Sat 28 Mar 2015
JAMES M. REASONER – Texas Wind. Manor, paperback original, 1980. Point Blank, softcover, 2004.
Rumor has it that Manor has gone bankrupt. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but the fact remains that I haven’t seen any of their product in over a year, and distribution was pretty good around here before that.
And I have never seen this book anywhere for sale. If James Reasoner hadn’t sent me a copy personally, I’d have never seen it period. All this leads me to the fairly safe conclusion that if you haven’t obtained a copy for yourself by now, you probably won’t.
It’s a pity, too, because it just may be the best book Manor ever published. They evidently never knew what they had either, because the back of the book is filled with ads for their western novels.
And this is a private eye book, for crying out loud. Cody’s home town is Fort Worth, and I guess maybe he wears cowboy boots, but that’s about it. He’s hired to find a missing daughter, who maybe has run off with her best friend’s boy friend — or has she been kidnapped?
There are a few false notes here (one of which led me into thinking up a whole new ending), and I thought Cody’s love affair with Janice, the new light of his life, came on too fast, but Reasoner has a deceptively smooth, easy-to-read style that helps you forget you’ve read hundreds of stories like this a hundred times over.
Never really flashy in any sense of the word, but a solid job through and through.
[UPDATE] 03-28-15. I was correct about the Manor edition becoming a collectible. The last time I looked, which was 10 minutes ago, there was not a single copy available for sale on the Internet. Luckily a softcover edition was published a short while ago, and I’m sure it’s also available online as an ebook.
I’ve not read the book since I wrote the review above, and now that I’ve reminded myself of that unfortunate fact, I intend to do something to do about that as soon as I can.
March 28th, 2015 at 5:08 pm
Nice to see this back in print as it has been hard to find for many years. It has become something of a legend, and unusually, actually deserves its reputation.
Texas based private eyes aren’t as rare now as they were when this was written well before Dan Roman or Billy Bob Holland. Donald Lam and Michael Shayne both got over Texas way (Shayne, according to Halliday, was based on an El Paso based eye) once in a while, and Lester Dent had done two novellas about Curt Flagg, but those were about it. In a stretch you could say Horace McCoy’s Texas Ranger Jerry Frost behaved like a private eye in BLACK MASK much of the time.
Good book, and by a really good guy as well.
March 28th, 2015 at 7:01 pm
I don’t want to belabor the point of how hard to find the original paperback is, because you’re right, David, the book is as good as the legend, but sometimes I was able the predict the future in these old reviews, and this is one of the times I did.
I’ve come across only two other copies in the almost 35 years since. One I gave to a long time friend, Bob Briney, the other I sold on Amazon not too long ago for $150.
This was James’ first novel, of maybe a couple hundred now, and from the start, he’s always had a readability factor that makes writing look so easy, but it isn’t.
There is a collection of all the Cody short stories that was published not long ago, called FORT WORTH NIGHTS. It’s not difficult to find, and for anyone reading this who doesn’t have a copy, you should.
March 29th, 2015 at 6:10 am
I have been annoyed for years that I loaned my copy to a “friend” who never returned it. I hope he chokes on his perfidy.
March 29th, 2015 at 8:23 am
Non-collectors do not understand the concept of borrowing. It’s only a book, after all. I’ve always preferred giving books away, not ones I have hopes of ever getting back.
Next one I find, I’ll send to you.
March 29th, 2015 at 3:01 pm
There should be a place in hell for non-collectors but Dante has it all wrong when he puts collectors in the 4th circle of hell and to top it off, he calls them hoarders!