Fri 13 Dec 2019
A Western Noir Thriller Review by David Vineyard: BART PAUL – Under Tower Peak.
Posted by Steve under Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Characters , Reviews[6] Comments
BART PAUL – Under Tower Peak. Tommy Smith #1. Arcade, hardcover, April 2013; paperback, November 2014.
It isn’t often when reading a mystery, Western, thriller, or combination of the three I find myself thinking in terms of writers like Ernest Hemingway, Tom Lea, Cormac McCarthy, and Jim Harrison, and at the same time hearing echoes of Craig Johnson, Elmore Leonard, James Crumley, and Stephen Hunter, but Bart Paul’s Under Tower Peak evokes all those and in the best way possible, and manages a sense of humor to boot, as hero Tommy Smith and his pal Lester lie under the stars in California’s Sierra Nevadas.
“Not ever.â€
“You see those movies with guys standing all alone on some distant planet a gazillion miles out in deep space with some weird moon on the horizon. But what if we’re the ones on the distant planet and all this just over our heads is deep space, all cold and huge and empty? You ever think that lying here we’re flying a million miles an hour in outer space right now?â€
“One of us is, that’s a fact.â€
Loosely suggested by the crash of businessman adventurer Steve Fossett’s plane in 2008, the novel finds former sniper Tommy Smith and his friend Lester in the high country where they discover the crashed plane of a missing billionaire adventurer. That’s a seemingly harmless enough fact, but it soon turns complicated when Lester takes an expensive Rolex off the dead man and some of the money carried in a bag on the plane. Once back in civilization his less than ethical sometime girlfriend Callie Dean, local tramp with a not quite heart of gold, contacts the family lawyers about a reward and when she shows up dead after talking to a man in a fancy car the stops are out.
Lester’s moment of greed has let loose the hell hounds as the dead man’s trophy wife and drug lord son, and their legal and illegal cadre of backers are soon threatening Tommy and Lester, and crawling all over the Sierra Nevada’s willing to kill for something related to the dead man and the crash that Tommy has no clue to. Innocent people are dying and Tommy’s one time friend idiot Sheriff Mitch isn’t up to handling the mess he has on his hands.
As the wife’s attractive lawyer Nora explains why Gerald, the son needs the father to be alive or he could lose a fortune she warns Tommy:
“He’s dead, alright. Lester and me were as close to the body as I am to you.â€
“That, Sergeant Smith,†she said, “makes you both very inconvenient people to leave walking around.â€
That’s setup enough for a solid tale of adventure, violence, and the hard won values of uncorrupted but not scrupulously honest men vs corrupt and ruthlessly violent ones, but Paul ups the ante not only by his evocative writing, but in his character of his reluctant but all too proficient hero who turns out to be equal parts John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and James Bond.
“Probably not much I could have done.â€
She sort of leaned in to me and her heat just poured out. I held the shirt tight around her.
“I doubt that,†she said. “It was like you were on a mission or something.â€
Even the gun-lore here, which in some writers’ hands is little more than gun porn, is part of the plot and the nature of the protagonist, never overdone, or less than vital to the story at hand.
It doesn’t take much to guess Smith and Lester are going to find themselves out numbered and out gunned against a small army of dangerous and violent people, but the fact that Paul makes that pay off again and again in ways that evoke the best writers of this kind of tale, James Lee Burke is another name that comes to mind, is remarkable.
After Gerald’s Cuban friends blow up his cabin Tommy lies in wait on a bridge for them.
Naturally at some point Tommy and Lester decide the law isn’t going to take its course in time to save their lives or avenge Callie, who was trying her hand at extortion, and decide to take things in their own hands against the advice of Deputy Sarah Cathcart who tries to protect them both.
This isn’t just an action suspense piece either, there is a decent mystery and noirish plot and some good detective work along the way putting the complicated ends of the story together with billions of dollars at stake, and something else Tommy can’t guess at drawing all the firepower, legal and not.
Paul is a writers’ writer, literate and literary without beating it over the readers head. Reading this book is not only a pleasure as escapist literature, but in watching a capable and gifted writer practice his craft with precision and style. His work invokes not just the obvious names, but writers like Edward Abbey, Oliver Lange, Newton Thornberg, Will Bryant, A. B. Guthrie, and Clair Huffaker, and that is notable company for any writer, in the genre or out.
The Tommy Smith series —
1. Under Tower Peak (2013)
2. Cheatgrass (2016)
3. See That My Grave is Kept Clean (2019)
December 13th, 2019 at 9:34 pm
You know what you just did, don’t you, David? Three more books in my Amazon shopping cart, that’s what.
December 13th, 2019 at 10:46 pm
I will second that, the review has me hooked. How did I manage to miss him until now?
December 13th, 2019 at 11:23 pm
The other two are on my Kindle list too, so enjoy the company guys. This sub genre has produced some fine books the last decade or so, but Paul is right up there at the top of the list doing this particular sub genre about as well as I have seen it done, with a believable protagonist who is a hero, but not a tin one.
As much as anything Paul’s beautifully crafted sense of language would mean nothing if Tommy Smith was just another testosterone challenged modern cowboy with a gun fetish. He’s not, he’s an interesting character.
One aspect of Smith’s character I don’t go into is that he is presented realistically, at one point the big city lawyer even questions if his “aw shucks” semi literate speech is for real, but it doesn’t hinder Paul in the lyrical passages or presenting outsiders who are also realistic sounding whether sophisticated or local.
It is no easy trick to pull that off without exaggerated dialects, but Paul does it and even points out he is doing it and still gets away with it.
December 13th, 2019 at 11:40 pm
Halfway through your review I stopped and reserved this at the local lbrary
December 14th, 2019 at 12:11 pm
Looks good.
January 22nd, 2020 at 3:57 pm
What a great recommendation, just finished the book and it is as good as David’s review says it is. Kind of a cross between A Simple Plan and the Bob Lee Swagger stories. Great voice, settings, action, etc. Just took the second one out of the library, and am looking forward to reading it.
Interestingly, to those fools like myself that collect first printings, the hardcover 1st seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth.