JOHNSON BY LAND,
LANGDON BY SEA
Dry Bones, by
Craig Johnson, is the second Walt Longmire novel I’ve
read (following Hell is Frozen, discussed
a couple years back). I know comparatively little about the 13-novel Walt
Longmire universe, but I still liked Dry
Bones even better, if for different reasons.
Here, Walt, the compulsively erudite
sheriff of Absaroka County in Northern Wyoming, is called in to pull the corpse
of Danny Lone Elk, a Cheyenne rancher, from a reservoir on his sprawling
property. Lone Elk ranch also happens to be where the largest Tyrannosaurus rex
skeleton on record was recently discovered, the ancient past uncovered by the
human present.
The T-Rex’s bones are being picked
over by several competing interests: the fractious Lone Elk family; the High
Plains Dinosaur museum, the dino diggers who actually discovered it; the
Cheyenne Conservancy , a tribal land-trust organization; and the U.S.
Government, represented by an ambitious, but intellectually barren U.S.
district attorney, name of Trost.
It’s up to Sheriff Walt to
maintain a certain peace among these contenders while he investigates Danny’s suspicious
death and its connection with them dry bones.
In the background, Walt has family
problems to deal with when his daughter’s husband meets a bad end in the bad
Big City, a crime he suspects was committed by an offender whom Walt locked up
some novels back.
Sorry I can’t be more specific. The
fact that I’ve read only a couple of the Longmire novels left me clueless now
and then. I caught a couple of seasons of the Longmire cable series, before
A&E dumped it off its schedule (leaving Netflix to rush in for
resuscitation). But the novels, to me, seem to exist quite apart from the
series, which has been markedly more serious and solemn in the manner of
prestige cable series (and being that we’re still grazing on cable at the Bar T&E,
we won’t be catching up to the herd too soon.)
Hell is Frozen
was an action-packed, over-the-top high country chase epic with a pleasurable
dash of the supernatural—which I liked for those very reasons. Dry Bones reads quieter, almost like a cowboy
cosy, concerned with the small things of rural life.
Walt’s wisecracks seem less forced
less this time and I like the annoying way he wears his book-readin’ like his
sheriff’s arm patch. He’s not too
good a good guy. He seems happily resilient in the face of it all, not one to turn
bitter and brooding like warm stale canteen water. Living in some of the most
beautiful country on God’s Earth, why wallow in despair?
Dry Bones is
a colorful, absorbing and entertaining contemporary western yarn. Craig
Johnson’s love of the stormy Wyoming landscape he calls home tumbles across
every page. The western novel may be in permanent eclipse, but I’m thankful
Johnson (and others like Loren Estleman) are around to keep it alive. There
really was and is an America outside our great cities. It does neither our
nation nor our literature any good to forget that.
S.S. Silverspray
is so forgotten, its presence barely registers on Amazon or any other maps. I
however was lucky to dig up a copy of it at, I recall, at Bibliomania in
downtown Oakland.
S.S. Silverspray is
a link in the chain of Skippers Gone Bad books, a row that includes Moby Dick, The Sea Wolf and The Caine Mutiny. Bad captains are
always a good hook. While the law of the sea has the captain going down with
his ship, in these stories the danger is the ship going down with its captain.
The S.S. Silverspray
is a 1950s freighter bound from San Francisco to the South Seas. Its master is
Milo Hansmalch, a man whose know everything about ships and nothing about
people. He possesses a stupendous bigotry and brutish outlook that leads to
clashes with his multi-ethnic crew and into a variety of storms both human and
natural.
Silverspray is
not a particularly ambitious fable in the vein of Melville or London. It’s more
of an exercise in social-realism and focuses on the day-to-day life of its crew
of fifty. There’s a plenty of precise detail about the workings of a freighter
of that era and the various challenges faced by a big ship on the high sea. It
made for invaluable research for my purposes.
On the negative side, there’s
seems to be little relationship between the men and the environment they’re
sailing through. Hansmalch’s problems, while serious and morally fatal, never
impact the fate of the ship itself—the final drama takes place in port. Its close
focus and realism makes it closer to say a Frank Norris story than a Herman
Wouk epic.
Langdon’s knowledge of and respect
for the ship’s crew members leads him to give equal time to all the characters
from the utility man number one on up. On a humanistic level, that’s
commendable. On a fiction level, it makes the novel feel unfocussed and adrift.
Nor is the writing very good, with awkward dialogue that includes poor stabs at
authentic dialect that, as they often do, lead to the kind of stereotyping the
author sincerely tries to avoid.
Copyright 2015 by Thomas
Burchfield
Photo of S.S. Silverspray by author
Thomas Burchfield’s latest
(yet to be published) novel is Butchertown,
a ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up. He is also the author of the
contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark, winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book
festival awards for horror in 2012. He’s also author of the original
screenplays Whackers and The Uglies (e-book editions only).
Published by Ambler
House Publishing, those three are available at Amazon
in various editions. You can also find his work at Barnes
and Noble, Powell's
Books, and Scribed. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on Twitter,
reads at Goodreads and drinks at various bars around the East Bay. You can also
join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern
California with his wife, Elizabeth.
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