RESOLUTION
Robert B. Parker
Putnam Adult
Western
ISBN: 9780399155048

• Read an Excerpt

Robert B. Parker has authored 60 novels over the past 34 years, but RESOLUTION is only his third western. This should come as no surprise, since he is widely acclaimed and acknowledged as the “dean” of American mystery writers. At this point, he is such a great writer that he could make anything interesting.

In 1974, Parker revitalized the American private-eye story when he introduced a Boston tough guy with a tender heart named Spenser. The series is still going strong today, although co-existing now with two other excellent mystery series authored by Parker.

In RESOLUTION, Parker goes back to the Old West and takes us to a brand new town making a hardscrabbled rising from the land. But longtime readers will recognize the themes of loyalty, violence and the personal code of honor that have filled Parker’s work from the beginning.

RESOLUTION picks up where Parker’s 2005 western APPALOOSA left off. After a bloody confrontation in that town, Everett Hitch, former West Point cadet, soldier and occasional lawman, arrives in Resolution and soon finds employment as a bouncer/peacekeeper in the Blackfoot Saloon. It is a challenging job since Resolution is so new that they don’t have a sheriff or any law to speak of. His new boss warns him that he has had difficulty keeping a saloon “lookout” in the past.

Sure enough, trouble soon arrives and Hitch kills the hired gun of the mining camp up the hill. And he starts giving shelter in the saloon to abused whores. He confesses to being “softhearted” for them, much to the chagrin of his boss, who is waging his own personal struggle for supremacy over the town against both the owner of the mine and the ranchers, or “sodbusters,” homesteading down the hill. With more trouble on the horizon, Hitch is happy when his old friend from Appaloosa, ex-lawman Virgil Cole, rides into town. Hitch describes his friend:

“She stared at him. I knew she did not understand him. Most people didn’t. There was about him a flat deadliness that frightened people.”

And it is in the character of Cole that readers will find the psychological complexity that has made the Spenser novels so fascinating to read. Both Hitch and Cole hire out to do “gun work.” They may be hired to keep order, but that job often involves killing people, something they do easily and extremely well. They live constantly with the possibility of sudden death or dealing out death. As Hitch explains to a young whore:

“You make a living doing gun work, you got to accept the possibility somebody gonna shoot you dead.”

Since there is no law and order, Hitch and Cole live by their loyalty to each other, their sense of duty and their own moral code. Although not formally educated, Cole reads Locke and the French philosopher he calls “Russo” trying to understand the social contract, human nature and the order that society is based upon.

So while the gunmen kill for a living, they don’t take killing lightly. This causes immediate conflict when Amos Wolfson, the saloon owner, seizes control of the mine after he has the owner assassinated and starts stealing the ranchers’ land and violently dispossessing them. In other words, he is a ruthless acquisition capitalist of the sort who dominated late 19th-century America and gave rise to the Gilded Age.

This does not sit well with the gunmen, but he is paying their salaries after all. Further complicating matters is when the leader of the ranchers brutally beats his wife in public; Cole steps in to protect her and then quickly gets involved with her.

Fans of Parker’s Spenser series will love this book. It has all the elements of great writing we have come to expect from the author: short chapters, chipped dialogue and simple descriptions. But what is remarkable is that, like the unfortunately departed HBO series “Deadwood,” Parker does not give us the romanticized view of the American West.

“‘Hard on women out here,’ Virgil said.

‘Hard on everybody out here.’ I (Hitch) said.”

And it is especially hard on the nameless Native American teenagers who defiantly “jumped the reservation” and got themselves killed because of it.

What Parker depicts here is not Gary Cooper’s High Noon Old West where the good and bad guys draw on the count of three. No. Hitch and Cole, and men of their like, will face you, tell you they are going to kill you and then proceed to do it. If the opponent is not fast enough to reach for his gun, or even if they put their hands up in surrender, they are dead. And nobody is fast enough yet to shoot back. Bullets resolve everything.

Hitch and Cole are killers with a conscience, as were the men who eventually brought order to the frontier. And despite their temporary ties to women or towns, they are as solitary as the vast plains and destined never to settle down. Hitch says:

“A whore I knew back in Appaloosa had asked me once if I get lonely, moving around in all this empty space, stopping in little towns with nothing much there. I told her I didn’t. I’m not hard to get along with. But I am not convivial. I like my own company, and I like space.”

And so was born the American myth of the Old West that played up the rugged individualist, the knight errant in spurs, and played down the killing, especially of Native Americans, and the constant degradation of and violence against women.

Readers of the genre and fans of Parker’s mysteries will enjoy RESOLUTION, an entertaining, grown-up western.

      --- Reviewed by Tom Callahan

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