Review: "Pistol Belt" by Dean Owen

 

Pistol Belt by Dean Owen Monarch Books, 1961     reviewed by Mike Baker     Hazard Coyle was ending the American Civil War as poor as he’d started it. Hanging Niles Tree, the day after the surrender at Appomattox, made sense. Tree’s neighbors hated him and his wealth, not in a bank, was in a massive cattle herd and a mercantile business. Killing Niles Tree in front of his wife and children made sense too. It would be easier to run them off. Coyle reinvents himself in the border town of La Casitas by single handedly cleansing the town of hardcases, whores, loafers, drunks and gamblers with a bullwhip and a pistol. Hazard Coyle has everything he’s ever wanted. Wealth. Power. The love of a beautiful woman. And all of this is spoiled by former Confederate officer Martin Tree, brother of the man he murdered at war’s end, driving his own herd to graze on his new partner’s spread right next door to Coyle’s Hub Ranch. Yancey Noughton, Martin Tree’s partner, is a broke, drunken aristocrat with a ranch to sell—when Martin Tree offers him 50% of Tree’s herd for 50% of Naughton’s spread. Tree also plans to Murder Coyle, for the cold blooded murder of Niles, but Naughton is desperate so he agrees. Also, Naughton has a wife whose desperate for a dude who doesn’t have whiskey dick. Sorry. That was cheap. She starts in on convincing Tree to run off or kill her husband Yancey. Wading into this roiling melodrama was not appetizing to me at all. The whole plot stretches the oft times already over stretched credulity of a western plot and this one was straddling pulp zaniness and mid-century melodrama in the awfulest possible way. Don’t let that stop you because the book is much more complex than that. Martin Tree has been running wild cattle hunts in the Texas brasada, which is a brutal and deadly place, to build a herd—while looking after his inept and immature adopted brother Bud since childhood. He’s also been hunting Coyle on the vengeance trail for three years and on the cusp of getting him, Martin is mentally and emotionally exhausted. He is coming apart at the seams. Underneath the ridiculous plotting is a character study of a man whose need to avenge his brother is at odds with his need to build something for him and his remaining brother. The book is really about how the selfish nature of hate destroys us and how can we find a way to survive our own self-immolation. Granted, I had to wade through about 40 pages before I realized that but it was worth it. The novel gets darker and more violent as we move closer to the inevitable confrontation’s murderous conclusion. Dean Owen (Dudley Dean McGaughy) came recommended to me as a hardboiled western author and reading this, I came to understand I wasn’t sure what hardboiled meant. I can define noir* but hardboiled was only vaguely defined for me. It was something I understood from Hemingway’s dead souled ex-soldiers and Hammett’s coldly pragmatic detectives. Neither made sense in a western story though. Post wars America (those times after major conflicts: WWII, Korea, Vietnam) left many needing a way to reconcile their war time experience with the world they now inhabited. I can’t speak for other “hardboiled” western authors or even Dean Owen’s other books but, if we apply the term here, it seems to refer to the question, how do you learn to thrive after massive trauma. And forgive me for this very topical language, the hardboiled post wars writers seem to be trying to understand how to heal themselves, and the men around them, which seems to be a concept they themselves didn’t even understand they were doing. *               *              * I wrote all this leaving out what you probably are here to read. Owen writes a slow boiling tense western with sporadic but visceral and gory fight scenes. The dialogue is clunky at times and the narrative is, as previously mentioned, a bit ridiculous but hang in. Owen slowly builds his case. He’s setting us up for something big and it’s worth the wait.

*My definition of noir is a story told from the criminal’s perspective where the reader understands that the criminal’s plan is doomed to failure ahead of the narrator. Noir never works out. Thus, the Parker books aren’t noir but Double Indemnity is noir.