"YOU JUST PULL UP THE BOARDS AND FIND MORE PLOTS...": IRON STAR'S LOREN D. ESTLEMAN

Early this year, Loren Estleman released the book Iron Star to acclaim from critics and other western writers. He goes back to one of his earlier books, Mr. St. John about a U.S. marshal's last manhunt, seen through the perspectives of the lawman's manuscript, the memoir of Rawlings, a Pinkerton who rode along on the quest, and Rawlings telling the story to rising cowboy star Buck Jones who wants to use it for a movie. The different perspectives look both the way we view the past and the different prose styles in western fiction. Mr. Estleman was kind enough to take some questions I had about the book.

SCOTT MONTGOMERY: What made you go back to Mister St. John decades later?

LOREN D. ESTLEMAN: MISTER ST. JOHN was one of my best early westerns.  It never really left me.  I wanted to revisit its various themes with what I’d learned about writing and life during the last forty years.  I keep my work fresh by setting myself a new challenge every time, each one steeper than the last, and the idea of telling a frontiersman’s story in three time periods simultaneously frightened me just enough to keep me on my toes throughout.

S..M.: Was Iron St. John based on any historical figures?

L.D.E.: Unconsciously, yes.  Almost every famous western lawman had at one time or another worked the other side of the fence.  Wyatt Earp couldn’t go back to Arkansas or be hanged as a horse thief, Wild Bill Hickok was a murderous psychopath, and Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid from ambush in the dark.  Their sheer ruthlessness gave them the ability to think like the men they hunted, and their familiarity with violence made them the choice of a developing civilization that had no alternative but to fight fire with fire.

S.M.: Was there anything you kept in mind when dealing with multiple perspectives?

L,D,E: Actually, MISTER ST. JOHN made wider use of multiple perspective than IRON STAR, which is told basically from Emmett Rawlings’ point of view, recalling what St. John entertained his listeners with about his checkered life.  The approach sharpened the focus on the central figure.

S.M.: What did those multiple perspectives allow you to do as an author?

L.D.E: The story decides the point of view.  I once got a hundred pages into a book before I realized it wasn’t working in first-person, so I tore it apart and started over, using third-person subjective.  That gave me just the distance I needed to understand the character.  In the case of St. John, having Rawlings quote him verbatim provided the kind of intimacy his story required.  One of the bewitching things about what I call “shotgun perspective”—the method of using several narrators—is when I’ve gotten all I can get out of a particular player at a certain point in the story I can always dash across town and see what so-and-so is up to.  Everyone gets a chance to rest, including me.

S.M.: Can you talk about the different styles and choice of language you approached St. John's memoir and Rawlings recollections?

L.D.E.: Rawlings is an educated man, who lays out his facts in semi-formal language, minding his grammar, syntax, and vocabulary, while St. John, who earned his scholarship in the wild, free-wheels his memoirs with the easy jargon of his environment.  His raconteur-style storytelling is reminiscent of my father’s.  Dad was a truck driver, housepainter, electrician, mechanic, bricklayer, stonemason, plumber, and farmer, with an eighth-grade education and more smarts and skills than ever came down to me; and he was funny.  Every time I came back to my lawman it felt like I was sharing a beer with Dad.

S.M.: When I posted my review, I got many responses from western authors about how much they loved the book. What do you think appeals about it to those who work in the genre?

L.D.E.: The lure of the frontier was its promise of a second chance.  Back East, you could fail at everything you tried, keep getting in trouble with the law, fall chronically ill—drift from one disaster to another—then go West and start over.  And from a writer’s point of view the freedom is intoxicating.  Since so many towns sprang up and disappeared as civilization crept onward, leaving no trace they ever existed, you can make up your own community, populate it as you choose, and if you want to put the bank next to the saloon you can damn well do it and not have to fact-check.  I don’t mean you don’t research; that’s crucial, and immensely rewarding.  All you have to do when you’re looking for an idea for a western is to study authentic history.  The genre spent a hundred years erecting an unlikely mythology on top of a far more fascinating history.  You just pull up the boards and find more plots and characters beneath than you can use in three lifetimes.