Wesley Britton's Blog - Posts Tagged "westerns"

For readers who might wonder how I’ve been able to post so many reviews this month, the answer is simple.

I wrote up some of these reviews back in 2016 before the titles went up at Amazon. So these reviews have been sitting in my files until the book’s publication. Like this one:

The Guns of Bridgewood: A Western of Modern America
Aaron Cooley
Publisher: Melnore Press; 1 edition (January 19, 2017)
Publication Date: January 19, 2017
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
ASIN: B01N5N3MDE
https://www.amazon.com/Guns-Ridgewood...

Aaron Cooley’s new novel opens with this dedication:

“This book is supposed to be at its heart a novel about three daughters;
and so I dedicate it to my own, Beatrix Hope.”

This dedication might suggest three daughters would be major players in the story, but as two of them are dead, one is disabled and unable to speak due to gun violence, they serve more as inspirations for the action, not living participants in it.

However, the subtitle is a strong signal of what will happen. The story is indeed a modern Western, featuring central character Clayton “Sour” Manco, a former FBI agent who dislikes guns. He was drummed out of the bureau under a cloud, but is drawn again into hunting violent killers by Congressman Homer Blunt. As a result, Manco is a literary descendent of all those legendary gunfighters who seek to put their pasts behind them but become enmeshed in the need to fall back on their old deadly skills against their will.

In this modern setting, Blunt wants Manco to hunt down and kill three assassins who’ve murdered three fellow congressional representatives for, at first, unknown reasons. Blunt’s head of security, Jill Creete, is assigned the task of being Manco’s shadow. She too lost her former employment in the government under her own cloud and doesn’t think much of Manco until he shows off his investigative chops.

The story is full of such psychologically wounded warriors, especially the trio of assassins with murderous vengeance coursing through their veins. To reveal what their motives are would be a spoiler, but I will say two dead school girls are very much at the heart of their anger. I will also note the irony of their using gun violence to react to what they perceive is a lack of gun control and any willingness by our leaders to restrict access to guns.

Cooley is especially good at drawing complex character portraits with none of his characters portrayed as simple black-and-white figures of good or evil. Most are very dark indeed, no matter what side of the law they are on. In particular, his anti-hero, Manco, is able to see the flaws in Blunt and the reasoning of his quarry despite their bloodlust.

I’ve had the pleasure of reading two previous Cooley novels, the Bond homage, Shaken, Not Stirred, and part of his Supreme Court legal saga, Four Seats: The Full Docket. While I have no quibbles with his previous work, I do think The Guns of Bridgewood is more sharply drawn with a richer depth in his characters. It’s also easy to see his script-writing experience as this novel unfolds like it belongs on screen.

I think the novel is a fine way for Aaron Cooley to begin 2017. It’s thought-provoking and an obvious leap forward in one novelist’s development.

This review first appeared at BookPleasures.com on Jan 17, 2017:
goo.gl/CzeEnf

The Badwater Gospel Kindle Edition
R.W. Magill
Publication Date: April 10, 2016
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services LLC
ASIN: B01DLPD32C
https://www.amazon.com/Badwater-Gospe...

Reviewed by Dr. Wesley Britton

The Badwater Gospel opens with a bit of literal gallows humor. In his jailhouse journal, convicted murderer Langdon Dorsey looks out his cell window and only thanks one group in his acknowledgements—the termites that destroyed the gallows he was supposed to swing from.

Touches of such humor are rare in this quirky Western where card shark and con man Lang Dorsey arrives in the Montana town of Badwater while impersonating a Baptist Minister. He’s accompanied by 18 year old Paris Miller who’s pretending to be his daughter, a beauty Dorsey falls in love with as the two fornicate all over Montana in the winter of 1887.

Mainly told in a series of first-person journal entries, Magill adds considerable verisimilitude to the book with occasional court transcripts from The Territory of Wyoming vs. Dorsey, letters written by the secretary at the Badwater Baptist Church, and a newspaper article from the Laramie Daily Sentinel. Throughout, we hear Dorsey’s side of things as he explains how a number of killings occur around him while he argues his innocence of these crimes beyond his confidence man chicanery. In court, the evidence compounds against him as he’s ultimately convicted of multiple murders.

As the story takes us through many surprising twists and turns, I often thought Dorset is something of a raunchier, rougher, and randier incarnation of Bret Maverick. Had the ‘50s TV show not had to deal with the mores and broadcast codes of the era, perhaps James Garner’s gambling man character might have been more of a kindred spirit with Dorsey who’s never presented as a willingly violent man. He’s a criminal who simply wants to get ahead by hook or crook. The story’s true villains are far darker than either Dorsey or Paris, a seductive girl with increasingly suspect motives. Or perhaps author Magill has cards up his sleeve that he doesn’t want to show until he absolutely has to?

Publicity for Badwater Gospel uses terms like “genre bending, anti-Western, noir, murder mystery.” I suppose several killings can be called mysteries, although Dorsey and most readers will have no difficulty figuring out who’s responsible for the violent deaths. I don’t really know what an “anti-Western” would be, considering all the uses of Western settings in too many dark films to count, TV shows like Deadwood, or novels like this one. I don’t see how The Badwater Gospel bends any genres. And I don’t think any such distinctions really matter. Publicists like to use tag-lines and coin phrases that will draw prospective readers to their offered titles, but sometimes the book can stand on its own with no need of special puffery.

In that light, I’d recommend Badwater Gospel to any adult reader whether they’re fans of Westerns, anti-Westerns, or hard-boiled noir yarns. Gratefully, R.W. Magill has given us well-drawn and very sympathetic protagonists presented in vivid and very believable settings. I’m equally grateful Magill found a very plausible way to tie-off the story with an unexpected but very satisfying conclusion. To say more would be a spoiler. Just know however bloody and vicious the book gets, there’s justice, of a sort, after all.


First posted at BookPleasures.com May 31, 2017 at:
goo.gl/jB9ySa