{"id":11238,"date":"2024-10-09T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-09T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11238"},"modified":"2024-10-08T18:47:06","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T22:47:06","slug":"where-legends-lie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=11238","title":{"rendered":"Where Legends Lie"},"content":{"rendered":"
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My friend Michael A. Black, a retired Chicago police officer, writes crime fiction and westerns. Now, I grew up with television (and movie!) westerns and spent a lot of time in what I thought of as the West\u2014that is, West Texas where my grandparents lived\u2014so I have a kind of sentimental attachment to the genre. When I was a kid, it seemed heroes and villains were made of very different stuff, and there was no doubt which was which. You could tell by their clothing, if nothing else (think of the Lone Ranger\u2019s perfectly pressed shirt. What?) I met Roy Rogers and Trigger when I was 3. Clint Eastwood and the man with no name spaghetti Westerns began to add ambiguity and complexity, but in recent years, I found Walt Longmire and fell in love again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Naturally, I\u2019ve eagerly read several of Mike Black\u2019s Westerns and, in his latest one, he pulls off quite a comfortable literary marriage. He manages to combine both traditional Western tropes and the 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s most powerful cultural interpreter and mis-interpreter\u2014Hollywood!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is one of those split-narrative books that, when you\u2019re reading one thread\u2014say, events that occurred in Contention City, Arizona, in 1880\u2014and the next chapter switches to the other narrative\u2014the 1913 movie-making about those events\u2014you\u2019re momentarily jarred and possibly a bit disappointed because the 1880 (or 1913) story is so captivating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1913, a veteran of the war in the Philippines, Jim Bishop, arrives statewide having no discernible job prospects. But his buddy has a relative working as a chef for a movie company in southern California. He\u2019s counting on a job there and thinks they may take on Jim, too. En route, they befriend, of all people, journalist and fiction-writer Ambrose Bierce, always up for adventure, who disappeared that year. Jim and his friend get the movie jobs and Jim, especially, proves himself useful to the film company in various ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1880, Sheriff Lon Dayton hopes to end the reign of one of the Arizona\u2019s outlaw gangs by offering the governor\u2019s amnesty if they will turn themselves in. They agree. Unbeknownst to Dayton, the Mayor and his unscrupulous henchmen have other plans.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The chance to experience (fictional) 1880 events and the filmmakers\u2019 recreation of them provides a nice contrast between two realities. The title of the book suggests that what we know about past events can be both unearthed, where they lie, and untrue, as they fib.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I greatly enjoyed the character of Jim, whom you first meet in a truly hair-raising battle overseas, which displays not only Black\u2019s skill in creating a vivid scene, but reflects the multiple aims of a soldier at war. Staying alive, sure, but also saving whom you can and appreciating the enemy too. Dayton is a western hero in the full Gary Cooper tradition. No wonder Hollywood latched onto him like a rattlesnake on a mouse. If you\u2019re looking for a story packed with adventure, as well as a reflection on how we mold the past to suit our present, you\u2019ve found it!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Order from Amazon here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My friend Michael A. Black, a retired Chicago police officer, writes crime fiction and westerns. Now, I grew up with television (and movie!) westerns and spent a lot of time in what I thought of as the West\u2014that is, West … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Ready to escape into a real adventure? Here are two doozies in one book. An 1880s Arizona showdown and the Hollywood version.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[440,266,126,32],"tags":[2246,1482],"class_list":["post-11238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adventure","category-history","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-michael-a-black","tag-western"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2Vg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11238"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11238\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11240,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11238\/revisions\/11240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}