Off-Topic Novel---True Grit, An American Masterpiece

True Grit, Charles Portis, 1968, Overlook Press edition with and afterward by Donna Tartt, 2004, 235pp, $14.95.

A bestseller when it was published in 1968, and the source document for two films, True Grit by Charles Portis is a masterpiece of short fiction and easily rests side by side with other first person monologue novels such as Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Catcher in the Rye.

True Grit, a version of which was serially published in The Saturday Evening Post, was very popular during the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969 Hollywood produced a film staring John Wayne and spun off a sequel in 1975 also staring John Wayne. A third 'further adventures of' film was made for television in 1975. The novel began to drift off the required reading lists of college freshmen. Joel and Ethan Coen filmed True Grit that stayed very close to the novel which moved back on to the bestseller lists during late 2010 and early 2011.

The narrator is Maddie Ross, who in her 70s during the late 1920s, recounts her quest to seek vengance on the outlaw who killed her father, Frank Ross, when she was 14 years old in the 1870s. Tom Chaney murderer of a Texas senator, flees to Arkansas and murders Maddie's father there, then flees on Frank Ross' horse to the Indian country where he joins a band of bank robbers led by Lucky Ned Pepper.

Familiar with the Bible when she is both young and old, Maddie Ross is a literate, strong-willed, and a quick to speak woman. Maddie Ross finds a deputy U.S. Marshall who, in the words of the local sheriff,is the meanest, most pitliless, double tough man who knows no fear and loves to pull a cork. Overweight and blind in one eye, Rooster Cogburn has a small arsenal of weapons strapped to himself and his horse. He has developed his law enforcement tactics under the tutelage of Quantrill, the notorious Confederate partisan. In Maddie's eyes, Cogburn possesses true grit.

Maddie hires Cogburn Texas Ranger to capture Chaney. Cogburn is forced to accept the aid of Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, who is in pursuit of Chaney for his Texas murder. Maddie forces herself into the company of Cogburn andLeBoeuf. Each with very different motivations, the three ride into the Indian country to confront Ned Pepper's gang. By the end of the novel Ross, Cogburn and LaBoeuf have shared adventures, sustained injuries, and killed and desperados.

In recent remarks in his History News Network column Jim Cullen quotes the opening line in the novel which is Maddie's remark that " 'People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although it did not happen every day,' . The magic of this novel is the way its compellingly strange language and narrator come to seem palpably real. It is the great achievement of True Grit that it evokes a moment in U.S. history in all its ordinary, extraordinary wonder.' "

Cullen's remark about 'the magic of this novel' may also be true of Shaara's Killer Angels. The compelling language of Shaara's novel, Shelby Foote's Shiloh, and Howard Bahr's Black Flower do evoke incidents in America's Civil War history which are both ordinary and extraordinary moments in warfare.

Donna Tartt, author of The Secret History and reader on the True Grit audiobook, notes in her afterword in the 2004 edition of Portis' novel, that the story exists in an era when chivalry and the frontier coexist. Maddie's adventure occurs during a time when the Confederacy is past, Reconstruction is ending, and is narrated when Wild West shows are popular amusements are almost over, Woodrow Wilson has died and Al Smith is running from president. Maddie tell readers what she said in the 1870s and what she still holds true in the 1920s: "Men will live like billy goats if they are left alone" and "I would not put a thief in my mouth" when she refuses whiskey.

Sources: Jim Cullen's Review of True Grit at the History News Network website.

Donna Tartt's afterword is in the 2004 edition of the novel. An edited version of her afterword is found at the Language is A Virus website.

The top image is of the 1968 hardcover edition; the bottom image is of the 2010 paperback edition in which is Donna Tartt's afterword.

Off Topic---Detective Fiction: The Quiet Flame of Memory

A Quiet Flame: A Bernie Gunther Novel, Philip Kerr, Putnam Publishing, 389 pp., 2009, $26.95.

Do the names Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M.Cain, and Ross MacDonald ring a bell? How about Steven Saylor, John Maddox Roberts, Max Allan Collins? James Crumley? All writers of detective fiction whose entire series are on CWL's personal bookshelf. Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and MacDonald founded and extended the 'hard boiled/noir' genre of detective fiction. Saylor and Roberts have set this genre in the Roman Empire. Collins offers Prohibition/Depression/WWII and post WWII era Chicago, Crumley has set his his hard boiled/noir detective in Montana and Texas. They are masters of their trade.

Philip Kerr's detective, Bernie Gunther, fought as a late teen in the WWI trenches, joined the Berlin police force during the Wiemar Republic era and made some very difficult choices during the early 1930s as cop who did not kowtow to the Nazi regime. Kerr does not 'grind out' a Bernie Gunther novel every year. March Violets (1989), A Pale Criminal (1990), A German Requiem (1991), The One From The Other (2006), A Quiet Flame(2009), If The Dead Be Not Raised (2010).

The political violence and crimes as well as the sexual cabaret of Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s is the environment of Bernie Gunther. The cast includes historic and fiction characters. A Quiet Flame combines two stories, one set in the early 1930s Germany and one set in the late 1940s Argentina. Josef Mengele, Adolf Eichmann, Otto Skorzeny, and Hans Kammler have crucial parts in the plot but Kerr does not make it about them on every page. One of Kerr's many strengths is that he shows these Nazi in small glimpses that are crucial to the plot.

Bernie Gunther is not a high minded copper weighted down by dogmas. His notions of justice, fairness, love, duty and honor develop through the course of his lifetime and in the context of the society and culture of his era. Gunther relies on what he has learned from his father, his police mentors and the women in his life. Gunter's search for criminals is also a search for a 'usable past' (to borrow a phrase from American historian Carl Becker who coined the phrase in his 1935 essay Every Man His Own Historian). It is an immediate past of the victim, the recent past of the perpetrator and personal life history of the detective.

Readers of Kerr's 'Berlin Noir' series enjoy a fine detective story, an immersion in German social history and the complexity of very subtle evil.

Off Topic Novel---Old School Detective Story: Rizzo's War

Rizzo's War: A Novel, Lou Manfredo, Minotaur/St. Martin's Press, 290 pp., 2009, $24.99.

After 27 years on the force, Joe Rizzo becomes wise, nurturing uncle to recently promoted street cop Mike McQueen. A young, handsome, skilled and lucky, McQueen replaces Rizzo's long time partner Morelli, an alcoholic and gambler. Rizzo and McQueen tackle assaults and the occasional homicide. They are called a upon to find a missing teenager whose father is a Brooklyn councilman. Nothing is simple or obvious. Realistic urban settings in the courthouse and on the beat help pace the novel. Husband and dad Rizzo plays master to McQueen the student.

Lou Manfredo, the author, brings 25 years of experience in Brooklyn's criminal-justice system to the novel. A uniformed court officer and a court clerk, Manfredo conveys the ethical and moral situations of police work; Joe Rizzo's deals with such situations with the philosophy that "There is no right, there is no wrong, there just is." The reader wonders how often those words echo through the halls of NYC justice systmem. McQueen develops a crush on a woman who has been sexually assaulted in the subway. Vowing to capture the man who abused her, McQueen and Rizzo locate the man, who he is a junkie but has overdosed about a half an hour before their discovery. Rizzo explains to McQueen what must be done. A report is written that the man confessed to the assault before he died and they get credit for the detective work and the capture. The case is officially closed. Rizzo's art of trimming corners includes a free meal from an Italian restaurant and the performance guard duty late at night as the restaurant's staff later takes the day's profits to the bank. There are many day-to-day details like this that ring true. Rizzo's War is much like the Ed McBain's paramont 87th Precinct series of novels. CWL met McBain once and asked him what part of the writing effort was the most enjoyable. McBain said that it was living and riding with the cops that he enjoyed the most. CWL believes that Manfredo would probably answer the question in the same manner.

Off Topic Novel---The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larsson, Vintage, 608 pages, paperback, $14.95



The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, is the first in a trilogy from the recently deceased Stieg Larsson. Mikael Blomkvist, respected financial journalist and co-owner of Millenium Magazine is sued for libel by an investment company owner and loses the verdict. Blomkvist's rescue comes from an established industrial family that requests a semi-authorized family history be written. To begin the research and spend a year to be interrupted by a prison sentence Blomkvist must review 30+ years old police files on the disappearance of a teen aged female family member. Lisbeth Salander, a young adult ward-of-the Swedish state, refuses to submit to authority and has a passion for computing and investigations. Nearly feral in her approach to life, Salander is clever, aggressive, and secretive. If Steig over reaches in any one character it is Salander. Near the end, she pulls off a Mission: Impossible heist that might in the reader's head leave echoes of Bond, James Bond.



The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo strikes a middle ground in its pacing. The book is not a page turner and is slow in developing characters. At times it seems to be heading into a noir detective genre but then turns away. At other times it seems to be heading to a techno-thriller then takes off in another direction. It is not a dissection of journalism, industrial families, or economic gangsterism. But all of these are bundled together in a story that at times has nearly over-the-top violence. It is the characters that keeps the plot moving forward. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is reminiscent of William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive and Neuromancer and John Grisham's The Firm and The Pelican Brief. Yes, not two authors generally associated together until now. Tech-driven, law-driven, character-driven, business-driven, crime-driven The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo glimpses into many human hearts out of which flows the issues of life.



CWL is looking forward to The Girl Who Played with Fire which is now in print and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest which will be released in May 2010.



Image Source: Murdock Books