The Ballad of Black Bart by Loren D. Estleman

Published by Macmillan/Forge Books on November 14, 2017

The Ballad of Black Bart is based on the celebrated stagecoach robber of the 1870s to 1880s. The novel includes some biographical detail that I presume to be accurate, although Loren Estleman admits to taking “small liberties with fact.” Still, the story is very much an imagined life, placing thoughts in the bandit’s head and recreating a personality that may or may not hew to his actual life. The novel is a literary look at an outlaw who captured the public’s imagination on the strength of two poems and good bit of audacity, the sort of thing that keeps journalists in business, particularly the yellow journalists of the time.

Black Bart was the British-born Charles Boles, although he used the pen name Charles Bolton. The novel follows Bolton to Iowa, where he marries and makes an unsuccessful attempt to live an ordinary life as a farmer, husband, and father. From there Bolton chased the gold rush to California, arriving too late to stake any serious claims. But most of the story addresses Bolton’s alter-ego as Black Bart, the nonviolent (his shotgun was never loaded, or so the novel says) stagecoach robber, who makes his way on aching feet from one robbery to another.

Apart from twice leaving behind a verse for the Wells, Fargo police to find (establishing himself as a po8 in the public imagination), Black Bart was known for his gentlemanly politeness during robberies, and for escaping on foot, leaving behind no trail to follow. As Charles Bolton, he banked his ill-gotten proceeds at Wells, Fargo (where else?) and enjoyed the comforts of fine dining, fine living, and the occasional paid company of women whose fineness the book does not describe.

Bart’s nemesis in the novel is Jim Hume, head of the Wells, Fargo police, who is also described in biographical detail, calling attention to the similarities between the two men. As with Bart, the details are carefully winnowed to explain the shape of Hume’s life without bogging down the narrative. Hume is more a meticulous detective than a gun-slinging lawman, making him a perfect fit to lead Wells, Fargo’s private police department and to track down its most elusiver robber.

The Ballad of Black Bart naturally describes some stagecoach robberies, but the descriptions are brief. The novel is less a western than it is a pair of convincing character sketches. The story is relatively brief and not as meaty as my favorite biographical western, Mary Doria Russell’s Doc, a literary examination of Doc Holliday. But while this book is comparatively slender, Estleman’s decision to trim out all but the essential details assures the vitality of those that remain. My favorite chapter follows Bart as he walks back to the Iowa town where he lived before abandoning his wife and daughters. Bart’s thoughts and actions in a few pages speak volumes about the man he became (as least as imagined by Estleman).

If you’re looking for shootouts between white and black hats, Bart’s empty gun robs the story of traditional western content. If you can be satisfied with a fictionalized examination of an acclaimed bandit and the man who tracked him, told with literary flair, The Ballad of Black Bart is a good choice.

RECOMMENDED

The Seeds of Treason by Ted Allbeury

First published in Great Britain in 1986; published by Dover on November 6, 2017

Jan Massey wants to be understood, so he agrees to tell his story to a reporter from the BBC. The interview takes place in his home in a remote part of Spain. Massey is a former MI6 agent who committed an indiscretion. The novel is his story.

Massey ran the Berlin office for MI6 after the war, a life marred only by a brief disastrous marriage until he met Anna Kolkov. Like Massey, she has Polish roots. Her husband, Alexei Kolkov, is a KGB officer in Berlin, which makes Massey’s affair with Anna rather dangerous. It’s also a bit unconvincing, since there seems little beyond their Polish roots to make them fall in love at first sight or to make Massey behave so impetuously. We are given to understand that Slavic passions are to blame, but the affair happens too quickly and too deeply to make me think that Massey would be such a fool. In any event, the affair gets Massey into a pickle before the novel reaches its midway point.

As the title suggests, traitors abound in The Seeds of Treason. Massey is getting information from a KGB agent named Kuznetsov who is, to some degree, a traitor to Russia, and from a greedy French spy who seems to be betraying everyone he can. Andrew Johnson, a member of the British military who is handling signals intelligence in Berlin under Massey’s watch, decides he’ll be more appreciated by the Russians than the British. He thinks his prostitute girlfriend will even like him better if he’s a Russian hero, but the girlfriend is also prepared to betray anyone who doesn’t pay her enough.

And then there’s an NSA mathematician/codebreaker named Jimbo Vick who isn’t knowingly a traitor, but chats without discretion when he’s in bed with his beautiful girlfriend. As with Massey, love is the source of betrayal. But it is Massey who is the biggest fish in the pond, and a great catch for the KGB if they can use his affair with Anna against him.

Ted Allbeury writes in a low-key, matter-of-fact style, a nice change from the hysteria that pervades so much American spy fiction. The novel lives up to its title by explaining how three different people become traitors, although Vick’s story, at least, seems to be thrown in to provide a third example. Vick’s story might be the most credible of the three but he plays a relatively small role in the story. The most convincing character development is given to Johnson. Whether or not his sudden decision to seek appreciation from the Russians that he can't get from the British is believable, he's such a self-centered creep that the reader will readily see him as someone who would betray his country.

Massey is a more likable character than either Johnson or Vick and, if I didn’t necessarily find his betrayal to be credible, I did appreciate Allbeury’s effort to make him sympathetic. Allbeury makes the point that when a government labels someone a traitor, its first order of business is to paint him as deplorable in all aspects of life, because the government can’t have people understanding why someone might betray the government or, even worse, supporting the betrayer. Not all traitors are deplorable, particularly when they betray a country that isn't your own. That's the lesson Allbeury tries to teach in The Seeds of Treason, and I think he does so successfully.

The novel’s ending seems realistic. This is the only Allbeury novel I’ve read (it seems to the third that Dover has returned to print), so I don’t have much basis for comparison, but I wouldn’t rank Allbeury with John le Carré or Len Deighton or Gerald Seymour, simply because those masters of British spy fiction are justly known for gripping stories and compelling characters. I would instead compare Allbeury to Clive Egleton, who wrote British spy novels that were pleasurable if a bit unexciting.

RECOMMENDED

Valiant Dust by Richard Baker

Published by Tor Books on November 7, 2017

Valiant Dust is a military space opera. It does nothing unexpected, so it suffers from a lack of freshness, but it also generates excitement as it tells an entertaining, albeit familiar, story.

Sikander North joined the Commonwealth Naval Academy earlier than expected because his father wants no other family members to remain in the Kashmir system, where they are subject to attack. Rather than assuming his duties as the son of a prince on his homeworld of Jaipur, Sikander is now a lieutenant in Aquila’s Navy, an alliance having been formed between the Aquilans and the Kashmiri. So we have a young officer from a royal family who needs to prove himself despite his aristocratic background, a fairly standard character in military/adventure fiction.

Ranya Meriam el-Nasir is a princess on Gadira, a planet founded by the Terran Caliphate that takes a temperate view of the teachings of the Quran. Gadira is troubled by isolationist groups that resent the sultanate’s growing dependency on offworld trade. The Gadirans are allied with the Republic of Montreal, which supplies military aid to the sultanate to assist its battle against tribal chieftains and urban radicals, particularly the tribes that would like to close Gadira’s spaceports to all contact with non-Islamic powers.

Salem al-Fasi, an old family friend of the Sultan, introduces Ranya to Otto Bleindel, a businessman from Dremark whose employer purports to have an interest in suppressing unrest on Gadira. What Ranya does not know is that Bleindel is an intelligence agent who is providing arms to opponents of the Sultan. But how, the reader asks, will Bleindel benefit from overthrowing the Sultan? The answer to that question is predictable but satisfying.

Sikander and his ship travel to Gadira to protect Aquilans in the midst of all the chaos. Conflict ensues, both on the ground and in orbit (more or less) as the Aquilan ship takes on a couple of Dremel ships. The battle scenes are familiar but they are well executed.

Some parts of Valiant Dust are unbearably predictable. Our valiant hero challenges another officer to a fight over a point of honor and, although the unlikable officer is a three-time kickboxing champion, Sikander defeats him. Gosh, did you see that coming? Of course you did, because that scene has been done countless times. Our valiant hero also meets Ranya, and it is a rule of romance novels that two attractive people with royal blood must commence a romance regardless of the drama that surrounds them. Romance novel rules shouldn’t apply to science fiction novels, but predictably enough, it does. And our valiant hero must disobey orders, more or less, in order to do the right thing. Pretty much every fictional military officer in history has done that.

The one thing that struck me as being different about Valiant Dust is the spread of Islam by the Terran Caliphate before its decline. The Islamic religion is still fractured in its varying interpretations of the Quran, both in terms of conflict on planets dominated by Islam and planets that take varying approaches to Islam. There otherwise doesn’t seem to be much religious conflict among the non-Islamic powers. Of course, the absence of conflict changes during the course of the novel, which may establish the background for the next novel.

Although the plot and characters don’t stand out, I did like the novel’s pace and its detailed creation of the framework in which the story is told. Coupled with the story’s ability to build excitement, I have to recommend Valiant Dust to science fiction fans, and particularly to fans of military sf. It’s doesn’t do anything new, but it does old things pretty well.

RECOMMENDED

Autumn by Ali Smith

First published in Great Britain in 2016; published by Penguin Random House/Anchor on October 17, 2017

Autumn is set in England, where “Thatcher taught us to be selfish and not just to think but to believe that there’s no such thing as society.” Issues like immigration and Brexit divide people, and it “has become a time of people saying stuff to each other and none of it actually becoming dialog.” Anger is worn like a shield and race hatred is prevalent. The news “makes things spectacular that aren’t, and deals so simplistically with what’s truly appalling.”

Against that backdrop, Daniel Gluck, having reached the age of 101, lies in a hospital bed, sometimes believing he’s on a beach littered with corpses, sometimes believing he’s inside the trunk of a Scotch Pine. Daniel once wrote songs that are no longer remembered. He seems unaware that Elisabeth Demand visits him daily, reading to him during the “increased sleep periods” that his nurses consider a prelude to death.

Elisabeth’s friendship with Daniel began when she was his 8-year-old neighbor. In flashbacks, we see Daniel as an aging man with an obvious interest in linguistics and art who imparts bits of wisdom dressed up in the kind of silliness that might appeal to a young girl whose mother is less than an ideal parent. Daniel taught Elisabeth how to make up stories that would help her understand the ways in which life can be shaped and the world can be changed. That makes him a pretty wonderful character, the opposite of selfish people who do not believe in society and prefer to shout their own opinions instead of listening to the opinions of others.

Daniel represents an earlier time, while Elisabeth, now a lecturer in art history, is just coming to comprehend the role that time plays in life. Daniel’s descriptions of paintings when Elisabeth was a child eventually lead Elisabeth to understand Daniel’s great secret, which helps her understand something about life. Through Daniel, Elisabeth becomes interested in the pop art of Pauline Boty, which leads her to contemplate Christine Keeler, who was central to the Profumo Affair. The sexual liberation that began in the 1960s came to be manifested in many ways, one of which is expressed by this thought: “A great many men don’t understand a woman full of joy, even more don’t understand paintings full of joy by a woman.”

Both Daniel and Elisabeth are perfectly drawn characters. Daniel is one of those gentle souls from a kinder era who dispense wise words in unexpected moments, drawing on their vast life experiences to apply the lessons they’ve learned to a new generation’s circumstances. Those characters exist in literature more than reality, but they are always a joy to encounter, in person or in the pages of a well-written story. We never learn much of Daniel’s life, but we learn enough to know his essence.

Daniel’s life is ending and, in a sense, Elisabeth’s is still beginning. By dealing with the mundane (repeated trips to bureaucrats who reject her passport photos because they do not match their precise requirements) and thinking about Boty, she learns to question the value of rules and norms of behavior, including rules that once defined the subservience of women, that are ultimately meaningless. She discovers that the past (Daniel’s song lyrics, for example) can be relevant to the present, even as people and events fade in and out of collective memory, to be lost and rediscovered, again and again.

Time flies, Daniel says, demonstrating by throwing his watch off a bridge. The past is replaced by the present which will be replaced by the unstoppable future. The immigrants who are reviled today will become the bedrock citizens of tomorrow. When so many people see change as something to be resisted, Autumn suggests that the march of time is to embraced, that the present and future can be shaped “with people’s histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times.” But whether we can shape it or not, Autumn reminds us, time remains in motion. We can join it or we can be stuck. And if we join it, we can choose to bring the best parts of the past into the present, and to create the present in a way that will build a better future. Those lessons, taught in joyful and lyrical prose, make Autumn a valuable addition to the literature of time.

RECOMMENDED

The End We Start From by Megan Hunter

First published in Great Britain in 2017; published by Grove Press on November 7, 2017

The End We Start From imagines that a mother gave birth to a baby, known in the novel as Z, during an apocalyptic event that, at the moment of birth, is characterized by rising flood waters. The brief novel combines mommy lit with post-apocalyptic fiction, two popular genres that, in this case at least, do not merge well. Babies are not interesting characters and the mother who narrates the novel doesn’t have much more personality than Z.

The exact nature of the catastrophe is ill-defined. The flooding might have been brought about by global warming, but it seems quite sudden and there are bullet holes in buildings, which might or might not have something to do with the crisis. Television persists for a time, but the news has suddenly become depressingly relevant to the characters’ lives, so they take a brief pause from watching the talent show channel to get a sense of what’s happening in the world. Floods lead to famine and the loss of internet and cellular service. Why? We’re never told.

The end of life as she knows it has apparently been coming for some time and, while the narrator lived in fear of it, she thought that having a baby would make the fear go away. It might have been more rational to fear bringing a baby into a world that is ending. Or to establish a residence in higher ground.

Eventually the protagonist and Z and Z’s daddy R all travel north from London, where they find refugee camps. R goes off in search of a better place to raise the family, leaving the narrator and their baby to make it on their own. After that, the narrator misses R, although I wondered why since abandoning his family in a crisis seems unhelpful.

The narrator starts to travel with O and O’s baby C. O knows about a boat they can take (presumably to Scotland). How she knows where and when to meet the boat in the absence of cell service is one of many mysteries the novel fails to explain.

Given the apocalyptic setting, the journey from London to Scotland seems remarkably easy, as does the eventual resolution of the crisis. The narrator spends most of her time fretting, but her fretting is more about motherhood than starvation or flooding or gang violence or the other terrors that vaguely lurk in the novel’s background but that never seem to pose an actual threat. Those distant concerns appear to have no impact on our intrepid mommy as she waits for baby’s next bowel movement.

There is something to be said for exploring the mundane (baby’s first tooth, baby's first step) in a chaotic environment, to focus the reader on a new mother’s myopic focus on her baby as a defining characteristic of motherhood. Motherhood has apparently opened the narrator’s heart to love; she loves everyone she does not fear. The novel has some value in the way it delivers messages about motherhood, but the messages would have been more powerful if the external world had been more fully or carefully developed.

The novel also doles out mommy wisdom, like “There is no skill. There is only another person, smaller than you.” Mommy lit is replete with similar mommy wisdom; no fresh insights are to be found here.

The novel is short, the story told in snippets. The minimalist style is probably meant to cut out all that is unimportant in favor of descriptions of how Z feels to the narrator while Z is drinking from the narrator’s nipple, or how Z’s eyes are starting to look like R’s, or the things that Z picks up and drops. I got the sense that some of the gaps in information would have been a good bit more interesting than what the narrator chose to tell us. I also got the sense that the missing information is missing because Megan Hunter couldn’t imagine plausible details with which to plug the gaps, or didn’t want to be bothered. The snippet form of storytelling sometimes works well (I recently read Ultraluminous, where the form is used to great advantage), but The End We Start From puts so little flesh on the skeleton that it feels like an outline for a novel, not a finished product.

The novel’s strength is its prose. In Scotland, where seeds still grow, the narrator remarks, “We have arrived at the non-happening, it seems: the invisible growth of Z’s body, the tiny increments of our meals coming out of the soil.” But in the end, the book seems like a collection of strong sentences that never give birth to a living story.

NOT RECOMMENDED