Forgotten Books: TO TRY MEN'S SOULS by New Gingrich and William R. Forstchen (2009)

In gearing up to visit George Washington's Mount Vernon® later this year, I googled around for historical fiction featuring old Georgie. And found surprisingly little. Along with a one called Citizen Washington by William Martin (which I'm now reading), only three pop to the surface. This is one of those three, first in a trilogy by Gingrich and Forstchen. If anyone can name other novels, I'd be pleased to hear about them.

To Try Men's Souls begins on Christmas Night, 1775, and ends the evening of the following day. As you've likely guessed from the cover, the action focuses on the celebrated Crossing of the Delaware, and the all-important Battle of Trenton. 

Actually, heroic as it was, the Crossing wasn't all that important, or the Battle either, except that they gave Washington and his men their first taste of victory (after several disastrous defeats), and emboldened them to carry on. The feeling conveyed here is that without this small win, they would have all given up and gone home. 

I find that pretty hard to believe. Washington was used to defeat, and could likely have absorbed another. His overall strategy was just to keep his army alive and avoid conflict unless he could be pretty damn sure of victory. The Crossing the the Battle were both very risky endeavors, and he was mighty lucky to get away with them. But I have to believe that if they had never taken place - or even resulted in defeat - he would have kept on trucking, likely with the same result. 

Still, it's a good story, and Gingrich and Forstchen tell it well. Point of view alternates between Washington himself, Tom Paine (the Common Sense guy) and a common man volunteer from New Jersey, named Jonathan. 

With George, we feel the problems and pressures heaped upon him by the Continental Congress, the British, the Hessians, the tories, his soldiers, Mother Nature, Providence, Martha and he himself. 

With Paine, we feel the pain of expectations, and the guilty fear that he may have led everyone astray. Soldiers carry copies of Common Sense in their packs, and either revere him or revile him, depending on they react to trudging around New England without clothes, or shoes, or food, or pay. 

With Jonathan, we feel every bit of that misery resulting from those deprivations, plus a family that has taken the easy way out and sided with the British. 

Gingrich and Fortschen have collaborated on a good number of other books, and this is my first. My guess is that Gringrich provides most of the historical detail, while Forstchen cranks out the prose. But that is just a guess. I've found nothing online describing their writing methods. Anyway, they do a good job of bringing history alive. 

My only complaint is that there are a lot of musings and flashbacks, particularly in Washington's POV, about earlier battles, which I don't know enough about to fully appreciate. OK, that's partly my fault, but still disturbing. I guess the authors can't be blamed for starting here, rather than with all the drubbings, which would NOT have resulted in a rousing read. 

The following books in the trilogy are Valley Forge and Victory at Yorktown. Rumor has it those books are less laden with flashbacks, and since I  toured both sites a few years ago, I expect to like them even better than this one. 

Forgotten Books: SHILOH by James Reasoner (1999)

The illustrious author

Book 2 of the Civil War Battle series introduces us to Coriolanus Troilus Brannon, the middle brother of the Brannon clan, and is mostly about him. Cory begins the story as a seedy, sotten, no-account wharf rat, despondent for having failed in his plans to make it big in the West. The West (to a Virginian) is New Madrid, MO, on the Mississippi River. As our story progresses, Cory becomes a riverboatman, finds self-respect, earns friends, learns to fight, finds courage and meets his lady love. And just when things are really looking up for him, the war comes rolling in and hands him a fistful of woe.

The author's illustrious ancestor, General J.M.
Reasoner, C.S.A.. Remarkable resemblance, ain't it?

On his way to an appointment with destiny at the Battle of Shiloh, Cory in involved in the engagements at Fort Henry and Fort Donaldson. One of the coolest battle scenes involves two Southern riverboats equipped with 18-pounders versus a squadron of Union gunboats, some of them ironclads.

Cory begins the fight at Shiloh as an infantryman and finishes riding with Col. Nathan Bedford Forrest's cavalry, and even manages to save Forrest's life. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch (or in this case, farm) Titus Brannon is drowning his sorrows in moonshine. He has seemingly lost the rich girl of his dreams and is sliding downhill so fast he might as well be on a skateboard. Brother Mac is chasing  a ghost horse (not really, but that's how he thinks of it), Sister Cordelia is being her sweet, moralistic self, and Mother Abigail is showing signs of regret for having banished her eldest son Will. Will is having his own troubles in the Federal army. His fellow officers look down their aristocratic noses at him, and his sergeant (a guy he routinely arrested for drunkenness in his previous life as a sheriff), can't keep his hands off the bottle.

There's plenty of great storytelling here (360 pages worth), and I'm looking forward to the next volume (of ten!), Antietam.

Forgotten Books: MANASSAS by James Reasoner (1999)

We take time out from our ongoing series BILL CRIDER goes to BOUCHERCON (see the first four instalments HERE) to look at this book by Bill’s pal James Reasoner. I’m sure Bill won’t mind. Part 5 of Bill at Bouchercon (2000-01) will appear on Sunday. Meanwhile, for those of you jonesing for more photos of Bill, we present several of he and James together (most shamelessly lifted from Bill’s blog).

My favorite James Reasoner novels are the ones with his own name on them. His name is on this one, and the following nine volumes of The Civil War Battle Series, and they’re all damn good. Though officially a “series,” it’s really one humungous meganovel, following the trials and tribulations of one Virginia farm family from the beginning to the end of the war. It would make a great 10-part miniseries for one of the cable networks. (Are you listening, HBO?)

We see a skilled novelist at work here, introducing us to a cast of strong and varied personalities, sure to provide plenty of drama as the saga rolls on.

William Shakespeare Brannon is the Culpepper County sheriff, and the oldest still at home. Macbeth Brannon is a horse whisperer. Titus Andronicus Brannon, an expert tracker and a crack rifle shot, is tragically in love with a girl out of his league. Henry Brannon, the youngest, is still trying to find himself. Their footloose brother, Coriolanus Troilus Brannon has gone West to seek his fortune, and we won’t actually meet him until Book 2. 

Seventeen-year-old Cordelia Brannon is the prettiest girl in the county, and not as empty-headed as her brothers think. Riding herd on them all is their fiercely religious mother Abigail, still bitter over the antics of their late father. And making life difficult for them all are the no-account, thieving and killing Fogarty brothers. (The books were published between 1999 and 2003. Was James listening to Credence at the time?)

There's a cool passage when the war starts:

The ticket agent shouted, "The word just came over the wire! We've captured Fort Sumter! It's war, boys, war!"
     "Cry havoc," Will muttered, quoting his namesake, "'and let slip the dogs of war . . . ,'" as people cheered and shot off guns.
     Those dogs were sure barking now.

Those opening shots of the war take place offstage, but we then ride to  Manassas—the first great battle—with Will Brannon, a newly minted captain of the Culpepper Catamounts in Brigarier General Thomas Jackson’s Thirty-third Virginia. And it’s a good thing Will is there, because without him Jackson may not have been in position to be standing "like a stone wall” and earn his catchy nickname. We’re also introduced to the intriguing notion that the famous “stone wall” comment, uttered by the soon-to-be-deceased Confederate General Bee, may not have intended as a compliment. I don’t recall encountering that before.

The battle scene is nicely handled, and leaves me looking forward to many more. I’ll be finding them in the rest of the saga: Shiloh, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Shenandoah, Savannah and Appomattox.

James and Bill, Western Writers of America conference, 1992

Brownsville, Texas, 1980, with Angela and Allen Crider

and the Howard family

Armadillocon 2017: Dave Hardy, Dwight Simms, Joe Lansdale, Lawrence Pearson, James, Bill, Scott Cupp

Bouchercon 2002: James, Joe Lansdale, Bill, Steve Mertz 

(photo by Art Scott)

UnForgotten Books: THE KILLER ANGELS by Michael Shaara (1974)

I like battlefields. One of the coolest places I've ever been is the site of the Battle of Hastings, where the Norman conquest of England began in 1066. So in planning a trip to Washington DC later this year, a side trip to Gettysburg is high on my list. Near as I can tell, we can ride the Metro up to Rockville MD, rent a car and proceed a short ways to the battlefield, where we can hire an official guide to ride around with us and tell us what's what. 

To get in the mood, I finally got around to reading this book, which has been highly recommended from various sources. Most impressive to me were the raves from Kassandra Kelly and Jackie Blain, two fine writers who don't normally read this sort of thing. If those two liked it, I knew it had to be good. And sure enough, it is.

The Foreward, I confess, was a bit daunting, introducing fourteen of the major commanders involved in the action. I read it twice and still thought, Jeez, I'm supposed to remember all this stuff? But as the story began, all that character info came into play. Each of those major players had long sections in close point of view, and the Foreword proved to be a very useful setting of the stage. 

The novel is recommended by historians as a good introduction to the battle, and I can surely see why. 

Shaara takes us deep into the mind and soul of each commander, so we see events unfolding through their eyes. And not only see, but feel what it's like to be there at that time and place, among those other men, and experience the major engagements of the three-day battle.

At the same time, the author manages to paint the landscape so clearly that I could picture the ground and follow troop movements even without maps. (The print edition does have maps, which I peeked at occasionally, but I was alternating between audio and ebook, where the maps are either invisible or too tiny to see.)

In my experience, nobody writes better battle scenes than Bernard Cornwell, but his are rarely in such close POV, so this was a special experience.

The book, published in 1974, did not sell well, so the first edition (black cover, at right) now commands between several hundred and several thousand dollars. Ouch. I want one, but not that bad.

I'll be following up with the Turner-produced film Gettysburg (based on the novel) and a couple true histories of the battle, and hope I enjoy them half as much. 

Sadly, this was Michael Shaara's only novel. Since his death, his son Jeff has written several other Civil War and other war novels, and seems to be very popular. But is he as good? It would be nice to think so.

Forgotten Books: THREE-BLADED DOOM by Robert E. Howard (1977)

My favorite Howard character is normally either Breckenridge Elkins, Conan or Francis Xavier Gordon, depending which I've read most recently. After reading one of their adventures, I'm usually raring to rip into another. Not so with Three-Bladed Doom. Rather than racing to dig more adventures of El Borak, I was just relieved it was finally over.

According to L. Sprague de Camp's intro to the 1968 paperback Conan the Wanderer, Howard wrote a 42,000 version of 'Three-Bladed Doom" in 1934. When that failed to sell, he chopped it to 24,000 words and tried again. That didn't sell either. Portions of the story first saw print in 1955, when de Camp  rewrote it into the 32,000 word Conan story "The Flame Knife" for the Gnome Press collection Tales of Conan.

All this talk about word count is important, because the version of this story I just read, published in both the U.S. and Great Britain in 1977, seemed much, much longer. The Orbit book is 121 pages of small type, and the Zebra edition is 166 pages of large. Maybe it's true there are only 42,000 words in each book, but it looks like a lot more, and the story takes a long time to unfold. Truth to tell, I kept falling asleep, and it took a lot of determination to pick it up again and again and push on through to the end.

 

I'm guessing the editors who rejected this story back in the '30s had the same trouble. Somehow, Gordon's character never really comes alive, and Howard's normally poetic prose falls flat. Descriptive passages drone on for many paragraphs with very little happening. Even when the story finally gets moving, Gordon is relegated to the role of frustrated observer, and sees little action.

 

Too bad, because the bare bones of the plot are promising. An ancient cult of assassins, whose trademark is a three-bladed knife, is reborn under a pitiless master, and now includes villains from many far-flung lands. Together, they're eradicating rulers who stand in the way of Germany's world domination.

 

The folks at Zebra probably knew this was a turkey, prompting them to market it as "fantasy/adventure" (a flat-out lie) and try to fool folks into thinking it was a Conan book by dressing Gordon in a Speedo. 

 

I'm thinking it's time to dig back into the saga of Breckinridge Elkins, but it's going to take quite a few non-Howard books to cleanse my palette of Three-Bladed Doom.

Forgotten Books: SCARAMOUCHE by Rafael Sabatini (1921)

I'm a big fan of Mr. Sabatini. I've read Captain Blood several times and rank it as my second favorite book of all time, right after Red Harvest. So I figured Scaramouche, his most famous novel, should be even better. I was wrong.

It was a good read, so I'm not complaining, I'm just surprised it was not as entertaining as I expected. One reason is that the hero, whose name is Andre, but who assumes the role of Scaramouche (a "roguish clown" character from Italian comedies of the previous century), muddles through most of the book without clear focus.

As the story begins, Andre's close friend--a passionate revolutionary--is murdered by a snooty aristocrat. The killer (and continuing villain of the piece) found the man possessed of a dangerous eloquence, and thus a threat to his way of life. Andre, who disagreed with his pal's politics, swears to take up his cause and spread the eloquence of revolution in his stead. He does that, a little, making two speeches that inflame the populace, then spends the next quarter of the book hiding out with an acting troupe. After another brief encounter with his arch-enemy he happens into a job as a fencing instructor and fools around with that for another quarter of the book. Throughout, he has no clear goal and no real conviction.

Finally, with maybe a third of the book remaining, the story kicks into high gear. For several chapters it races right along. Andre seems to know what he wants and how to get it. But his plans are derailed by several seen-them-coming plot twists, and the climax dissolves into creaky melodrama. If Sabatini wasn't such a good storyteller, it would have been pretty painful.

The other problem I had with this book wasn't Sabatini's fault at all. It was entirely my own. The whole tale, you see, is set against the backdrop of the French Revolution. Sabatini assumed (rightly, of course) that his readers would have a basic understanding of the events and the various forces in play. So he explained what was happening only in relation to Andre and the other characters involved. Trouble is, I know dang near nothing about the whole hullaballoo, so much of the revolution-related drama went over my head. I'm now seeking to remedy that, with the Oxford History of the French Revolution, but it's too late to rescue my enjoyment of Scaramouche. Maybe by the time I see the movie it will make more sense.

More Forgotten Books at pattinase.

Forgotten Books: THE SHADOW OF THE TOMAHAWK by Hugh Pendexter

The Shadow of the Tomahawk is a novel so forgotten it had to wait 93 years to be published in book form. It first ran as a serial in Adventure in 1920 and 21 and was finally given new life last year.

Members of the Western APA (Amateur Press Association) OWLHOOT (you know who you are) have raving about this Hugh Pendexter guy, but this was my introduction to his work, and I'll be eagerly looking for more. And thanks to Tom Roberts and Black Dog Books, it won't be hard to find. This book is one of five volumes now available in the Hugh Pendexter Library, and there are more on the way. 

Pendexter, I was pleased to learn, was the author of nearly eighty novels, so I have a lot to look forward to. The Shadow of the Tomahawk involves a time and place in American history that I know very little about, but the novel's narrator, frontier scout Basdel Morris, took me into his world, introduced me to the players, the conflicts and the landscape, and left me the wiser for it.

The story takes place on the Virginia frontier of 1774, with the British still trying to control their colonies and having very little luck. The guys back in Parliament want peace with the Indians, but folks on the frontier know that's no longer an option. There have been atrocities committed on both sides, and reasonably objective observers like Basdel Morris know there's plenty of blame to go around.

There are still settlers who just want to get along, and still some tribes that are friendly. But there are hotheads whose sole ambition is to exterminate all Indians, and warchiefs who are determined to eradicate all the colonists infesting their hereditary territory. Our hero Basdel represents the voice of reason, but when the pampered city girl he loves - and her know-it-all father - head toward the frontier preaching peace, he must turn to the fiercest of Indian killers in an attempt to save their scalps.

Pendexter was known for his historical research, and recreates a world that rings true in every respect. Through his characters and dialogue, he brought the past to vivid life. Based on my brief acquaintance with him, I'm tempted to call him the Bernard Cornwell of the last century. 

The other books now available in the Hugh Pendexter Library are Red Trails (a related novel set ten years after this one), The Shorthorn Kid (a collection of western stories), According to the Evidence (the collected adventures of The Bureau of Abnormal Litigation), and Along the River Trail (a novel featuring a mountain man at the time of Jim Bridger). For ordering and other info, visit the Black Dog Books site HERE.