Those who follow this blog know I'm a fan of Parker's work (see http://bmorrison.com/blog/210/robert-b-parker-an-appreciation). In recent years I've heard complaints about his later work, that it lacks the narrative complexity of his earlier work, that the brusque dialogue with its recurring booms of he said/she said makes the stories impossible to listen to on cd. Opening this book reinforces these criticisms: there's a lot of white space on these pages and only an abnormally large font gives the book enough heft to seem like a full novel. Yet I continue to read Parker's work, and not just out of loyalty or nostalgia for the days when I could bury myself in his world and come out changed. I still delight in these books. No matter how slender, they are still full of heart.
We say of some crime fiction that it is hard-boiled. Resolution seems to me boiled down to the essence of what makes a western. A man with a gun comes to town and is hired to keep the peace. He is the kind of person others look to. As Elmer Kelton said of one of his characters: “He knew what to do and was man enough to do it.” He is joined by a friend, and together they face the anarchy of a town where there is no government yet, no one to keep the peace, no one to turn to when you are in danger, no rules or laws to appeal to.
Everett Hitch is hired to sit lookout in the saloon owned by Amos Wolfson, who also owns the store, the bank, and much of the land outside of town. Yet he wants more. Not content with building a community that will become steady customers, Wolfson plans to extract every penny from the farmers, whom he contemptuously calls sodbusters, foreclose their mortgages and resell their land to a new crop of gullible marks.
His competition for richest and most powerful man in town is O'Malley, owner of the copper mine, who uses intimidation to take what he wants. Stark, owner of the sawmill, is different in that he takes the long view of investing in building a town and a community. The story reminded me of Deadwood, a tv series that Jake recommended to me which brilliantly traces how a society is created and how people and the town must change to accommodate the new social structures that evolve. I was curious as to how a group of strangers thrown together in a place with no society, no culture to dictate roles and behavior, would organise themselves, how a leader would be chosen or emerge, how mores and laws would develop. I don't think Lord of the Flies is the last word, that we would turn to crude violence and power-mongering.
Hitch's friend and former mentor, Virgil Cole, is the most interesting character to me. A former lawman, he wrestles—mostly silently—with issues around when it is right to use his gun. When he was a lawman, even if he and Hitch mostly wrote the laws themselves, it was easy for him to justify shooting men who broke those laws. Now, being just a man with a strong sense of right and wrong and skill with a gun, it is less clear.
The dialogue is terse. These are not men who talk a lot. There’s not a lot of description of waves of grain and purple mountains. Instead, there is the matter-of-fact building of tension as the various characters become more and more themselves.
A couple of other themes are relevant for today. What could be more contemporary than Wolfson’s desire for instant gratification, his desire to scrape every cent out of the people around him, even though he has no place to spend it? Also, there is much here about what it means to be a man. Men like Boyle, the rookie gunman, and Redmond, the farmer, brag about their courage and ability, wanting respect but unwilling or too impatient to develop the skills that will earn it. Much has been written lately about how boys are failing in our society, outpaced in education and achievement by girls. The Women’s Movement has done a good job of freeing girls from past restraints and opening doors. Attention now needs to be paid to our boys, and a conversation begun about how boys become men and what it means to be a man in our society.
Parker’s work, as always, goes to the heart of these important questions. What are our responsibilities to each other, what makes a man a man, how do we build communities when the greedy few are determined to take all the wealth and power for themselves: these are questions that affect how we envision what our society will look like in the future. I will miss him.