This lively series opener reveals why Wild West tales continue to entertain.
A Western adventure explores the danger and excitement of the stagecoach era.
In this latest foray into the Old West from Harris (A Novel Journey, 2019, etc.), readers are introduced to colorful driver Stagecoach Willy and his taciturn shotgun messenger, Ten. The two are dragged down from their mountaintop retirement cabin for a special assignment. They have to carry $250,000 in cash and gold and plans for a new type of sawmill from Portland, Oregon, to Sacramento. There is a wrinkle to which the old partners must agree. The plans are locked in a briefcase held by Kate Warren, a beautiful Pinkerton agent. To put Willy’s and Ten’s minds at ease, Kate lists her credentials, adding: “I can’t pee standing up, but I can do just about everything else you boys can do.” Kate quickly proves herself, even stopping the first attempt to rob the partners of their cargo. The group even adds a passenger, Sydney, a dog that was being mistreated at one stop. The quartet settles into the challenging routine of rolling from stop to stop over often treacherous roads, looking out for trouble. The four also bond as a result of their exhilarating exploits. In this first installment of a series, Harris deftly summons the spirits of the old pulps for a new generation. Long before armored cars, stagecoaches transported important cargo. The author’s intrepid odd couple have a history of success: The two men never lost a load during their time together. The gregarious Willy always has a story to tell, and Ten, too often his friend’s audience of one, longs for the quiet of his cabin. While this pair isn’t terribly nuanced, Kate proves a deeper character, being orphaned and ending up the head of her family at too young an age. The author’s thorough research is apparent in his vivid descriptions of the stagecoach life. What results is an invigorating novella with the feel of a fast-paced movie serial from yesteryear, which will leave readers pondering what will happen next to the heroes.
This lively series opener reveals why Wild West tales continue to entertain.Pub Date: June 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-07-205054-4
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Dusty Saddle Publishing
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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