BRIMSTONE
Robert B. Parker
Putnam Adult
Western
ISBN: 9780399155710
Having revitalized the private eye genre 35 years ago with his Spenser series, Robert B. Parker might be in the process of doing the same thing for the western. BRIMSTONE is the third installment in a series that started with APPALOOSA in 2005 and continued with RESOLUTION in 2008.
At first, longtime readers of Parker’s mysteries were curious if the great writer could weave his narrative magic in the western genre. We need not have worried. In these westerns, Parker has created a fresh take on a tired genre.
BRIMSTONE once again deals with the exploits of “guns for hire” Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, two men who have partnered together for 20 years. While former West Point graduate and soldier Hitch tells the story, the center of the story revolves around Cole. Cole calls the shots. Parker introduces us to him on the first page:
“Several people looked at Virgil when he came in. He wasn’t special-looking. Sort of tall, wearing a black coat and a white shirt and a Colt with a white bone handle. But there was something about the way he walked and the way the gun seemed so natural. People looked at me sometimes, too, but always after they looked at Virgil.
BRIMSTONE picks up where RESOLUTION left off. Virgil is searching for the woman he loves, Allie French, who ran off a while back with another man. We first met Allie in APPALOOSA when she arrived in town with dreams of being a saloon singer and piano player. She won Virgil’s heart, even as it became apparent that she had no musical talent whatsoever.
Everett and Virgil spend a year wandering through every little camp settlement looking for Allie. When BRIMSTONE begins, we learn that Allie’s dreams have died hard. Everett spots her first in the little Texas town of Placido, “which had a railroad station, and one saloon for every man, women and child in town.”
Hitch says: “I looked at the whores. It was hard in the dim light, and I almost missed her. The pink dress was dirty. Her hair was ratty. She was a lot thinner than she had been, and the body that had once pushed at the confines of her dress now seemed shrunken inside her clothes…I went back into the despondent street feeling tired and tight across my shoulders.”
Both men, of course, rescue Allie, and they all flee to the town of Brimstone to start anew. Virgil and Everett take jobs as deputies. But much of the book revolves around the question that Virgil wrestles with: Can Allie change? Can anybody ever change? And that gives this western a unique psychological dimension.
At one time the western genre was one of the most popular in popular fiction. From the earliest pulp paperbacks to the extensive work of Zane Grey, the western novel cemented in American culture the heroic myth of how the West was won. Hollywood quickly cashed in and glorified the American Indian War, America’s first war of counterinsurgency. But by the 1960s and 1970s America was fighting another war of counterinsurgency in Southeast Asia, and the once popular western novel and movie was in rapid decline.
The heroic fictional myth of the Old West was also exposed by historians such as Dee Brown and Howard Zinn. Brown’s BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE is still required reading for every American. It showed that the glorious American Indian War was little more than the genocide of Native American human beings and the stealing of their land.
Popular western fiction that came out of this period was decidedly revisionist, such as Thomas Berger’s novel LITTLE BIG MAN, later made into the 1970 film, and the movie Doc, written by Pete Hamill.
But the traditional western was largely finished, and even great writers who worked extensively in the field, such as Elmore Leonard, quickly migrated into mysteries. The one exception has been Larry McMurtry, but his most famous work, LONESOME DOVE, was really a psychological character study of two comrades. In later years westerns such as Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven and the HBO series “Deadwood” have been neither mythic nor revisionist, preferring instead to be realistic portrayals of the Old West.
Parker is now writing definitely in the realistic style. Everett and Virgil are killers, but basically good guys. And while they might wear badges, they are not lawmen in any traditional sense. They have no civic commitment to the towns where they work and have little use for courts or law; indeed, there are no courts or law or government in Brimstone besides their guns. They are mercenaries with a conscience.
Unlike Brother Percival, the preacher who practices a “militant Christianity” complete with armed “deacons,” while lusting for earthly power, or saloon owner Pike, who kills for greed and power, Virgil and Everett are motivated by more complex reasons. Parker writes:
“‘We not going to back-shoot anybody,’ Virgil said. ‘We risk our lives to do what we think, the right thing to do. Somebody told me once that was pretty much all you can ask for.’
‘Who was that?’ I said.
‘A smart fella,’ Virgil said, and sipped his coffee. ‘Went to West Point.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Him.’”
And in BRIMSTONE their motivation is dictated by Virgil’s complicated feelings about Allie, who, despite her professed love for him and promises to change, continues her unfaithful ways. She says at one point, “Only way I knew to get what I wanted, feel like I wanted to feel, be how I wanted, only way for me was to f*** somebody.”
Nobody draws pistols on the count of three in this version of the Old West. Virgil simply tells his foe, “I’m gonna kill you.” Then he does. And those who fall receive another bullet in the head to make sure they stay down. Life is particularly hard on women and Native American children kidnapped by the U.S. Army and forced to go to the “Indian school” to adapt to the white world.
Parker has written a fast moving, authentic western in a time when counterinsurgency policy has been revived. And in Virgil and Everett, he has created two colorful characters who rival Gus and Call from LONESOME DOVE in terms of their dialogue and interplay. We can hopefully look forward to many more adventures involving Virgil Cole, Everett Hitch and Allie French.
--- Reviewed by Tom Callahan
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