Thu 9 Apr 2015
A Western Fiction Review by Dan Stumpf: MILTON LOTT – Backtrack.
Posted by Steve under Reviews , Western Fiction[2] Comments
MILTON LOTT – Backtrack. Houghton Mifflin, hardcover,, 1965. Berkley F1472, paperback, 1967.
I mentioned Milton Lott before in these pages (he wrote The Last Hunt, 1954) but I’ve never been able to find out much about him except that he died in 1996 at age 80 after turning out only three books. I haven’t read Dance Back the Buffalo (1959) but based on The Last Hunt and this one, I wish he’d done a lot more.
Backtrack is a woolly thing, set in Texas around 1879 but darting one way, then another, like a horse that won’t be saddled, never settling down to one theme, but never losing momentum or a sense of purpose either. The narrator is a cowboy (literally, he makes his living herding cattle) who meets up with a very strange and troubled youth in the course of a cattle drive. When the kid (now known as “the Kidâ€) kills 2 men and lights out, he goes after him to tell him he’s not in trouble with the law — and to sort of look after him, since the kid seems too weird to last long without a keeper.
But….
The narrator himself (called “Ringo” for a wound he suffered trying to take a dump on a hot pot) has hang-ups of his own. Though he seems gentle enough, he has a reputation as a killer, and suffers from what we now call Repressed Memories: odd flashbacks he can’t put together that warp his judgment at times. And as he follows the kid’s trail, it leads him back to his childhood home and confrontation with his past.
This would have been enough for a fine Western all by itself, but Lott never loses sight of his narrative peg for very long, and as Ringo struggles with his identity, the Kid picks up a reputation of his own, two gunmen on his trail, and the idea that Ringo is after him to kill him.
What could have been hopelessly over-complicated at a lesser typewriter flows with natural grace from Lott. Backtrack teems with energy and inventiveness that are a real pleasure to read, evoking the dusty trail, the grinding work of the cowboy, and hair-raising encounters with man & beast, including a medicine show huckster who seems to have stepped out of Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show.
There’s a really really clever confrontation between a gunfighter and a sleight-of-hand artist (“I couldn’t see any gun on him, but he didn’t look like he’d take long to find one.â€) and a splendid moment when a cowboy dodging a night-stampede climbs a tree for safety and sees his saddle climb the tree too.
To appreciate that last bit you’ll have to read the book. And I recommend you do.
April 9th, 2015 at 3:42 pm
Some here may not care for the distinction, but Lott, writers like A.B. Guthrie, Will Henry, Paul I Wellman, Fredrick Manfred, Oakley Hall, John Cunnigham, Jack Shaffer, J.P.S. Miller, Cormac MacCarthy don’t write Westerns, but novels about the West. A fine distinction but one that needs to be made.
That is not a knock at writers who do pen westerns, but I think most of them would make the distinction themselves. I’m not sure you can honestly toss Zane Gray and Max Brand into the same pot with Mary Johnson or James Warner Bellah. They have different goals and aims. Raymond Chandler wrote mysteries, but I don’t think you can toss him in the mix with Agatha Christie and assume they had the same goal in regard to what they did anymore than you can William LeQueux and Graham Greene regarding spy novels.
Lott writes novels and novel structure is somewhat different in its aims and goals than just storytelling. A great deal depends on the theme of the work and how the writer defines it. Lott was a novelist writing about the West which isn’t quite the same thing as a Western. Novel means more than length.
And I agree Dan, its a shame there isn’t more Lott. He was good and damn interesting.
April 9th, 2015 at 9:27 pm
“Some here may not care for the distinction, but Lott, writers like A.B. Guthrie, Will Henry, Paul I Wellman, Fredrick Manfred, Oakley Hall, John Cunnigham, Jack Shaffer, J.P.S. Miller, Cormac MacCarthy don’t write Westerns, but novels about the West. A fine distinction but one that needs to be made.”
No argument from me, most definitely not. You are 100% on target here. I happen to enjoy the westerns writers who come from the pulp tradition more, but all of the authors you mention above are always worth reading, David, but for different reasons than those ones who romanticized the West. Different goals, different aspirations, but storytelling? Absolutely. That, too.