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The Death and Life of Strother Purcell
The man, the myth, the one-eyed a frontier epic for fans of Ron Rash and Cormac McCarthy. In 1876, the fabled lawman Strother Purcell disappears into a winter storm in the mountains of British Columbia, while hunting down his outlawed half-brother. Sixteen years later, the wreck of Purcell resurfaces – derelict, homeless and one-eyed – in a San Francisco jail cell. And a failed journalist named Barrington Weaver conceives a grand redemptive plan. He will write Purcell's true-life story. All it requires is a final act… What unfolds is an archetypal saga of obsession, lost love, treachery, and revenge, told in Ian Weir's trademark funny, fast, wickedly intelligent style. A deadpan revisionist Western, refracted through a Southern Gothic revenge tragedy, The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is a novel about two cursed brothers, a pair of eldritch orphans, the vexed nature of truth, and the yearnings of that treacherous sonofabitch the human heart.
380 pages, Paperback
Published September 4, 2018
3 people are currently reading
102 people want to read
About the author
Ian Weir
12 books27 followers Ian Weir is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. His first novel, Daniel O’Thunder, was named one of the top historical novels of 2011 by Library Journal, which described it as “a debut novel both outrageously funny and bizarrely creepy.” It was a finalist for four awards: the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for First Book, the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize, and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction.
Among his extensive television credits, he was writer and executive producer of the critically acclaimed CBC gangland miniseries Dragon Boys. He was also creator and executive producer of CBC’s adventure/drama series Arctic Air, and the long-running teen series Edgemont. Along the way, he has written more than 150 episodes for nearly two dozen series, ranging from ReBoot to Flashpoint. His stage plays, which include The Idler, Bloody Business, and The Man Who Shot Chance Delaney, have been produced across Canada, and in the U.S. and England. Other credits include ten radio plays (three for the BBC and seven for the CBC) and three young adult novels. He has won two Gemini Awards, four Leos, a Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award, and a Jessie.
Ian lives near Vancouver, BC, with his wife Jude and their daughter Amy. His work takes him frequently to London, which has remained his favourite city on the planet ever since he fell in love with it as a graduate student at King’s College. For his sins he has been a lifelong fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Among his extensive television credits, he was writer and executive producer of the critically acclaimed CBC gangland miniseries Dragon Boys. He was also creator and executive producer of CBC’s adventure/drama series Arctic Air, and the long-running teen series Edgemont. Along the way, he has written more than 150 episodes for nearly two dozen series, ranging from ReBoot to Flashpoint. His stage plays, which include The Idler, Bloody Business, and The Man Who Shot Chance Delaney, have been produced across Canada, and in the U.S. and England. Other credits include ten radio plays (three for the BBC and seven for the CBC) and three young adult novels. He has won two Gemini Awards, four Leos, a Writers Guild of Canada Screenwriting Award, and a Jessie.
Ian lives near Vancouver, BC, with his wife Jude and their daughter Amy. His work takes him frequently to London, which has remained his favourite city on the planet ever since he fell in love with it as a graduate student at King’s College. For his sins he has been a lifelong fan of the Toronto Maple Leafs.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 29, 2018
3.5 stars. There was much to admire in this book. It has a terrific, but violent plot. The author is a great story teller, but it has an unreliable narrator. I am unsure what really happened at its bloody conclusion. This is an old fashioned Wild West story for modern times. The setting is western United States into California, Oregon and into Canada. It is a tale of dysfunctional families and long simmering revenge, and the men who made the West ‘Wild’ .
I liked the author’s way with words and how he sometimes used archaic words and phrases. The structure of the book didn’t work for me. The chapters moved back and forth in time and this disrupted my train of thought.
I found the many characters flawed but compelling. This is where I had to work hard not to become confused. It seems the many main characters had at least one alias, a necessity for their times and their crimes. As the chapters alternated between the characters’ past and a future time, we meet the same characters again with entirely different names. This took much concentration on my part. It was an enjoyable but twisted reading experience. Not relaxing.
I liked the dark humor. Wyatt Earp and his wife appear as characters in the story. Other real life characters from the times and location were mentioned in the book, and it was fun looking up old photos of the outlaws referred to on the internet. The story gives insight on how, through elaborating on a few facts, legends are created.
I liked the author’s way with words and how he sometimes used archaic words and phrases. The structure of the book didn’t work for me. The chapters moved back and forth in time and this disrupted my train of thought.
I found the many characters flawed but compelling. This is where I had to work hard not to become confused. It seems the many main characters had at least one alias, a necessity for their times and their crimes. As the chapters alternated between the characters’ past and a future time, we meet the same characters again with entirely different names. This took much concentration on my part. It was an enjoyable but twisted reading experience. Not relaxing.
I liked the dark humor. Wyatt Earp and his wife appear as characters in the story. Other real life characters from the times and location were mentioned in the book, and it was fun looking up old photos of the outlaws referred to on the internet. The story gives insight on how, through elaborating on a few facts, legends are created.
December 16, 2018
An epic story. A fine example of creative fiction from start to finish. Picture Clint Eastwood as the elderly, down and out Western lawman Strother Purcell. He should buy the movie rights to this book.
September 11, 2025
Like some small creek you find in a vast forest, one that you decide to follow along with and watch as it grows in size and strength, leading to impossible lost places that challenge you to get through, until reaching this mighty river's birth place at the base of unending glacier, snuck between the valley of rocky giants under a vast pale blue Canadian sky.
Yeah, this is that kinda book.
Yeah, this is that kinda book.
August 21, 2021
This is one of those books that I read more slowly toward the end, in order to make it last. The story is told through several chroniclers, who may or may not be reliable. It all adds up to a glorious romp through the second half of the nineteenth century in the Smoky Mountains, San Francisco, and British Columbia. Strother Purcell, legendary lawman and associate of Wyatt Earp, deals with his own demons while trying to be true to his convictions. The Death and Life of Strother Purcell is a great follow-up to Ian Weir's earlier books.
October 18, 2018
I've enjoyed both of Ian Weir's previous novels, but this one is an utter pleasure. Each time I put it down, I couldn't wait to dive back into its Shakespearean unwinding of fate. Weir plays with words like a sculptor plays with clay, crafting every sentence with wit and purpose, treating the reader to strokes of delightful whimsy, followed by poignant meditations on death, life and everything in between. The characters are big and bold as befits legends of the Old West, but they're fully-dimensional and human, too. The story clips along at a bracing pace, but Weir also delivers satisfying emotional depth in the tragic love/hate relationship between two brothers, set against the sometimes harrowing backdrop of the Canadian and American West, in the mythic era of the late 19th century. For my two bits, even those who may think they're not fans of the classic western will find The Death and Life of Strother Purcell a humdinger of an entertaining read.
March 11, 2022
"This claimed first prize in the cake-baking tent at the harvest fair for idiots."
This is the sort of wacky, amusing phrasing you get with Strother Purcell. The Death and Life is a highly entertaining backwoods yarn that is all at once comical, disconsolate, audacious and epic. It is three parts myth, one part Wild West - the sort of book you can't wait to get home from work to flip through.
The repeated use of character name changes got a touch old in the latter half. Otherwise, Ian Weir's Death and Life is an exuberant ride. Grab yer spurs and saddle up: you won't never regret this here title.
This is the sort of wacky, amusing phrasing you get with Strother Purcell. The Death and Life is a highly entertaining backwoods yarn that is all at once comical, disconsolate, audacious and epic. It is three parts myth, one part Wild West - the sort of book you can't wait to get home from work to flip through.
The repeated use of character name changes got a touch old in the latter half. Otherwise, Ian Weir's Death and Life is an exuberant ride. Grab yer spurs and saddle up: you won't never regret this here title.
April 25, 2019
Delightful crafting and fictional old Western-themed storytelling.
Very strong developed characters from start to a surprising inevitable finish.
Enjoyable reading experience. 👍
The surprise is I don't normally if ever read Westerns—ever—yet, it was the cover artwork that first successfully yanked my attention... Kudos to the Book's Graphic Designer: Jaye Haworth
Very strong developed characters from start to a surprising inevitable finish.
Enjoyable reading experience. 👍
The surprise is I don't normally if ever read Westerns—ever—yet, it was the cover artwork that first successfully yanked my attention... Kudos to the Book's Graphic Designer: Jaye Haworth
May 30, 2019
(...the perfect script for a cohen/tarantino movie)
==========
There was an instant of deadly hush, in which the great globe itself stood frozen. The moment grew more protracted with each successive telling, until by 1898 T.E. Spurlock—now a resident of Kamloops, where he maintained a position as town drunk—would recollect the world’s standing still for an entire four minutes and a half, while God gazed grimly down.
==========
“Come what may.” He had read this latter phrase in a book and thought it particularly fine. But his sister made no reply.
==========
I kept pace and we found ourselves trudging in silence, for awhile. The past will do that, if you let it creep up on you. It’ll spread out its shadow like the wings of oncoming night, and there you are, in gathering darkness.
==========
“’S there something you want?” the old man said. “You judged me, once.” “Did I?” “Yes, sir. You did. You looked down from that horse, and you judged me in one second. You judged that I was low, and vile, and would never amount to one thing worth being, on this earth. So I just come here to tell you . I just want to say, you were right.” “And that’s it?” “Yes, sir,” Tyree said. “I’d say that’s about all of it. I never done a thing to prove you wrong. I never will.” “Why not?” “’S too late.” The old man considered this. “Are you dead yet?” “Pretty near it,” Tyree said. “Not quite.” “Well, then?”
==========
The outlaws had begun with a two-day head-start, but slowly, inexorably, he closed it. This was inevitable. No man in the wrong can outlast a man in the right, who keeps on coming.
==========
In 1994, long after her husband’s death, and at the age of 85, Tilda gathered whole boxes of files about her and sat down at a portable typewriter. Winding the first of many sheets into the roller, she began: They were passing into myth before the snow had commenced to fall in earnest on that bleak midwinter afternoon, blurring the hard distinctions of this world. So it is not possible with confidence to say where certainties begin and end. There were three of them; this much at least is beyond dispute...
==========
There was an instant of deadly hush, in which the great globe itself stood frozen. The moment grew more protracted with each successive telling, until by 1898 T.E. Spurlock—now a resident of Kamloops, where he maintained a position as town drunk—would recollect the world’s standing still for an entire four minutes and a half, while God gazed grimly down.
==========
“Come what may.” He had read this latter phrase in a book and thought it particularly fine. But his sister made no reply.
==========
I kept pace and we found ourselves trudging in silence, for awhile. The past will do that, if you let it creep up on you. It’ll spread out its shadow like the wings of oncoming night, and there you are, in gathering darkness.
==========
“’S there something you want?” the old man said. “You judged me, once.” “Did I?” “Yes, sir. You did. You looked down from that horse, and you judged me in one second. You judged that I was low, and vile, and would never amount to one thing worth being, on this earth. So I just come here to tell you . I just want to say, you were right.” “And that’s it?” “Yes, sir,” Tyree said. “I’d say that’s about all of it. I never done a thing to prove you wrong. I never will.” “Why not?” “’S too late.” The old man considered this. “Are you dead yet?” “Pretty near it,” Tyree said. “Not quite.” “Well, then?”
==========
The outlaws had begun with a two-day head-start, but slowly, inexorably, he closed it. This was inevitable. No man in the wrong can outlast a man in the right, who keeps on coming.
==========
In 1994, long after her husband’s death, and at the age of 85, Tilda gathered whole boxes of files about her and sat down at a portable typewriter. Winding the first of many sheets into the roller, she began: They were passing into myth before the snow had commenced to fall in earnest on that bleak midwinter afternoon, blurring the hard distinctions of this world. So it is not possible with confidence to say where certainties begin and end. There were three of them; this much at least is beyond dispute...
October 16, 2018
If Shakespeare and Faulkner had a knife fight in a back alley, the blood they spilled would be the ink Ian Weir used to record The Death and Life of Strother Purcell. The tale of a legendary gunman and his outlaw brother is as mythic as it is down and dirty, crossing years, borders and near every moral and ethical boundary imaginable as the estranged brothers head for a reckoning that is sure to be as apocalyptic as it is inevitable. It’s fit for those who like the westerns of Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx in equal measures: as literary as it is lurid, as epic as it is eerie. Picture John Wayne riding into a Greek tragedy and you’ll have a notion of the peculiar brilliance that is The Death and Life of Strother Purcell.
February 12, 2019
This is one book that should be allowed to have 6 or more stars. I didn't want to put this book down and I didn't want it to end. Strother Purcell is all the Wild West men rolled into one, he's Rooster Cogburn only bigger and better or Clint Eastwood in the Unforgiven with more grit. He's a legend that will leave his mark on the Wild West stories. He'll be talked about around camp fires and whispered about in whiskey saloons. There are no good girls either, only tough western women trying to make their way in a world of booze, gambling and outlaws. A great rollicking tale, with dark humour, determined men, revenge on a biblical scale and disfunctional brotherly love.
September 12, 2019
"A man in the wrong cannot prevail...not against a man in the right who keeps a coming."That is the "speak" of every book written that brings frontier justice to the "bad" cowboys! This was a grand tale of the law man of the old American west. We find ourselves immersed in this tale of justice. It can only end with a showdown. The ending that is scripted leads to many scenarios but this ending just comes out of the blue. Brother against brother, but in the climax all is righted. In takes awhile to get there, which can be trying, but a fine tale. Later.Keep Reading.
November 14, 2025
Unexpected gem, a Tarantino-esque western novel that briskly moves through South Carolina, San Francisco and British Columbia, told by several unique voices, a tale of retribution and disorder. At first I was a little disoriented by the prose - a little too folksy - but as the story progresses it has different narrative styles that fit together very well. A rousing adventure, well told, and well recommended.
February 9, 2019
Have you ever read a book that deserves far more than a measly five stars? This is one such book! A weaving meandering tale set in the wild west, virtually every page with intrigue and a great belly laugh! I'll keep this book in my personal library for a very long time - can't wait to reread it every couple of years! The best!
January 19, 2019
I had a hard time getting into this book but am I ever glad that I stuck with it. Although this is a work of fiction, the spattering of history throughout the story allows the reader to feel as though this tale did truly unfold.
March 17, 2022
This is the book that makes you realize why you don’t give up on a book when it’s hard to get into. A well spun but slightly unbelievable tale of love, hate, family ties and perseverance. I’d love to hate this book but can’t quite get there
March 25, 2024
Really enjoyed this book. The characters were great, Weir takes the tropes of the old west and keeps them fresh. None of the characters are wholly good or wholly bad, and the book definitely didn't go anywhere that I thought it would. Great book.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews