JAMES CARLOS BLAKE'S RULES OF WOLFE

The Rules Of Wolfe is billed as a 'border noir' and it may well be just that. Eddie Gato Wolfe is 19. He's part of a clan of criminals whose legacy stretches back generations and across the Texas-Mexico border. But the family rules say Eddie can't join the real action in the family business until he's finished college, and college is not on his agenda. So Eddie disappears, and resurfaces in the middle of the Mexican desert, guarding the weekend getaway of 'The Boss', 'La Navaja'. The work is dull, and once again, there are rules. But Eddie isn't one for rules.

So when he eyes one of the women who arrives for the weekend soiree, Miranda, who's La Navaja's brother Segundo's squeeze, he ought to know, and we certainly do know, that doing anything about it will lead to trouble. But he does, and she does, and it does lead to trouble and next thing we know Eddie and Miranda are on the run, heading across the desert for the border, with all the resources of La Navaja's organisation mobilized against them. Eddie needs help, but contacting his brothers Rudy and Frank would not only be humiliating, it might alert La Navaja about where he is.

I reviewed James Carlos Blake's first novel The Pistoleer, about John Wesley Hardin, twenty years ago. His shifting narrators have a particular resonance which reminded you of how gunfighters moved into myth. I have followed him consistently since, and frequently been hugely impressed; not least with The Killings Of Stanley Ketchel, which has joined my list of best boxing novels ever.

Blake writes about outlaws, and their struggles to survive in America--with this he's added Mexico to the mix as well, with the country on the other side of Donald Trump's wall serving as a kind of wild wild west surrogate. On the surface, The Rules Of Wolfe isn't a complicated novel, basically a classic man on the run story, but the structure is actually quite neatly built--switching between the Wolfe family in Texas and their own problems, and Eddie Gato, and eventually managing to bring the two together.

Wolfe writes cleanly, which keeps the pace moving, and he is a master of that laconic kind of American voice that goes back before Hemingway into the western. It's a modern sort of western he's written here, and it's a rewarding read.

The Rules Of Wolfe by James Carlos Blake
No Exit Press, £8.99, ISBN 9781843444084

Note: This review will appear also at Crime Time(www.crimetime.co.uk)

PETER MATTHIESSEN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the writer Peter Matthiessen is up at the Guardian's website now. You can link to it here, and it should be in the paper paper soon. I wrote it quickly, to a flexible word length. A few things were cut out, and some explanations added it, but mostly it is as I wrote it.

The most extensive loss was my second graf:

No less than his work, Matthiessen's life embodied the nature of opposites beloved in the Zen Buddhist philosophy he practised. Beyond the dichotomy of fiction and fiction, Matthiessen was able to found the pre-eminent literary journal, The Paris Review, while working for the CIA. And his journey to radical politics and alternative life-style never saw him abandon the elite New York society from which he came, right down to living in the smart east end of Long Island.

  

I felt the point about the Zen nature of his life was an important one to make, particularly because his final novel seemed so strongly to encompass opposites. And though some of the specifics are covered later in the obit (hence the cut) I actually would have liked to take a little more time to explore the contradictions in his atrician New York life style and his earthy proto-hippie explorer quality. It was something that is very American upper-class--another small item cut was my mention that while at Hotchkiss he withdrew his name from the family's listing in the Social Register; yet proceeded on to Yale, and continued to live the life-style of the elite. I also mentioned that he'd been at school with George Plimpton, a fellow founder of the Paris Review, and a close copy of Matthiessen, right down to writing for Sports Illustrated--Plimpton explored professional sports the way Matthiessen explored the natural world. They were both elegant in that strong patrician way, the kind of men who wear seersucker that never wrinkles. Perhaps my interest reflects all the time I have spent in this country!You can seen the connection when people compare those Americans to the same sort of English, more prevalent in the pre-Thatcher years than now, a sort of transcontinental Oxbridge centered on America's prep (ie: British 'public') schools and our Oxbridge of Yale and Harvard. Of course, if America were Britain, Matthiessen would have probably been presenting wildlife programmes, a la David Attenborough.

These were the men recruited for the CIA in its early days, and although the taint of having spied on his fellow expats never seemed to stick to Matthiessen, it was interesting the way he always moved to distance his magazine from his own work. Yet anyone following the funding dispersed by the CIA in that period could hardly doubt that some of it must have made its way to the Paris Review. The question inflames some people, like Elia Kazan informing on fellow-travelers, yet here it doesn't quite makes its way into Philby territory, perhaps another difference between the American faux-aristocracy and the British.

That life style is interesting too because Matthiessen's house on Long Island was a meeting place for New York's literary world, which was a potent mixture of WASPy upper crust and urban immigrant-types, mostly Jews. Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, if you please. From this mix emerged the bright world of post-war American fiction. I seem to recall reading an Esquire piece about a highly competitive softball game organised out there, but I couldn't dig up the reference.

Mathiessen was quite funny about the way Timothy Leary ruined the world of LSD for everyone, by making such a fuss the government was almost forced to make it illegal. I wanted to include Matthiessen's take on Leary, but didn't; in the end, the single mention of him went too. His trip to New Guinea in 1961, which became Under The Mountain Wall, was made with Michael Rockefeller, who later would disappear, and appears to have been killed and eaten by cannibals.

I found it interesting too that his father was awarded an OBE for his camouflage designs for merchant convoys during the war (that was cut) and that his father's cousin was F.O. Matthiessen, the legendary professor of American Studies at Harvard, whose book, American Renaissance, was one of the first and still one of the classic looks at the great writers who seem to have in part inspired Matthiessen's fiction (I didn't have space for that rumination!). The Watson trilogy might be compared to Melville or Twain, you could also mention Faulkner, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy, or James Carlos Blake.

But the important thing was Matthiessen's writing, and trying to explain the nature of its appeal, both to the most intense literary types and to casual readers of travel, exploration, and nature. A few British comparisons occur to me now, but although many are elegant, they are more concerned with the phenomenology of travel, not the dissection of the spirit of the natural world. In this, Peter Matthiessen was one of a kind.

JAMES CARLOS BLAKE'S PISTOLEER: A Forgotten Friday Entry

THE PISTOLEER (1995)
by James Carlos Blake

PORTRAIT OF WES, SERIAL KILLER

I wouldn't really call James Carlos Blake's work forgotten, or even ignored; in fact,it's usually marketed as 'literary fiction' and sold outside the crime sections of bookstores. This novel,though nominally a western, was published in the UK in 1997 by Canongate, a publisher of both fine and eclectic tastes and high standing in literary circles, yet still it sank like a corpse wearing concrete espadrilles. I don't believe any of Blake's other books have been published here, though in the US they've appeared steadily, from imprints like Harper Perennial, eclectic publishers on the literary side of the bookstore divide.

I've written many times about how the crime novel and the western are inextricably linked; Public Enemies, Bryan Burrough's recent study of 1930s robbers, which Michael Mann is filming, made the same point, and Blake works in that territory, making the links evident. His 'Dillinger' novel, Handsome Harry, is excellent, but all his books tend to be set between the turn of the last century, through the Depression, and if you replace horses with Fords and six-guns with tommy guns, you can see clearly the smooth continuity of the genres.

Although Blake’s sympathetic portrait of John Wesley Hardin in The Pistoleer might seem to owe more to various Billy the Kid stories than to modern crime novels, there is another interesting connection, between the modern, serial killer 'heroes' and the outlaw whom death seems to follow around. As in many of Blake's books, the criminal's story begins with abuse in childhood (classically, the outlaw’s usually comes at the hand of legal, rather than parental, authority) and then takes the structure of the road novel as a framework for a series of deaths, the final one usually being his own. And in The Pistoleer Hardin is presented as a prototype version of the serial killer, a sociopath if not a psychopath, who almost needs the death that becomes his stock in trade.

In westerns, killings often make some men more attractive to some women, and again, it is one of Blake's tropes to include the outlaw's women in his stories, and not merely as eye-candy. This too is a major part of the Thirties gangster mystique, and not just for Bonnie and Clyde. In The Pistoleer, Blake uses multiple points of view, and some of the best sequences are those narrated by women. Not only do he show the how ladies love outlaws, those ladies have their own perspective on the phenomenon, a perspective not usually a part of the genre. Sadly for modern writers, serial killers never seem to have that same attraction for women.

This perspective might seem surprising from a writer as superficially hard-boiled as Blake, but in fact he can also become overly romantic; but this novel certainly doesn’t suffer for it,and his other books contain a couple of absolutely devastating endings. Here, the kaleidoscope of narrators give him lots of scope for irony, and provides a panoramic view of the West which few novels have time or scope to attempt, much less deliver. The depth of the story, and the quality of the writing, show why publishers refused to consign Blake to the ghetto, but it's worth moving this book into the western sections. When it came out I compared it to Geoff Aggeler’s Confessions Of Johnny Ringo and Loren Estleman’s Bloody Season as among the best “bad man” novels of the 1990s, and it remains just as good today.