Lance Mannion

Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes: All of history summed up in an uncashed check

Originally posted June 9, 2012. Re-posted Monday, November 28, 2016.

The tall, skinny guy in the center, that’s Fidel Castro, with several of his lieutenants, in the Sierra Maestra at about the time he’d have been interviewed by the main character of William Kennedy’s latest novel, Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes.

Fidel Castro is a character. Ernest Hemingway is a character. Bing Crosby makes a cameo appearance. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King aren’t exactly characters but their offstage presence is felt so keenly, painfully, and poignantly by other characters that they might as well be characters. Thinly disguised versions of Albany politicians and city movers and shakers and local celebrities that if you grew up in the area you’ll recognize pretty easily are characters. Characters from other novels by William Kennedy are characters, which is no surprise, because Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes continues Kennedy’s Albany Cycle, his series of inter-related historical novels covering over a hundred years of local and national politics and now international politics as seen through the eyes of various Quinns, Daughertys, and Phelans.

And among all these famous and glamorous and to Kennedy fans well-established and beloved characters, there's George Quinn, an elderly low-level civil servant suffering from the onset of senile dementia who starts off his part of the novel just wanting to get a check cashed so he can buy himself a beer at his favorite bar and is stymied by two inconvenient facts. The bar went out of business years ago and he doesn't have an account at the bank where he's trying to cash his check. George, it turns out, while not the main character is the most important one, thematically, that is. And it's because his memory is not what it was.

It's become something weirdly magical, like a magician’s cabinet that throws open its drawers seemingly at random but revealing something grander than the merely pertinent---the symbolically illuminating.

Here. Look at these three apparently trivial snatches of conversation. The first is between George and his son and they're talking about why the housekeeper won't be coming today to look after George. The second occurs when George bumps into an old political crony. And in the third George turns on the old charm for a long ago flame whose name keeps escaping him. In all three, George is the second one to speak.

"How are you feeling?" Quinn asked.

"I'm several flavors of excellent. How's yourself?"

"I'm tip-top but Ursula isn't coming today. She totaled her car and broke her arm. "

"Was she hurt?"

"She broke her arm."

"Ursula?"

"Yes."

"How did she do that?"

"She totaled her car."

"Was there much damage?"

"It was totaled."

"That doesn't sound good."

*****

"What'd you think about Bobby Kennedy?"

"I voted for him. Patsy passed the word to cut him, but I voted for him. I'd vote for anybody named Kennedy."

"They shot him."

"Who shot him?"

"Some guy, I don't know who. But they caught him right away. He's probably a communist."

"Kennedy's not a communist."

"Get the paper, George. It's all in the paper. After midnight last night, out in L.A. He just won the primary and they shot him.”

"Who won the primary?"

"Bobby."

"They shot him because he won the primary?"

*****

"Just don't say it anymore, okay? You understand? Don't say it or he'll throw you out. Roy can get very excited."

"Who's Roy?"

"The bartender. He said his name is George, but it isn't."

"Right. He's not George, I'm George."

"You certainly are. George Quinn."

"That's me. Will you be going dancing at Beauman's this evening?"

"You're still thinking about Beauman's."

"It's right up to snuff. King Jazz's orchestra. You can't beat it. I don't recall your name."

"Vivian. Vivian Sexton, George. You know me a hundred years."

George took off his hat and held out it out to her. "It's venerable to know you so long, Vivian," he said.

"You are such a gentleman," she said.

"I would be privileged to buy you a drink, Vivian. We could sit at that table over there. I'm on my way to the Club and I have to cash a check. The clock of life is wound but once and no man has the power to tell just where the hands will stop."

"That certainly is true, George, and it's a very poetic thing to say. I'd be glad to have a drink with you. "

George placed his hat over his heart and he asked her, "Will you kiss me now or will you wait?" And Vivian kissed him on the cheek.

Notice that in each of these exchanges there’s a logic to George’s non-sequiturs. His mind isn’t wandering in the usual sense of the phrase. His thoughts are taking the scenic route.  Also, his memory gets sharper and his thinking clearer as each conversation takes him deeper into the past.  This is how it goes with him as the story progresses.

George's job as a character in Chango’s Beads is to remember. It’s June, 1968.  Bobby Kennedy has just been shot and lies dying in a hospital in California. In Albany, as in other cities across the country, people are filling up with anger, fear, and despair at more evidence the country is coming apart. An urge to violence is spreading.  In the capital of New York, the state Kennedy represents in the United States Senate and where therefore he is seen as one of their own, passions are running especially high. The city’s black citizens are already seething from the murder of Martin Luther King only a few weeks before and now the whites (still mostly Irish Catholic) have a reason to feel equally aggrieved and angry.  And of course black and white are ready to take it out on one another. Caught out on the streets in a city on the brink of full scale riot, George and Vivian are dragged from flashpoint to flashpoint by a politically active priest looking to help keep a lid on the things in the poor neighborhoods he's been ministering to while trying to find a safe place to stash his two elderly babes in the woods.  And as they go along, George’s memory is re-ignited by old haunts, old associations and he grows more lucid, more focused, and more talkative. In his various occupations, which include bagman for the City’s numbers racket, he went everywhere and met everyone in Albany. His array of jobs and many friendships introduced him to the rich and powerful, political, social, and criminal.

The stories bubble out of George and other characters are inspired to tell their stories to fill in the gaps in George’s memory and Kennedy’s narrative. Chango’s Beads becomes about those stories.  In a way it’s not a proper novel but a collection of short and not so short stories knit together by a plot that seems to have nothing to do with many of the stories.

As their memories are jogged and the stories pour out of them. they make connections between now and way back when or they show where the connections have been broken. The past isn't past for George and his friends and through them Kennedy is making the point that it's not for us either. The implication is clear. The night Bobby Kennedy was shot is as much a part of our present as a night when he and Vivian were young and they rode a streetcar home from an amusement park or a day when Governor Al Smith sent him out to buy a newspaper or the time when George’s father, then a young journalist, interviewed President Ulysses S. Grant are a part of June 5, 1968 for George.

It’s June 1968 in Albany, New York, but it’s also March 1957 in Havana, Cuba, and another young newspaperman named Quinn has arrived on the island from Miami, looking to cover the building revolution. Fidel Castro has gathered his guerrillas in the hills for his final moves against the dictator Fulgencio Batista.  But Quinn is also an aspiring novelist. We meet him as he’s wandering into the Floridita, one of Ernest Hemingway's two favorite bars in Havana, looking to meet his literary idol.  Which he does.  He also meets a magically beautiful art student, Cuban aristocrat, and closet revolutionary, Renata Suarez. Under Papa's watchful and approving but also jealous and malicious eye, the two fall in love, although with Quinn falling faster, harder, and deeper. The problem is that Renata already loves somebody else. Or two somebody elses. Possibly three. One of those other somebodies is a rebel and the next day he helps lead an attack on Batista's palace, he and his men armed with machine guns Renata helped him smuggle into the city. The attack fails to get Batista.  Renata's lover is killed. Batista’s troops go on a killing spree. Bloody violence erupts across the city. Dodging bullets, Quinn rushes to the museum where Renata works and carries her away to safety.

Not dramatic enough?

Over the next few days, they witness the assassination of one of Batista’s top henchmen in a nightclub lobby, Quinn helps Renata smuggle more guns, they get married in a Santeria ceremony---Renata believes in Voodoo. Chango, by the way, is a Santeria god, something of a trickster, and a notorious cheater of death---Quinn scores an interview with Castro, and Renata is brought in for interrogation by the police and, although the word hasn't yet been coined to describe what happens to her, disappeared.

But remember, it’s still June 1968.  George and Vivian and their priest protector are still lost in the city. For company now they have a drunk and drunk addict named Tremont, the son of a locally famous jazz pianist and singer who was with Bing Crosby the night he sang in George's living room thirty-two years ago and whose farewell concert George and Vivian attended before all hell broke loose around them. Tremont is on the run from the cops, having been implicated in a plot to assassinate the mayor, set up by an FBI informer attempting to discredit the Albany version of the Black Panthers.

It gets even more convoluted.

George's son, Dan Quinn, now a forty year old reporter for the Albany Times Union is also dashing about, covering the building violence, and in the process uncovering the plot to frame Tremont. Quinn goes to the mayor to warn him there may be an attempt on his life and tell him who will really be behind it.  The mayor, Alex Fitzgibbon, a smooth, refined Wasp politician who learned his trade at the knee of an old-style Irish boss, Patsy McCall (Erastus Corning and Dan O'Connell, to those of you who know Albany's political history) is the lover of Quinn's niece by marriage, Gloria, who's been staying with Quinn and his wife---yes, he found and married the enchanting Renata, but they haven’t lived all that happily ever after. Gloria is recovering after a suicide attempt brought on by her despair at Fitzgibbon's wife having discovered the affair.

Still not done, because it's 1957 again or still and we’re back in Cuba which we never really left and Quinn is interrupting his search for Renata to act as Hemingway's second in a duel with an American tourist Hemingway humiliated in the Floridita the night Quinn and Renata met and who has challenged the writer to pistols at twenty paces in a cemetery and, yes, this is comedy. The whole Albany Cycle is a comedy, in the classical sense, which means it's tragic at the same time. In Chango's Beads and the rest, history happens as tragedy and farce at the same time.  Hemingway and the tourist are meeting at dawn and Renata is in prison at the mercy of her torturer and Fidel is about to complete the Revolution that will lead to the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the poisoned cigars, the scheme to make his beard fall out, and, maybe, who can say, to Bobby Kennedy sprawled on the kitchen floor in the Ambassador Hotel and George and Vivian running from Molotov Cocktails in the streets of Albany while George sings songs that were popular when he was a boy and remembers the time he bought the governor a newspaper. All that history, past and yet to unfold, is tied up in that little moment and all our seemingly little moments.

Cuba shows up in Albany, knocking on Quinn's door in the form of Max Osbourne, Gloria’s father, Renata's brother in law, who was the editor who gave Quinn his job on the newspaper in Havana and also a part time spy for the CIA and is now on the run from gangsters from whom he stole money or failed to pay back money he owed, he's cagey about which. But he has a bag full of dough, hundreds of thousands of bucks he hopes to use to buy his way back into Cuba and Fidel’s favor and if Renata helps him out and even if she doesn't a big chunk of that money is hers and Quinn's and how ‘bout they come with him?

The past and the present, tragedy and farce, one and the same, and all of it radiates out from and circles back in on George Quinn not being able to remember the name of his bank.

Hemingway is a character but he's not a Hemingwayesque character, although, being Hemingway, he tries.  And Chango’s Beads is not a Hemingwayesque novel, even at its most romantic and violent.  Kennedy doesn't give into any temptation to write Hemingwayese.  Like his alter-ego, Daniel Quinn, Kennedy idolized Hemingway when he started out to be a writer, but he has long-since outgrown the anxieties of that influence.  Kennedy knows that he doesn’t have to make any loud Hemingwayesque noises for hi readers to hear echoes in their heads of To Have and Have Not, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Islands in the Stream, although it must have taken a strong effort of will not to have Hemingway point out to Renata that she has the same first name as the heroine of Across The River And Into The Trees.  I heard those echoes, but I heard louder echoes of Graham Greene---Our Man in Havana, of course, but also The Quiet American, The Comedians, and even Travels with My Aunt. Damon Ruynon’s voice reverberates too, in dialogs between George and his cronies from the old days and between Dan and his fellow reporters and his sources among the local cops.  Runyon was another of Kennedy’s early literary heroes.  As a kid he devoured Runyon’s syndicated newspaper columns and short stories.  He’s said that Runyon used to make him laugh three times within a single sentence.  But the main influence on Kennedy here is…William Kennedy.

At certain points, Chango’s Beads seems aware of itself as a novel and not just any sort of novel but a novel within the Albany Cycle. In fact, Dan Quinn has been at work on his own Albany novels which sound an awful lot like Kennedy’s, which suggests that Quinn is in the process of writing himself into existence.  Kennedy is having some metafictional fun at his own expense here.  My favorite example is this:

“You think this will make a good book?”

“Your friend Tex, you mean?”

“Everything that’s happening, the whole megillah. Who’d believe what’s going on right this minute?  Tex, Roxy, Claudia, Roy Mason, Matt Daugherty, Bobby, riots, vigils, my wino friends, and maybe you and me thrown in for the hell of it.  There’s a lot of mystery and they’re all telling me to pay attention to them.”

“Sound like a panoramic newsreel.”

“That’s not worth writing. If I can’t find a focus the hell with everybody.  People like the title---The Slum Book---but they don’t like the subject.  Another protest book?  The woods are full of them.  I see heroes but editors see winos and bums.  Who wants to read about bums, especially bums in Albany?”

“They don’t know our bums.”

So fifteen years before Kennedy will publish it, Dan Quinn is writing Ironweed.

You don’t have to have read all or any of the previous novels in the Cycle---Legs, Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Ironweed, Quinn's Book, Very Old Bones, The Flaming Corsage, Roscoe---to follow Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes.  You can start the cycle with it or with any of the others.  There’s no special order you need to follow because they’re all happening together all at once.

It’s March 1957 and Dan Quinn is climbing up into the Sierra Maestra to interview Fidel Castro and it’s June 1968 and George Quinn is having that ice cold beer he wanted and it’s November 2, 1938, All Soul’s Day, and Francis Phelan, ballplayer turned bum, is arriving at St Agnes’ Cemetery to dig graves to earn money for a place to flop for the night.

________________________________________

Chango’s Beads and Two-Tone Shoes by William Kennedy is available in paperback and for kindle at Amazon.

A valediction for Sam Vimes: Snuff by Terry Pratchett

Terry Pratchett’s most recent Discworld novel, Snuff , is available in paperback at last. Here’s my review from November 2011:

One of the small goods I’m proud of having accomplished with this blog is introducing people who might not otherwise have found their way to them to the Discworld novels, Terry Pratchett’s series of comic fantasies set in a magical world where wizards, witches, trolls, goblins, vampires, werewolves, and talking dogs mix and mingle in a society suspiciously like 21st Century Earth without the technology, brought to life in energetic and games-playing prose reminiscent of Charles Dickens, P.G. Wodehouse, Douglas Adams, and whatever author whose plots, tropes, style, or characters Pratchett happens to be bending to his own satiric purposes at the moment.  And routinely, people eager to get started will ask me where to begin.  There are, after all, thirty-nine novels in the series, so far.

There are several good paths into Discworld.  One is to start with the very first book, The Color of Magic, and work your way through chronologically.  Another is to pick one of the series within the series---Pratchett has been alternating telling several long, interconnected stories---and read each of those in order, but then you have to decide which mini-series to start with.  Rincewind and the Wizards?  The Witches?  DEATH and his granddaughter Susan? The City Watch? Or the newest entries, the adventures of the former con artist, Moist Von Lipwig?

Lately, I’ve been recommending starting by reading, not in any particular order, the best of each mini-series, Interesting Times (Rincewind), Maskerade (The Witches), Hogfather (DEATH), Feet of Clay (The Watch), and, the one I’m coming to feel is the best of all the books, so far, Going Postal, starring Moist Von Lipwig---and seeing which series and sets of regular characters take your fancy.  Although the books are interconnected, characters cross over and cross back, and some subplots are continued from book to book within mini-series, most of them stand by themselves and contain enough exposition that you can pick up all you need to know as you go.

So it almost doesn’t matter where you start.  Almost.  I can tell you where not to start.

Don’t start with Pratchett’s newest, Snuff .

That’s not because Snuff, which continues the adventures of the Watch, isn’t any good.  And it’s not because you need to have read all the other Watch books first (which, word of warning, is the case with Night Watch) to follow the plot, although it would probably help if you’ve read at least the previous Watch novel, Thud!, and maybe the first one, Guards! Guards!  It’s because I think you need to have read at least enough of the Watch novels to have gotten to know and love the character of Sam Vines in order to tolerate the way Pratchett overuses him for the first half of Snuff.

Samuel Vimes, Sir Samuel Vimes, Chief Constable Sir Samuel Vimes, commander of the Watch, the Ankh-Morpork city police, also Duke of Ankh, thanks to his marriage to the Lady Sybil, also Blackboard Monitor, a title of great honor bestowed upon him in gratitude by the Low King of the Dwarfs, product of the streets, reluctant aristocrat, congenital democrat, ferocious upholder of law and order, doting husband and father, and policeman from the smoldering tip of his cigar to, literally, the soles of his boots, is the hero of the Watch books.  And such is the strength of Vimes as a character and so central to the Discworld series are the Watch books (which is why I sometimes recommend that neophyte readers start with them) that his presence is felt, if only in being sorely missed, in the majority of the of books in which he doesn’t actually appear---a good case can be made, although it wouldn’t be made by Vimes himself, who’d insist he’s just doing his job as a copper, that he’s the hero of the whole enterprise.

Snuff is more focused on Vimes than any of the other Watch novels and it’s hard not to think of it as a valediction.  Pratchett has Alzheimer’s, fortunately a more slowly degenerative form and he’s been able to keep working and plans to keep on working---he’s said to already have two more books in the hopper---but there’s no telling when things will catch up with him and so it seems that with Snuff Pratchett is, not saying goodbye to his best and favorite character, but attempting to givie him his due.  Snuff is like a testimonial dinner, except that there’s a problem.  For long stretches, the only person giving speeches in Vimes’ honor is Vimes.

Vimes spends more time thinking and musing and brooding and lecturing on the problem of being Sam Vimes than Hamlet spends on the problem of being Hamlet.  The difference is that Hamlet is a sensitive and self-doubting young man in serious trouble while Vimes is a querulous, cocky, defensively self-confident middle-aged man whose job is to make trouble for others who’ve earned the attention of the police.  A young prince poetically worrying about the state of his own soul is a somewhat more sympathetic figure than a fifty year old police chief grousing profanely on the state of others’.

In all the other Watch novels, Vimes is the lead character in a large ensemble of secondary heroes, major and minor villains, eccentrics, knaves, fools, saints, lunatics, and just folks with strong personalities, who include not just the other members of the Watch and the criminals they pursue but the entire population of the city of Ankh-Morpork.  And he is opposed and often overmatched by a number of adversaries, chief among them his boss, the Patrician, Havelock Lord Vetinari, the thoughtful and not always benevolent tyrant who rules Ankh-Morpork with a combination of ruthless pragmatism and disinterested guile.

But in Snuff, Pratchett whisks Vimes out of Ankh-Morpork and drops him down in the countryside where he meets very few other people and none who are his match.  Pratchett hasn’t come up with any new characters who can stand up to Vimes as characters and the result is usually that when they meet Vimes talks right over them. 

Gently bullied by Lady Sybil, with help from the Patrician, Vimes leaves the city for his first vacation ever.  He and Sybil and their little boy, Sam, head out for Sybil’s family’s country estate, where, of course, Vimes, a city mouse’s city mouse, is immediately and hopelessly out of his element. 

It had been a long day and last night’s sleep in the inn had not been salubrious or restful, but before he got inot the huge bed Vimes opened a window and stared out at the night.  The wind was murmuring in the trees; Vimes mildly disapproved of trees, but Sybil liked them and that was that.  Things that he didn’t care to know about rustled, whooped, gibbered and went inexplicably crazy in the darkness outside.  He didn’t know what they were and hoped never to find out.  What kind of noise was this for a man to go to sleep to?

It’s a rule of mystery novels, movies, and television shows that police detectives can’t take vacations: wherever they go, to the mountains, to the seaside, to the French Riveria, and, especially, to country estates, they will stumble upon a freshly murdered corpse and there goes the holiday.  Pratchett loves rules like that.  He loves to play games with them.  Throughout the Discworld series, Pratchett has made use of plots, imagery, conventions, and cliches from fairy tales, mystery novels, the plays of William Shakespeare, Conan the Barbarian, The Lord of the Rings, westerns, movies of all sorts including King Kong and Gone With the Wind---in Snuff, Vimes even idles for a few pages within the plot of Pride and Prejudice---and not always simply for comic effect.  The family estate exists where the world of Agatha Christie bleeds into the that of P.G. Wodehouse and so I settled back with my copy of Snuff like Bertie Wooster with one of his beloved cheesy thrillers and waited for the bleeding, and the parodying, to start. 

And waited.

And waited some more.

Pages go by without even the hint of violence and mayhem.  Vimes suspects something wicked is at work behind the scenes but it’s almost 100 pages before his suspicions are confirmed.  Murder inevitably does out, but it isn’t done in the library with the candlestick.  It’s a bloody slaughter on a hillside with a knife in the dead of night, something more out of Dexter than Miss Marple, but more to the point, it doesn’t reach back into the manor house or over to the village.  It reaches into Middle Earth.

More specifically below Middle Earth.  Down into the caves and tunnels where the goblins dwell in The Hobbit.

In fact, the crime involves goblins.

Goblins as victims.

Not that that should matter.  A recurring theme of the Watch novels has been Vimes having to learn to accept creatures he has previously distrusted or despised---dwarfs, trolls, werewolves, zombies, and vampires---as human.  It helps that Pratchett’s dwarfs and trolls are take-offs on British cultural stereotypes of the Welsh and the Scots and that his vampires, werewolves, and zombies are---or were, at any rate---human and they continue to go about the business of being human although with eccentricities like sleeping in coffins, baying at the moon, and dropping the odd limb or appendage now and then and having to have the lost body part sewn back on.  But his goblins, like his elves in the Witches novels, are defined by comparisons to Tolkien’s elves and goblins.  They are magical creatures, and while there is magic in Discworld, generally, in Ankh-Morpork it’s outmoded, out-dated, and obsolete except as a parody of science.  A certain degree of realism pervades all the novels, naturally---they’re all satires.  But the Watch novels are the most realistic.  Goblins don’t fit in Vimes’ world nor does he fit in theirs.

They would fit in the Wizards’ world or the Witches’ or Susan and DEATH’s and the crime Vimes has to deal with, the kidnapping of goblins and their being sold into slavery, would have been a natural for Rincewind to tackle, ass-backward, or, more craftily and formidably, by Granny Weatherwax (particularly if the criminals were elves) or more adventurously and heroically by Susan, but Pratchett doesn’t seem to know what to do with the goblins once he brings them and Vimes together and so, after spending a lot of time describing them and their culture, he drops them as characters.  They become merely a plot device.

Fortunately, two things happen that bring the story to rollicking life.

The first is that the crime reaches back into Ankh-Morpork as well as into the goblins’ caves and some old favorite characters are drawn into the plot, including the dwarf forensics expert Cheery Littlebottom, Igor, the Igor who acts as police surgeon---in Discworld Igors are a species, and all of them are named Igor or Igorina---and particularly this pair of less than zealous coppers:

Sometimes people asked Commander Vimes why Sergeant Colon and Corporal Nobbs were still on the strength, such as it was, of the modern Ankh-Morpork City Watch, given that Nobby occasionally had to be held upside down and shaken to reclaim small items belonging to other people, while Fred Colon had actually cultivated the ability to walk his beat with eyes closed, and end up, still snoring, back at Pseudopolis Yard, sometimes with graffiti on his breastplate.

The other thing is that Pratchett, having given up on the murder mystery plot and stymied in trying to work Vimes into what is essentially a fairy tale, turns Snuff into an action-adventure novel.  The story that takes over is an extended chase scene with the goblins as helpless villagers being carried off by bandits and Vimes and his small posse as the cavalry in hot pursuit.

Pratchett’s reputation is based on his greatness as a comic novelist, but he’s a great writer, period, and like another great comic novelist, Charles Dickens, he is adept at staging murders, fights, fires, storms, and all other sorts of scenes of calamity, mayhem, and destruction.  The chase takes Vimes into a fight to the death with a murderer aboard a runaway barge tossed about on a river in roiling flood during a storm at night.

[The killer] squirmed out of Vimes’ grip, spun neatly and threw a punch which Vimes very nearly dodged.  It was harder than he had expected, and, to give the devil his due, [the killer] knew how to defend and, perish the thought, was younger than Vimes, much younger.  Yes, you could tell the eyes of a murderer, at least after they had done more than three or so and got away with it.  Their eyes held the expression some gods probably had.  But a killer in the process of trying to kill was always absorbed, constantly calculating, drawing upon some hideous strength.  If you cut their leg off they wouldn’t notice until they fell over.  Tricks didn’t work, and floor was slippery with debris of half a forest.  As they kicked and punched their way across the wheelhouse deck, [the killer] was winning…

There is, of course, plenty of great comic writing.  Plenty of plain good writing too.  I especially liked this description of a goblin girl who’s learned to converse in Morporkian (English):

…the girl spoke as if she were pulling words out of a rack and then tidily pushing them back in their places as soon as they had been said.

And these from a bedtime scene in which Vimes and Lady Sybil fall asleep together while discussing the case:

Vimes lay back in the bed, enjoying the wonderful sensation of being eaten by pillows…

All he could see of her right now was the very tip of her nose, as the pillows claimed her…

Lady Sybil turned over, which meant---since she was a woman happily rich in gravitational attraction---as she turned, the pillow closest to Sam, acting like a gear in a chain, spun softly in the opposite direction so that Sam Vimes found himself now lying on his face.  He struck out for the surface again…

Gently drifting into a nightmare world where the good guys and bad guys so often changed hats without warning, Vimes wrestled sleeplessness to the ground and made certain that it got eight hours.

Snuff isn’t where I would start if I was just starting to explore Discworld, but it’s a good place to continue from if you’ve been there, a pleasant way station to pass the time until the next book comes along, which, I hope, will be soon, with another to follow not long after that.

Snuff by Terry Pratchett, published by HarperCollins, is available from Amazon in paperback as well as in hardcover and kindle editions.

All the Discworld novels can be purchased through my aStore.

Paperback Writer: The Floor of Heaven

Another of my favorite books from last year, The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum, is now out in paperback.  Here’s my review, slightly revised, from May 2011:

A rip-roaring tale of high adventure featuring cowboys, Indians, outlaws, gunfights, robbery, murder, and million dollar gold strikes that all happens to be true. 

The boom town of Skagway, Alaska at the time of the Yukon Gold Rush.

Reading The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum has given me a renewed respect for the HBO’s Deadwood.

The Floor of Heaven is a history of the gold rush as seen through the eyes of three men who were there, on to get rich digging for gold, one to get rich by stealing from men who were there to dig for gold, and one to track down and throw into jail men who got rich by stealing from the men who got rich digging for gold. 

The man who got rich by digging for gold was George Carmack, whose strike at Bonanza Creek set off the stampede to the Klondike.

The man who got rich by stealing was Jeff “Soapy” Smith, a gambler, con artist, violent thug, gang leader and criminal mastermind with ambitions to make himself a respectable citizen.  I’d call Smith a real-life Al Swearengen, except that Al Swearengen was a real-life Al Swearengen.

The third man was Charlie Siringo, a Pinkerton agent who became famous as “The Cowboy Detective,” although very little of his detective work over a long and successful career as a lawman involved any cowboying.

Quick summary:  In the mid-1890s, the three men head north to Alaska.  Siringo, who has a gift for undercover work, is out to solve the mysterious robbery at a gold mine.  Carmack, whose lifelong ambition is to find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow his father wasted his life chasing, sets out as a prospector but comes close to settling for a life as an Indian chief.  And Smith, on the run from the law, sees in Alaska’s wide-open and virtually unpoliced frontier all kinds of opportunities for a man of his particular talents to make easy money. Eventually, the trio’s separate paths to adventure intersect, with guns drawn on all sides.

The Floor of Heaven is, as advertised above, a rip-roaring tale of high adventure featuring cowboys, Indians, outlaws, robbery, murder, and million dollar gold strikes told with verve, humor, and charm by Blum,a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, a former New York Times reporter twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and the author of other true tales of adventure and mystery, including the Edgar Award winning American Lightning: Terror, Mystery, and the Birth of Hollywood and The Brigade: An Epic Story of Vengeance, Salvation, and WWII.

The hero of The Floor of Heaven is Charlie Siringo.  This is partly due to the fact that Siringo was a heroic character.  But it’s also due to his having made a second career for himself as a writer of rip-roaring tales of high adventure that happened to be true and featured himself as the main character.  All three men, Siringo, Carmack, and Smith left copious written records of their lives, but Siringo wasn’t only the more talented writer, he was the more interesting human being, as well as the most decent.  All three were intelligent, brave, and energetic, but Carmack and Smith were emotional drifters; on the one hand they were ambitious, on the other they didn’t care.  They weren’t so much driven as pulled forward by their dreams, and when you get right down to it, their dreams, although grand in scale, were fairly trite and dull.  They wanted to get rich and without having to work hard to do it. Carmack did work hard, and it’s actually amazing how hard and how much he put himself through physically, but he didn’t expect to have to work hard for long.  Any day now, he was going to find the mother lode and then he’d be done with it.  Smith kept himself busy with schemes to get rich without doing any honest work, but while some criminals are fascinating in their criminality, Smith’s mind seems to have been mostly elsewhere.  He and Carmack lived in their dreams, so when Blum has to bring one or the other of them front and center in his narrative and we are made to see things happening from their points of view, there’s a certain fading of focus, a lack of clarity and immediacy.  Carmack and Smith just weren’t paying close enough attention.

Siringo, however, was all attention.  He wouldn’t have survived as an undercover detective otherwise.  He didn’t just see everything clearly, he took it all in, in detail, and if he couldn’t see its immediate importance, he filed it away as potentially useful.  The result is that he’s given Blum more to work with when the point of view shifts to Siringo’s.  But it’s also the case that he was a good-natured, outward-looking, and open-hearted human being.  He liked people, even the ones he was out to put in jail, and he was interested in what made them tick.  These are qualities that helped make him a good detective, but they also made him a livelier and more entertaining writer.  Plus, he led an adventurous and exciting life.  So it’s not surprising that things perk up mightily whenever Siringo takes over the story.

We meet him as a young cowboy, top hand on a cattle drive that has just rolled into Dodge and getting into a bar fight, that he loses, with the sometime lawman, sometime gambler Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp’s friend and first boss.  We follow him into the company of Pat Garrett and a target-shooting contest with Billy the Kid and from that adventure he and we move on to his courtship of the beautiful, dark-eyed Mamie Lloyd and his decision as a married man and new father to settle down and leave off riding the range for steady work as a small businessman.  He opens a cigar shop, that does well, an ice cream and oyster parlor, that does better, but he starts to grow restless.  Siringo was ambitious too, but not for money.  He wanted work that made the most of his talents and brains.  He was a successful shopkeeper but the work didn’t engage his full attention or need all his considerable energy.  He talked his way into a job with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, helped clean out their corrupted and incompetent Denver office, and took on his first undercover assignment, infiltrating a gang of outlaws in order to track down a murderer.  Then Mamie suddenly got sick and died and Siringo went into an emotional tailspin that he attempted to pull himself out of by taking an assignment in the far north.  He went undercover again to solve a series of robberies at a gold mine and it was while working this case that he first met up with George Carmack, whom he initially suspected of being in on the robberies.  But he figures out who the real robbers are, realizes they’ve already hightailed it, and sets out in pursuit, which requires him to become not so much a cowboy detective as a sailor detective.  He searches for the thieves up and down the coast of the Alaskan panhandle, plying the waters in an overloaded and less than seaworthy canoe.  Along the way he shoots it out with a whale.

Hand to God.

Eventually, he crosses paths again with Carmack and with Soapy Smith.

Blum has chosen to tell his story in the limited third person.  When the action shifts from one of the main characters to another, the point of view shifts too and we see things strictly through that character’s eyes.  Although he had plenty of other sources, his main sources were his three main characters and it appears that long stretches of his narrative are rewritings, paraphrases, and summaries of their writings.  It’s hard to say how good a writer Siringo was because Blum rarely quotes directly from his, or either of the other’s, writing, but it’s clear he knew how to structure a story and if he wasn’t a particularly introspective man he was a sharply observant one.  He understood that people told you a lot about themselves by gesture and habit as well as by word and, since he defined himself to himself by what he did more than by what he thought and felt and then redefined himself by writing about what he did, we get a pretty good sense of him as a person and of the people he dealt with.  I suspect that his impressions of George Carmack are more reliable than Carmack’s own impressions of himself.  But then Carmack seems to have been careful not to have formed any definitive impressions of himself.

Carmack left behind a voluminous personal correspondence and an autobiography (that went unpublished in his lifetime), but he had a habit of sentimentalizing, romanticizing, and idealizing his feelings.  He wasn’t just ambitious to be rich.  He dreamed of being a certain kind of rich and successful man, and in the letters he wrote as a young man he took pains to present himself as if he was steadily on his way to becoming that sort of man and---although, again, I can’t be sure because as I said Blum rarely gives us direct quotes---if in his autobiography he was more honest about what sort of young man he’d actually been, naive, often foolish, floundering, lost in his own dreams, he was still prone to romanticize and sentimentalize his adventures.  In short, Carmack doesn’t come across as the most reliable source on the subject of George Carmack.  And since he was something of a loner and inclined to keep an emotional distance between himself and other people---possibly because he was afraid that they're versions of reality would impinge on his dreams---he doesn’t come across as the most reliable source on the subject of the people he dealt with either, even those he most cared about.  Consequently, when other characters enter his sections of the story, they tend towards caricature and Carmack’s interactions with them play like the melodramas that were popular on the music hall stages of the period and that would soon provide the plots of countless silent movies and then talkies and then TV westerns, which is ironic since it was Siringo who wound up in Hollywood and whose exploits provided the plots for countless movies.

I have to point out that this isn’t actually a flaw in The Floor of Heaven.  In fact, it’s part of its charm.  It’s a reminder of how the reality of the Wild West, of which Alaska was the last frontier, blended with the legend and that the truth could be more outrageous and exciting than the fiction.  Plus, in a roundabout way it gives us insight into Carmack as a character that Carmack couldn’t relate honestly and directly about himself.

And, despite his self-romanticizing dreaminess, Carmack was smart and practical and perceptive in his way.  He knew what he was doing when it came to prospecting.  He could hunt and he could fish and he could use an ax and a saw. Blum relies on him to tell us how things got done on the Alaskan frontier and to show us what the place was like---big, beautiful, empty---how the land lay---not flat---how the weather was---generally cold---and how the people lived---on the edge.  Through him his eyes Blum shows us how to survive an Alaskan winter, how to build a snug cabin, how to catch a salmon, how a few men went about digging out a million dollar mine.   In one of the book’s most thrilling sequences, we follow Carmack up the dangerous mountain pass that was the  most direct route into Yukon from the American side and which over time as the rush sent thousands up the trail became lined with the bones and rotting carcasses of overworked pack animals and every step of the way marked a spot where someone who had tried the ascent ahead of you had collapsed in exhaustion, pain, or despair.  And if his life wasn’t as full of incident as Siringo’s, he had his share of adventures.

He started out in life as practically an indentured servant to his brother in law, tending sheep in the mountains of California.  During the long, lonely hours he consoled himself by composing bad poetry and dreaming of gold.  He joined the Marines to get away and the Marines sent him to Alaska.  Up there he determined that Alaska was where he was going to strike it rich, and as I said, although he was a dreamer and prone to losing himself inside his dreams, he was also practical and smart.  He decided that before he’d go stampeding out into the wilderness hunting for gold he’d learn how to survive out there first and he picked as his teachers the people that knew the place best, the Indians.  He ingratiated himself with the Tlingits who lived around his Marine camp and got to know them and their ways so well that he was more comfortable among them than among his fellow white men.  Later, on his second go-round in Alaska, after having deserted from the Marines, when his luck was running so bad that he temporarily gave up his dreams of finding gold, he lived with other Indians, a tribe of Tagish, who adopted him as one of their own.  He took and Indian wife, they had a child, he went on a vision quest (and had an actual vision), and tried to satisfy himself with ambitions of becoming a chief of the tribe.

Then one day his old dreams of gold returned.  He picked up his shovel and ax and pan again and set out.  Led by his instincts and trusting his knowledge gained from past experience, he wandered up a tributary of the Klondike River, dipped his pan in the running water, and came up with something shiny and yellow.  He named the creek Bonanza Creek and set to work.  It wasn’t long before he knew he had found it, the true mother lode.  Word got out, thousands headed for the Klondike, the gold rush was on, but Carmack was already a rich man and growing richer with each shovelful of dirt he dug.

That’s when he caught the attention of Soapy Smith.

Smith had come to Alaska because the once Wild West of the lower forty-eight had finally become to civilized to tolerate his presence.  He had run out of places to run to when too much law and order made it impossible for him to do business anymore.  He was an organizational genius, though, and in each new town where he’d set up shop, he’d quickly assemble a gang of thieves and thugs with a variety of criminal skills and talents, buy himself political influence, pocket a lawman or two or three, open up a saloon and a whorehouse, take control of a large share of the local gambling, and soon be at work fleecing all and sundry.  He repeated the pattern twice in Alaska and he was pretty much running the town of Skagway when George Carmack struck it lucky.

You can see what I mean about Smith being a real-life version of Deadwood’s Al Swearengen, and for all I know he really was like the character so brilliantly played by Ian McShane.  Smith must have been possessed of a dark intelligence and he was a dangerous man, capable of terrible violence when angered.  But it’s hard to say from Floor of Heaven what he was really like, which isn’t a failure of talent as a writer on Blum’s part.  Siringo and Carmack wrote enough and wrote well-enough to give Blum plenty of material to develop their points of view.  Smith didn’t write an autobiography.  He wrote many letters to his wife whom he kept out of the way back in Kansas, but there was a lot about himself and his life out west and up north he couldn’t tell her, partly out of fear that a letter might go astray and wind up in the hands of the law, but partly out of a game of pretend he and his wife were playing with each other.

Smith apparently dreamed of the day when he’d have earned enough money from his criminal enterprises that he could afford to go completely legit.  He longed to be a respectable and upstanding citizen and he and his wife often wrote to each other as if that day had already arrived.  The Jeff Smith who appears in many of the letters, then, is a fabrication and a rather banal and dull character to boot.  But what’s really disappointing about this phony is that he doesn’t know many of the details of Soapy Smith’s crimes and depredations and he wasn’t intimately acquainted with members of Soapy’s gang, which is too bad because it would have been interesting to have a peek into the individual personalities of men with names like Slim-Jim Foster, Old Man Tripp, the Moonfaced Kid, Fatty Green, Kid Jimmy Fresh, Yank Fewclothes, and Yeah Mow Hopkins.

Smith routinely made the papers, but the journalism of the times favored sensationalism over insight and facts were what reporters and editors needed them to be to fit their stories, if you can imagine that.  A character named Soapy Smith would make headlines, but neither journalists nor their readers cared how how closely that character resembled the real person it was based on.  The things he did were thrilling in that they stoked readers’ fears or inflamed their imaginations.  Why he did what he did was easy enough to explain.  He was a villain and a scoundrel.  What else did you need to know?

While Siringo’s and Carmack’s adventures would make a good movie or movies---and Floor of Heaven has been optioned by Fox 2000---the parts of the book focusing on Smith seem to be straight out of the movies, background and set up to Dodge City or Destry Rides Again, and rather than coming across as the main player in his own story, Smith often seems at a loss, going through the motions, while waiting for Errol Flynn or Jimmy Stewart to stride onto the scene and kick start the plot into motion.  Unfortunately, since this is history not the movies, the hero doesn’t appear  to confront the villain until the final act.

But it’s not just with Smith that Blum’s narrative strategy causes a problem.  As I said, Carmack, while observant and perceptive, was not particularly insightful, but Siringo, despite his talents as an observer and reporter of his own life, isn’t necessarily always reliable.  Smith, of course, couldn’t sign his own name without working a lie into it.  But Siringo wasn’t under any compunction to be a hundred percent truthful.  He was writing for an audience that wanted rip-roaring tales of adventure not introspective memoirs and they appreciated writers who didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.  There’s reason to wonder if from time to time Siringo gave into the temptation to embellish, so it might have been helpful if Blum hadn’t been so wedded to the limited third person and allowed himself to break away now and again to quote outside sources that could have told us things Siringo and the others couldn’t have known or supported some of their more astonishing adventures.

There’s another problem in that I don’t know whom to blame when Blum’s writing starts to take on the flavor of the dime novels of the period.  I suspect that while he was trying to convey the sense of Siringo’s character as Siringo portrayed it himself Blum allowed himself to be infected by Siringo’s prose style.  Since Siringo was working within the conventions of the bestsellers of the day, he probably felt he had to make himself sound like what his readers thought a real cowboy sounded like.  The result is occasional eruptions of corniness that the writers of Gunsmoke would have been embarrassed to work into dialog for Festus.  People don’t think or feel or believe they have to do something as often as they are “of a mind” to do it.  They rarely guess, figure, conclude, decide, deduce, or reflect.  They “reckon”.  Siringo doesn’t reach for his gun or his pistol or his revolver or his weapon; it’s always his “Big Colt.”  Blum grows way too fond of this locution to the point that he might just as well have started calling the gun “Ol’ Betsy.”  In the course of just a few pages we read that someone has no “hankering” for gold and someone else wants no “truck” with Indians.  There’s “plumb foolishness” all about, folks who fall into conversation get to “jawing,” things cost “a pretty penny,” and fifty bars of gold weigh “near on” three hundred pounds.  You can’t help feeling that a durn tootin’ is going to “roll into town” any minute.  It never does, although durn makes its way onto a page by its lonesome and we are bushwacked by a tarnation.  I kept wishing for signs that along with all his other research Blum had read the works of two great writers from the period who happened to be in Alaska around the time as Carmack and Siringo and Smith and chronicled their own adventures, one in his fiction and one as a continuation of his nature writing, Jack London and John Muir. He also might have benefited from having episodes of  Deadwood  on in the background while he was writing.  All the wild and prodigious and wonderfully creative cursing on the show was there to disguise the fact that the characters all spoke their own unique and lyrical versions of great Nineteenth Century prose and poetry, proving week in and week out they were the contemporaries of Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Stephen Crane, and Henry James, whose works they might have read along with if not instead of the novels of Ned Buntline.  For a flavor of how people in the second half of the 19th Century actually thought and wrote, it would be better just to strip the c-words out of any of Al Swearengen’s speeches.

None of this amounts to a fatal flaw nor should it or will it get in the way of an overall enjoyment of the book.  It’s just a reminder of how rich and varied the literary history---fiction and non-fiction---of the West is.  Anyway, if I want to read John Muir or Jack London, I can read John Muir and Jack London.  As a matter of fact, I did.  I had a lot of fun re-reading  Klondike Tales and Travels in Alaska alongside The Floor of Heaven.  Blum’s book is a welcome addition to that section of my bookshelf.  A rip-roaring tale of high adventure that happens to be true and highly entertaining as well.

The Floor of Heaven: A True Tale of the Last Frontier and the Yukon Gold Rush by Howard Blum is available in paperback from Amazon and, yes, boys and girls, you can get it for your kindle.

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Excerpt. George Carmack climbs the Chilkoot Trail.

In the early morning, he woke up stiff and aching.  He came out of his ten, his boots crunching against the fresh layer of of ground frost, and for the first time he had a good look at the mountain he intended to climb that day.  The camp lay in a broad basin, and from this perspective the Chilkoot stood out from the surrounding peaks.  It seemed to rise higher and more steeply, and the sunlight glinted with harsh menace off the green-iced glaciers that fortified its walls.  It would be impossible to cross, George suddenly moaned to himself.  He’d barely taken a single step, but the muscles in his thighs and calves were still throbbing from yesterday’s ordeal.  Yet how could he dare to give up, to turn around and go back?  But would that be any less of an embarrassment than surrendering half-way up the mountain?  Or, worse, falling to his death, his body lost forever, shrouded each passing year by snow and more snow?

Then George saw the Indians hoisting their huge sacks---one hundred pounds each!---onto their backs.  And they Day brothers, too, had lit their cob pipes and were raring to head off.  George knew he could not be the only one to quit.  He was, he chastised himself, too close to his lifelong goal to give up.  So in a tremendous burst of will, he lifted his pack to his back, adjusted the leather shoulder straps, and joined the others.

It was four miles uphill to the summit, and George had not gotten far before it became clear to him that he was locked in a battle to the death:  Either he would cross the Chilkoot into the Canadian Yukon or he’d die trying.  Even if he didn’t have the heart, it was no longer possible to turn back.

The snow was thick underfoot.  Icy boulders as big as street cars needed to be traversed. The wind shrieked.  A mammoth overhanging glacier reflected the sunlight like a prism, dazzling hues of turquoise, sapphire, and rose bouncing off walls of sheer ice, blinding him, while the huge glacier itself seemed poised to come crashing down at any moment.  He sweated under his heavy coat.  His socks dripped rivulets of ice.  His pack ground down hard on his back as if he were carrying the broad trunk of one of the sturdy evergreens he’d only days before admired.  After two miles, the line of bone-weary men reached a flat-ledged slope.  The Indians lowered the packs from their backs.  It was a signal to rest.

George could now see the pass’s white-tipped summit.  It was tantalizingly close.  Nevertheless, he decided he could walk no father.

He was right. When the line moved forward for the final ascent, he found himself bent over, climbing in an awkward hunched fashion rather than walking upright.  A snow-covered rock slide blocked the trail, and the only way up the increasingly steep path was to pull himself over one icy boulder after another.  His legs were cramping.  His fingers were numb.  In his wet, slick boots, footholds were slippery and brief.  By the time he found the muscle and ingenuity and the will to get over the rock slide, all pride belonged to another life.  Crawling on all fours like a beaten animal, George reached the summit…

Photo of Skagway courtesy of the Virtual Museum of Canada.  Photo of Jefferson Smith and his gang courtesy of the Alaska State Library.  Photo of miners on the Chilkoot Trail via the National Park Service.