OLD LEGENDS AND THOSE WHO LIVE IN THEM: LOREN D. ESTLEMAN'S IRON STAR

Loren D. Estleman is a writer skilled in how to use genre. For over four decades, he has worked in or combined most of them, particularly in crime fiction and westerns. He often uses it to examine history and our relationship to it. In Iron Star, he further digs into his own fiction story about a western hero.

The book begins in 1926 with retired Pinkerton detective Emmett Rawlings getting a visit from rising cowboy star Buck Jones. Rawlings is trying to publish his memoirs about his life with the agency and Jones is interested is interested in using a particular case. Rawlings rode with Marshal Iron St. Johns and his colorful posse, hunting down The Buckner Gang . It was the aging lawman's last manhunt. St. John wrote a sanitized autobiography, but Jones wants to know the real story for a movie he wants to do. He has a financial backer he wants Rawlins to meet.

Rawlings initially declines, but then gets news about The Pinkerton Agency blocking the publishing of the book that he has already spent the advance on. He goes down into the basement of the rooming house he stays in, where some belongs are. He finds the original manuscript St. John wrote.

This rougher version tells of his early life as an outlaw. Due to a proposition from Judge Parker, he takes on the badge. We follow him on many arrests and misadventures. There wild, wooly, and often funny.

Rawlings travels to meet with Buck Jones and his backer (a fun reveal of another historical figure), he sets the record straight on the Buckner Gang manhunt. It begins as a great adventure with colorful characters in the posse. However it quickly turns more sordid and sobering as it continues to the real story. At the end of each chapter, we often get Rawlings comment of the situation through his 1923 eyes.

Estleman has taken the story from his early novel, Mr. St. John, and deconstructed it to look at western fiction in general. St. John's story is a more rough, tumble, and vulgar of aht we can imagine of what that sanitized version was, yet it still holds a large of romance to it. It has the feel of a barroom racontour. Rawlings story fights to set the version straight with ambiguity and true repercussions of the killing done.

Estleman stitches these stories with skill and enjoyment he isn't using it to study the different approaches to the western and celebrating them all. Much of this is done in the fun he has with language shown in the difference between St. John's and Rawling's languages. St. John's is more avuncular and ribald in a way that reminded me of Charles Portis' True Grit. Rawlings' reflects Glendon Swarthout's The Shootist with its more somber tone. St. John's violence is depicted as rousing action, while Rawlings' gives it sobering impact. The result is a tapestry of gunsmoke and saddle leather that covers old west justice and the prisms it has been viewed from.

In some ways, Iron Star is Loen D, Estleman's bebop version of the standard he wrote in Mr. St. John. It opens up the story and goes deeper with virtuoso flair. In doing so, he takes the idea of the western legend and looks at both the relationship to "the true story" and those touched by it.