After the great enjoyment I got from Lou Cameron’s first book, the
jazz/crime novel Angel’s Fight
(reviewed HERE), I was eager to try some of his westerns. And I was pleased to
see there were a lot of them, though most were in “Adult” series, including
about fifty Longarms, thirty-six Renegades and fifteen Stringers.
The only things immediately available, from my local library
through Hoopla, were downloadable audio versions of the Stringer books. So I
tried this one, the first.
It started off great. Cameron’s narration here is not as
Hammettish as in Angel’s Flight, but it’s sharp and creative, with many an
entertaining turn of phrase. I liked the subject matter, too. Stringer,
so-called because he’s a freelance writer for the San Francisco Sun, is
assigned a piece to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the death of
Joaquin Murietta. There’s a lot of
speculation about whether the head collected by Capt. Love was really
Murietta’s, or if Murietta existed at all. Could it be that was just a name
invented to mask the identities of various Mexican outlaws? Interesting stuff.
I liked the setting, too. The series takes place takes place when the West was Old, and already fading from memory
to legend. Frank James and Cole Younger, we learn, are on the lecture circuit,
warning of the wages of sin. Stinger has an interesting background, having
worked as a ranch hand while attending Stanford, and reported on Teddy and the
Roughriders in Cuba.
Unfortunately, this being an “Adult”
western, the story barely gets going before we have an obligatory sex scene.
Like almost all of them in such books, it’s just damned silly, and stops the
story cold. After that, I kept expecting the story to pick up, but it just sort
of loped along in the background, with a lot of well-written but meaningless
jabber until the next sex scene.
I’ll admit, there’s kernel of plot in
there, too. Somebody has stolen library books about Murietta, and killed the
librarian (the lady who made that first sex scene possible), presumably in
hopes of finding the booty from an old stagecoach robbery. And some unseen
party is taking potshots at Stringer. And he just incidentally has to shoot a couple
of gents. And one of the sex scenes strives for relevance with Stringer popping
questions about Murietta between erections.
But there just wasn’t enough story to
keep me interested. By the time I gave up, just over halfway through, there had
been three sex scenes, very little out-of-bed action, and no real progress
toward answering the Murietta questions. It just wasn’t worth my time.
I haven’t given up on Cameron yet. I’d
still like to try another of his old Gold Medal mysteries, and maybe a
non-Adult western, but this was not an encouraging stop on the journey.
6 comments:
The only one of his I've held so far, and known it, was CYBERNIA, which I recall as fun, but no sharp details.
A year or so before I started, some of my coworkers at TV GUIDEwould do round-robin reading aloud of LONGARM novels at lunch. Apparently helped break up the day.
Sounds like a good way to "read" that stuff.
So, these western series you named are soft porn cowpoke novels? Not for me, then
Try THE SPIRIT HORSES.
Who's the author, Cap'n?
Lou Cameron.
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