Longmire by Land, Hansmalch by Sea

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.

 

Research on an upcoming high-seas novel has led me on voyages to many far-flung literary shores. Among the latest distant islands is S.S. Silverspray by John Langdon, a novel published by MacMillan in 1958. (Langdon worked on many ships as an electrician before finally coming ashore as a reference librarian at San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute Library.)

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.

Thoughts on "Hell is Empty," a Longmire novel by Craig Johnson

It took some months before amiable Wyomingite Craig Johnson, who friended me out of the Twitter/Facebook blue (as have David Morrell and Peter Straub), emerged to me from the Internet’s blizzard as the novelist Craig Johnson, the one behind Longmire, the very popular, well-regarded, A&E cable crime series with a modern West setting.

I had earlier caught a couple of episodes of Longmire on the fly and liked it fine, especially for its outdoor Western setting and themes. But due to the tsunami of good TV these days—plus the need to get outside, like its title character--I pass on plenty of shows I might like (e.g., two new IFC series, Top of the Lake and Rectify.) And so, I let Longmire slide off my viewing plate.

To make up for my tardiness, I decided to read a Longmire novel. At the time, I was just finishing The Inferno of Dante when I noticed that canon classic was a central motif in the seventh novel, Hell Is Empty. I thought I’d give that horse a ride. I’m glad I did. (Another thread in this uncanny pattern: I gather the novel has also been adapted for Longmire’s second season, starting May 27.)

Walt Longmire is sheriff of fictional Absaroka County, in remote, rural north-central Wyoming, a great setting for adventure and imagination: wide-open spaces, rolling prairies, beckoning high blue mountains in the distance; peaceful on the surface, but occasionally turbulent, even more so when evil steals its way through the hills like a winter wind.

As Hell is Empty opens, Sheriff Walt is transporting three very bad criminals to a rendezvous with the FBI and a private security firm with security issues. The baddest of Walt’s passengers is Raynaud Shade (a nicely eerie name, maybe drawn from the European trickster myth of Reynard the Fox). Shade is a child-murdering sociopath with mystical pretensions and the teasing enigmatic manner of Anton Chigurh.

Walt and his two deputies play their part professionally, but the other teams do not. Quickly the bad guys break free, take hostages, and make for the snow-covered Bighorn Mountains. Walt Longmire, armed with pistol, rifle, and his deputy’s copy of the Inferno, singlehandedly sets off to track them down one by one through a series of hair-raising, ripping confrontations, through roaring blizzards and a really exciting and vivid forest firestorm, until he and Shade meet for the big showdown on an icy windswept summit in the Bighorn Mountains, a place empty like the Hell described in the epic poem.

While the manhunt plot seems routine, Hell Is Empty is refreshingly strange and eccentric. We urban folks tend to stereotype rural folks as redneck reactionary blanketheads, but, as anyone who spends enough time “out there” knows, they are often much more interesting—and smart and kindly--than anyone you meet on Internet comment boards, or the seedy alleys of big city America.

Certainly, that’s the case here: Walt and his posse are a mixed-raced band of eccentric autodidact bookworms, exurban outcasts, and even a Basque-American. They are “liberal” in some ways, not so in others. Native Americans, of course, figure largely here, but they are neither stone-faced suffering noble plaster saints nor drunken miserable savages. Johnson portrays them with common humanity, from very good to very bad, the whole range of human types.

The supernatural occasionally gleams pleasingly in the air, especially later on, when Walt is joined in his quest by his own Virgil, a mountain hermit with a ghostly manner, who seems to slip in and out on every gust of wind, between the curtain between life and death, like the mythic Wendigo.

The comparisons with Inferno are, fortunately, not overly neat. The writing is at its best in picturing the landscape, but it’s a bit confusing in the second chapter and also often baggy and overwritten in places.

The prose once in a while strains for effect ala Zane Grey, where the barbwire, frontier stoicism of Luke Short (my favorite western writer, with Clifton Adams and Larry McMurtry) might serve better emotionally. I also wish Walt would rein in his wisecracks a little. What, I’m wondering, would a modern literary genre hero who wasn’t such a compulsive wiseguy be like?

Walt (a direct descendant of Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon), is an especially pigheaded, go-it-alone hero: no matter how often the dispatcher pleads with him to wait for backup, as any modern police officer would, Walt plows on alone through ice, snow and fire, no matter what.

At first, this make Walt appear to be a rigid, overused Western stereotype, the man who’s gotta do what he’s gotta do, and a bit of ego-driven bonehead on top. But the fact that Walt is also a recent widower adds a tinge of despair and suicidal wish fulfillment that could be the real spur driving his questionable tactics. It makes him an involving character.

As much as Walt is the hero, Death also keeps turning him away, sending him back down the mountain, away from this frozen Hell, not to his lost Beatrice in unknowable Heaven, but to the people he belongs with, whom he still needs and who still need him, the life still worth living in the beautiful land he calls home.

Copyright 2012 by Thomas Burchfield

Thomas Burchfield has recently completed his 1920s gangster thriller Butchertown. He can be friended on Facebook, followed on Twitter, and read at Goodreads. You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.