Word: badman
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Annie Proulx twirls words like a black-hat badman twirling Colts, fires them off for the sheer hell of it, blam, blam, no thought of missing, empty beer cans jump in the dust, misses one, laughs, reloads, blams some more. Something like that...
...conversation stirs because in his latest crime novel, Comeback (Mysterious Press; 292 pages; $18), Westlake has reached high on his shelf to blow the dust off a memorable badman. About 35 years ago, at the beginning of his career, he turned in a manuscript starring an armed robber named Parker. That was it; if Parker had a first name, you didn't want to get close enough to know it. He was tough, mean and distinctly unfunny; a sullen bad guy who drank whiskey, smoked cigarettes and cuffed both men and women around. Parker got caught...
...Comeback, the irredeemable badman Parker returns, tougher than ever. His old target was the Mafia (you don't want even a bad-guy hero brutalizing widows and orphans). This time the cash cow is a sleazy televangelist. The holdup goes like grease, netting several garbage bags full of bucks donated by the pious, when suddenly...
...same rare gift for making heroic tales from small-town street sweepings is on view in his new novel. Pretty Boy Floyd (Simon & Schuster; 444 pages; $24), written with McMurtry's screenwriting partner, Diana Ossana, is a lesser story, loosely tethered to the life and death of the renowned badman Charles Arthur Floyd (1904-34). But like Lonesome Dove, it beguiles the reader with a golden haze of lovely lies...
...second villain appears from over another horizon -- that of the future, perhaps. He is Mox Mox, not so much a Western badman as a modern serial killer who likes to burn people. And Garza, the bank robber, is shown to be as shrewd and ruthless as Call in his prime, and much quicker. Ranger or not, Call is really too old for this kind of thing...