sexual needs taken care of by various women in town.
“One thing I particularly valued about the prairie was the reticence of most of those living there, and the lack of interest, or overt interest anyway, in one’s neighbor’s origins,” says Bill, and you can sense in his words both the classic loner of Western literature and a man unsure of his own abilities to control himself within the bounds of society.
Temptation arrives in Cottonwood in the form of a slick Chicago operator called Marc Leval, who announces convincing plans to turn the town into a railroad hub and promises vast prosperity. Bill is more taken by the promise of Leval’s lovely wife, Maggie, but he is shrewd enough to also sign on as Leval’s partner in a new saloon. Then the book’s tone deepens and darkens, as a growing number of traveling salesmen and itinerant cowboys begin to disappear. Their deaths are traced to family of predators known as “The Bloody Benders,” based on an actual criminal clan, and it’s during the hunt for these killers that Ogden and Leval have a serious falling out.
From this point, Ogden—accompanied by Maggie Leval—begins an odyssey that reads like a modern deconstructionist version of a story by Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce which moves from Cottonwood to San Francisco and back again, covering a sizeable slice of American history.
However, it’s not Phillips’s thoughtful, exciting plotting but rather his amazing ear for the sad sounds behind the words of his people that makes his novels so exceptional. “ ‘They said they was going to perform in a show, a traveling thing, and they wondered if I’d like to come along,’ ” says a miner, a lucky survivor of the Benders’ madness. “He looked over at the river in the direction they’d gone, the very picture of wistful regret, apparently having forgotten what we’d told him three minutes earlier about who the Benders were and what they’d done. ‘I’ve got a claim to work, though, and I’m damned if I’ll wreck one more thing in my life.’ ”
STONE CRIBS, by Kris Nelscott (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
One of the best things about Kris Nelscott’s terrific series about savvy survivor Smokey Dalton is the way it has used the normal pace of passing time to investigate the important social and moral issues of the 1960s—without becoming the least bit doctrinaire or obvious. Her fourth book about Dalton continues those high standards: it finds Smokey and Jimmy Bailey (the now 11-year-old orphan boy he rescued from Memphis when the youngster happened to witness the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and knows that the killer wasn’t James Earl Ray) still living as father and son and trying to survive in Chicago in 1969.
Nelscott’s third Dalton novel “Thin Walls,” explored the problems of keeping boys like Jimmy out of the pervasive influence of high profile gangs such as the Blackstone Rangers. “Stone Cribs” has another major social agenda—the crime of forcing women to seek out illegal abortions. Smokey puts his and Jimmy’s lives at great risk by helping a young black woman who is bleeding to death after such an operation, and then commits crimes of his own as he investigates the death of a friend who helped him in the past. Nelscott’s nuanced writing makes it all as natural and inevitable as the small urban tragedies which happened every day in the 1960s in cities like Chicago—and which are still happening, in other forms and colors, almost 40 years later.
THE GRENADILLO BOX, by Janet Gleeson (Simon & Schuster)
If you’ve ever looked at a beautifully-decorated piece of furniture made from exotic woods by an artist like Thomas Chippendale and marveled at what it said about our civilization, you’ll probably be both amazed and appalled by this exciting and brutal first mystery. Art historian Janet Gleeson, who turned a fascination with fine porcelain into a memorable non-fiction book (“The Arcanum”), manages to combine a
“One thing I particularly valued about the prairie was the reticence of most of those living there, and the lack of interest, or overt interest anyway, in one’s neighbor’s origins,” says Bill, and you can sense in his words both the classic loner of Western literature and a man unsure of his own abilities to control himself within the bounds of society.
Temptation arrives in Cottonwood in the form of a slick Chicago operator called Marc Leval, who announces convincing plans to turn the town into a railroad hub and promises vast prosperity. Bill is more taken by the promise of Leval’s lovely wife, Maggie, but he is shrewd enough to also sign on as Leval’s partner in a new saloon. Then the book’s tone deepens and darkens, as a growing number of traveling salesmen and itinerant cowboys begin to disappear. Their deaths are traced to family of predators known as “The Bloody Benders,” based on an actual criminal clan, and it’s during the hunt for these killers that Ogden and Leval have a serious falling out.
From this point, Ogden—accompanied by Maggie Leval—begins an odyssey that reads like a modern deconstructionist version of a story by Mark Twain or Ambrose Bierce which moves from Cottonwood to San Francisco and back again, covering a sizeable slice of American history.
However, it’s not Phillips’s thoughtful, exciting plotting but rather his amazing ear for the sad sounds behind the words of his people that makes his novels so exceptional. “ ‘They said they was going to perform in a show, a traveling thing, and they wondered if I’d like to come along,’ ” says a miner, a lucky survivor of the Benders’ madness. “He looked over at the river in the direction they’d gone, the very picture of wistful regret, apparently having forgotten what we’d told him three minutes earlier about who the Benders were and what they’d done. ‘I’ve got a claim to work, though, and I’m damned if I’ll wreck one more thing in my life.’ ”
STONE CRIBS, by Kris Nelscott (St. Martin’s Minotaur)
One of the best things about Kris Nelscott’s terrific series about savvy survivor Smokey Dalton is the way it has used the normal pace of passing time to investigate the important social and moral issues of the 1960s—without becoming the least bit doctrinaire or obvious. Her fourth book about Dalton continues those high standards: it finds Smokey and Jimmy Bailey (the now 11-year-old orphan boy he rescued from Memphis when the youngster happened to witness the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and knows that the killer wasn’t James Earl Ray) still living as father and son and trying to survive in Chicago in 1969.
Nelscott’s third Dalton novel “Thin Walls,” explored the problems of keeping boys like Jimmy out of the pervasive influence of high profile gangs such as the Blackstone Rangers. “Stone Cribs” has another major social agenda—the crime of forcing women to seek out illegal abortions. Smokey puts his and Jimmy’s lives at great risk by helping a young black woman who is bleeding to death after such an operation, and then commits crimes of his own as he investigates the death of a friend who helped him in the past. Nelscott’s nuanced writing makes it all as natural and inevitable as the small urban tragedies which happened every day in the 1960s in cities like Chicago—and which are still happening, in other forms and colors, almost 40 years later.
THE GRENADILLO BOX, by Janet Gleeson (Simon & Schuster)
If you’ve ever looked at a beautifully-decorated piece of furniture made from exotic woods by an artist like Thomas Chippendale and marveled at what it said about our civilization, you’ll probably be both amazed and appalled by this exciting and brutal first mystery. Art historian Janet Gleeson, who turned a fascination with fine porcelain into a memorable non-fiction book (“The Arcanum”), manages to combine a
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