skinner or tool-pusher off a Wyoming drill rig. The hard-looking gent made a sweeping gesture with his right hand and shouted: “And then, she said I’d stolen the title — from you!”

Hugo went into a rapture of guffaws and the two old bulls roared with laughter together, apparently enjoying an inside joke. I glanced at Neil McMahon, who was standing beside me there in the shadows, also somewhat timidly holding his own can of Rainier. “Who the hell is that?” I said.

“That,” said Neil, who was always in the know, “is James Crumley.”

Jim Crumley will be remembered by lots of folks for his early detective novels and the epic scale of his excesses. He was, for almost forty years, a legendary figure in Missoula’s bars, from The East Gate Liquor Store and Lounge and the poker tables in the Oxford Café in the ‘70s and ‘80s, to Charlie’s and The Depot in more recent years. Hundreds, probably thousands, of people can say they had a beer or toked a fatboy with Jim at one time or another. And it is true that Crumley knew and enjoyed an astonishing mix of people, from Missoula street characters to lovely graduate students recently disembarked from Smith; from part-time carpenters and guys who worked for slim wages in the woods, to a mob of graduate students and writers and artists from all over the country.

James Crumley

Oh, yes, we thought we knew him during those Missoula days in the Eighties, back when a bunch of us spent our days typing away, groping toward a future when we’d be writers and much in demand. The Last Good Kiss was out, and Jim was our bar-room celebrity, our dope-smoking bad boy, our ex-Texan who wrote about people dealing with failed lives and hopeless yearnings right there in Montana, in the manly, crack-on prose that made him famous. Jim had a string of broken marriages, a list of teaching jobs that didn’t last, a bird dog named Bean, and his daddy’s Winchester Model 94, which he would pawn and redeem and pawn again, as his fortunes rose and fell. He was grand company and bear-trap smart without ever seeming especially learned or literary. He had some bad habits and a good heart, and we loved him for both.

Jim died four years ago. Since then his old pals and former loves have taken their turns remembering him in print and on various web sites. Although we knew he’d wrecked his health, and that death was coming, his passing left some of us wounded, nonetheless. The old lion was gone, and that took some getting used to.

In the late 1970s and early ’80s, when I lucked into some good times with Jim, he carried himself like an out-of-work-logger, yet he sported a quick mind and great laugh. In other words, the sort of man you’d notice right off in a roomful of people. He was usually the last man on his feet at the parties Missoula writers threw for themselves back then, and he was about the best company you could find for cross-country road trips. But to say he was well-known and widely-liked falls way short of the truth, because so many of us just flat-out loved him and his books with all our hearts.

There was more to Jim Crumley than most folks saw, at least at first. It took a while before he’d let people in. I was fortunate enough to spend time with Crumley outside the usual Missoula writers’ scene, which could get cheesy and inbred. We once drove from Montana to New York City together to attend to bookish affairs that involved agents and editors and going to lunch. Jim and I cut wood at Annick Smith’s place near Potomac, and hunted mule deer at my Dad’s ranch, where Jim used his father’s old lever-action to kill a couple nice bucks. The summer I spent in Missoula working on a novel, we’d get together in the afternoons and drive the backroads, smoking a little of this and that, sipping cold beers and talking. We didn’t talk much about books or writing. We spoke instead of things that mattered, like motorcycles and women and the places we loved.

Sure, the public Crumley shared enough vices with his detective heroes, C. W. Sughrue and Milo Milodragovich, that some people had trouble seeing where the man ended and his characters began. Jim’s detectives were tough guys, yet during his years in Missoula, and on the trail of his many travels, Crumley would sometimes open, like the blossom in a prickly pear cactus, to reveal a sensitivity and child-like sweetness that had been there all along, hidden among the thorns. Although in later years he could seem remote and self-indulgent, he was among the kindest and most generous men I’ve known.

So I understand why, when I think about Jim Crumley, I think of him always as a man alive in stories about him, stories in which he was a participant, not an author. I can’t begin to think about Jim as a literary figure or as someone I could reveal by talking about his books. I understand him best, I know, when I close my eyes and see him in motion, doing something gentle or earnest, unruly or funny, some darned thing his friends would remember and retell years later with gusto. Here, then, are three such Crumley stories:

In the spring of 1980, Jim and I decided to drop a few pounds of beer flab. Because we hated to suffer alone, we’d meet up at the Van Buren Street bridge and run together along the grade where the Milwaukee Road’s rails had once headed east out of town. All right, we didn’t exactly run. Like a team of draft horses who’d spent all winter in the barn, we lumbered along, coughing up years of cigarette smoke and hoping our morning would not prove a final humiliation. Crumley, though, was tough and surprisingly steady, a two-hundred-and-forty-pounder who chugged along as if powered by steam. Most days he’d outlast me, until I fell, gasping, into a walk after three miles or so. Then we’d turn and walk back, already talking cold beers and good smoke, while hoping we’d done ourselves no permanent harm.

One bright morning, when we’d finished our run and had walked back almost to the University of Montana, we noticed two young men, dressed in casual wear that seemed a tad preppy, coming toward us with a bulldog trotting at their heels. As we neared them, one of the lads recognized Jim and said, “You’re James Crumley, aren’t you?” And when Crumley nodded, the young man pointed to the bulldog. “Meet Fireball Roberts,” he said.

Crumley couldn’t have been more tickled if they’d given him a prize. He talked with them for a few of minutes, as the bulldog drooled and grinned, and it was easy to see, as I stood and watched, that Jim was every bit as pleased by the encounter as they were. He was like that. Never stand-offish, never condescending, but genuinely interested in the people he encountered. If you spent any time around Crumley back then, it was easy to forget that he was not only famous, but already had the beginnings of a cult following, too.