THE SUNDOWN SPEECH by Loren D. Estleman

The Sundown Speech is the most recent entry, 25^th overall, in Loren Estleman’s justly celebrated Amos Walker private detective series. Dante and Heloise Gunnar were swindled out of $15,000 by a would-be director named Jerry Marcus. Jerry hooked the couple for an investment in a film dubiously titled Mr. Alien Elect, and when he stopped returning telephone calls the couple contacted Walker. It is a straight missing person case and Amos reluctantly takes it; reluctantly because the Gunnar’s, particularly Heloise, are off-putting to his working class sensibilities, and all the leads are in Ann Arbor, Michigan. A scant 45 minutes from his beloved Detroit, but worlds apart—

“The place looked as far away from the Motor City as Morocco.”

The setting is post 9/11, but not by much. The preamble is as cool and stylish as anything I’ve read:

“Roll the clock back a dozen years, maybe more; Michael Jackson was still alive, Iris, too. I could walk all day without limping. Tweet was bird talk, the chain bookstore was the greatest threat to civilization since ragtime music, and the only time you saw a black president was in a sci-fi film. Going back is always a crapshoot.”

And it only gets better. Amos Walker is his usual smart ass and hard-boiled self, and the mystery is something of a locked door job. This time, however—and not to give too much away—the locked door is in the police forensics lab. The supporting cast is college town unusual; big and brassy while lacking experience and boasting excessive aspirations. A photographer who photographs nudes in public places not minding the accompanying public decency ticket and bail money for his model. The local police have a thing for writing parking tickets, and the detective working the case keeps giving Amos a polite, but resolute “sundown speech”—thanks for your help, please go back to Detroit. Amos doesn’t much want to stick around either, but the facts keep him there as the case turns more and more serious, and more and more curious.



This review originally went live on Ed Gorman's blog December 22, 2015.

THE LONG HIGH NOON by Loren D. Estleman

“No one but Randy Locke and Frank Farmer knew just what it was that blackened the blood between them, but it didn’t lose its kick with time.”

The feud began in 1868, for reasons unknown, when the two traded drunken shots in an El Paso saloon. It escalated the following morning when Randy broke one of Frank’s ribs with a .44 slug, and their lifelong co-dependence was cast with Randy’s crushed leg; an injury caused by Frank’s misjudged pistol shot, which placed the pill in the horse rather than Randy. From there the two men dance across the Western frontier, their sole reason for living the taking of the other’s life—they trade barbs in Salt Lake City, hunt each other in Wyoming and San Francisco, and plan, with the aid of huckster Abraham Cripplehorn, a live pay-per-view duel to the death in Indian country.  

The Long High Noon is the tallest of tall tales, and its power isn’t a telling of the West, but rather a telling of the mythology of the West. It is told in vivid strokes, whimsy and humor. The humor often exposed in fine dialogue—

In an early passage the narrator—an unidentified gentleman who, from time to time, slips into first person—tells of Randy’s success with women (sometimes not having to pay at all), and Frank’s reaction: “That little stump’d have to pay a sheep.”

In a later passage Abraham Cripplehorn tells Randy: “It never occurred to me you had a mother.”

It chronicles, tongue-in-cheek, the settlement of the American West; from the post-Civil War expansion to its ultimate settlement and civilization. It is something of a mythology of the mythology of the West. It starts with the dime novels, the sensationalism of early western journalism, the traveling Wild West shows, and ultimately the rise of settlement and the fall of men such as Frank Farmer and Randy Locke. A fall both men take quite fittingly.

The Long High Noon is smooth, vivacious, and curious. There are moments—splashes of dialogue, shimmering narrative, clever twists—when Mr. Estleman appears to be showing off; it isn’t cheap or distracting, but rather a display of how good a writer he is. He has mastered his art, and it shows. It also displays a deep understanding of both the westward expansion and the literary genre that grew up around it; the reality and mythology wrapped into one neat package.

I wrote this review for Ed Gorman’s fine blog New Improved Gorman. If you haven’t been there, you should.

Purchase a copy on Amazon.

"The Bandit" by Loren D. Estleman

A note up front. I wrote this piece, read it, and then debated for some time about actually posting it. As you can see I decided to go with it. The subject matter, "The Bandit" by Loren Estleman, is really terrific. You should find a copy and read it. As for the wistful philosophy, it is all my own, and while it sounds more like a sophomoric argument in a community college literature paper, and less like something truly deep and meaningful, don't hold that against the story or its author.

There is one constant in human history. Change. There are times when change seems terribly distant, and others when change is so near and terrifying we try to ignore and hope it doesn’t last. It always does last however, and the only thing that will take its place is more change, and that expected change never moves us back to where we were. Sometimes it seems like we step back, but we never really do—it is always forward, although not always for the better, and only sometimes for the worse.
 

The Western story is a glimpse at that change—the moving from the old to the new, and then further past still. It is a window to the past. A vision of what was. The technology of an era gone by—the freight wagon was the high technology of its day, and without it we never would have devised such a thing as the freight train or the modern semi-tractor trailer rig, or even the airplane. There is a progression that is natural and scary as hell that is defined by one word: time. It moves forward with an unflinching eye and we either stay with it, or we are unmercifully left behind.

I recently read a short story that reminded me of change and its unrelenting march forward. It is a Western story written by one of the best writers the genre has produced: Loren D. Estleman. It was published in 1986 and won the Golden Spur Award for best short story. Its title: “The Bandit”.

It is the chronicle of an outlaw who was incarcerated in 1878—the pinnacle of the post Civil War mythologized Western outlaw era. He spent the prime years of his life in a penitentiary only to be released 29 years later at the age of 60.The automobile was replacing the horse and wagon as the major mode of transportation, and the American economy was moving from its old agrarian self into the industrial age—and still it changes today as we move into the so-called post industrial age.

The old man is in awe at his first glimpse at an automobile—“He watched it go by towing a plume of dust and blue smoke and said, ‘Oldsmobile.’” He kept up with modern life and technology through magazines and newspapers, but there is nothing like the real thing, and when he is released he finds the world a changed place. He doesn’t know if the train station is still in the same place, and he doesn’t know exactly how he will live in this world—a world to which he really no longer belongs.

The irony of the story is that it is his past—the past—that gives him currency in this new place. It is his stories and wisdom that allow him a position. Very much as it is our own pasts—both our personal past as well as the cultural past—that give us a future. We depend on the past to define ourselves, and in that definition and experience we create both today and tomorrow.

“The Bandit” is a wonderful tale that is as entertaining as it is enlightening. It can be read as both a genre piece and a deeply affecting literary story. The difference between the two is probably no more than semantic, but this story should appeal to anyone who enjoys a story as a story and also to those who need to grapple with deep meaning and nuance. A line that is nearly impossible to walk, but a line that Loren Estleman often approaches and straddles in his Western fiction.