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The Sheriff Chick Charleston Mysteries #4
PLAYING CATCH-UP.
Sheriff Chick Charleston asks Jason Beard, a deputy, to investigate the murder of an oil company stenographer who secretly moonlighted as a prostitute
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First published January 1, 1985
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
April 1, 2023
I’m pretty disappointed with this one. Guthrie wrote some prize winning epic westerns in the middle of his life, such as The Big Sky and The Way West and even wrote the screenplay for Shane. In 1973 he wrote the first in a series of contemporary western crime novels set in Montana. This book is the. fourth in that series, published in 1985.
Playing Catch-Up has some good points. It’s got a decent story, two well developed characters in the young narrator and his mentor the sheriff. The setting has a good small town Montana 80s feel. It was written by Guthrie when he was 84, which I’ve got to applaud.
Unfortunately the women characters are very one dimensional—the whore with the heart of gold, the broke down trashy woman, the fawning ideal mother. Guthrie must have been feeling the loosening of sexual prohibitions for writers in this period. Unfortunately, I think he does a pretty poor job of being contemporary. As one of the characters says at one point, there is a lot of “crotch talk” and locker room mentality. Very dated; he’d never get away with it today. The ending came completely out of the blue. What, that’s it?
Playing Catch-Up has some good points. It’s got a decent story, two well developed characters in the young narrator and his mentor the sheriff. The setting has a good small town Montana 80s feel. It was written by Guthrie when he was 84, which I’ve got to applaud.
Unfortunately the women characters are very one dimensional—the whore with the heart of gold, the broke down trashy woman, the fawning ideal mother. Guthrie must have been feeling the loosening of sexual prohibitions for writers in this period. Unfortunately, I think he does a pretty poor job of being contemporary. As one of the characters says at one point, there is a lot of “crotch talk” and locker room mentality. Very dated; he’d never get away with it today. The ending came completely out of the blue. What, that’s it?
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December 30, 2019This book was great just like the other murders A.B Guthrie wrote. Overall I really like this book.
November 15, 2020
This series is simple, maybe somewhat juvenile, but I like the characters, and generally enjoy the stories in spite of all the murder and mayhem.
January 20, 2025
This book lacks the human and natural magnificence that Guthrie has written before.
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March 20, 2012Didn’t know until I stumbled across this book that A. B. Guthrie (1901-1991) ever wrote crime fiction. This one comes fifth in a series of novels featuring Guthrie’s small town sheriff Chick Charleston. Guthrie was 85 when he wrote Playing Catch-Up, after a writing career that started in journalism and flourished in his sweeping historical novels set on the Montana frontier.
With The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949) he created his own brand of western storytelling. The grand scale of his books didn’t translate well into Hollywood movies. Still, he’s guaranteed a place in Hollywood history as the screenwriter for Shane (1953).
Most of Guthrie’s Chick Charleston books were written in the 1970s and 80s. I don’t know what the rest are like, but this one is kind of quirky. There are twice as many characters as you’d expect in its 183 pages. We learn little about its first-person narrator, Jason Beard, except that he lives with his mother, is fierce in a fistfight, and is trying to rekindle a romance with an old girlfriend.
The short chapters pack a punch, but the story refuses to build with the usual coherence you expect in crime fiction. A rape and murder has occurred before the opening chapter, and another occurs a short time later. A ruffian living rough in a camper is a prime suspect.
Sheriff Charleston is a common sense kind of public servant, with a relaxed style, who has learned to trust his hunches. A state inspector arrives on the scene to run his own investigation, generally making a nuisance of himself. Deputy Beard, the narrator, is often a passive observer, attentive to his boss.
As the story jumps forward in various unpredictable directions, you expect the basic elements of the mystery to snap into sharper relief in the last third of the book. Instead, it takes some meandering digressions involving the employment of several women at various jobs. And then the mystery kind of solves itself. It ends in fact with another murder, the outcome of which is left hanging.
I liked the characters in the book and the description of rural life in a small western town under the influx of oil field workers. Guthrie sets the story on the cusp of seasons between spring and summer. He also has an ear for wry, clipped dialogue.
Looking back over the book, you realize how much of it has to do with women – partly as objects of lust and rage, but also as rural poor, underemployed and overworked. The first murder victim is a woman who has a second income as a prostitute. Another woman has a live-in arrangement with a man who beats her. Guthrie has her gratefully accepting cast-off clothes and a job cleaning houses.
The men meanwhile get plenty of chances for camaraderie. Mostly single, they’re often gathering around a table for a good meal, or they’re bellying up to the bar for a brew or two. It’s not quite the good life, but it ain’t bad.
You wonder how much Guthrie’s intent was to show the lot of women in the New West, where men are men, and women supposedly like them that way. It sure doesn’t work out like that in this novel.
With The Big Sky (1947) and The Way West (1949) he created his own brand of western storytelling. The grand scale of his books didn’t translate well into Hollywood movies. Still, he’s guaranteed a place in Hollywood history as the screenwriter for Shane (1953).
Most of Guthrie’s Chick Charleston books were written in the 1970s and 80s. I don’t know what the rest are like, but this one is kind of quirky. There are twice as many characters as you’d expect in its 183 pages. We learn little about its first-person narrator, Jason Beard, except that he lives with his mother, is fierce in a fistfight, and is trying to rekindle a romance with an old girlfriend.
The short chapters pack a punch, but the story refuses to build with the usual coherence you expect in crime fiction. A rape and murder has occurred before the opening chapter, and another occurs a short time later. A ruffian living rough in a camper is a prime suspect.
Sheriff Charleston is a common sense kind of public servant, with a relaxed style, who has learned to trust his hunches. A state inspector arrives on the scene to run his own investigation, generally making a nuisance of himself. Deputy Beard, the narrator, is often a passive observer, attentive to his boss.
As the story jumps forward in various unpredictable directions, you expect the basic elements of the mystery to snap into sharper relief in the last third of the book. Instead, it takes some meandering digressions involving the employment of several women at various jobs. And then the mystery kind of solves itself. It ends in fact with another murder, the outcome of which is left hanging.
I liked the characters in the book and the description of rural life in a small western town under the influx of oil field workers. Guthrie sets the story on the cusp of seasons between spring and summer. He also has an ear for wry, clipped dialogue.
Looking back over the book, you realize how much of it has to do with women – partly as objects of lust and rage, but also as rural poor, underemployed and overworked. The first murder victim is a woman who has a second income as a prostitute. Another woman has a live-in arrangement with a man who beats her. Guthrie has her gratefully accepting cast-off clothes and a job cleaning houses.
The men meanwhile get plenty of chances for camaraderie. Mostly single, they’re often gathering around a table for a good meal, or they’re bellying up to the bar for a brew or two. It’s not quite the good life, but it ain’t bad.
You wonder how much Guthrie’s intent was to show the lot of women in the New West, where men are men, and women supposedly like them that way. It sure doesn’t work out like that in this novel.
February 1, 2013
Jason Beard has wanted to be an officer of the law since he was in high school. Now out of college he is waiting for a job in the city but agrees to help out his mentor Sheriff Chick Charleston with a brutal murder of a young working girl. He takes on the case and begins to make a little headway when another young girl disappears on her way home from a school music practice.
Jason helps in the search and what he finds rattles him. He begins to think that he is not cutout for the horrors of the job. He pulls himself together in order to help finds a vicious murderer or two.
Guthrie puts his poetic prose to good use as he casts a spell over the reader and transports them from where ever they are to the foothills of Montana in a beautiful June springtime. These are great characters in whom we begin to believe. I am sorry there aren't any more of these Montana stories.
Jason helps in the search and what he finds rattles him. He begins to think that he is not cutout for the horrors of the job. He pulls himself together in order to help finds a vicious murderer or two.
Guthrie puts his poetic prose to good use as he casts a spell over the reader and transports them from where ever they are to the foothills of Montana in a beautiful June springtime. These are great characters in whom we begin to believe. I am sorry there aren't any more of these Montana stories.
October 23, 2014
Jason Beard is aiding the sheriff of a small Montana town investigate a murder. Jason is called upon to interview the local madam who spills the dirt on many of the citizens. He also has to deal with a whole deck of jokers.
November 3, 2016
Not bad, but not worth seeking out either. I'd hoped for something different with what the cover labeled "a western mystery." I did want a clever mystery well written, but this comes up short. I would give it two and a half stars if I could, it is workmanlike but nothing special.
April 19, 2016
Fast paced. Light read
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews