ROBERT B PARKER'S BLACKJACK by Robert Knott

Robert Parker wrote four westerns starring Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, starting with Appaloosa, which was made into an excellent film whose adaptation was co-written, with star Ed Harris, by Robert Knott. Blackjack is Knott's fourth continuation of Parker's series, and probably the best of the bunch.

You can find my reviews of the two of those previous novels here at Irresistible Targets. I wrote before that Knott was restrained a bit by the characterisations built up in the film,
which was a shame because it was Parker's sharp contrast between Hitch's perceptive narration (much like Spenser's first person in the detective novels) and Cole's western silence that delineated the story even more than the characters themselves. This problem continues: Knott lacks Parker's ability to allow Hitch to sketch in quickly the characters of supporting players, a shame in this book because the characters have the potential to be hugely entertaining, particularly Boston Bill Black, a gambler and gunman accused of a brutal murder, Valentine Pell, a gunman with a surprising past, and Daphne Angel, the muse of a great hotel/saloon/casino/brothel going up in Appaloosa.

But what is most problematic is the loss of the edginess in the relationship between Virgil and Allie, which lay at the core of Appaloosa. Allie is the polar opposite of Spenser's Susan. Just as Virgil is love struck but opposed to Spenser in his inability to deal with his obsession with Allie, Allie is incapable of being fully independent, and it's her lack of attachment to Virgil when his presence as anchor is drifting that made her a source of constant tension. Here they seem to have settled into a sort of unsatisfactory domestic bliss--but it also seems pretty clear that Knott is building a future conflict into the story.

Blackjack is actually more of a murder mystery than a western, made more difficult because the murder occured in Denver and there were no witnesses. There are scenes of courtroom drama, and unusual behaviour from the local judge which is never really explained. It's resolution is not quite unexpected, but the motivation and casuality are; they are very modern in their execution. Which also reminds me that there are a number of times when modern discourse interferes with the western setting: I doubt if 'meaningful relationship' or Ms. were part of the 19th century.

Knott keeps the story moving well, introduces a nice, if not fully delineated suporting cast, and gets enough out of the Hitch-Cole dynamic to make Blackjack a diverting, if not compelling, read.

Blackjack by Robert Knott
Putnam, US$9.99, ISBN 9781101982525

JAMES GAMMON: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the character actor James Gammon, brilliant as manager Lou Brown in Major League, is in today's Guardian with a fine photo of him and Tom Berenger in that move; you can link to it here. There were only a few small changes from my original copy, which follows:

JAMES GAMMON: ACTOR

With a voice that sounded like it was strained through gravel chipped off his craggy face, James Gammon, who has died aged 70, was a memorable presence as a character actor in crime stories, rural dramas, and especially westerns and neo-westerns, from A Man Named Horse (1970), to Urban Cowboy, Silverado, Wyatt Earp, Streets Of Laredo, Wild Bill, and Appaloosa (2008). Ed Harris, who directed and starred in Appaloosa, said 'if he'd been born twenty years earlier he'd have been in every other western ever made.'

He was a natural father figure. Speaking through a perpetual squint that could be interpreted as crazy or wise or both, his best-known role was as the unflappable baseball manager Lou Brown, chosen to fail and ultimately winning in the comedy Major League (1989). In the Nineties he played Don Johnson's father in the long-running TV series Nash Bridges. And his ability to reveal an essential weakness, and the potential for violence beneath a macho exterior, made Gammon an actor of choice for playwright Sam Shepherd, playing the malevolent father-figures around whom much of his work centers.
Like Shepherd, Gammon came from a broken home. Belying his western voice, he was born in Illinois, but after his parents divorced, brought up with relatives in Orlando, Florida. After high school he worked at a local television station, as a cameraman and then director. He also began acting in community theatre, and decided to pursue that career in Los Angeles. He made his television debut in 1966, in The Wild Wild West, and his film debut, uncredited, the following year as one of the chain gang in Cool Hand Luke. Television westerns,cop shows, and small roles in films followed, before he achieved a breakthrough of sorts with a recurring role as Zach Roswell in the popular TV drama The Waltons.
Meanwhile, he co-founded the 50-seat Met Theatre in Los Angeles, where his work got him cast in the New York Public Theatre's 1973 production of Shepherd's Curse of the Starving Class, beginning an almost symbiotic relationship with the playwright. 'He definitely rang a bell with me,' Shepherd said. 'He was more than an actor. He was part of a whole world I was familiar with.' Gammon starred with Harris in Simpatico, was nominated for a Tony award for his performance in Steppenwolf's Broadway revival of Buried Child in 1996, and in 2000 played the lead in the San Francisco debut of Shepherd's The Late Henry Moss, where his co-stars, Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, and Cheech Marin, came up to the playwright one-by-one asking 'who is this guy? Where did he come from?' Gammon returned to the Met to play a memorable King Lear in 2003.
He had actually played Don Johnson's father once before, in a TV movie version of The Long Hot Summer, and after Major League he was cast in Crime Story, had a lead role in the short-lived series Baghdad Cafe, and in eight episodes of the highly-regarded Homefront. After his role in Robert Redford's Milagro Beanfield War, he bought a ranch in Florida he named Milagro and on which he raised horses. Gammon played opposite Christine Lahti in Ed Zwick's overlooked Leaving Normal (1992), and as an off-beat mafia boss in Masado Harata's Painted Desert (1993), which mixed Baghdad Cafe with Bad Day At Black Rock and added yakuza. He reprised Lou Brown in Major League II (1994) and did a number of voices for the animated version of Ted Hughes' The Iron Giant (1999).
Despite his suffering from liver and adrenal cancer, Bertrand Tavernier made a point of casting him in In The Electric Mist (2008) where he was recognisable mostly by his voice. His final roles were as a sheriff in Otis E, and in the the New Daughter, based on a John Connolly ghost story. He died 16 July 2010 at home, and is survived by his second wife, Nancy Kapusa, whom he married in 1972, and two daughters. According to Shepherd, 'this was a guy who could act circles around most other actors, and he never pretended to be other than a working kind of actor.'

James Edward Gammon

born 20 April 1940 Newman, Illinois, died 16 July 2010 Costa Mesa, California

ROBERT B PARKER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY, COMPLETED

My obituary of the great detective novelist Robert B Parker is in today's Guardian; you can link to it here. I read Parker from his very first novel, and probably read just about all of them, and the bit about the Chandler revival was true; those Ballantine editions with the glossy covers were very popular, and I wrote an essay at the time for a magazine called Starling, about discovering Chandler. Maybe I'll dig it out and reprint it here. I've written a lot about Parker over the years, and my attitude toward him is summed up in one of my favourite 'interviews'; a review of Trouble In Paradise which you can link to from the 'Bullseyes' section to the right, or by hitting the link here.

I felt unusually odd writing the obit because last month I finished an essay on Boston for Following The Detectives, a Maxim Jakubowski-edited anthology about various cities and their detectives, which was predominantly about George Higgins, Parker, and Dennis Lehane. And in November I reviewed his Spenser novel The Professional, linked to here, which is worth reading because it summarises both the strengths and weaknesses of his later work. But I could still hear what I'd written then echoing around my head, Parker's death was that unexpected.

The obit ran mostly as written, allowing for the usual oddities of style (Colby College became Colby college, though one would never see Oxford university in the British press; the actress Helen Hunt became an actor), but lost was one comment on why Parker's slighter work remained entertaining; the wise-cracking Spenser usually got the zingers to end each chapter--zinger was probably thought to need explanation.

More crucially, an entire paragraph on his westerns was cut. This was odd, because it reflected the earlier reference to Rich Slotkin's Gunfighter Nation, because it connected Tom Selleck to the Jesse Stone films, which also thus go unmentioned, because Gunman's Rhapsody is an important work within his output, because Appaloosa was a quality film, and a successful one, and also because the forthcoming fourth novel in the Cole and Hitch series is mentioned in the final paragraph, but with no explanation, as if the previous reference had not been excised. Anyway, here's the missing bit, which was the penultimate graf in my copy:
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In 2001, Parker's novel Gunman's Rhapsody recast Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday as Spenser and Hawk; which led to his working on the screenplay for the 2003 TV movie remake of the classic Monte Walsh, starring Tom Selleck. Selleck then played Jesse Stone in a series of TV movies between 2005-09, with one remaining unaired. Parker's 2005 western, Appaloosa, was made into an excellent film by the actor Ed Harris, and spawned two more novels featuring lawmen Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch. 

I could go on about how the link between westerns and detective stories is so important, but mostly I'd like to end by remembering just how much pleasure Parker's writing brought me over the years, and how much we will miss him now that he's gone.