I decided to return to a comfort genre last week and did a search on authors who write 'red neck noir' stories, which I find fun to read. An author that came up was James Reasoner who works in the field and is a heavily published writer of westerns. I went to his website and looked at his bibliography that said he has something like 200 novels in a wide variety of genres written under around 30(!) pseudonyms and has cracked what appears to be a writer's milestone of 1,000,000 words a year on more than one occasion. How do these people do this?
Dust Devils takes place in ugly west Texas. 20yo Toby McCoy's mother abandoned him at birth and he lived in a succession of foster homes in Oklahoma. His search for family is the foundation of the book. We meet up with Toby as a hitchhiker looking for work and gets hired on at a dirt farm of Dana, a 40something woman on her own in the barren plains of west Texas. While digging around when the lady was occupied, he finds a veritable arsenal of weapons. Just as she confronts him, 2 bad guys burst in and she swiftly and professionally takes them down. Then they are off on the run.
I'll leave one bizarre (but highly entertaining) twist out as it would spoil the book, but it turns out the farmer lady is hiding out from a bank heist gone bad and the 2 guys were out for revenge. Now she has to tell the other crooks she isn't to blame for the double cross, another of the group is. So they pack up for Dallas looking to make things right. Toby is now an unwitting accessory.
In Dallas, they hook up with the original double crosser for an armored car heist. More double-crossing and the remaining bank robbers are after her and Toby. The tale ends with a shootout in a parking lot of an observatory in SW Texas. Toby and the lady are free, flush with money, and off to make a new life, until the radio stories report a link to the farm shootings, the armored car holdup, and the bodies in the observatory parking lot...the link is Toby and his continuing life of loss and search for family.
As is the case in most noir stories, not all is as it seems. The reader follows Toby's search for some permanence that keeps getting uprooted by bad things from Dana's past. One never knows quite who should be trusted. People who get shot and left for dead wind up surviving, quiet scenes explode in gunfire, and a link to Oklahoma surfaces to tie everything together at the very end. What happened in Oklahoma and will that give any answers to the trail of mayhem left behind by Toby and Dana.
Not bad. not bad at all. Reasoner is credited with a cult private eye noir story called Texas Wind that I will have to find. too bad our library doesn't carry it. may actually have to buy a book!
East Coast Don
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